Energy Policy Modernization Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, the Senate is still at work crafting a package of energy legislation that can earn the support of a broad majority and potentially become this body's first comprehensive energy efficiency legislation since 2007.
This is my 126th weekly call to arms to wake us up to the duty we owe our constituents and future generations of Americans, not only to unleash the clean energy solutions that will propel our economy forward but also to stave off the devastating effects of carbon pollution.
I commend Energy Committee Chairman Murkowski and her ranking member Senator Cantwell for bringing us a bipartisan bill that builds upon some of the best ideas of the energy efficiency legislation championed not long ago by Senators Shaheen and Portman. According to a report assessing the emissions reductions related to Shaheen-Portman done by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, the cumulative net savings of these provisions would reach around $100 billion over the years 2014 to 2030, along with a reduction of about 650 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions over that 15-year period.
While these are welcomed reductions, they are a fraction of what we expect just from the clean energy tax credit extensions that were included in the end-of-year omnibus. Those 5-year incentives for wind and solar will yield cumulative emissions reductions of over 1 billion metric tons of CO
Last year, the ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Senator Cantwell, offered an ambitious legislative vision for growing our clean energy economy while tackling the growing climate crisis. Her Energy bill outlines achievable reductions in carbon pollution. It would repeal oil subsidies and level the playing field for clean energy. Estimated carbon reductions under her plan would be 34 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, which would help us achieve our international climate commitment. Our goals in the legislation now before us should be just as ambitious.
Of course, the big polluters always shout that any steps to reduce emissions will invariably hobble the economy. They have the nerve to say this while they are sitting on an effective subsidy every year, just in the United States, of $700 billion, according to the International Monetary Fund. It really takes nerve to complain while sitting on that big of a public subsidy.
In the bill before us, I was glad to add an amendment with my colleague from Idaho, Senator Crapo, with the bipartisan support of Senators Risch, Booker, Hatch, Kirk, and Durbin, to strengthen the development of advanced nuclear energy technologies in partnerships between the government and our national labs and the private sector. The Holy Grail here is advanced reactors that could actually consume spent fuel from conventional reactors and help us draw down our nuclear waste stockpile.
I know that many of my Republican friends have supported commonsense climate action in the past. Senator McCain ran for President on a strong climate change platform. Senator Collins coauthored an important cap-and-dividend bill with Senator Cantwell. Senator Kirk voted for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in the House. Senator Flake has written an article in support of a carbon tax that reduces income taxes. And there are more. So I hold out some hope, but it is hard.
There is a whole climate denial apparatus that helps manufacture doubt and delay action. The fossil fuel industry players controlling this machinery of denial use a well-worn playbook--the same tactics employed by the tobacco industry and the lead industry: Deny the scientific findings about the dangers their product causes, question the motives of the scientists they oppose, and exaggerate the costs of taking action. They tend to look only at the costs to them of having to clean up their act. They tend never to look at the cost to the public of the harm from their product. If accountants looked at only one side of the ledger like that, they would go to jail.
In each case, tobacco, lead, climate change, and other sophisticated campaigns of misinformation were used to mislead the public. So this is why I have submitted an amendment declaring the sense of the Senate disapproving corporations and the front organizations they fund to obscure their role that deliberately cast doubt on science in order to protect their own financial interests and urging the fossil fuel companies to cooperate with investigations that are now ongoing into what they knew about climate change and when they knew it.
I have also pressed to have the political contributions of these same polluters made transparent to the American people. The Supreme Court's awful Citizens United decision flung open the floodgates of corporate spending in our elections, giving wealthy corporate interests the ability to clobber, and perhaps even more important, to threaten to clobber politicians who don't toe their line.
My Republican colleagues have refused to shine the light on this spending, so since the amendment failed, Americans will remain in the dark about who was trying to influence their elections and how.
The Koch brothers-backed political juggernaut, Americans for Prosperity, has openly promised to punish candidates who support curbs on carbon pollution. The group's President said if Republicans support a carbon tax or climate regulations, they would ``be at a severe disadvantage in the Republican nomination process. . . . We would absolutely make that a crucial issue.'' The threat is not subtle: Step out of line, and here come the attack ads and the primary challengers, all funded by the deep pockets of the fossil fuel industry, powered up by Citizens United.
Unfortunately, a large portion of the funding behind this special interest apparatus is simply not traceable. Money is funneled through organizations that exist just to conceal the donor's identity. The biggest identity-laundering shops are Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund. Indeed, these are by far the biggest sources of funding in the network or web of climate-denial front groups. These twin entities reported giving a combined $78 million to climate-denier groups between 2003 and 2010. Dr. Robert Brulle of Drexel University, who studies this network of fossil fuel-backed climate-denial fronts, reports that the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund operations are the ``central component'' and ``predominant funder'' of the denier apparatus, and at the same time, they are what he calls the ``black box that conceals the identity of contributors.''
The denial apparatus runs a complex scheme to delegitimize the honest, university-based science that supports curbing carbon emissions and to intimidate officials who would dare cross this industry. And, regrettably, it is working.
Since Citizens United let loose the threat of limitless dark money into our elections, a shadow has fallen over the Republican side of this Chamber. There is no longer any honest bipartisan debate on climate change, nor is there a single serious effort on the Republican side of the Presidential race.
So, anyway, I have submitted the amendment to require companies with $1 million or more in revenues from fossil fuel activities to disclose their hidden spending on electioneering communications, to bring them out of the dark. The amendment is cosponsored by Senators Markey, Durbin, Sanders, Shaheen, Baldwin, Leahy, Murphy, Blumenthal, and Menendez.
Corporate and dark money, and particularly fossil fuel money, is now washing through our elections in what one newspaper memorably called a ``tsunami of slime.'' All my amendment would have done is show the American people who is trying to sway their votes from behind the dark money screen. It is a pretty simple idea. It is, in fact, precisely the solution prescribed by the Supreme Court Justices in the Citizens United decision. Moreover, it is an idea the Republicans have over and over again supported in the past. But now that dark money has become the Republican Party's life support system, all the opinions have changed.
Well, I believe fossil fuel money is polluting our democracy, just as their carbon emissions are polluting our atmosphere and oceans. It ought to be time to shine a light on that dark money. In a nutshell, we have been had by the fossil fuel industry, and it is time to wake up. Student Loan Debt
Mr. President, if I may change topics for a moment, we had a meeting this morning with a number of students from around the country who came in to share with us their concerns about the growing burden of student loan debt in this country, which I would argue has now reached a point of crisis.
Time and again, we tell young people that the path to the American dream runs through a college campus. Young people get this, and they respond to it. They overwhelmingly want to go to college, and they work hard to get there.
But the cost can be more than many students bargain for, especially once they leave school, with a degree or without, and get hit with student loan payments. Young people are graduating with more debt than ever before. For the past several years, as springtime rolls around and graduates get ready to cross the stage, we hear reports that average debt loads have increased yet again. Each new class seems to set a new record. The average graduating senior in the class of 2014 held $28,950 in student loan debt. Indeed, over the past decade, student loan debt has quadrupled. Total outstanding student loan debt held by 40 million Americans is now over $1.3 trillion. That makes student loans the second highest type of consumer debt after home mortgages. Student loans are more than both credit card debt and car loans. Rhode Islanders alone owe upward of $3.6 billion. Students who graduate from 4-year colleges and universities in Rhode Island emerge with an average of $31,841 in student loan debt.
I asked my colleagues, most of whom graduated many decades ago, can you imagine starting out in your life that deep in the red? This is the reality for so many Americans today. It is the reality for so many Rhode Islanders I have met with.
Tammy is a childcare provider from Warwick, RI. She spoke at a roundtable discussion Senator Reed and I held in Rhode Island to hear firsthand from our constituents about the challenges they face in repaying student loan debt. Tammy has a master's degree in child development and early childhood education. The original principal balance on her student loan was $43,530.56. But even with a master's degree in child development and early childhood education, the pay has not been great. We went through that Wall Street-caused financial crisis and now, 16 years later, her balance has grown to $88,000. Instead of making headway on her debt, she slips further into the red.
Danielle from Narragansett, RI, racked up roughly $60,000 in student loan debt between her undergraduate and master's degrees from the University of Rhode Island. Now, she says, the burden of that debt is affecting the decisions her son, Talin, is making about his own college education. When a parent works and studies to make a better life for her child, the last thing she expects is for the cost of her education to limit her son's opportunities.
Ryan, also from Warwick, is a special education teacher. He was my guest at the State of the Union Address. He is going back to graduate school to become an even better educator. ``I've made a conscious choice,'' he says, ``to invest in my education and my ability to make a difference in the lives of my students as a teacher.'' But his loans are a heavy burden on his finances. He works a second job on top of his teaching job to help cover his expenses and pay down his loans. His debt is affecting his life decisions about things like marriage or buying a home. Why should becoming a better teacher mean postponing the dreams of adulthood?
Young people should enter the workforce ready to get their lives started--to earn, to create, to invest. College should be a path to opportunity, not a decades-long sentence of debt and instability, not deferred dreams of starting a family or buying a house.
The average age of the Senate today is just over 60, meaning most Senators were in college about 40 years ago. So we have no idea. Between then and now, the cost of college has increased more than 1,000 percent. According to Bloomberg Business, from 1978, when the records began, through 2012, the costs have increased by twelvefold--1,120 percent. Going to college in the seventies generally didn't leave students with insurmountable debt. Today it is a fact of life. We must work not just to stop but to reverse these trends.
It is because of this crisis in college affordability that my Democratic colleagues got together to create the Reducing Education Debt Act, or the RED Act. This important bill would do three vital things:
First, it would allow students to refinance their outstanding student debt to take advantage of lower interest rates. That would put billions of dollars back into the pockets of people who invested in their education. Refinancing would help an estimated 24 million borrowers save an average of almost $1,900.
Second, the RED Act would make 2 years of community college tuition- free, helping students earn an associate's degree, the first half of a bachelor's degree, or get the skills they need to succeed in the workforce, all without having to take on so much debt. Free tuition at community college would save a full-time student an average of $3,800 per year and could help an estimated 9 million college students.
Third, the RED Act would help ensure that Pell grants--named for our great Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell--keep up with the rising costs by indexing part of the Pell grant to inflation permanently. By indexing the Pell grant, compared to current law, the maximum Pell grant award would increase by $1,300 for the 2026-2027 school year, resulting in larger awards for over 9 million students, helping to reduce their debt.
We think the RED Act is a critical step toward an essential goal: debt-free college.
The American middle class was built in part on the opportunity provided by higher education. Believe it or not, it was once common to be able to go to college and graduate with no debt. We owe it to today's college students to be able to leave college and begin to build their lives free of debt and ready to achieve their dreams.
We look forward to bipartisan participation on this issue in the Senate, although regrettably it has virtually never appeared in the Republican Presidential debates as an issue. There are 40 million students with $1.3 trillion in debt--not interested, not compared to Benghazi. So I am hoping we will do better than those candidates in this Chamber and be able to pull a bipartisan solution together that will relieve that burden of debt on our next generation.
I see the senior Senator of Rhode Island.
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