North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act of 2016
Floor Speech
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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, the most important words in our Constitution are the first three words of that document: ``We the People.'' These are words that the authors put in supersized print to tell us that this is what our government is all about--and also, what it is not about.
They did not start out this document by saying that we are a government to serve the ruling elites. They did not establish this Constitution to serve the titans of industry and commerce. And they did not write our Constitution to serve the best off, the richest in our society--quite the contrary. The genius of America was a government designed, as President Lincoln so eloquently summarized, to be ``of the people, by the people, and for the people.''
This Senator will be rising periodically to address issues that affect Americans across our Nation. It is important to a government of, by, and for the people to address issues that we should be addressing in this Chamber.
Today I will use this time to talk about the challenge we face in climate change. Last month, scientists reported that 2015 was the single hottest year on record. NASA says that this past year was a full 0.9 degrees centigrade. That is well over 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the average during the 20th Century. Moreover, it rose significantly warmer from 2014, which was the previous hottest year on record--0.23 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than 2014. That is an unexpectedly massive increase in the challenge of global warming.
These numbers come from the best scientific analysis. They take the combined temperatures from the land, water, and air to get a comprehensive picture of what is going on in our beautiful blue green planet. In total, 15 of the hottest years our planet has experienced while humans have tread this Earth have been in the last 16 years.
These temperature records send a strong message to us, but there is also a message coming from what is happening on the ground--the facts on the ground. We see the impact of global warming on our own communities. We see the impacts in terms of the pine beetle expansion because the winters are not cold enough to kill them off. We see it in terms of the red zone that comes from that. We see it in terms of the longer fire season--60 days longer in the last 40 years in my home State of Oregon. On the Oregon coast we are having trouble with oysters reproducing because the first few days it is difficult to form a shell with waters 30 percent more acidic than they were before the Industrial Revolution. We see it in the Cascade Mountains, where the snowpack has been smaller. It affects our winter sports, and it certainly affects the runoff that serves our farms. We have had massive, difficult droughts in southern Oregon in the Klamath Basin.
These changes are not just happening in Oregon. They are happening across our Nation. They are happening across the world. This change is driving huge costs that can be measured in lost lives, lost homes, lost farms, lost businesses, burnt forests, and billions of dollars in disaster relief.
Scientists agree that we must keep the warming of our planet under 2 degrees Celsius to avoid catastrophic impacts. We are seeing severe impacts now, but these will be nothing compared to what is anticipated if we allow global warming to continue. At this stage below 2 degrees Celsius or 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit, we must pivot off of the fossil fuels to a clean energy economy. That means pursuing energy efficiency in our vehicles, in our freight transportation, and in our homes. It does mean investing in renewable energy, noncarbon electrical energy produced by sunlight and by wind.
The simple, sobering fact is this: Energy efficiency and renewable energy will not be enough to stop the warming of our planet unless we leave 80 percent of the currently known fossil fuel reserves in the ground. That is a powerful statement because there are enormous financial forces that seek to extract those proven reserves, to burn those proven preserves, and in doing so will destroy our planet.
You and I, fellow citizens, are owners together of a vast amount of fossil fuels, of coal, of natural gas, of oil. This is the oil and gas and coal that is underneath our public lands and water. We should use our ``We the People'' power to manage these fossil fuel reserves for the public good, and the public good is to move away from an era where the U.S. Government facilitates the extraction and burning of our citizen-owned fossil fuels to a new era where the Federal Government, together our ``We the People'' government, leads the transition from fossil fuels to a clean energy economy. As we face the threat of catastrophic climate change, the public good in regard to these fossil fuels is to keep them in the ground.
When we do a new lease for the extraction of our citizen-owned fossil fuels, we lock in carbon extraction for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, even 50 years into the future. That is unacceptable. That is morally wrong because that extraction, decades into the future, will do enormous damage to our planet, to our forests, to our farming, and to our fishing. This is an assault, first and foremost, on rural America, and it is our responsibility to stop it.
That is why I introduced the Keep It in the Ground Act. This legislation ends new leases for coal and oil and gas on public lands and waters, and it would drive a transition from fossil fuel extraction and combustion toward a renewable energy economy.
Critics might argue that we cannot simply end consumption of fossil fuels tomorrow. They might point out that society still depends on fossil fuels for electricity and for transportation, and they might know the leases that have already been put out there provide extraction opportunities decades after this bill is enacted. That being said, it is all the more important that we not do new leases, that we not do new leases that empower more extraction decades into the future. Time is short and public lands and waters are citizen owned. Public lands and waters are the right place to start, and it is critical to the future of our planet.
The success of this moment, the ``keep it in the ground'' movement, will depend on grassroots organizing. The grassroots stopped the Keystone Pipeline, which would have turned on the tap for some of the dirtiest fossil fuels in the world. Grassroots organizing has driven the administration to suspend and possibly to stop drilling in the Arctic waters--drilling, which is the height of irresponsibility in the fragile Arctic region, and just recently grassroots organizing and energy has encouraged the President to put a pause on coal leasing to evaluate its climatic impacts.
While these are important steps in the right direction, I want to encourage our President to go further. Just as he has suspended new leases for coal, President Obama has authority to do the same for oil and gas. Last week I joined with nine other colleagues in calling on the Department of the Interior to strengthen its climate commitments by dropping all new fossil fuel leases from the 5-year Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program.
I emphasize grassroots organizing as critical because this building on Capitol Hill is full of individuals, such as I, who have been elected, and in our elections vast funds from the fossil fuel industry are holding sway. So it is going to take citizens and a ``We the People'' government--of, by, and for the people--to be able to continue to drive what we all know is right. It will be essential to sustain and expand the ``keep it in the ground'' movement.
Not so long ago, when individuals outside of this building were talking about ``keep it in the ground,'' and then inside this building we started to have that conversation, many said: It is just too much of a stretch. It is just too much of a paradigm change from the past, when we sought to lease out our fossil fuels, that this wouldn't work.
Where are we now? Not only did we have success in the Keystone, not only did we have success in the Arctic, not only did we have success in terms of suspension of coal leases, but we have a broader conversation about ending all of these new leases in each of these areas of fossil fuels on our citizen-owned property.
Senator Bernie Sanders, who is a cosponsor of my keep it in the ground bill, said in November:
We cannot continue to extract fossil fuels from Federally owned land.
He continued and said:
You can't talk the talk and say I'm concerned about climate change. And at the same time, say we're going to extract a huge amount of oil, coal, and gas from federal land.
Last Friday Secretary Clinton called for banning fossil fuels or banning fossil fuels on public land a ``done deal,'' and she went on to say: ``No future extractions, I agree with that.'' That is what she said. So we have come a long way in a short period, from action in three specific areas to the leading Presidential contenders on the Democratic side calling for moral action to take on this threat.
Moving forward, there are two options before us. Our Federal Government can be a government of, by, and for the titans, and it can be complicit in digging our carbon hole even deeper and doing more damage to the land we love or our Federal Government can be the ``We the People'' government that was laid out by our Constitution, and it can lead this effort to manage our fossil fuels on public lands for the public good and work with our partners around the globe to save our planet.
It has been said we are the first generation to see the impacts of global warming and that we are the last generation that can do something about it. So the choice is simple. Let's move aggressively away from a fossil fuel economy to a clean energy economy. Let's work in partnership with the world to take on this worldwide challenge and let's do the smart thing. When it comes to our publicly owned fossil fuels, let's keep it in the ground.
Thank you, Mr. President.
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