Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I rise to recognize the importance of the signing of the Paris Agreement.

Tomorrow marks the 46th anniversary of Earth Day--the first Earth Day--the Earth Day that occurred when I was in seventh grade. My seventh grade teacher made a point of making sure all the students were aware of it. They made sure we had a chance to do a field trip to the community college to learn about some of the issues related to stewardship of the planet.

It is a day to appreciate the extraordinary beauty of our blue-green planet but also to recognize, to remind ourselves of the fact that we have a huge responsibility to be good stewards of the wonderful planet we have.

It was Theodore Roosevelt who said that ``our greatest central task [is] leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us.'' That is the definition of stewardship, and that is what Earth Day is all about. This is why it is so fitting that tomorrow, on Earth Day, America will join other nations in signing the Paris Agreement.

This international climate accord is a tremendous step forward. It makes clear the world recognizes that global warming is a very significant and grave concern facing human civilization on this planet. It is, indeed, the moral challenge of our generation.

I am proud and inspired by the global community's unprecedented commitment to avert global warming, to avert a climate crisis. We know what the stakes are. We don't need computer models to look 50 years into the future because the impacts are here today. We see it in our own communities. We see it in our own States. We see it through the impact of droughts, the impact of wildfires, the impact of heat waves, the storms, the hurricanes, the tornadoes. We see it through story after story of this year or this month being the warmest ever recorded by humans. These events have profound costs that can be measured in lost lives, lost homes, lost businesses, billions of dollars in disaster relief.

It is important to understand that global warming's major assault is on our rural communities, on our farming, our fishing, and our forestry. You can see it across the world. You can see it across the country. You can see it just inside my home State of Oregon. We have had significant droughts greatly impacting our agricultural community in my State.

We have had a loss of snowpack in the Cascades, a trend over decades impacting the availability of water for irrigation in farming. We have seen the impact on fishing, with streams that are warmer and smaller than they were in the past. We have seen it on our oyster population on the coast, where now the oysters are having trouble reproducing because the Pacific Ocean is 30 percent more acidic than it was before we started burning fossil fuels on this planet. That greater acidity is affecting the ability of baby oysters to form shells. That should frighten us all--the ability of shellfish to form shells being threatened.

It is hard to imagine that we have burned enough fossil fuels to actually impact the acidity of the oceans. But we have, and the problem is getting worse. We see the impact on our forests. We see it in my home State of Oregon through the red zone. That is the term given to the vast swaths of forests that have been killed by pine beetles because the winters now are not cold enough to kill off the pine beetle. So the infestations are much more aggressive, much more widespread.

We see the impact on our forests from more vigorous wildfires and a longer forest fire season--a season that has grown by 60 days over 40 years. That is 2 months. In fact, we have even had forest fires in Oregon in the month of January. It is a huge loss, a huge impact on the ecosystem, and a huge impact on the economy.

If you care about rural America and our farming, our fishing, and our forestry, you must care about carbon pollution and global warming. Scientists agree that we must keep the warming of our planet under 2 degrees Celsius in order to avoid the catastrophic impacts of climate change--impacts much worse than what we are seeing now. But we have already warmed the planet by 1 degree. So we are halfway toward that boundary, which is why an important component of the Paris agreement is not just the substance of the agreement itself but also a compact that the international community will revisit every 5 years, because the measures taken in the Paris agreement are not enough to fend off catastrophe.

What they do represent is virtually every nation in the world coming together and saying we understand the challenge to our planet, and we understand that we must be part of the solution. To have more heads of state come together in December for the Paris agreement than at any other time in human history is very impressive. But the commitments made, even if they are fully fulfilled, don't go far enough. We are going to have to come back together every 5 years to add to our understanding and to increase the speed with which we are pivoting from fossil fuels to renewable fuels.

At those 5-year gatherings, we will strengthen our pledges, we will work to reduce the emissions even further, and we will review the changing technologies. There is so much investment going on. There is a program called Mission Innovation, which is a number of countries coming together, private companies coming together, and foundations coming together to develop the best ideas--out-of-the-box ideas--to be able to take on the challenge of global warming. Those technologies are going to be a key part of accelerating our ability to tackle this challenge.

We have to keep working to drive down the cost curve on renewable energy so that it makes a positive contribution to our economy in every possible way, lowering the cost of power while at the same time putting thousands or, in some technologies, millions of individuals to work. We have to make sure developing countries can afford these options in solar, wind, and other renewable strategies.

Together, we must invest in paradigm-shifting technology. One of those might be battery storage, to make better use of solar energy when the solar energy exceeds current demand, or to capture wind energy when the wind is blowing strongly and our wind turbines are producing more than the current demand.

It means we have to do things such as investing in a broader grid to ship those amps of electricity around the country--those watts of energy around the country. Here at home, we can't keep up business as usual. If we need to pivot from fossil fuels to renewables, then we shouldn't keep subsidizing fossil fuels. We can't keep drilling oil offshore and opening up drilling in new places like the Arctic. The Arctic nation should come together and reach a pact not to drill in the Arctic and to put it off-limits.

As American citizens, you and I own a lot of oil, a lot of coal, and we must recognize that we need to keep those fossil fuels that we own in the ground because here is the size of the problem. For us to succeed in keeping the temperature of our planet below 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial age, we have to leave 80 percent of the identified proven fossil fuel reserves in the world in the ground.

If we are going to do that, then it makes no sense at all--for what you and I own as citizens--to be pulling it out of the ground. It makes no sense to be doing contracts today--leases--that provide a legal contract for extraction of our coal, our oil, and our gas, which you and I own as citizens, three decades, four decades, or five decades into the future--long after the world has to have pivoted off of fossil fuels.

It is said that when you are in a hole, stop digging. In this case, we are in a carbon pollution hole, and we need to stop digging fossil fuels out of the ground. Instead, we must seize the opportunity to invest in the infrastructure of the future, to spur a clean energy revolution, and to build a green economy creating living-wage jobs. It has been said that we are the first generation to feel the impact of global warming, and we are the last generation that can do something about it.

That is a huge responsibility. The signing of this agreement consists of doing something about it, something major about it, something important about it, something that all the Nations in the world have come together to do together to take this on and to recognize our collective responsibility. It is a breakthrough moment in the fight-- the international fight, the human civilization fight--to take on this moral, major challenge to our planet.

While this deal is by no means the end of the work we must do, having the global community come together around a vision of action is a huge milestone in the path to averting climate catastrophe. This agreement should only strengthen our Nation's resolve to build a sustainable future, to protect our beautiful blue-green planet, and to work harder to fight climate change not just on Earth Day but every day of the year. In fact, this agreement is very much central to the task that Theodore Roosevelt put before us: to leave our land a better land for our descendants than it is for us. Let's get to work.

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