National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2017

Floor Speech

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Mr. COONS. Mr. President, if I might make an inquiry about the order. Senator Whitehouse and I were about to engage in a colloquy.
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Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I am so pleased to join my colleague, the Senator from Rhode Island, to discuss one of the most important issues facing future generations in our world, which is climate change, an issue that also directly affects both of our coastal and low-lying States.

Many may know Delaware's status as the first State to ratify the Constitution, but I think few of my colleagues are aware that Delaware is also our country's lowest lying State. We have the lowest mean elevation. This status comes with certain challenges, especially with nearly 400 miles of exposed shoreline. That means no part of our State is more than 30 miles from the coast, so the good news is that no matter where you live in my home State, it takes less than 30 minutes to get to sun and sand. But the challenge is that we are particularly vulnerable to the increasing effects of climate change.

In recent years, we have seen how flooding can devastate homes and communities up and down our State. Low-lying neighborhoods often don't have the resources to cope with steadily increasing flooding. A community such as Southbridge in Wilmington--pictured to my right--has been disproportionately affected.

Environmental justice has long been a concern of mine and of Senator Whitehouse. We had the opportunity to visit the neighborhood of Southbridge. Southbridge is significantly flooded every time it rains more than an inch or two. With subsidence, the steady sinking of the land, and with sea level rise acting in combination in my State, we will simply see more and more challenges from severe flooding due to sea level rise around the globe and in my home State.

It is not just houses and neighborhoods that are threatened by sea level rise; it also affects businesses and entire industries. There is a broad range of long-established industries and businesses in my State that are placed in coastal areas because of the history of our settlement and development. Somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of all the land used for heavy industry in my State will likely be inundated by sea level rise by the end of the century, and that doesn't even include all of the other productive land use for agriculture and tourism that contribute to jobs and revenue in my home State.

Despite our small size and our significant exposure, we also punch above our weight when it comes to tackling the challenges of climate change. In places like Southbridge, our communities have come together at the State and local level to find creative solutions to cope with the flooding that is increasingly caused by climate change. This image demonstrates a plan that has been developed for the South Wilmington wetlands project. Senator Whitehouse may describe his visit to the State of Delaware in more detail, but I wanted to open simply by describing this community response to the flooding that we saw in the previous slide. We have come together as a community to plan a cleanup of a brownfield area to create a safe and attractive park for the neighborhood and to improve water quality and drainage in a way that also creates new ecosystems, new opportunities for recreation, and a new future for a community long blighted and often under water.

That is not the only example of the many actions that have been taken by my home State of Delaware. Delaware also participates in RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a collection of nine mid-Atlantic and northeastern States, including Rhode Island, that have joined together to implement market-based policies to reduce emissions.

Since 2009, the participating States have reduced our carbon emissions by 20 percent while also experiencing stronger economic growth in the rest of the country, which I view as proof that fighting climate change and strengthening our economy are not mutually exclusive exchangeable goals.

In fact, over the past 6 years, Delaware has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions more than any State in the entire United States. We have done that by growing our solar capacity 6,000 percent through multiple utility-scale projects and distributed solar. We have also done our best to adapt to climate change through community and State-led planning. Our Governor Jack Markell and former Delaware Secretary Collin O'Mara led a fantastic bottom-up, State-wide level planning effort to address the impacts of climate change on water, agriculture, ecosystems, infrastructure, and public health. In December of 2014, they released their climate framework for Delaware--an impressive statewide effort to be prepared for what is coming before it is too late.

I believe Delaware is an example of how communities that are most vulnerable to climate change can work together across public and private sectors to meet the challenges of climate change head-on. That is why I invited my friend and colleague Senator Whitehouse. He is a true leader in the work to address climate change, not only in his home State of Rhode Island but across our country, and he has paid a visit to my State.

Every week, Senator Whitehouse gives a speech on a different aspect of climate change, and I was proud to participate today in his weekly speech on the topic and thrilled to welcome him to my home State in May as part of his ongoing effort.

The beach in Prime Hook over the last 60 years has receded more than 500 feet. Over the last decade, storms have broken through the dune line several times, flooding 4,000 acres of previously freshwater marsh.

When Hurricane Sandy hit this already fragile shoreline, leaving this coastline battered, as we can see here, it broke through completely and permanently flooded and destroyed the freshwater marsh. The storm deepened and widened the beach from 300 feet to about 1,500 feet and exacerbated routine flooding on local roads used by the community to access the beach.

For a delicate ecosystem like this wildlife refuge, this type of severe weather and flooding can be devastating. Over the last 3 years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has worked in tandem with other Federal agencies, State partners, and NGOs to restore this highly damaged fragile ecosystem and rebuild the beach's defenses.

It is a long story, but you can see the punch line here. As of 2016, construction of a newly designed, resloped, redeveloped barrier has been completed. Senator Whitehouse has also had the opportunity to visit this area. The finished project will be a saltwater marsh that I am confident will contribute significantly to a durable, resilient, and long-term ecosystem.

This is just one example of the creative things we are doing in Delaware to address the impacts of climate change and sea level rise. In some ways I think the most important and exciting was the last stop in our statewide visit.

With that I will turn it over to Senator Whitehouse to discuss in more detail his visit to Delaware and our last visit to the southernmost part of my home State.

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Mr. COONS. With that, Mr. President, I want to conclude by commenting that our day together began and ended with citizen science. The very first thing we did was to visit Delaware's national park to participate in a bio blitz, where volunteers from all over the country were identifying species and categorizing the threats to them from climate change. The very last thing we did was to count horseshoe crabs along the Cape Henlopen shore. I must say that my colleague from Rhode Island, even though there was driving rain and there were difficult conditions, was passionate and determined to do everything we could to contribute to the counting effort of the horseshoe crabs that day. It was a terrific opportunity to see a State that is engaged in planning and preparation and to witness one of the most remarkable migrations across our globe.

I want to express my gratitude to Senator Whitehouse for his leadership on this issue.

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Mr. COONS. The Senator will yield for a question.

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Mr. COONS. We were, indeed, the most persistently wet Senators in the entire country by the end of a very wet and very fulfilling day up and down the State of Delaware.

With that, I thank my colleague from Rhode Island.

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