Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2017--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. COONS. Madam President, I wish to thank my great colleague, the Senator from Rhode Island, for his tireless efforts to keep climate change on this Chamber's radar. One day I hope that we can move it from our radar to our to-do list and ultimately to the history books.

Today I am pleased and proud to join my colleagues to speak about something I thought we had established in grade school but apparently bears repeating; that is, the importance of science. It is troubling that today in the 21st century, there is any doubt about the importance of real, sound science in many facets of our lives. It is troubling that we still need to defend science here on the Senate floor.

Scientific discovery and invention are the engine of our economy. Science leads to transformative technologies and new ways of thinking in a wide range of fields, including health care, manufacturing, agriculture, clean energy, and national security.

Scientific inquiry is also the foundation of good public policy. It shapes and informs how we inform global threats such as ozone depletion, an issue on which the international community has made real progress. Science must play an equally central role in how we address climate change.

When we want to know what to do about a public health or environmental crisis, we turn to science. For example, rigorous, careful data collection and analysis are critical to understanding long-term trends. Data can show the effectiveness of a medication in treating a disease, for example, or the ability of a new material to withstand extreme conditions over time. And data can help us make good decisions based on those trends. Never have we had a greater ability to collect and analyze data than today. That is why more than ever in today's world, science should drive policy, not the other way around.

In a number of areas, I have worked with my Republican colleagues on bipartisan bills that help substantially advance scientific inquiry, from encouraging citizen science projects to improving public-private partnerships with our national labs. So why is climate science so threatening to some?

Sadly, there are far too many organizations in existence today that have it backwards. These organizations have attempted to distort science for purely political ends because the facts threaten the bottom line of those who have created and sustained them. These organizations claim to use sound science to support policy objectives, but their actions indicate that the only science they find sound is the kind that sounds like profits.

One of these organizations is the now-defunct The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, known as the TASSC--an organization that played a key role in obscuring the facts around the dangers of tobacco use. TASSC was originally founded back in 1993 under the guise of promoting ``sound science in policymaking.'' In reality, as was later uncovered in the documents that came to light in the course of litigation against the tobacco industry, TASSC actually had the opposite goal. The year it was founded, it stated in private documents at the time that one of its goals was to lay the groundwork to help Phillip Morris advance its agenda of promoting tobacco use nationally and at the State and local level. How? Let me quote from one of these discovered documents: by ``encouraging the public to question--from the grassroots up--the validity of scientific studies.''

These are not the statements of an organization devoted to scientific inquiry and data-driven policy.

Let me be clear. The problem doesn't lie in industry hiring scientists to argue their case. That is well within the rights of industry and of any organization in our country. The problem is when groups like this one misrepresent their very motives, hide their sources of funding and industry ties, and push out misleading or even incorrect information under the guise of ``sound science.''

We all know today that smoking tobacco is profoundly harmful to our health. Yet these same organizations, the ones that decades ago promoted ``science'' that hid the truth about tobacco and threatened public health for far too long, are now in sadly too many cases doing the same with climate change.

Fortunately, today, this group I am discussing, TASSC, is now defunct. But its former executive director, Steve Milloy, is still an active climate change denier who helped draft the 1998 ``Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan.'' It included the statement: ``Victory Will Be Achieved When Average citizens `understand' . . . uncertainties in climate science; recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the `conventional wisdom.' ''

Quite simply, his goal was and continues to be to persuade people, using incorrect, scientifically unsound information, to doubt the science about climate change, one of the greatest global challenges we face. His policy goal is to halt action on climate change, and he is using science incorrectly to achieve this political end. Frankly, this is irresponsible and it flies in the face of the foundation of the scientific method.

As someone who trained in chemistry in college, I am familiar with how scientists are trained to formulate hypotheses, carefully construct experiments to test those hypotheses, and without bias or preformed assumptions, then draw conclusions about those hypotheses. Starting with the answer and considering only evidence that supports the answer--that is not science; that is politics.

The very existence of groups like TASSC and others that my colleagues will speak about this evening and tomorrow make clear that we must work even harder to defend and support science throughout our society.

That means providing robust funding for our national lab system.

That means establishing a Federal effort to coordinate research in a new subfield of chemistry that I have been excited about promoting.

That means supporting the use of crowdsourcing and citizen science methods in Federal agencies.

That means supporting policies that will support industry-relevant training in engineering, including advanced manufacturing.

All of these are efforts that I have been involved in and that enjoy bipartisan support. My colleagues know that I make an effort to promote pragmatic, bipartisan policy ideas. Science should not be a partisan issue, and neither, frankly, should climate change.

Climate change is all too real for those of us who live in low-lying coastal States like my home State of Delaware, where flooding has already devastated homes and communities up and down the State. The science is clear: This severe flooding is only going to increase as temperatures continue to rise around the globe and as the sea level rises as well.

We live in an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advantages. The NASA Juno spacecraft mission to Jupiter; the ability to use 3-D printing to manufacture custom products, specifically prosthetics; the evolution of new developments in robotics and genomics--these advances capture our imagination, and they can change our world. These developments happen because America's best trained scientists and engineers have spent decades undertaking rigorous and innovative research and applying their findings to address the big questions of our world.

Certainly the challenges of climate change are daunting and urgent, and so we should be focused on using the best science available to tackle these challenges with the best policy solutions possible--not convincing people who prefer denial and deception that the science isn't even real.

I wish to thank my friend and colleague Senator Whitehouse for his tireless leadership in addressing climate change and for assembling today's important colloquy.

If I might, with the forbearance of my colleague from New Mexico who I see has come to the floor, I wish to take just a few more minutes to address an unrelated but urgent topic. Tragedy in Dallas

Madam President, before I invite one of my colleagues to continue today's colloquy, I just want to say a few words about the tragic events in Dallas. Just four days ago, a peaceful protest in Dallas that brought together protesters and police in an example of the very best of our Nation was torn apart by a cowardly and savage act that reflected the very worst. Five police officers were murdered, leaving their families, friends, and country in shock, in mourning, and in search of answers, and six of their colleagues were injured.

Last week was a very difficult one for America. From Dallas to many other cities, including Baton Rouge and St. Paul, MN, far too many lives were cut short by violence, far too many families will never be whole again.

But as our President said this weekend, America is not as divided as we may appear. We are united in mourning the tragic deaths of Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Michael Krol, Lorne Ahrens, and Michael Smith, and in mourning Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. We are united in our grief for their families and communities.

We are united in our respect and admiration for police and first responders, the overwhelming majority of whom do their dangerous jobs with bravery and selflessness.

But we are also united in our awareness that we have so much more work to do to strengthen the relationship between law enforcement and the communities they serve and protect. We are united in our understanding that moving beyond this tragic and unacceptable status quo--to heal our wounds and build toward a national community of respect and compassion--will challenge us in ways both new and uncomfortable.

But as Franklin Roosevelt said in an address exactly 80 years ago today: ``There are no limits to this Nation's capacity to obtain and maintain true freedom, no limits except the strength of our Nation's desire and determination.''

I am confident our desire and determination will build an America in which police officers can serve their communities, worrying only about how to make their communities safer, not whether they will come home that night.

Our desire and our determination can and should build a Nation in which every American can live, work, play, and worship free of concerns about discrimination, a Nation in which all of us are able to abide by the law as written with a law as lived. We must do better and we will do better.

I thank my colleagues for the opportunity to join in this colloquy, and I wish to yield the floor to my colleague from the State of New Mexico.

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