Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016--Conference Report--

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHATZ. Madam President, I hate conspiracy theories. I believe most of the suspicious, confusing, frustrating, or unknowable things in the world are the way they are not because there are 12 people in a room wringing their hands trying to figure out how to trick all of us but because the world is complicated, often unfair, sometimes illogical, and we all operate with incomplete information. So even as a climate hawk, I came to the idea of an organized misinformation campaign with real hesitation. I didn't want to be that guy who believes there is an evil empire that lies for a living. But here is the thing: I have studied this, and I have learned that there really is an organized, well-financed disinformation and misinformation campaign on the subject of climate change. It is straight out of a bad movie about politics, complete with PR guys, dark campaign money, fake scientists, politicians in the mix, and a weakened media. It is like Raymond Tusk actually exists.

I rise today to join my colleagues in combating a pervasive and highly damaging campaign of misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies. For decades, the same hired guns that tried to convince the American people that there was no link between smoking and lung cancer have been following the same playbook on manmade climate change. They want to sow doubt where no doubt exists. Just like the tobacco companies profited from denial, so too have the fossil fuel companies profited by propping up front groups and sham think tanks that try to convince us that the science on climate change isn't settled and that no consensus exists between mainstream scientists, but of course that is not true.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science said:

The science linking human activities to climate change is analogous to the science linking smoking to lung and cardiovascular diseases. Physicians, cardiovascular scientists, public health experts, and others all agree that smoking causes cancer, and this consensus among the health community has convinced most Americans that the health risks from smoking are real. A similar consensus now exists among climate scientists, a consensus that maintains climate change is happening and human activity is the cause.

It is worth pausing here to make two basic points. The first is one I mentioned earlier, and that is that the same techniques which were used to block science and prevent action on tobacco are now being deployed to prevent action on climate. That stands to reason. If you are looking for public relations techniques to essentially mislead the public so you can squeeze additional years and decades of profitability, then you would be wise to use the techniques, methods, and procedures that worked in the past, so that sort of stands to reason. It shocks the conscience, but it shouldn't shock us that this is happening. The really shocking part is this. Of course they would use the same techniques to mislead the public regardless of the issue, but the real shock is that it is literally the same people. It is not the same type of person or the same category of person, it is the same human beings and the same professionals. They are the same PR firms, and they have replicated the machinery of the Tobacco Institute, sharing processes, procedures, personnel, and funding sources. But just as we did against Big Tobacco, we are going to win the war of ideas against Big Oil and Big Coal.

The truth is on our side, but the truth is not guaranteed to come out. We actually have to expose their ecosystem of misinformation to make real progress on climate, and so for a moment I will talk a little bit about the media, which has played an unfortunate role.

Generally speaking, people in the U.S. media like to get ``both sides of the story'' just to be fair, which under many circumstances works just fine. After all, the definition of a bad story in a lot of reporters' minds is to be one-sided. What happens when one side of the story is factual and the other side is a house of cards? Many in the media still report it as though, on the one hand, scientists say climate change is real, and on the other hand, some say it is not. To be fair, this has improved over the last year or so, but that was the foundational weakness of the American media--their credulity when reporting on deniers--that the climate denial apparatus took full advantage of.

There are not two sides to every issue. Sometimes there are just facts on one side and bull on the other. We don't argue about the existence of gravity or whether the Earth is round or, thankfully, whether smoking causes lung cancer. We have known since the 19th century that carbon dioxide traps heat much like a greenhouse. We know that burning fossil fuels releases stored carbon into the atmosphere. We have seen the evidence of increasing temperatures and rising sea levels for decades. The correlation between levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global temperatures is absolutely undeniable. To deny the reality of manmade climate change in this context requires willful ignorance.

How is this happening? Academics from Yale and Drexel Universities, among others, have researched and exposed the many sources of dark money that are fueling the climate denial machine. My colleagues are speaking today--and spoke yesterday as well--about some of the greatest offenders, and I will focus my remarks on just two. One is a small organization that most people haven't heard of, and another is an organization that I think a lot of people who work in politics have heard of. The first is the Center for Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, and the other is the Heartland Institute.

The Center for Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change is a family project out of Tempe, AZ, that claims that global warming will be beneficial to humanity. The center does not disclose funding information because they believe doing so would bias the way people perceive their purpose and publications, and that may be the only thing they say that is true.

Transparency is crucial in the world of science because it allows the scientific community and the general public to determine whether there might be a conflict of interest. In this instance, there is a conflict of interest. We know that at the very least, ExxonMobil and Peabody coal have given significant sums of money to the center. When two companies with a long history of climate denial are paying you to deny the scientific consensus on climate change, it is fair to point out that something smells a little fishy.

Better known than the Center for Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change is the Heartland Institute, which gained national attention after putting up a billboard comparing those who believed in manmade global warming to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. This tasteless stunt rightfully cost Heartland $825,000 in corporate donations, but Heartland still receives millions of dollars a year from fossil fuel companies and others with a vested interest in continuing the status quo. They still have an outsize impact in the national conversation by insinuating that the science on climate change is not settled.

Not surprisingly, Heartland follows the tobacco playbook to a T. Their reliance on dark money means that Heartland's funding is notoriously difficult to track. According to the watchdog group Conservative Transparency, Heartland has received more than $14 million from the Koch-initiated Donors Trust and Donors Capital groups, which shield donors' identities. We know that ExxonMobil has contributed at least $675,000 since 1998, and the Union of Concerned Scientists found that 40 percent of those funds were specifically designated for climate change projects. The money from these organizations, among others, allowed Heartland to publish nearly 3,000 documents toward climate change skepticism between 1998 and 2013. Heartland also organizes gatherings of climate skeptics and defends fossil fuel funding experts who continue to deny the reality of the changing climate we are already seeing today. We have seen this movie before.

What is happening this week is historic. We are no longer going to allow these front groups to pose as on-the-level think tanks. We have a moral obligation to not only solve this problem but to also fix our politics. We should all be making decisions about how best to solve this problem.

Let's have this great debate. Let the two major political parties have an argument about the best way to tackle climate change because this isn't just a climate thing at this point, this is an integrity thing.

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