Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016--Conference Report--
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. HEINRICH. Mr. President, I rise to join my colleagues from the Senate Climate Action Task Force on the floor to bring attention to the well-funded network of organizations that are deliberately misleading the public on climate change. My colleagues have called them the web of denial. We all gathered on the floor yesterday and today to bring attention to these political front groups that are acting as major roadblocks to the actions we must take as a nation and as a global community to address the difficult and disruptive but absolute and unequivocal scientific reality of climate change.
This web of denial is made up of dozens of organizations propped up by dark money. These political front groups for wealthy and self- interested donors like the Koch brothers--you may have heard of them-- peddle bogus theories that climate change isn't real or, at the very least, the American public should doubt the overwhelming scientific evidence and fear what might happen if we enact policies that move us toward cleaner energy solutions. These organizations are promoting policies that are completely counterproductive at a time when we urgently need to take decisive action to combat climate change and to protect the health of our children and future generations.
As many of my constituents know well, climate change has already had a very real and costly impact in my home State of New Mexico, as it has across our Nation and around the world. In New Mexico, we are already seeing more extreme and prolonged drought conditions, larger wildfires, shrinking forests, and increased flooding. This is the reality now, not some far-off date in the future, and the longer we wait to act, the more difficult and the more expensive the solutions will be.
That is why the fictitious narratives spun by this web of denial and their organizations are so dangerous and why we, as policymakers, need to stand and refute their lies. We need to disclose who they really are and discredit their campaigns.
I am focusing this evening on the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. ALEC is an organization made up of State legislators across the Nation, and ALEC claims that nearly one-quarter of our country's State legislators are affiliated with the organization. ALEC calls itself a nonpartisan organization that promotes an exchange of ideas to help create State-based policies that promote economic growth.
Sounds like motherhood and apple pie, doesn't it? But when you take a look at who is behind ALEC's operations and you take a look at the types of policy they are pushing in State capitols across this Nation, you get a sense for their real agenda, and you can tell they are part of the coordinated and well-funded campaign to peddle doubt and skepticism about the settled science of climate change.
ALEC has been described as ``a dating service between politicians at the State level, local elected politicians, and many of America's biggest companies.'' ALEC writes ``model policy''--thousands of cookie cutter, anti-conservation bills that legislators can introduce under their own name, in their own States, in hopes of turning them into law.
Specifically, in the area of energy policy, ALEC pushes a concerted legislative agenda that is in line with the rest of the Koch network to promote climate skepticism and roll back laws that protect clean air and water. ALEC's ``model bills'' read like they were written by the biggest polluters in our country because they probably were.
There are resolutions condemning the Clean Power Plan, calling for States to withdraw from regional climate initiatives and to reconsider national environmental standards such as rules that reduce ozone pollution--and, I might add, save lives. ALEC also pushes bills that call for repealing renewable fuel standards that are moving our electric grid toward cleaner energy sources.
ALEC has also written model resolutions that call for selling off or turning over public lands, such as our national forests in Western States like New Mexico and across our country. The current ALEC State chair in my home State of New Mexico introduced legislation at the Roundhouse in recent years called the Transfer of Public Land Act, which would call on the Federal Government to turn our public lands over to State management.
The only way Western States like mine could foot the bill for administering America's public lands would be to raise taxes dramatically or--and this is much more likely--sell off large expanses to developers and other private interests. Over time, it would mean public lands that New Mexicans go to every summer to hike and camp and barbecue with their families, the national forests where they go to chase elk and mule deer during hunting season would be closed off behind no trespassing signs.
I have long believed public lands are an equalizer in America, where access to public lands ensure you don't need to be a millionaire to enjoy the great outdoors or to introduce your family, your children to hunting and fishing and hiking. This land-grab idea is just as ludicrous as denying climate change, just as detached from reality, and similarly comes at the expense of our public health and protection of our public lands and resources.
Frankly, you don't have to do a deep-dive investigation to figure out what is going on. The so-called policy experts and leaders that make up ALEC's board of directors are on the record as climate skeptics. ALEC's CEO, Lisa Nelson, said: ``I don't know the science on that,'' when she was asked if CO
We all know the reason ALEC's members and leaders say things like this and promote these kinds of bills. It is because so much of the funding for ALEC's operations comes from sources other than membership dues. Over 98 percent of ALEC's revenues comes from corporations and trade groups and corporate foundations. That is how ALEC works, by sewing uninformed seeds of doubt to move the needle at the State and local level toward anti-science, anti-climate action policies that benefit their funders' bottom line.
ALEC is just one piece of a large web of similar dark money organizations that promote climate skepticism and are dangerous fronts for corporate interests to deliberately mislead the public and influence lawmakers. To see just one other recent example of this in my home State of New Mexico, I would like to take a moment to look at a letter to the editor published last week in the Las Cruces Sun-News by the Environmental Policy Alliance.
This is another one of those web-of-denial political front groups. In the letter to the editor, they claim that conservation and monument designations are really ``federal land grabs'' and the work of ``radical environmental groups'' trying to stop economic development. These ``radical groups'' and ``green decoys'' are, according to the letter, such dangerous groups as Trout Unlimited, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, the Izaak Walton League, and Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, groups that all stand up for the interests of sportsmen and hunters and anglers--certainly not what most of my constituents would consider radical.
A close look shows who the real decoy is. The Environmental Policy Alliance is funded by the Western Fuels Association, another organization in the web of denial, and it is a pet project of lobbyist Rick Berman, who has also led deceptive public campaigns on behalf of cigarette and alcohol companies and now dirty energy. This organization doesn't care about the best way to manage our publicly owned lands or preserving the ability of Americans--no matter what their stake in life is, how much money they make--to experience our country's rich outdoor heritage. Instead, the Environmental Policy Alliance wants to put our public lands up for sale so the corporate elite can develop them for their own use and their own profit.
The Environmental Policy Alliance has published similar letters in dozens of small to midsized city newspapers all across our country in recent years--canned letters with no connection to local sentiment.
The reality is, the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument in Southern New Mexico, which this group has slandered, serves as a national example of community-driven, landscape-scale conservation. In fact, independent polling shows overwhelming local support for this monument, and I am proud of my close work with the region's diverse coalition and stakeholders that worked so hard for so many years to make that monument a reality.
Two years into the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks designation, local businesses in the Las Cruces area are attracting major tourism dollars and economic benefits. The Lonely Planet guidebook has named Southern New Mexico as a top 10 ``Best in the U.S.'' for 2016 destination, and highlights the national monument as a reason to visit.
The tax revenues of the town of Mesilla have jumped over 20 percent since the monument's creation, and Las Cruces' lodgers tax revenues are up since 2015, in part because of new conferences and meetings attracted to the area by the monument.
You can see how out of touch these groups are that want to instead sell off this public land. The organizations that make up this web of denial are promoting dishonest and deceptive campaigns that frankly run directly counter to the public interest.
At a time when we desperately need to move our State and national energy and conservation policies forward, we should be taking the overwhelming and indisputable scientific fact of climate change seriously, and we should make smart and forward-looking investments in the sustainable, low-carbon fuels of the future.
I am convinced advances in energy efficiency and generation and transmission of clean power offer us a roadmap that not only allows us to combat climate change but to do it in a way that will create thousands of new jobs and much needed economic activity in New Mexico and all across our country.
That is the reality, just like climate change. Climate change is not theoretical. It is one of those stubborn facts that doesn't go away just because we choose to ignore it or if we listen to the company line from self-interested Koch donor networks and organizations like ALEC.
I think it is time to call these ``Astroturf'' groups out for who they really are and, frankly, who they really answer to. More importantly, it is time to take action on the moral challenge of our time--addressing climate change--so that our children can inherit the future they truly deserve.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source