Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016--Conference Report--
Floor Speech
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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I rise today to join my colleagues in speaking out against what I believe is the misleading and dangerous campaign of some in the fossil fuel industry to undermine this Nation's efforts to combat global climate change.
The science on climate change is beyond rational dispute. Climate change is real. It is a clear and present threat to our planet, and it must be addressed robustly and urgently.
Scientists have proven unequivocally that CO
True to form, 2015 was the Earth's warmest year on record. Rising global temperatures have led to extreme changes in weather events and in our environment. No country is insulated and no State is insulated from the escalating effects of climate change.
In the United States, we are seeing it in this every region of the country, and we are witnessing its effects very dramatically in my State of New Hampshire. Rising temperatures are affecting our tourism, our outdoor recreation, and our agriculture industries. We are experiencing an onset of negative health impacts and increases of insect-borne diseases--Lyme disease is one--all of which can be tied to the effects of climate change.
In the United States and throughout the world, people acknowledge that global warming is an existential threat that requires immediate action to slow its pace and mitigate its effects, even while those climate deniers are still out there, making noise.
According to the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of all Americans acknowledge that climate change is real and that action must be taken to address it. But there are some, an extreme but influential minority, who argue that climate change is a hoax; that it lacks scientific consensus; that the changes we observe are not due to CO
Not surprisingly, these climate deniers are not scientists, though they may pretend to be. They are front groups funded by the fossil fuel industry, generally, and the Koch brothers, in particular. These front groups are paid to spin a web of denial wrapped in ideology with the aim of purposely deceiving the public about the dangers of climate change. This is deceitful and it is wrong, and we are here on the floor this afternoon to call out these groups by name so that the public knows what to watch for and there is some transparency about what is being said.
One of those groups is the Competitive Enterprise Institute, or CEI, based in Washington, DC. This group describes itself as ``a public policy organization committed to advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government.'' But if we look more closely, we find that CEI is not an independent organization. It is funded by powerful corporations designed to spread untruths and disinformation on behalf of its corporate sponsors.
In recent years, CEI has taken up the issue of climate change. It has been outspoken in disputing scientific evidence that human-produced greenhouse gas emissions are driving global warming.
Some may recognize CEI not for its work on climate denial but for its prominent role in misleading the public about the scientific evidence linking smoking to lung cancer and heart disease. Legal documents from major tobacco companies exposed the fact that CEI received more than $800,000 from Philip Morris to launch coordinated media campaigns to attack the Food and Drug Administration's efforts to regulate tobacco.
Beginning in December, those groups conducted an aggressive media campaign toward those goals, incorporating the issuance of policy papers, conducting symposia, filing petitions with FDA and taking other steps to keep the public and media focus on the agency.
On the legislative front, a group of southern Democrats began negotiating with the White House early this year on behalf of the industry seeking to eliminate any role for the FDA in the regulation of tobacco.
The quid pro quo in these negotiations would be voluntary concessions on the part of the industry on the issue of youth access to cigarettes. Leading the negotiations were Sen. Wendell Ford and Rep. L.F. Payne. After nearly eight months of discussion, the WH rejected the compromise.
Beginning in January, members of Congress--at the urging of several outside groups including Citizens for a Sound Economy--began taking a much closer look at the FDA appropriations request. That scrutiny led to the successful effort to eliminate $300 million sought by FDA to consolidate its offices in a new federal campus, by any measure a major setback for Kessler.
Meanwhile, Congress also was scrutinizing the regular appropriations and voted to freeze the agency's budget, effectively decreasing the level of funding for next year when adjusted for inflation.
Language was inserted in that legislation to restrict Kessler's authority to assign employees to various projects and a list of questions was submitted to Kessler regarding his investigation into tobacco, including what resources and personnel were being devoted to the effort.
Congress has not been satisfied with his responses to date, raising the issue of whether Kessler has been evasive or even engaged in obstruction of Congress in this area.
Congress also initiated a series of oversight hearings regarding the agency, conducted in the House by Rep. Thomas Bliley and in the Senate by Sen. Nancy Kassebaum. Those hearings focused on whether the FDA was fulfilling its mission and included several demands by Congress for documents and deposition.
At the Senate oversight hearing, former FDA Commissioner Charlie Edwards testified, raising further questions of whether the FDA was acting legally and responsibly in pursuing a course that would lead to tobacco regulation.
As a result of the growing focus on FDA from inside and outside Congress and the groundwork laid through the oversight and investigations committee work, legislation to reform the FDA was proposed earlier this year and is expected to be formally introduced in September. A key provision in the reform legislation will be to restrict FDA's regulatory authority.
The House Agriculture Committee also requested that Kessler supply all documents he was using in consideration of his tobacco regulations. Kessler has resisted, and that effort continues.
In recognition that Kessler ultimately would play some regulatory role regarding tobacco, an aggressive campaign was conducted over the past six months to educate members of Congress and their staffs regarding the issue of regulation.
One result of that campaign was a July 15 press bipartisan press conference led by Reps. L.F. Payne and Richard Burr as a result of media reports that Kessler had sent his regulatory proposal to the White House. Participants circulated Dear Colleague letters throughout Congress and submitted Op-Ed pieces to their hometown newspapers challenging the need for FDA regulation.
Also, as a result of those education efforts, delegations of elected officials met with White House officials in an effort to derail federal intervention in tobacco regulation.
The groundwork that has been laid legislatively has been designed to create a receptive atmosphere in Congress for legislation that will be introduced to eliminate FDA's role in tobacco regulation. The timing and specifics of such legislation are under consideration.
Efforts in Congress also were made to identify unlikely allies--those who generally are more concerned with the politics of regulation rather than the substance--and resulted in meetings with the WH with Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Dick Gephardt. Labor also presented opposition to Kessler's role in regulation.
Recognizing that legislators weren't the only point of White House access, a conference of tobacco growers held this summer focused on the ramifications of FDA regulation. Both Sen. Ford and Rep. Payne spoke to growers, and efforts continue to mobilize the agricultural community in opposition to the proposed regulation.
The support of Administration political advisors was enlisted to discuss the ramifications of FDA regulation, and those efforts also continue. State Activities
Efforts focused primarily on defining the issue of youth smoking as one that properly should be addressed at the state and local level, rather than having FDA intervene with any regulatory scheme.
In all 50 states, the stated goal was to endorse or pass reasonable marketing laws which stop minors from purchasing cigarettes, with a minimum of government interference in the marketing of the cigarettes to adult smokers.
State elected officials also were contacted to intervene with the White House to stress the point that there was no need for FDA regulation. In addition to the states' rights issues, economic and political arguments were incorporated in the discussions with Administration officials.
Support of the American Legislative Exchange Council--a public/private consortium of conservative state legislators-- took a stand against FDA regulation, as did the Southern Legislative Congerence, a group affiliated with the Council of State Governments.
Meetings were held with the Southland Corp., one of the nation's largest cigarette retailers, and with the Food Marketing Institute and National Association of Convenience Stores to brief those groups on potential adverse impacts of FDA regulation and to enlist their opposition.
A working group was formed by the Tobacco Institute to bring together industry representatives and the retail and wholesale trade communities to join together and work toward the common goal of compliance with laws prohibiting sales of tobacco products to minors. Much of the focus centered on employee education regarding underage sales. Covington and Burling also was given the assignment of drafting appropriate state legislation that could be used as a model in state legislatures.
A blueprint was established to enable the company to contact and mobilize legislative and retail association allies to participate in the 90-day comment period once the Kessler regulations were released and to support appropriate Congressional action on the issue.
Third-party spokespeople were identified in each state to address the issues of FDA regulation with local media, and a state elected official in each state has been identified to enlist his or her colleagues in upcoming legislative sessions on youth access issues. Internal Activities/Media Relations
Work began last year to formulate a PM program that would address the issue of youth access, with a decision made in December to hold those proposals in abeyance.
Company employees and outside consultants involved in the issue were formally assigned roles as the FDA response team, and efforts began in January to incorporate the various elements into a comprehensive program addressing all conceivable actions that could be taken by the Clinton Administration or the FDA regarding tobacco regulation.
These efforts encompassed both public affairs campaigns and potential legal filings. Press releases, statements, fact sheets, video news releases, background video and other materials necesssary to convey the company's position were drafted and taped for each of the options considered.
PM representatives with scientific credentials were assigned the task of meeting with various ``think tanks'' to discuss the issue of FDA regulation and generate guest editorials and comments to the media.
Those team members who were identified as taking a public role in PM's response were given media/communications training, focusing on the effective delivery of company messages.
In late spring, the proposed youth access program was resurrected and the company subsequently announced Action Against Access, incorporating voluntary and proposed legislative steps to address the issue of youth smoking.
The announcement of AAA was made at a New York press conference and was accompanied by an aggressive media outreach campaign, including the use of VNRs, background video feeds, letters to elected officials and coordination with third-party allies.
In early July, those involved in the FDA working group participated in a simulation geared to measure company response to an announcement by the FDA of full or partial regulation of tobacco.
That exercise envisioned several different actions Kessler could take on tobacco regulation, and measured the company's response to an FDA announcement. Based on the results of that exercise, the action plan was fine-tuned to deal with various options Kessler was believed to have available.
By the time of Kessler's announcement of regulatory intent, the company mobilized to battle the Administration proposal on both the legal and public affairs fronts.
A lawsuit was filed as soon as the FDA notice of intent to regulate was published in the Federal Register, and two hours before President Clinton's afternoon press conference announcing the action, PM held a press conference to announce the lawsuit and register its objections to the FDA action.
By the time Clinton made his announcement, a video news release and background video was fed by way of satellite to television news departments throughout the country, and satellite time was booked to provide those stations an opportunity to interview PM spokespersons for local broadcasts.
With assistance from Burson-Marsteller, PM press kits were sent to all major Washington-area media in anticipation of stories generated by those reporters.
While World Regulatory Affairs was dealing with the public affairs aspects of the FDA announcement, the Washington Relations Office mobilized its plans to reach legislative supporters in Washington and in key southern states to mount criticism of the President's decision.
All materials disseminated to the press also were circulated on Capitol Hill to provide legislators with the PM's position and rationale for filing suit. With information in hand, several southern legislators were able to react and respond quickly to media inquiries.
The PM briefings on Kessler's actions extended to conservative columnists and think tanks, enabling them to provide third-party views of the Administration's action.
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Mrs. SHAHEEN. CEI lobbied politicians, conducted symposia, and published policy papers and op-eds with titles such as ``Safety Is a Relative Thing for Cars: Why Not for Cigarettes?'' CEI's then-policy analyst, Alexander Volokh, even went so far as to describe the act of smoking as a civic duty.
As the documents that we have just submitted for the record detail, CEI's mission was to portray the FDA as ``an agency out of control and one failing to live up to its congressional mandate.'' For a time, CEI was successful. Congress took a closer look at FDA's appropriations requests, and lawmakers slashed agency funding and passed language to restrict FDA's authority to regulate tobacco. In fact, at one oversight hearing, Members of Congress even questioned whether the FDA was acting legally and responsibly in pursuing a course that would lead to tobacco regulation.
If this sounds like deja vu, that is because it is. CEI and other front groups are using the same playbook, the same tactics to deny climate change that they used to deny a link between tobacco use and fatal disease. CEI is now on a new mission to confuse and mislead the public on climate change. It is financing and directing ad hoc groups like the so-called Cooler Heads Coalition, which claims that global warming is a myth and that many scientists are skeptical of climate change. CEI has also produced two television ads that allege that the polar ice caps are thickening, not shrinking, and that CO
CEI's ads sound more like something that Saturday Night Live might come up with. For instance, this is their tagline about CO
They call it pollution. We call it life.
Of course, we all know that CO
Just as in the case of Big Tobacco, one need only to look at who funds CEI to see how they determine their messaging. We have a chart here to show where their funding comes from. I would just point out that this is data all compiled from publicly available records. We see ExxonMobil Foundation. Then we see the Koch family and their foundation. Then we see Philip Morris. So there is significant funding from people who have an agenda about climate change.
My staff has determined that between 1985 and 2015, CEI has received almost $15 million from rightwing organizations like the Donors Trust and the Dunn's Foundation for the Advancement of Right Thinking. CEI has also received more than $2 million, as we see here, from ExxonMobil, and more than $1 million from the Koch foundations and the Koch brothers personally. The strong ties between CEI's message denying climate change and the interests of coal, oil, and gas companies are clear and obvious. So it seems that while CEI has changed its client, it is still in the exact same business of selling lies and selling out the health and the future of ordinary Americans.
Another industry front group I wanted to talk about this afternoon has been exceptionally loud in denying climate change. It is the so- called Energy & Environment Legal Institute, or E&E Legal. E&E Legal has several different aliases--the American Tradition Institute, George Mason Environmental Law Clinic, and Free Market Environmental Law Clinic--but its MO is one and the same. Like CEI, E&E Legal has a core mission of discrediting climate science and dismantling regulations that protect the environment. However, instead of rolling out ad campaigns, E&E Legal has a different approach. Its specialty is harassing individual climate scientists and researchers with the aim of persuading the public that human-caused global warming is a scientific fraud. Of course, the group's lawsuits are frivolous and baseless. But this doesn't matter because the entire point of the lawsuits is to disrupt important academic research that may help us anticipate, avoid, or mitigate the impacts of global warming.
Once again, if we look at the funding behind E&E Legal, we understand exactly why this group is attacking climate scientists and their work. E&E Legal does not publicly disclose its donors. We have seen that before. However, bankruptcy proceedings have identified that the group is funded by Arch Coal and Peabody Energy, and that E&E's senior lawyer has received funds directly from Alpha Natural Resources. These are some of the largest coal producers in the United States. It is shameful and dishonorable that these coal companies are funding the harassment and intimidation of scientists. They are putting profits ahead of people, and their disinformation threatens the scientific inquiry and transparency we need in order to make smart climate policy decisions to protect our Earth.
In conclusion, big corporations are using organizations that claim to be independent to spread misleading messages to the American people, knowing that people would be quick to discount these messages if they actually knew they were coming directly from coal companies and from Koch Industries. This campaign of disinformation and propaganda endangers the health, environment, and economic well-being of people in the United States and across the world. That is why Senators who acknowledge the science of climate change, Senators who understand the urgency of action to combat climate change are speaking up this afternoon and for many days to come.
By coming to the floor, we want to expose groups like CEI and E&E Legal for what they are--front groups whose role is to spin a web of denial. By championing clean energy policies, we want to ensure that the United States reduces its dependence on fossil fuels while creating millions of jobs to support our economy in alternative energy and green energy sources.
By supporting our country's leadership in negotiating the international climate agreement concluded last year in Paris, we are doing our part to slow global warming and help poorer nations most affected by it. This is just the beginning. We will continue to come to the floor to advocate for policies to reduce carbon emissions, to strengthen our economy, and to protect our environment.
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