Climate Change

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, it is summer. It is supposed to be hot, but if last month felt hotter than past summers, you are right. Last week the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, or NOAA, said the United States experienced its warmest June on record ever. Already this year there have been eight weather-related and climate-related disasters that each caused at least $1 billion in damage. Globally, it was found that 2015 was the hottest year on record, and so far this year is on track to beat last year. We can't even hold the record for a year--2016 has been as hot as Pokemon GO--and anyone watching the Senate floor tonight who is younger than 31 has never experienced in their life a month where the temperature was below the 20th century average.

That last happened in February of 1985. Ronald Reagan was starting his second term as President, and ``Beverly Hills Cop'' was the No. 1 film at the box office. If you went to the movies that month, you probably saw a trailer for what would be that summer's blockbuster, ``Back to the Future.''

Well, that future is here. Temperatures are increasing, sea levels are rising, rainfall is more extreme, and the oceans are more acidic. Why is that? It is mostly because of carbon dioxide pollution that is released from the extraction and burning of fossil fuel. Virtually all climate scientists agree that the climate is changing and that human interference with the climate is now the driving force of that change. Thanks to excellent investigative reporting at Inside Climate News and other news outlets, we now know that as far back as the 1970s, Exxon and the other oil companies were following the latest developments in climate science and Exxon was undertaking its own research on the impact of carbon pollution on the climate.

The top leadership of Exxon was warned in July of 1977 by its senior scientist James Black: ``In the first place there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.''

That is from 1977 to Exxon from its own scientists. A year later in 1978, that same scientist once again told senior management: ``Present thinking holds that man has a time window of 5 to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies that might become critical.''

Ten years later in 1988, a memo laid out Exxon's position, which included these three points: No. 1, emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions regarding the potential enhanced greenhouse gas effect; No. 2, urge a balanced scientific approach; and No. 3, resist the overstatement and sensationalization of potential greenhouse effects which could lead to economic development of nonfossil fuel resources.

Exxon knew full well back then the impact of carbon dioxide on the climate and what that could mean to their businesses. Exxon, the Koch brothers, Peabody Energy, and other individuals and businesses whose profits might suffer under rules to reduce carbon pollution have had a vested interest in stopping climate action for decades.

That is why Congress still hasn't sent comprehensive climate legislation to the President. More than 50 years ago, in a special message to Congress on pollution, President Lyndon Johnson noted that ``the increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels has altered the composition of the global atmosphere.'' Since then, the scientific evidence and observation of climate changes already underway have continued to mount.

But even as the science has become overwhelming, climate policies have gotten trapped in a web of denial. During the last 2 days, we have heard many of my colleagues talk about the many strands of this web of denial. Like a real spiderweb, it is hard to see this web unless the light catches it in just the right way. So this evening I am going to shine a light on a few threads of this web.

At the heart of this web is denial. That is where you find the George C. Marshall Institute, whose attacks on the science of the so-called nuclear winter consequence of nuclear war and its opposition to the nuclear freeze movement expanded over the years to include anti-climate change efforts. The institute was named after the U.S. Army Chief of Staff during World War II who then became Secretary of State. He helped to rebuild Europe and won the Nobel Peace Prize for what is now called the Marshall Plan. Given Marshall's view of the need to address hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos, it seems likely that if he were alive today, he would agree that national security experts see that climate change is a security threat to the United States. Marshall himself would likely support efforts like the Green Climate Fund to ensure that the poorest countries in the world have the resources necessary to overcome the challenges climate change pose to their economic development. He would likely support American leadership of global climate efforts to ensure that all countries are taking action to address climate change.

But the institute that carries the George Marshall name has countered international climate science and action every step of the way. When the Marshall Institute first expanded into environmental policy in the 1980s, the environment and climate change had bipartisan support. In the 1988 election, George Herbert Walker Bush pledged to meet the ``greenhouse effect with the White House effect.'' Increasingly, world scientists were raising concerns about carbon pollution. In 1990, the first assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, detailed what the fossil fuel companies already knew-- that carbon pollution released from burning fossil fuels was causing the Earth to warm. The very business model of the fossil fuel industry was altering the planet. So while the scientific community was sounding the alarm, it has now been revealed that Big Oil and fossil fuel companies conspired to mute that alarm, and the Marshall Institute soon became a critical part of their climate denial web.

Mind you, we are not talking about the original George C. Marshall. He would have had no part of this. This is just the absconding of his name and having it placed above an institute--the Marshall Institute-- which is now disseminating this bad science. That is what has happened.

In 1989, this Marshall Institute published a report on climate change casting doubt on the impact of carbon pollution and spinning a core component of the web of denial. As Washington insiders, the institute's report was read by the White House, shared by media outlets, and became a so-called side of a new public debate on climate change. The Marshall Institute turned debating climate change into a game, and the science became a political football. It was exactly what they wanted. By dividing climate science into sides, pitting each one against the other, they had found a foothold for doubt and a reason to delay climate action.

Still, the first Bush administration signed and the Senate ratified the historic United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. The goal of the treaty was to reduce atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions and prevent ``dangerous anthropogenic interference with Earth's climate system.'' But it took another 23 years, until 2015, for the countries of the world to agree on a global solution in Paris last December.

That 1989 Marshall Institute report, funded by the fossil fuel industry, was an especially sticky strand of this web of denial. Since then, the tactic of casting doubt on climate science has been used time and again by the Marshall Institute and other organizations to delay policies that could hurt the profits of oil, coal, and petro-polluters like the Kochs. This is what Senator Whitehouse has led all of us in trying to bring out here to the Senate floor--that there is a web, and the web goes back to money, and that money is the profits that are made by the coal, the gas, and the oil industries. Those millions of dollars that the Marshall Institute has received from Exxon and the Koch- connected foundation over the years have allowed the web of denial to grow.

The Marshall Institute misinformation campaign doesn't just come in the form of reports. Their chairman, William Happer, has testified in front of Congress multiple times espousing climate denialism and perpetuating the self-serving interests of the fossil fuel industry and the Kochs. He may be an accomplished physicist, but Dr. Happer's views on climate science have been routinely debunked.

When I was chairman on the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, in the House of Representatives, I heard Dr. Happer use the theatrics of a CO2 meter as proof that climate change doesn't exist. He advocated for the government to support an ``alternative hypothesis'' and to support his alternative hypothesis, which was nothing more than the denial of climate change. Just last year, while the climate talks in Paris were underway, Dr. Happer testified before the Senate Commerce Committee, continuing to spread doubt. But this past May, William Happer was a signatory on a misleading, full-page ad in the New York Times. The ad, placed by another thread in the web of deceit, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, attacked the reasonable efforts of New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman and a coalition of other attorneys general united for clean power who are investigating more than 100 businesses, nonprofits, and private individuals to see if they misled the public about climate change.

But the Marshall Institute's efforts alone were not enough. So they helped form the cynically named Global Climate Coalition in 1989, shortly after the formation of the IPCC at the U.N. to fight climate change.

The Marshall Institute CEO, William O'Keefe, a former lobbyist for Exxon, chaired the coalition that included members of manufacturing, automotive, oil and gas, mining and chemical industries, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They invested in denial and delay to allow business as usual to continue. But climate science and international climate efforts continued to advance after the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change came into force.

Of course, the fossil fuel coalition's concern continued to increase. As the IPCC worked on its second report in the early 1990s, it decided to include a chapter entitled Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes. It became clear that the world's climate scientists were examining the considerable collection of climate observations and research to see what they could say about human influence on the climate.

So the Global Climate Coalition sprang into action to influence what the IPCC might say about the human influence on climate.

At a November 1995 session to finalize the text of the IPCC report, alongside Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti representatives, the Global Climate Coalition weighed in heavily against the chapter focused on the detection and causes of climate change. After a flurry of negotiations and additional objections, the IPCC agreed that the amassed climate observations ``now point toward a discernable human influence on global climate.''

The world's climate scientists, the government representatives had now acknowledged that humans were altering the climate. So the calls for climate action got louder, and the effort to extend the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and draft what would become the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 increased. But in an effort to silence the calls to action, the investment in the web of denial grew.

The Global Climate Coalition spent more than $13 million opposing the Kyoto Protocol. Between 1994 and 1997, they spent $1 million every year downplaying the threat of climate change.

Ultimately, this broad coalition collapsed as their business interests and the impact of climate change on their profits changed. The Global Climate Coalition closed its doors in 2002, but the web of denial was already stretching to find new places to grow. Those threads have since expanded with the careful cultivation and collusion by the fossil fuel industry and the petrol polluters.

We know that the Koch brothers, Exxon, and other major donors have invested millions of dollars into organizations that actively work to discredit climate change and oppose climate legislation. Those organizations pressure elected officials to take increasingly extreme stances with specific reference and focus on the members of the Republican Party.

During President George W. Bush's first campaign in 2000, he promised to fight climate change by limiting greenhouse gas emissions. But in 2001, he pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol. In 2005, his Vice President, Dick Cheney, helped pass an energy bill that included massive subsidies and tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry.

As recently as 2008, the Republican Presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, recognized the science of climate change and supported action. This was an era that has now passed. The web of denial has firmly trapped this issue in the Republican Party in such a way that no action is possible at all. But even in the face of the millions of dollars pumped into the denial machine, the House of Representatives was able to overcome it in 2009.

The Waxman-Markey bill passed the House just over 7 years ago. It was the only comprehensive climate change legislation ever to pass a Chamber of Congress. It has been reported that the oil and gas industry, including the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil, spent $175 million and hired more than 800 lobbyists in 2009 to kill the Waxman- Markey bill. Let me give those numbers again: $175 million and 800 lobbyists to kill a bill that would have put a clamp on the increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

They saw any action on climate, especially legislation, as a threat to their bottom line. But Members of the House knew better. They saw that Waxman-Markey was good for our environment, good for our economy, good for America. A Congressional budget analysis found that Waxman- Markey would have reduced the Federal deficit and cost the average American household less than 50 cents per day. An analysis of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy found that Americans would save about as much as CBO's cost estimates from energy efficiency policies in the bill that CBO did not take into account.

With an outstretched arm to lift them into the clean energy future, the bill included more than $200 million for the coal industry, $200 billion to capture carbon and to sequester it. Seven years ago, we gave the fossil fuel industry a choice: legislation or regulation.

But Exxon opposed the bill. The Koch brothers opposed the bill. Peabody coal opposed the bill, except for the parts that helped the coal industry. Rather than change their current business model, centered on pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere, they fought attempts to change the law. Now, 7 years later, Peabody coal has filed for bankruptcy. We are continuing to untangle the Koch brothers' web of denial.

The Koch brothers have lied to the American people for decades about climate change. They have also lied to their own employees. When Waxman-Markey was being debated, the Koch Industries newsletter published an article attacking the climate change legislation and encouraging employees to check out specific Web sites for more information. The listed Web sites were funded by the Koch brothers. They sent their employees to other parts of the web of denial. When a Republican tries to stand up and publicly support climate action, the Koch brothers' ``spidy sense'' goes off and their web of denial springs into action. They mobilize, they target, they attack every Republican who stands against their business plan. Koch money floods primary campaigns to ensure that their self-serving lies trump in every election.

The oil and coal industry will not stop their efforts because now the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party is a climate denier. But their obstruction and climate denial tactics are as bogus as a degree from Trump University. Trump says he wants an ``all of the above'' energy agenda, but we know he is really running on an ``oil above all'' platform. But the Koch brothers are now bigger than the Republican Party.

The Kochs have built upon the tactics practiced by the tobacco industry generations ago in its campaign to discredit the science linking smoking with increased risks of lung cancer. The Kochs' goal is to discredit the science itself. How successful are they? Donald Trump has said that if he is President, he is going to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States--abolish it. I guess he assumes that Americans think that the air is too clean, the water is too clean, the soil is too clean, the rivers are too clean in the United States, and that we can afford to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency of our country.

This is the world that the Koch brothers have forgotten. Their mission has always been to create doubt across America on climate science. They fund attempts to counter the fact that climate change is a threat to our national security and to our public health. Their funding attempts to counter the fact that action to combat climate change is feasible and necessary and will create American jobs. They fund the web of denial to serve their own interests to make billions in profits at the expense of America's health, America's safety.

But for someone who is focused on protecting the poor and the vulnerable of this world--that person understands the threat presented by climate change. I have in my hand Pope Francis's encyclical on climate change, ``Laudato si','' subtitled ``On the Care for our Common Home.'' The Pope is a chemistry teacher. That is what he did before he became Pope. When he came to Washington, DC, last year, he spoke to Congress and delivered his sermon on the Hill. He said that the planet is dangerously warming and that the science is settled. He said that human beings are a significant contributor to the dangerous warming of the planet. He said that since humans are contributing to the problem, we have a moral obligation to do something about it.

When the rest of the world looked up, they saw red, white, and blue CO2. Since the United States has historically been the largest contributor of carbon pollution, we must be the leader in working to reduce our own pollution.

As soon as the Pope spoke out urging action on climate change, the well-oiled climate denial machine shifted into high gear. The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty is another strand of the web of denial. Between 1990 and 2014, the Acton Institute received millions from Donors Trust or Donors Capital Fund, the Koch-funded dark money ATM, as well as money from the Koch families and from Exxon.

Reverend Sirico, the founder and president of the Acton Institute, testified in front of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee just last year. Reverend Sirico claims that the Catholic Church does not have expertise in science and should stick to matters of faith and morals. Well, here is the irony. A lack of expertise surely has not stopped Senate Republicans from blocking any and all climate change legislation.

Informed by the scientific evidence, the Pope made a clear moral case to act on climate and to act now. The Pope's comments came from the heart and from his belief in our ability to act collectively. It is just common sense that when you learn something is dangerous for you, for your health and for our Earth--and especially, as the Pope said to us, its impact on the poorest people on our planet, those who will be most severely harmed by climate change--we have a moral obligation to stop that harm.

There is no doubt that fossil fuels forever changed our society, but pointing to the benefits from them does not take away the harm they cause or the urgency to transition to clean energy now. Many of those who oppose action on climate invoke the importance of preserving the free market.

As an example, consider the Lexington Institute, an organization funded by ExxonMobil and those pushing so-called free market solutions. The Lexington Institute--and may I add, the Lexington Institute is in Virginia; it is not in Lexington, MA, where the shot heard round the world was fired. No, this is just, again, absconding with a name and placing it upon an institution to try to give it the veneer of credibility. Of course, beneath the veneer is just more veneer. There is nothing. There is no science. There is nothing that backs up the arguments which they are making.

So the Lexington Institute claims that renewables need to be able to compete with fossil fuels without Federal subsidies, but the real truth is, the fossil fuel industry has never succeeded in the free market alone. Its success is built on more than a century's worth of tax breaks and subsidies.

The Lexington Institute sheds these crocodile tears about how much they care about the free market, but for 100 years they missed the fact that the oil, the coal, the gas, and the nuclear industries were all subsidized by the Federal Government. It is only when wind and solar show up that all of a sudden they become greatly concerned about the fact the free market is being distorted. Well, by giving tax breaks to wind and solar, of course, we are just making it a level playing field so they get the same kind of breaks all of these other industries have received for 100 or more years.

The subsidies for the fossil fuel industry top more than $7.5 billion annually. You got that? It is $7.5 billion per year. These tax breaks go back 100 years. Multiply that by 100, and then the crocodile tears start getting shed over something we do for wind or solar or fuel cells, biomass, geothermal?

There is no need for fossil fuel CEOs to come to Congress to justify the support for long-established subsidies, which they have always been getting. They do not even come up to defend it. They get it automatically--the extension of their tax breaks. The oil and gas industry have the Federal subsidies, coal has Federal subsidies, nuclear has Federal subsidies. What has happened every year, when we try to extend subsidies for renewable energy--for wind and solar--for even just 1 year, it is the end of the world as we know it in the capitalist system.

Just last year, the Koch brothers wrote a letter to every single Member of Congress urging them to oppose the tax breaks for wind and solar, and of course they cited ``the free market.'' Because even though billions of dollars in Federal subsidies have benefited their companies for years and years, they have never come up here to say: Oh, take them away. It makes my company feel unclean. Oh no, they took those billions every single year. It is only when wind and solar step up and say: Well, how about us? We are clean. We don't pollute. We are what the younger generation wants to see us investing in as the technologies of the 21st century. Then they get morally offended. Then their free market principles start to get offended.

So the Lexington Institute, citing the free market, has fought the extension of renewable tax credits for wind and solar, but unlike the battle of Lexington that started the American Revolution, this Lexington is trying to stop a renewables revolution. Economic growth and climate action go together. We can have a country with clean air and water and clean energy and a strong economy. History continues to prove that the benefits of environmental regulation are enormous and beyond just financial.

Recently, we have seen global economic growth hand in hand with no increase in energy-related carbon pollution. We are seeing GDP go up but not carbon pollution. And in Massachusetts, since the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative started in 2009--the real Lexington revolution, the one in Massachusetts--we have seen powerplant greenhouse gas emissions go down 34 percent while Massachusetts' gross domestic product increased 25 percent.

So we are left with a really simple question: Why do fossil fuel companies continue to get Federal subsidies, but we do not extend them to clean energy? The answer is this: Koch, Exxon, the Marshall Institute, the Global Climate Coalition, the Acton Institute, the Lexington Institute, and their partners in the web of denial. Millions of dollars are spent to deceive and to mislead all in the name of self- interest and profit.

The Global Climate Coalition collapsed more than a decade ago. The Marshall Institute broke up last year, and its climate denial arm morphed into the CO2 Coalition. Exxon is now publicizing their support for a carbon tax that they began espousing in 2009. The American Petroleum Institute is reportedly rethinking its messaging on climate. The threads of the web of denial are breaking and weakening, and the more light we shine on it--especially light fueled by the power of the Sun--the sooner it will fall apart.

We are in the midst of a clean energy revolution. The United States has a massive reserve of untapped renewable energy. Our reserves are so massive that just a small fraction could power our entire country. The question is no longer if we can power our country with renewable energy, it is when and it is how. We will make the transition to 100 percent renewable energy before the year 2050 if we keep the right policies on the books, and I believe we are going to meet that goal.

In the last 10 years, we have seen a dramatic expansion of renewable energy in our country. Just as the Pilgrims harnessed the wind to sail across the ocean to Plymouth Rock, we too can power our economy. Our current capacity is 74,000 megawatts of wind, and we have 14,000 more megawatts of wind waiting now to be deployed in our country. U.S. solar capacity is now more than 27,000 megawatts. Over 25 percent of this capacity was added in 2015 alone. We are projected to double that capacity by the end of this year.

Megawatts are hard to understand. Simply put, by the end of this year, we should have enough wind and solar energy to power over 25 million homes. That is one-fifth of all American homes.

We must continue to untangle ourselves from the Koch brothers' web of denial sewn by lies and doubt. The science is overwhelming. Climate change is real. Carbon pollution is accelerating the warming, and right now American cities and towns are preparing for an uncertain future in a world with a changing climate and rising seas. While the Senate has yet to knock out all of these old cobwebs of climate denial that are holding back action, we know, if we focus on the future, we cannot continue to have these decisions of today be borne by generations yet to come.

We must focus on resiliency and clean energy and what we are going to do to leave the world better off for future generations. No matter what lies and information the climate deniers try to peddle, the facts are with us, the moral authority is with us, the economic opportunities are with us.

We have a chance to create a clean energy revolution that increases jobs as it cuts pollution. This is job creation that is good for all of creation. We must take the climate deniers and their fossil fuel funders to task for their obstinate, obdurate, oblivious opposition to the clean energy to battle climate change.

Here is where we are. By the end of 2016, there will be 400,000 people employed in the United States in the wind and solar industries and 65,000--65,000--coal miners. By the year 2020, at the current pace, there will be 600,000 people employed in the wind and solar industry.

Half of all new electricity on the planet last year came from renewable electricity. This is a revolution, and it is a revolution we cannot allow to be derailed because we will be employing people, giving them the jobs they want, which will make it possible for us to save this planet.

I thank the Senator from Rhode Island for organizing all of the Members over the last 2 days to come out on the floor to make this case about this web of denial, which is at the core of what has been blocking this Senate from taking the actions necessary to deploy the technologies, to create the jobs which can save the planet by deploying these technologies all across the planet.

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