Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act--Motion
Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, the reason ``I came to speak on the floor [right now is to talk] about an issue that many in Washington would prefer to ignore; that is, [the] climate changes that are being caused by our carbon pollution.''
That is how I began these speeches, with that sentence, on April 18, 2012, from this desk. I have returned week after week to try to make sure there would not be silence in the Senate on the climate crisis. This is my 199th weekly foray; next week will make it an even 200.
Back on that April Wednesday in 2012, debate about climate change had all but died in Congress. Just a few years prior, the House of Representatives had passed the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, led by our colleague, now the Senator from Massachusetts. In this body, Republican colleagues had openly acknowledged the existence of climate change and called for legislative action to cut carbon emissions. Since John Chafee, climate change had been a bipartisan concern.
In 2010, came the Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United decision, which allowed the fossil fuel industry to unleash limitless dark money on our elections. The polluters' money and threats cast a shadow across any Republican who might work on carbon pollution, and it ended that bipartisanship.
When I gave that first speech, even the White House had thrown in the towel on climate change, after letting Waxman-Markey die on the vine. You couldn't get them to put the words ``climate'' and ``change'' in the same paragraph, at least not until the President engaged on this issue in his speech in June of 2013. Washington had gone dark on climate.
I knew I couldn't match the financial muscle of the big polluters, but I believed if anything was going to change around here, we would need to shine a little light on the facts and on the sophisticated scheme of denial being perpetrated by the polluters. I decided to put at least my little light to work, and I started these speeches.
The last 6 years, unfortunately, have offered no shortage of bad climate news and dubious milestones. This chart shows the 4 hottest years ever recorded have occurred since I began giving these speeches. Global warming is, of course, driven by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
When I gave the first ``Time to Wake Up'' speech in April 2012, the concentration of CO
During the 6 years I have been giving these speeches, the United States has experienced more and more extreme weather events, many of which scientists tell us are linked to climate change: from deadly storms, including 2012's Hurricane Sandy and 2017's Harvey, Irma, and Maria, to California's record drought and wildfires, to temperatures so warm in the Alaskan Arctic that the computer algorithms thought the thermometer had broken.
In 2017 alone, the string of U.S. extreme weather disasters--six major hurricanes, wildfires in the West, catastrophic mudslides, temperature records breaking all over the country--caused well north of $300 billion in damage and killed more than 300 people. The last 6 years provide us with a menacing preview of things to come.
Scientists, including scientists at all of our home State universities, say these changes are driven by carbon pollution. Our national security leaders warn of the increasing danger of international strife caused by climate change, as well as the threat to U.S. military facilities and force readiness.
Faith leaders urge us to protect creation and those less fortunate than we are, led by Pope Francis, who, on this, has been magnificent. The insurance and credit rating industries, whose business models depend on accurate and responsible assessment of risk, warn us, as do major American corporations and leading investors--folks who can't let climate politics interfere with their bottom lines. I have spoken about them all.
I also visited States across the country to see for myself and to talk to people firsthand--folks who know climate change is real because they see it where they live, because they study it. In North Carolina, business leaders were organizing to protect the local coastal economy from climate change and associated sea level rise. In South Carolina, tide gauges in Charleston were up over 10 inches since the 1920s. In Georgia, I went out on the water with a clammer who showed me how changes in climate are hurting his livelihood. In Florida, the Army Corps of Engineers officials in Jacksonville gave a dire presentation of what the sea level rise portends for the Sunshine State. In Ohio, I saw the ice cores from faraway glaciers that record our looming climate catastrophe.
In Utah, the ski resorts fear climate change will ruin their ``greatest snow on Earth.'' I know the Presiding Officer takes pride in Utah's greatest snow on Earth. In Pennsylvania, child health specialists from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia see climate change worsening children's asthma. In Iowa, Des Moines Water Works was busy preparing the city for more frequent and severe climate-driven flooding. In Arizona, they are changing the staffing for emergency responders facing summer temperatures the human body cannot sustain. New Hampshire is forecasting that its State bird may no longer be seen as its range moves ever northward out of New Hampshire on our warming planet.
I traveled on to Texas, Iowa, Nebraska, Delaware, and more. I brought stories to this floor from every corner of the country, hoping colleagues would heed the warnings from their own home States, to match what I was hearing from Rhode Island, from Rhode Island's coastal towns and scientists and fishermen: ``Sheldon, it's getting weird out there,'' I was told. ``It's not my grandfather's ocean.''
Many Democratic colleagues joined me to discuss the changes they see in their home States, including 30 colleagues who held the floor all night long in 2014.
In July of 2016, 18 Senators and I took to the Senate floor for days to expose the fossil fuel-funded front groups that were behind the campaign to deny climate science and stymie legislative action. There is a whole carefully built apparatus: phony-baloney front groups that are designed to look and sound like they are real; messages honed by public relations experts to sound like they are truthful; scientists on the fossil fuel payroll whom polluters can trot out as needed.
This industry-fueled misinformation campaign has been a theme of these speeches. I relayed the findings of researchers who study the flow of money through the climate denial network and the journalists who uncovered Exxon's coverup of what they knew of the climate dangers. I compared the fossil fuel polluter playbook to the fraudulent tactics of the tobacco industry to bury the truth about the health effects of cigarettes.
I listened to conservative economists and offered market-based solutions. Back in March 2013, I described the market failure of carbon pollution's not being baked into the price of the product. Market economics doesn't work when corporations can just offload their costs onto the general public. It is called a negative externality in economics jargon, and we see it all around us in storm-damaged homes and flooded cities, in drought-stricken farms and raging wildfires. The big oil companies and the coal barons have offloaded those costs onto society.
Virtually every Republican who has thought the climate change problem through to a solution comes to the same place: put a price on carbon emissions; let the market work; and return the revenues to the American public. This concept is supported by a who's who of former Republican Cabinet officials and Presidential economic advisers. I listened, and, in November 2014, I introduced with Senator Schatz the American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act to establish an economywide fee on carbon dioxide, return all of the revenue to the American public, correct the market failure, promote energy innovation, and, of course, dramatically reduce carbon pollution.
I have seen over the years of these speeches that the landscape is shifting. The Senate has actually held votes that show that a majority here believes climate change is real, not a hoax, and is driven by human activity. It took years, but I guess that counts for progress around here.
Outside of Congress, the Paris Agreement in 2015 committed the nations of the world to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius by reducing carbon emissions. America's part was the Clean Power Plan--to reduce carbon emissions from the power sector by one-third by 2030 from 2005 levels.
Automakers adopted new fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks in 2012. Vehicles would get nearly 55 miles per gallon by 2025, saving consumers billions of dollars while eliminating billions of tons of carbon emissions.
The EPA issued new rules in 2016 to limit the flaring of methane--a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide--at oil and gas wells, and the Obama administration helped negotiate the Kigali Amendment to phase out the use of hydrofluorocarbons, which have powerful greenhouse gas heat-trapping properties in the atmosphere. Secretary Kerry convened wildly successful international oceans conferences, which are still ongoing and are scheduled for years ahead, to address the warming and the acidification of the seas.
In sum, up through 2016, even if Congress had been trapped in fossil fuel muck, the United States had still been making slow but steady progress on climate policy. Then Trump was elected President, and he decided to see if he could reverse all of this.
He announced that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. He put the three stooges of fossil fuel--Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, and Rick Perry--in charge of climate policy. Trump completely forgot his and his family's own words from a full-page New York Times advertisement in 2009, calling climate change ``irrefutable'' and portending ``catastrophic and irreversible consequences.'' That was Donald Trump and his family in 2009.
As bad as the news became coming out of Washington, we saw action around the country to give us some reason for optimism. The leadership void left by the Trump administration was filled by State and local governments, businesses, academic institutions, and faith organizations which pledged to honor the Paris Agreement. California and Washington State joined with Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico to announce a plan to put a price on carbon that would reach virtually up and down the entire west coast of the Americas.
Over management opposition, BlackRock, the great investment firm, helped force ExxonMobil to report its climate risk to its shareholders. Moody's announced it will start using climate risk in rating the bonds of coastal communities. Companies like Microsoft and Unilever adopted an internal carbon price to help them reduce the carbon intensity of their operations.
At heart, this is a battle of truth versus lies, and courts are a good forum for the truth. California municipalities as well as New York City have sued fossil fuel companies, under State law, over the huge adaptation costs they will have to bear from sea level rise and extreme weather. The State attorneys general in Massachusetts and New York are pursuing a fraud investigation into what ExxonMobil has been covering up about its fossil fuels.
So there you have it. Over the last 6 years, we are ever more aware of the accelerating pace of climate change and ever more aware of the terrible threat that rising seas, increased temperatures, and more frequent extreme weather events pose. It has become harder and harder for the fossil fuel industry and the web of front groups and Trump administration officials who do its bidding to claim there is nothing to see here, folks, that it is all a hoax, and to move along.
Yet, despite all of the information and all of the evidence, this great institution--the U.S. Senate--continues to sit silent, paralyzed by the threats of retribution that come from the fossil fuel lobby. When this started, I had hoped we would never get to 100--let alone 199--of these speeches. We ought to have solved this years ago. It is a disgrace that we haven't, and it is a disgrace as to why we haven't. If we remain as ineffective as we have been during the last 6 years, we will have failed ourselves and all future generations.
America deserves better than this. A city on a hill, with the eyes of the world upon it, can ill afford to ignore such a problem--worse still when the reason is one all-powerful industry that demands obedience. America deserves better. The countries and people around the world who rely on and look to American leadership deserve better. At long last, it is time for us to wake up here and meet our responsibilities. Nuclear Innovation Bill
Mr. President, the distinguished chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee has come to the floor. While she is here, may I thank her for her work in clearing the nuclear innovation bill that Senator Crapo and I passed into law this afternoon by unanimous consent. The chairman's work, along with the ranking member's, in clearing that bill was essential to getting it passed, and she was a cosponsor and a critical force in getting it done. I am grateful to her.
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