Climate Change

Floor Speech

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to move to the subject of climate change, however, my colleague, Terri Sewell, has reminded me that a very important organization needs a few moments, so I yield to the gentlewoman from Alabama (Ms. Sewell), to speak about the Stennis Center. Recognizing Rex Buffington

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mrs. Roby, Mr. Harper, and Ms. Sewell for bringing to our attention one of the important organizations that develops leadership here in the United States, and, obviously, from the two of you, Mrs. Roby and Ms. Sewell, who are perfect examples of the success of the center. Climate Change Is Real

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, we will turn to another topic, I think, of interest, if my colleagues would just excuse me for a moment.

I always try to start these sessions with purpose. What are we all about here? And I often use this from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he said: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.''

While I always use this, I am trying to figure now, how does this figure into climate change? What would the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt have to do with climate change in the era of greenhouse gas emissions?

I thought about it for a while and I said, it may be difficult to make the connection, but there really is one. And I really want to start with this: What is our purpose here?

If we think about climate change, we are going to have to understand and read and pay attention to this. This is the cover of an extraordinarily important document that the Federal Government, the Government of the United States of America, issued last Friday when most of America was out shopping, Black Friday.

Now, maybe there is some reason that the administration chose to issue this critical report on that day. If it was to bury the report, they are not going to be successful, because this document, required by Congress over the last 20-plus years, gives a clarion call to every human being on this planet today.

That clarion call is so important that, on this first day following Thanksgiving and the issuance of this report, we brought it to the floor of the House of Representatives to alert this Nation that, despite trying to hide this report on Friday, it is now part of the public record.

We need to understand what the impact of climate change is on all of us today, Americans, and to generations into the future. The impact is stark. It is heavy. It is ominous. And it is already happening.

The front page says: Fires. I am from California. We know about fires. This is a month ago, fires in California, all of these at one time: the Mendocino Complex in my district, the largest single wildfire in California's history; the Sierras, down in the southern valley; and the smoke from the Camp fire, burning more than 1,000 homes on this day; smoke covering nearly the entire State of California.

Are those fires the result of climate change? The answer is absolutely, yes--the extensiveness, the severity, and the number of acres burned.

More familiar, perhaps, and more recent, just days after those fires that I just put up there, this one happened. Eighty-four people are known to have perished in the Paradise fire, the most mass casualties in recent history in the United States. Unfortunately, there are still a couple hundred people unaccounted for.

Is this fire a result of climate change? Yes, it is--the intensity of the fire, the rapidity with which it tore through the forest and wiped out an entire town of 26,000 inhabitants. Fourteen thousand residences were burned out in this fire. There is more to be said.

How about flooding? Port Arthur, Texas, a city that was flooded, and more along the Gulf Coast this fall. Another community was totally wiped out or near totally wiped out on the Florida panhandle. Massive storms ripped through the Caribbean and up into the United States.

Is flooding a result of climate change? The severity and the intensity of the flooding, certainly--North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Texas. In California, we have our share of it also.

All of these are words laid out in this climate assessment: Economic losses today and into the future, perhaps $141 billion over the next several decades from heat-related deaths alone; $118 billion cost from sea level rise.

Do you live on the coast? The San Francisco Bay, Florida, a good portion of Florida, Miami, the Everglades, the East Coast, all of it is affected by climate change.

We have a problem, folks. Are you interested in ecology? Are you interested in wildlife? Are you interested in forests? This was once a green forest in California.

We predicted in the mid-1990s, when I was given a task as the Deputy Secretary at the Department of the Interior to investigate and to anticipate what climate change would bring to America, we said there would be more fires, more intense fires. They would be more devastating. They would be larger. They would be faster.

We said there would be more flooding. We said the hurricanes would be even greater than in the past. We predicted that a city called New Orleans would flood. We predicted that a place called New York City would flood. And they both did a few short years after that report, as we prepared the United States for the Kyoto climate conference.

Coming out of that conference, the House of Representatives and the Senate of this great body denied the opportunity for the United States to join in the treaty that came out of that conference, and it got worse.

Forests of California, we predicted there would be a die-off. And, in fact, there is. This is just one small part of the massive die-off of trees that is occurring in the forests all across America, even into the Arctic regions.

Pay attention, America. Pay attention, Congress. Pay attention, Senate. And for heaven's sake, President Trump, please pay attention to the reality of climate change. It is here. It is a massive problem.

The U.S. military more than a decade ago predicted that wars would be breaking out because of climate migration, climate refugees. It is happening. It is happening around the world.

Read this assessment of what it means to America. We have an obligation. We, the 435 Representatives of the American people, have an obligation to address this crisis. It is not a crisis of the future. It is a crisis of today and the future.

Do we have the courage to do this? Do we have the courage to decarbonize our energy supplies? We have to find the courage. We have no choice.

Joining me tonight are people, Members of this House who share the commitment to address climate change.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman so very much for his very forceful words and for the fact that he brought to the table not alternate facts, but real facts laid out by the scientists who put this together. We have a challenge, and I know, with the kind of leadership the gentleman is providing for all of us here in the House of Representatives and back in Illinois, we have no choice but to get this done--and we will.

Mr. Speaker, I would like now to turn to my colleague, Mr. Payne from New Jersey. We often are here on the floor together. I invite Mr. Payne to please join us, and we will talk about this issue as it might affect him and his constituents.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, in the gentleman's discussion, Mr. Payne hit upon a really important issue, and it relates to this. I brought this up because this is where I am coming from on public policy.

When FDR said that it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little, normally we think about this in terms of economics, we think about in terms of wages, living standards, and the like. But you hit this squarely, because it is those who have little who are going to be the first and most terribly impacted by climate change.

You talked about the vulnerable. You talked about the elderly, the young, the working class, and communities of color. Those who have the least will be the least able to adapt. They won't be able to afford the additional electric bill for air-conditioning. They are the most likely to get sick from the various new illnesses that will work their way into the American healthcare system. As the climate warms, we can expect to have more tropical, hot weather illnesses coming. We see it already. West Nile virus is the example that you gave.

So this is very, very relevant. I don't think FDR had in mind climate change when he talked about this. This is what he talked about during the Great Depression. This is relevant today in the era of climate change not just here in the United States, but you look at the poor around the world.

For the population of Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world, it is likely that 50 percent or more of that population will have to move because of sea level rise.

Ethiopia, where Patti and I served as Peace Corps volunteers, has always been plagued by famine as a result of the climate moving back and forth. It will get worse.

So do we provide enough for those who have too little? Across the world this is a key issue.

Joining me now is my colleague from California. He and I get to share the great Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the greatest estuary on the west coast of the Western Hemisphere.

Before I come to Mr. McNerney, I am going to put up one of your favorite things here for him to look at, because I know this is what gets him really excited--clean energy systems. This has been his life's work, and he can talk about it. When he finishes, we will talk a little bit more about some of these.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, before the gentleman leaves, I brought this up because I know that these wind turbines, these windmills are part of the gentleman's life. You spent, as you say 25, 26 years building these systems. I believe he was doing it in Altamont Pass in California, which is now part of his district and adjacent to mine.

It was 1978, 1979 that California passed the very first laws in the nation to provide a State tax credit for wind, solar, and conservation. I was the author of that law. The gentleman and I go back a long, long way here on this issue, Mr. Speaker, and we are not going to give up. As he said, it is about the next generation.

I have got here on my phone, which I know I cannot use on the floor, so I am not going to turn it on, but I have a picture of my 13th grandchild, who was born yesterday. It is those children, that young boy and his generation, that will either curse us or thank us. Thank us because we had the courage, we had the wisdom to attack this problem; or curse us because we didn't.

I believe that we have the wisdom. We have people like Mr. McNerney who has spent his life working on this, both in the private sector and now in Congress. I thank him so very much for that determination to address this critical issue. I thank him for joining us tonight.

I have noticed the East-West show is back in town. Mr. Tonko and I started doing this 7 years ago. Climate change and energy issues were what we talked about back then. This was some of his work when he was working in the State government in New York City, as I recall. Not that he always talked about it on the floor, but he occasionally would point out that he was working, trying to create the new technologies that would address this problem. I thank him for joining us this evening.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, Mr. Tonko said something a moment ago that I know will happen. He is presently the ranking member of the Environment Subcommittee of Energy and Commerce. In about 1 month I believe he is going to be the chairman of that committee. The hearings on this issue, the Fourth Annual Climate Assessment, will finally be heard and the issue will finally be before the Congress.

It has been 8 long years of denial by the Republican-led Congress and 2 years by the current President. I know that in his role--and I believe he will be the chairperson of that committee--he will make sure that America and the Congress know and understand this critical issue. I look forward to those hearings. I look forward to his leadership on it, and once again to be on the floor with the gentleman with what we fondly call the East Coast West-Coast program. We are back.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, indeed, we are paying for it in so many way. I showed earlier the fires, the floods, the sea level rise that is already occurring, the storm surge that recently affected the Panhandle of Florida. All of these things are the reality of today. And it is not going to go away.

The gentleman cited several facts. This is one of our programs that we used 8 years ago. It is this slide. Eight years ago we used this in our Make It in America presentations and we talked about the wind turbines and solar. That is actually an electric bus made by a bus manufacturer in California, the Gillig company. They are using that. These electric buses are part of the future, as are electric cars.

All of these are the new jobs. These are the new technologies. These are where people will be going to work. So that is where the jobs are. These are jobs that won't be exported. These are American jobs. The maintenance of this, all of these things are available today.

The gentleman mentioned California. Yes, California is way out in front, really, competing with New York on who can be the best to decarbonize, to move away from it.

Unfortunately, the administration is going exactly the wrong direction. The President wants to do away with the mileage standards, the fuel mileage standards for automobiles, wants to reintroduce coal back into the economy, which is the worst of all energy sources. We don't need to do that.

We can do it. We have proven that it can be done, in California and other places, in other parts of the world. We cannot go backwards. We owe it to the future generations.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Exactly.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Tonko mentioned asthma. We Democrats campaigned on a better deal for the people, which I just happened to put up here: A better deal for the people.

We talked about healthcare. Asthma is a preexisting condition. We have a challenge to deal with the Affordable Care Act and the Republican attempt to reinstitute insurance companies being able to discriminate based upon preexisting conditions.

All of these things will tie back: job creation, new technologies, research, healthcare. All of this, in one way or another, comes back to this question of climate change. So we need to address it.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Tonko very much for joining us.

This issue is about those of us who are here today, but it is, far more importantly, about those who will be in the future.

I want to dedicate this hour to a very special person, our new grandson, Grady Christopher Bardet, who was born yesterday afternoon.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. He will live in the future, either a very good future that we and our colleagues here build for him, or one that is not.

To Faith and Eric Bardet, we love you. Thank you for this beautiful gift.

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