Disapproving the President's Proposal to Take An Action Relating to the Application of Certain Sanctions with Respect to the Russian Federation

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I know you are not allowed to respond to me, but allow me to welcome you to the Chair as a new Member of the Senate.

With a new year come a lot of changes. This month, a Democratic majority was sworn in to the House of Representatives. That new majority has heard the call from Americans to make tackling climate change one of our top priorities, and what a change that will make from the last Congress.

Young voters who helped propel this change are urgently concerned about climate change. More than three-fourths of millennials agree on the need for climate action. Even a majority of Republican millennials agree on the need for action in face of our climate crisis. Indeed, a former Republican Congressman just wrote about climate change: ``My party will never earn the votes of millennials unless it gets serious about finding solutions.''

Of course, it is not just younger voters; polling shows that Americans of all ages and political stripes favor policy solutions that scientists and economists say are needed to tackle climate change. A recent survey of more than 10,000 registered voters showed that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that investing in renewable energy will create more jobs than investing in fossil fuel. Among Republicans-- here--52 percent of Republican voters think that focusing on renewables will create more jobs than fossil fuel--52 percent to 29 percent--and that is with the nonstop saturation, indoctrination of the Republican Party by the fossil fuel industry, with all of its propaganda and nonsense.

Of course, the facts bear out that renewable energy will create more jobs. It is already happening. Over 3 million Americans are employed in the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries, compared to just over 1 million in fossil fuels. There is far more job growth in the renewable sector than in the declining, decrepit fossil fuel industry.

Solid majorities of Americans say they want more emphasis on renewable energy. Seventy-one percent want more solar, 64 percent want more wind, and 56 percent want more hydropower. By contrast, only 40 percent want more natural gas, only 25 percent want more oil, and only 18 percent want more coal. Seventy-one percent want solar, and 18 percent want coal. I think the Trump administration would do well to pay attention to those numbers--if it were, indeed, about the numbers, anyway.

So make the question harder. Go all in. Ask Americans about a full transition to a 100-percent renewable energy system, and most say that the transition to a 100-percent renewable energy system for America will be good for working families--better than continuing on our fossil fuel path.

If you look at what Republicans say, by 2 to 1, Republican voters say that going to renewables will have a positive impact on working families, versus only 23.5 percent who say it will have a negative impact. The rest--``don't know'' or ``no impact either way.'' But the people who favor 100 percent renewables as a good thing for working families--even among Republican voters, it is 2 to 1 over fossil fuel.

When Americans are told about a Green New Deal to reduce carbon pollution and create clean energy jobs by investing in infrastructure and renewable energy and efficient buildings and transportation systems, almost 70 percent are supportive, and that includes almost 60 percent of Republicans--20 percent strongly support, and 36.8 percent support. So even the Green New Deal is a winner among Republican voters.

Ask about putting a price on carbon pollution. Why would you want to do that? Because right now, the costs of carbon pollution are put on the public. They are put on all of us. They are put on our constituents. Polluters get away with polluting for free, and the rest of us pay for the added drought and wildfire and storm damage costs. Well, more than 60 percent of registered voters support pricing carbon to reduce emissions. And if you look at Republicans, a majority of Republicans under the age of 45 also support a carbon price.

This new polling matches other polling that is on its way out or recently out that shows solid support for pricing carbon and making polluters pay for the damage they are causing--which, by the way, is also economics 101, but never mind that. We are talking about polling today.

A Monmouth University poll showed that 64 percent of Republicans now accept climate change as a problem, and a majority of Republicans support government action to combat climate change--a majority of Republicans.

An ABC News poll showed that 81 percent of Americans support cutting greenhouse gas emissions, two-thirds supported a carbon tax, and 81 percent supported tax breaks for renewable power.

These are big, strong, national majorities in favor of the kind of action we need and could do to stem the climate crisis.

A poll for Yale and George Mason Universities showed that 70 percent of registered voters, including over half of Republicans, support reducing greenhouse gas emissions regardless of what other countries do.

This poll also found majority support across both parties for U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement and overwhelming support for renewal energy among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.

What is more, this poll found that almost three-quarters of registered voters, including a majority of Republicans, support setting strict limits on carbon pollution from coal-fired powerplants, and a majority of Republicans, Independents, and Democrats support imposing a revenue neutral carbon tax on fossil fuel companies. A majority of Republicans support imposing a revenue neutral carbon tax on fossil fuel companies.

Well, I have had a bill with Senator Schatz in the last several Congresses to do just that--charge a fee on the polluters for their carbon emissions and then return all the revenue raised to the American people. Several bills on the House side also price carbon pollution, and a few even had Republican cosponsors.

These bills went nowhere under Republican leadership, notwithstanding these numbers and notwithstanding public support. Why? Because the fossil fuel industry opposes them--so no hearings, no vote, no nothing.

What did get a vote in the House last year under Republican leadership? A resolution condemning carbon pricing--condemning the carbon pricing that a majority of Republican voters support--backed, of course, by the fossil fuel industry. Virtually every expert, economist, and scientist who has studied the question says that putting a price on carbon pollution is not only the right thing to do morally and economically but is necessary to keep global temperatures from climbing 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial norms, as the scientific consensus makes clear we must do at a minimum--at a minimum. If we blow past 2 degrees, all bets are off, and the consequences of climate change may become irreversible. Even at 1.5 degrees, we are taking chances, but dozens of industry-backed front groups--this is hard to see, but this is the usual array of web-of-denial, phony-baloney front groups that have been supported, funded, and created by the fossil fuel industry so people don't think it is the fossil fuel industry committing this nonsense. They have groups with names such as ALEC, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, Heartland Institute, and Institute for Liberty. These groups clean up their propaganda for them.

So here come these letters. These industry-backed front groups had one important thing going for them that the Nobel Prize-winning economists on the other side couldn't match, and that is big political money and the fossil fuel industry behind them. Groups behind this letter to Speaker Ryan received at least $54 million from Big Oil and the Koch brothers' political network--at least $54 million. We don't know for sure because of their clandestine, dark money funding network. Likely, it is far more.

The minimum $54 million that the fossil fuel industry funded these groups with may likely be far more because so much of the fossil fuel industry's funding is obscured through dark money channels to hide their hand.

What did they achieve? Well, they got a vote. Unlike the carbon pricing bills, they got a vote on the House floor. Speaker Ryan brought the fossil fuel-funded resolution to a vote, and with the Republican caucus largely a wholly owned subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry, the resolution passed.

There is a whole case study in corruption here, as the Founding Fathers would define it, but the simple lesson for today's purposes: Money talks and big fossil fuel money commands.

This situation stinks. The polls I just went through and others show what Americans want. Americans want jobs, Americans want clean air, Americans want a healthy climate, and Americans want to be safe from extreme weather, wildfires, and rising seas, and Americans know clean energy solutions will get them there.

Americans are ready for bipartisan action, and before the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United came along, we had bipartisan action in the Senate on climate. We had lots of bipartisan action in the Senate on climate, but with Citizens United, unlimited money launched into our politics and things changed, and now the strings are pulled by Big Oil, Big Coal, and a couple of creepy fossil fuel industry billionaires.

Special interest money has infected almost everything we do in Congress, and it is the flagrant fact of our nonresponse to the climate crisis. The warnings have been coming for decades--first from the scientists, then from the economists, now from practically everywhere.

I went to the capital city of the Presiding Officer's State and was told there that the staffing requirements for police and fire were going to have to change because Phoenix, AZ, was becoming so hot that to get people to work outside, responding to emergencies, responding to fires and so forth, you had to build in a whole new staffing regime because it was so hard to work in the new levels of heat that the city of Phoenix is experiencing. You have to be able to rotate people much faster through crime scenes and through fire scenes and you had to have other people willing to stand by and cool them off after they were exposed to superheating.

So it is everywhere now. If you live on the coast, it is sea level; if you live out West, it is wildfires, and it includes Republican voters and particularly younger Republican voters.

Remember what the recently departed Republican Member of Congress said: ``My party will never earn the votes of millennials unless it gets serious about finding solutions.''

Well, clean energy is a solution. The fact of all this Republican voter support on the one hand is a sign of hope for the new year--of hope that elected Republicans will hear their voters and will take action and support the clean energy solutions that can avert the climate crisis. At the same time, the voters on the Republican side who are saying what they want are also being ignored. Therefore, these numbers are equally telling of the secretive political forces at work in Congress to bottle us up and to prevent what even Republican voters want.

There is a rot in our politics, and our failure on climate change is a telling indicator of that rot. The whole world is watching. America is supposed to be ``a City upon a Hill,'' an example for the world. They don't stop looking when we are a bad example. We have to get serious about this. Time is running out. It is time to wake up, and it is time to clean up.

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