Climate Change
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, earlier this month, a report from Hawaii's Mauna Loa Observatory found that carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere have now reached the highest level in human history--in human history. It was a chilling reminder that the threat from climate change is real, immediate, and existential. Almost everyone accepts this science and the gravity of the threat it portends. The only group of folks that still seem skeptical of climate science are Republicans and the Trump administration.
Yesterday the New York Times reported that the Trump EPA is planning to rewrite the established benchmarks for unsafe levels of air pollution. You heard that right. They are planning to use dubious math to obscure the real and long-known health risks of air pollution. These new formulations would result in fewer predicted deaths than what the experts have long agreed to. People will still die. The numbers will just be wrong about the effect.
Why, might you ask, would anyone want to obscure the full health risks of air pollution? Because then the Trump administration could use the fake math to justify further rollbacks to clean air rules at a time when global warming is increasing and when Americans know the danger. This Trump administration and the Republican majority are rolling the clock back--more carbon, more coal, more oil, and more gas, when we need less. We all know that.
What kind of Orwellian nonsense is this? The Environmental Protection Agency making it easier to pollute the environment? It is a textbook definition of ``dystopian.''
As my colleague Senator Whitehouse so often points out, dark money lurks behind so much of what the Trump administration does. Big Oil, Big Gas, and big polluters everywhere are the only possible boosters of this decision. It is their money, funneled to political organizations and politicians without a trace of disclosure, that motivates folks in the Trump administration to make it easier to release more pollution into the air.
We should be using the Senate to debate climate policies in search of common ground, but Leader McConnell has decided to bring forward his version of the Green New Deal just so his party could vote against it. We know what Leader McConnell and the Republicans are against. What are they for in dealing with climate change? So far, nada, zero, nothing-- they haven't put a single thing on the floor. The American people see the effects of climate change in their lives, and they know Congress must act. Only the Republican majority stands in the way.
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