Providing for Further Consideration of H.R. National Defense

Floor Speech

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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, my amendment would direct the President to establish an office of climate resilience within the White House to coordinate climate resilience activities across all government agencies.

As the climate crisis worsens, American communities are in desperate need of an office to increase the resilience of our communities.

As my colleagues well know, climate disasters are increasing in frequency and severity at an alarming rate. Just last week, a few of my colleagues and I visited Yosemite National Park, where climate change continues to fuel larger, longer, and more severe fires.

In the last 14 months alone, 20 percent of giant sequoias in Sierra Nevada were killed in wildfires. Not more than 48 hours after we left, a wildfire started that is still burning across 2,000 acres and endangering the park and the surrounding communities.

Last month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that there were nine individual billion-dollar weather and climate events across the country during the first 6 months of the year alone, including severe drought, two tornado outbreaks, and dangerous hailstorms.

Last year, damages from these severe weather events totaled approximately $145 billion. These costs are felt by families across the country. These families lose their houses, all of their belongings, their livelihoods, and sometimes their loved ones in these disasters.

As the climate crisis worsens, this harm will be exacerbated by the lack of climate resilience planning.

There is immense work needed to make our communities resilient and safe from climate disasters. Thankfully, much work is underway. Over 20 Federal agencies have separate climate resilience action plans, but the United States lacks a robust, unified, national climate resilience action plan, and there is no overarching coordination between Federal agencies on this very important security issue. As such, these disjointed efforts are likely performing duplicative work without maximizing the potential benefit.

My amendment would establish an office of climate resilience to coordinate the various efforts currently going on across the Federal Government. The office of climate resilience in the White House would leverage the expertise available from all sectors involved in climate resiliency, including the knowledge and lived experiences of frontline communities.

The office would improve current climate resilience efforts throughout various Federal agencies and ensure that they are rooted in environmental justice as they protect and develop the climate resilience workforce.

The amendment will enable the United States to better prepare for and prevent future climate disasters and protect American families and our Nation's security while mitigating the destruction that natural disasters wreak on our communities.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support my amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I don't understand why the other side is so distraught about an Office of Climate Resilience, and I would love to hear my colleagues on the other side go and tell the people who have lost their homes in wildfires, who are flooded underneath enormous amounts of water that somehow that is not an interest of the Federal Government or even of our military to help protect.

By the way, the military does go into many of these communities when we have these big natural disasters. So it is absolutely about protecting the security of our country, and the reality is it is the duty of the Federal Government to protect these people.

Now, you can make up all kinds of things about why this climate change is not real, but let me tell you, experts around the world believe this is a national security issue. They believe it is real, and they believe we need to address it.

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