Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under Chapter 8 of Title United States Code, of the Rule Submitted By the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Relating to ``Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards; Fuel System Integrity of Hydrogen Vehicles; Compressed Hydrogen Storage System Integrity; Incorporation By Reference''

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, let me describe what I think is going on here on the Senate floor. Today is an unusual and interesting day.

What we understood the plan was, was that the majority was going to move to the Congressional Review Act regarding the California clean air rule in an effort to overrule the Clean Air Act rule for the fossil fuel industry, which the majority so diligently serves.

The problem with that is that the Parliamentarian has ruled that the Congressional Review Act does not apply to the waiver that California gets, allowing it to do its own clean air standard. So they had a problem. The problem was that Democrats were going to make a point of order saying: Hey, you can't do that. We have argued this matter. We both went before the Parliamentarian. We made our case. We filed our pleadings. We got a decision. In our view, it was not even a close call of a decision. But that is in our view. And what you are really doing here is, for the fossil fuel industry, going nuclear, overruling the Senate Parliamentarian to accomplish a legislative task--to amend, basically, the Congressional Review Act--and then open the door for that to undo a 30-year tradition of California and other States like Rhode Island being able to operate under better clean air standards and the vehicle emissions standards than the Federal Government may be willing to accomplish.

So that is where we thought we were. Now, what is happening is that we have gone to a different CRA, this one having to do with hydrogen vehicles. The minority has 5 hours. There is a total of 10 hours, evenly divided. I suspect the majority is not going to use much of that time. But the minority has 5 hours to talk about what is going on.

We are now in the 5-hour debate period on the hydrogen vehicle CRA, as the majority moves toward making its play on the California clean air standard.

This is a slight bump in the road for them, but our understanding is that there is a new plan. The new plan is, at the conclusion of our 5 hours, to make a new point of order that allows them to do the California CRA effort and create a new way to get around the terms of the Congressional Review Act.

The predicament for them is that the Congressional Review Act, as a law--passed by the Senate, passed by the House, signed into law by the President--says: In the Senate, which is where we are, when a committee is discharged from further consideration of a joint resolution, which is where we are, all points of order against the joint resolution are waived.

They intend to create a Senate exception to that. We expect the Parliamentarian will say, when they offer this point of order, based on the statute, based on the law, well, that is not in order. Then they will go nuclear on this. They will bring everybody back to, by a simple majority vote of 51, overrule the Parliamentarian as to that new point of order.

The purpose is to create a point of order that allows a bypass of the Parliamentarian's decision--a very sound one, a clear one, in my view, based on precedent, law, history, tradition, all of it--that the CRA effort to undermine California's clean air standard does not work under Senate rules.

In a sense, this is like a double nuclear option. They are going to overrule the Parliamentarian to create a new point of order under the CRA that will amend, in effect, the CRA. It will make the law regarding this no longer effective because they will come in and overrule the Parliamentarian.

And, then, even though the Parliamentarian's ruling is that you can't use the CRA to go after the California waiver, they don't have to overrule that directly because they will have, by overruling the Parliamentarian, created this little end-around.

So I guess this is a demonstration of how many hoops the Senate majority is willing to jump through for their fossil fuel supports.

And it ends at the same point, which is the purpose of the exercise. It ends with the Parliamentarian being overruled, and it ends with an attack on California and other sovereign States' ability to require cleaner air and lower vehicle emissions in their States.

Now, why does that matter? Well, obviously, if you are the fossil fuel industry, one of the things you sell is gasoline, and one of the things that the California clean air and emissions standards do is to require the auto industry to make automobiles more efficient--maybe even make them hybrid, maybe even make them electric. And whether they are more efficient or hybrid or electric, it all ends in the same place for the fossil fuel industry, which is: We can't sell as much polluting gasoline, and we want to sell more gasoline, and we don't like clean air standards that get in the way of us selling as much gasoline as we want to.

So we are here through this complex parliamentary rigmarole to overrule the Parliamentarian to get around her ruling that the Congressional Review Act only covers rulemakings, not the California waiver and other things. One of the problems with that is that--you know, if you give a mouse a cookie--it doesn't stop here; it opens the Congressional Review Act, which was very specifically designed to address rulemakings within a period of time after the conclusion of the rulemaking. And this would allow essentially anything you could put into the Federal Register to be submitted to Congress for Congressional Review Act review, no matter when it was done. All you have to do is re-up it with a submission and send it in to Congress, the California waiver being an example of that in the sense that it has been around for about 30 years now.

So one of the Congressional Review Act's limitations was it had a brief time window in which you were allowed to come to Congress to disapprove a rule, and that time period is now blown to smithereens if they go through with this parliamentary scheme.

The second thing is, it had to be a rulemaking; that it added a process at the end of the Administrative Procedure Act rulemaking, when the rule was finally enacted into law as an Agency rule. You always had the ability to go to court and sue and say that the Administrative Procedure Act was violated, it is arbitrary and capricious, was a violation of the law or whatever. This gave it political extra opportunity, which was to jump straight to Congress and just ask us to disapprove it. You don't have to prove, then, that there is anything wrong with the rule; just, politically, we don't like it so we are going to jam it.

And so, when you expand beyond just APA rulemaking to essentially any Executive decision that can be dumped into the Federal Register to create a submission that can then be brought here, you have opened a massive, massive array of Executive actions to Congressional Review Act disapproval.

As my colleagues have said, it could be as simple as a lease, as simple as a permit, as simple as a license. Essentially, any Executive decision since the passage of the Congressional Review Act can now be brought here on a purely political basis and--boom--blown up.

If my colleagues on the other side don't think that we will use this if they do this, they have taken leave of their senses. Of course we will. They are about to create a new Senate in which the CRA can be used for an immense array of purposes, well beyond what the actual law says.

(Mr. SHEEHY assumed the Chair.)

They don't have to be doing this. Let's be clear. They do not have to be doing this. There are other ways to serve their fossil fuel industry friends in the industry's desire to attack the vehicle emissions standards, the clean air standards. There are a whole bunch of them. One, they could do it administratively.

In fact, in 2019, the Trump administration withdrew a previously granted Clean Air Act waiver. And to do that, it made findings per a Clean Air Act process--administrative findings per a Clean Air Act process--as to the three criteria established under the Clean Air Act that determine whether a waiver application gets granted or denied.

So they already tried that once. They know that that is an avenue. Why did they not want to do that? Well, for starters, it is amenable to challenge if it is done unlawfully, if it is done arbitrarily and capriciously--the magic words of administrative mischief. And you end up in a forum like a court where you have to defend your facts, unlike here where all you have to do is have a majority and ram it through. So they didn't want to do it administratively, but they could have, and they already tried in the last Trump administration.

What else could they have done? Well, this is California's Clean Air Act standard. They could have gone and negotiated with the sovereign State of California and the other sovereign States that have attached themselves to the cleaner standard of California, which includes Rhode Island. This could be done through a regular process of negotiation.

We just had the Administrator of the EPA in the committee this morning for a lively exchange, and he repeatedly talked about how interested EPA was in cooperative federalism; that the Federal Government has to be a real partner with sovereign States; that we shouldn't be lording it over the sovereign States; they have expertise and interests of their own and cooperative federalism means that the Federal Government and the State governments should work as partners to accomplish goals.

Well, that was pretty rich, while EPA is trying to roll a sovereign State that is the fourth biggest economy on the planet without any hint of negotiation or cooperative federalism or effort--because when you are negotiating, the other side gets a vote, too, and you have to come to an agreement. And it is much easier to come here and have your friends in the Senate do your bidding in the Senate without any standard other than: Do we have the votes?

But they could have done it that way. There is a totally clear path to negotiate with California--say: Hey, circumstances have changed in this way or that. We have new policy issues that we want to argue to you, and let's try to figure out if we can work this out.

Nope. Didn't even try.

The other way to do this would be to go back and actually change the Congressional Review Act, right? It is a statute so we can amend it. And we could go through the process of amendment and say: OK, we don't want the Congressional Review Act to be limited to rulemakings any longer. We want to open it up to more stuff. And we could have a conversation about what should and should not be included in an expanded gateway to the Congressional Review Act. The House would have its say. You would end up doing what we call around here regular order. And in the Senate the minority--because you would have to get through cloture, the minority would have a chance to make our points. And you could do an amendment using regular order. Again, they would have to listen to us, and they would have to pay attention to facts.

Now, all they have to pay attention to are interests--and the fossil fuel interest is their dominant interest--and votes, do they have the votes. And those make it easy to choose this way, to go nuclear in the Senate rather than do the work either of amending the Congressional Review Act by law or negotiating with a sovereign State in ordinary Federal-State cooperative federalism or pursue that Clean Air Act administrative process that they had begun back in Trump 1.

Again, the reason not to do all those three is you can't just roll everybody and do what the fossil fuel industry wants. So here we are. This is because this is the shortcut. This is the thing that does what the fossil fuel industry wants.

And the price is going to be very, very high because, in my recollection, there has never been a legislative outcome in this body determined by overruling the Parliamentarian. We have gone back and forth on nominations, but on a legislative outcome which changes the Congressional Review Act and which allows an attack on a statutory waiver in the Clean Air Act for the State of California--those are legislative in their effect. And so, to me, that is not the right way that we should be going about this.

So there are a bunch of problems with what is going on here, but to understand the floor machinations we are about to go through--the overruling of the Parliamentarian to create an end-around so we don't have to overrule but can only violate the order of the Parliamentarian on the CRA--you really have to understand the baseline story here. And the baseline story here is that this is the fossil fuel industry in action. It may look like it is a majority and a minority in the Senate having an argument. No. It is the fossil fuel industry in action, trying to create a shortcut for itself so it can sell more gasoline and pollute more and ignore all the States that have joined with California to demand cleaner air for their constituents.

The fossil fuel industry essentially runs the Republican Party right now. The fossil fuel industry hates this clean air standard because it sells less gasoline in the States where the clean air standard is there. And it sells less gasoline in other States because it is hard to market both a clean vehicle and a dirty vehicle side by side. So to get to the enormous number of States that are with California on this and to sell into their markets, they have to make more efficient vehicles everywhere so that everybody enjoys the benefit of spending less on gasoline, getting better vehicle mileage, and having cleaner air.

So it actually works out pretty well for everybody except--except-- the fossil fuel industry, which, of course, wants to sell more gasoline, period and end of story. And what they have is a willing Senate majority that will basically do whatever it is that they want, and they have an executive branch that has been infiltrated by fossil fuel interests and is now essentially run by fossil fuel interests.

In my previous ``Time to Wake Up'' speeches, I have described--I am probably not going to get this perfectly right because I am going from memory here, but there is a kind of wasp that injects its larvae into another bug; and as the larval wasp begins to grow, it takes over the neural system, it takes over the command and control system of the other bug. So the other bug is still alive. It still looks like the other bug's shape and size and all of that. It doesn't look any different than a regular other bug, but it is being driven from inside by the larval wasp, which tells it to go do things that then create a place where the larval wasp can grow, can nest, can feed, whatever it needs to do.

It takes over the bug from the inside and takes over command and control, and steers it around. That, to me, is a pretty good analogy for what the fossil fuel industry is doing with the U.S. Government right now.

All of their front groups, all the machinery they created over the years to propagate the fraud of climate denial and to exert wild political influence all over the country, all of that just slots right into positions in government that are taken over by people who say, you know, that the concern about climate change is crud, climate change is a religion and not science.

They speak utter nonsense. It is like the worship of Baal back in Biblical times, bowing down to fossil fuel and doing whatever it is the great god Baal wants.

Well, things didn't work out too well for the priests of Baal, if you followed that analogy, but that is where we are. And what all of this overlooks is the coming storm.

When the President pretends that climate change is a hoax, he disables government's ability to prepare for a coming storm. When the executive branch sensors the use of the terms ``climate change,'' demands that they be struck from government documents, that prevents the executive branch from preparing for the coming storm.

When the executive branch--as we heard just today in the Environment and Public Works Committee--goes around and terminates grants based on a heresy hunt, where they are looking through the grants for language they don't like--like ``equity,'' there is a bad word; ``inclusion,'' can't have that; ``climate,'' definitely worth terminating a grant over that--they are destroying the programs that would help communities prepare for the coming storm because they have the word ``climate'' in them.

They even went so far in the executive branch as to have an Executive order on energy that refused to include either solar energy or wind energy in the definition of ``energy.'' Like, you can say what you want about whether you like solar or whether you like wind, but all you have to do is go to a solar facility or go to a wind facility, and you can see the electrons coming off of it.

The idea that that is not energy, that is not just a violation of law and common sense, that violates the dictionary. But that is how far the fossil fuel industry wasp will drive the Trump administration bug to ignore the coming storm.

What does the coming storm look like? Well, let me start.

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, now this is always good to remember because it wasn't always this way with President Trump. Here in 2009, there was a full-page ad in the New York Times. President Obama was getting ready to send a crew to Copenhagen for the COP, the climate change conference, and business leaders spoke up about that, saying, as business leaders, here is what we have to say:

[One,] if we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.

Well, that is kind of the point here, and I will get into, in a moment, what some of those catastrophic and irreversible consequences look like.

And it goes on to demand that the Obama administration show leadership on climate change:

Please allow us, the United States of America, to serve in modeling the change necessary to protect humanity and our planet.

Signed by Donald J. Trump, chairman and President; Donald J. Trump, Jr., EVP; Eric F. Trump, EVP; Ivanka M. Trump, EVP; and the Trump organization.

So there have been times when the Trump family understood what climate change was all about, understood the catastrophic and irreversible consequences that were looming, and were willing to say so.

But in between came exposure to politics, exposure to the power of fossil fuel on the Republican side and the understanding that if you really want to make it in Republican politics, you have got to do whatever the fossil fuel industry wants, whenever the fossil fuel industry wants it. That means we are ignoring some pretty serious warnings.

One of the earliest warnings came from Freddie Mac. Freddie Mac is not a green organization. Freddie Mac is a huge mortgage company, a federally chartered giant mortgage company. And as a giant mortgage company, it has a very distinct interest in the mortgage market.

And what did the chief economist for Freddie Mac warn? He warned that climate change was making coastal properties uninsurable. Climate change was making coastal properties uninsurable, either because sea levels were rising and they would flood or because storms were worse and there would be more damage by hurricanes and massive rains or because, who knows, they would lose access to the fresh water in their wells because of the infiltration of salt water underground. There are all sorts of ways in which climate risk hits coastal properties.

So the chief economist said: Here is how that works. The climate risk disrupts the insurance industry as to certain properties--meaning, those properties also can't get a mortgage any longer.

Freddie Mac is a mortgage giant. It knows what is needed for a mortgage. What is needed for a mortgage is an insurance policy. No insurance policy, no mortgage.

So now you have got properties along the coast that are at risk, that can't get insurance and can't get a mortgage. What happens to the value of those properties? Well, it goes down, he predicted. He predicted a coastal property values crash as a result of that cascade from climate risk to uninsurability to no mortgages.

And the coastal properties values crash he predicted was going to be so severe that it would look like 2008--that mortgage meltdown--all over again, and he stands by that testimony. In fact, he came when I was chairman of the Budget Committee to reiterate it.

Something else has changed in the meantime, though. It is not just coastal property risk. Ask any of our Western colleagues about wildfire risk and about what is going on in areas that have wildfire risk that the insurance company can't figure out, can't predict; and, therefore, it backs away from.

We are seeing that all across the country. The coastal property values crash warning now has an evil sibling: the wildfire adjacent property values crash warning. And either one of them, or both, could create that cascade from uninsurability to unmortgageability to crash in property values to nationwide recession.

He is not alone. A little over a month ago, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Chairman Powell came and testified in the Banking Committee. What did Chairman Powell have to say? He said that in 10 to 15 years, it will be impossible to get insurance or a mortgage in entire regions of the United States; exactly that cascade--climate risk, uninsurability, can't get a mortgage, property values crash.

Here is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, also not green, just a guy who is interested in dealing with risk to the financial system, and he is saying: Here it comes, buckle up. We are going to see that in 10 to 15 years.

Well, if we are going to see that in 10 to 15 years, who is looking at that now? Investors are; insurance companies are. You can't wait 10 to 15 years for the effects of entire regions of the country that can't get mortgages to start to be felt. That is going to start to happen now, and, in fact, it is. Look at the high-risk areas in the country.

Here, we see things like--from our Budget Committee work--these are nonrenewal rates around the country. And you can see in high-risk areas--Florida or coastal, California for both coastal and wildfire, that nonrenewals are spiking up in areas of climate risk.

What is nonrenewal? A nonrenewal is when your insurance company says to you: You know, thanks for all the premium you paid all these years, but your piece of property has now become uninsurable. We can't manage that risk any longer. Therefore, you are fired. Go find another insurance company.

Well, that is a big mess.

Then we go onto First Street, which took some of this data and others and started predicting forward. This is where home values are headed because of climate change.

You can see in these darker red areas, you are looking at actual reductions in home value, right? Not your home is your castle and it is always going to be valuable but, actually, the value of it goes down.

Some of the marks go as much as 100-percent loss of value. Eighty percent is this color. Sixty percent is this color. And you can see it speckled throughout the country. Places where, in the time of a 30-year mortgage--in the time of a 30-year mortgage, you are going to see property values actually go down--the property values crash that was predicted by Freddie Mac and the loss of mortgage availability that was predicted by Chairman Powell.

Here is another one: Where do insurance premiums go in the next 30 years? Well, in a lot of places, like down in Florida, we have already seen double, triple, and quadruple. An average home insurance payment in Miami Dade County is $17,000 a year. You look down here at Miami, and it is in the dark zone where it is supposed to go up 300 percent. That is a quadrupling, just so you know.

So if you are at $17,000 now and you are going to quadruple in 30 years, that means you are going to end up--do the math. I am not doing it right now in my head, but let's say it is $70,000 a year, right? Quadrupling $17,000--$68,000 a year.

If you have a property that has a carrying cost for the buyer of $68,000 a year, how valuable is that property? What is the present value of that liability that comes with the property? It is a huge liability, and it knocks down the value of the property.

So that is why the home value evidence that First Street collected here relates to the insurance premium expense. You don't just lose the value of your house when your property isn't mortgageable any longer and you can't find anybody to buy it other than a cash buyer; you also lose the value of your house when the carrying cost of your home insurance becomes so great that nobody wants to buy into that annual $68,000 liability.

How much would you pay to have to write a $68,000 check every year? Not much. It would have to be a pretty darn nice house to cover that. And for a lot of people, that just erases the value of the home, which is why we get there.

So, First Street, their estimate was that climate change could erase $1.4 trillion in U.S. residential real estate value by 2055 due to these concerns that they put on the chart. And they are not alone. It is not just Freddie Mac; it is not just First Street Foundation; it is not just Fed Chair Powell.

Here is the Mortgage Bankers Association. You think that is a green group? Fat chance. But they do care about mortgages, and what they say in their report is:

Chronic physical risk associated with climate change--i.e. the insurance risk--may exceed the capacity of insurance and government assistance to sustain some areas.

That kind of tracks with Jay Powell saying there are going to be whole regions of the country where you can't get a mortgage any longer--even with government help, even with insurance, it just doesn't work any longer.

So when an advocacy group like that for the mortgage bankers is giving this warning, it might be worth paying attention to. It might be worth not just dismissing it: Oh, climate change is a hoax. None of us need to worry about that.

The Economist Magazine, also about as ungreen as it can be. And the Economist Magazine--this is a cover story. If you can't read it, it says: ``The next housing disaster,'' and it is a house on a piece of land that is being eroded by seas.

If the size of the risk suddenly sinks in and borrowers and lenders alike realize the collateral underpinning so many transactions--

Like those mortgages-- is not worth as much as they thought--

Because those prices have fallen as insurance rates climbed-- a wave of repricing will reverberate through financial markets.

Here is the punch line:

Climate change, in short, could prompt the next global property crash.

Another way they say it in the article is this:

At present, the risks of climate change are not properly reflected in house prices. A study in Nature, a journal, finds that if the expected losses from increased flooding alone--

That is that coastal value crash risk; not the wildfire one, just flooding-- were taken into account, the value of American homes would fall by from $121 billion to $237 billion.

Again aligning with what First Street predicted--changes in Americans' home values because of climate risk uninsurability and unmortgageability.

Mr. President, $121 billion to $237 billion is a pretty big hit on those homeowners whose properties have lost that value.

Globally, what they say is that we are looking at a $25 trillion hit to global real estate markets. The largest asset class on the planet is real estate, and it is looking at a $25 trillion hit. Yeah, let's ignore that and believe the fossil fuel-funded White House that says it is a hoax. That makes a lot of sense.

Obviously, if there is going to be a property values crash and if mortgages are going to be in the center of it, that is not great for the banking industry. Why? First of all, the banking industry makes a lot of money off of mortgages. If a whole bunch of properties won't sustain a mortgage any longer, that shrinks the market, so there is less revenue to be had for the banking industry.

Also, if you have a mortgage on your books as a bank, the liability-- what the owner owes you on the mortgage--gets offset in your solvency determination by the value of the collateral that you hold against that liability. The collateral is the value of the home.

What happens to a bank in a region where the value of the home has fallen by half? What happens when the homeowner owes more money than the property is now worth? That hits the bank's loan-to-value ratio. That is a determinant of bank solvency.

So, guess what, this is not just me saying this; the International Financial Stability Board just did this report in January giving a warning to the global banking system: Look out. Buckle up. Climate risk is coming. Uninsurability is coming. Unmortgageability is coming. You need to plan to stay solvent through and survive that crisis.

So I will tell you, this is a very technical report done by very technical people. The Financial Stability Board is, again, not a green organization, but they do have an obligation to look forward and predict risk, and they are predicting this risk to the global banking system.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, during Trump 1, by the way, issued this report--``Managing Climate Risk in the U.S. Financial System''--saying that climate change poses systemic risk to the U.S. economy across multiple sectors ``simultaneously and within a short timeframe''--this is coming at us--undermining the U.S. financial system's ability to sustain the economy.

Let me read the opening sentence from the report, from the executive summary:

Climate change poses a major risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system and to its ability to sustain the American economy.

Precisely as the other experts argued.

Risk to insurance, to mortgage, to property values crash, to economic collapse.

On the next page, they say among findings of the report:

A central finding of this report is that climate change could pose systemic risks to the U.S. financial system.

Let me say a word on systemic risks because it sounds like a pretty dull term. It is not like apocalyptic risk, catastrophic risk; it just says systemic risk. What does that mean? That means that the whole system takes a hit. That means that the damage is not contained to the sector where the damage is happening.

That is like 2008 all over again. We had that set of bad mortgages, but when that set of bad mortgages--when it became apparent that that was fake and phony and that there was not real value there, it didn't just harm the mortgage holders, it took down entire investment firms, and that crash cascaded out through the entire economy.

Those of us who were here in 2008--I can remember the financial agony of Rhode Islanders when that recession hit so hard and so suddenly. I can remember the people who were at the Treasury and at the Fed who were supposed to prop up our economy in a state of absolute, sweating panic about how this crash was going to wipe out the U.S. financial system. That is what systemic risk is. It means the whole thing goes down, the whole system.

So it sounds like a pretty mild term, but if you are familiar with economics, you know that is one of the scariest words in the economic lexicon.

What else have we here? We have Deloitte--not very green, either--a big consulting powerhouse. Here is what they say about continuing to fiddle around on climate change, pretend it is a hoax, censor the term, and act like idiots about a true coming risk with abundant warnings about the risk. They say that we have a range of outcomes. By 2070-- that was their target period--they said that if we can start getting climate right, if we can start addressing this problem before these systemic harms happen, then what is going to happen is the global GDP will increase by around $40 trillion; i.e., the world will be better off financially by $40 trillion by our making the right decisions to get climate change right. That is one outcome.

The other option is that we continue goofing off. We continue fiddling around and lying about climate change or believing the lies about climate change. We continue ignoring the evidence. We continue ignoring what we are seeing with our own eyes in the insurance industry in regions of the United States right now, already.

Go around Florida and talk about property insurance and tell me what you hear, because I am pretty sure I know because I have been there and heard it.

The other is a $180 trillion hit to global GDP, which means there is a $220 trillion swing that will come to pass in the lives of children now. The world can be $220 trillion poorer or $220 trillion richer depending on whether we continue to screw up responding to climate change, ignore it, and listen to the worst people in the world to listen to--the fossil fuel industry, which is wreathed in conflicts of interest on the subject, crawling with conflicts of interest, infested with conflicts of interest, and eager to shove those conflicts of interest into our politics with lies and dark money, secret influence. It is one of the fouler things that have been done, what has been done in our Congress by the fossil fuel industry.

If Deloitte is right, that $220 trillion swing is a hell of an outcome for people who will be alive then--all because we won't make good decisions now.

Potsdam Institute says that climate change losses by 2049 could hit $38 trillion and then get bigger after that.

So, again, we are dealing with a sooner window than 2070, but we are dealing with very, very, very big numbers--$25 trillion hit to the global real estate sector; $38 trillion hit from lost agricultural yields, labor productivity, and infrastructure; $220 trillion globally, depending on whether we get this right or continue to be fooled by those with the worst conflicts of interest.

Recently, Allianz, which, by the way, is the biggest insurance company in the world, a trillion-dollar company--two things about the insurance industry and Allianz in particular. The insurance industry needs to predict accurately in order to price its insurance correctly. So, first of all, they are making like trillion-dollar bets on what the future is going to look like. They are not just lying to make up stuff so that they can sell more gasoline next year in California and Rhode Island and other States; they have to look out.

When they do look out, not only do they have that huge bet that they are placing on what the world is going to look like, what risk they are insuring, they are actually under a fiduciary obligation. They can be sued by their shareholders and by their members if they are not doing proper due diligence and getting it right.

So when the insurance industry is doing signals like this, it is worth paying attention. The insurance industry is under a fiduciary obligation to get it right, the fossil fuel industry has a massive conflict of interest to tell us stuff that is wrong, and we are believing the fossil fuel industry? It is madness or it is politics or worse.

Well, here is what the Allianz board member wrote:

We are fast approaching temperature levels--1.5 degrees [centigrade], 2 degrees [centigrade], 3 degrees [centigrade]--where insurers will no longer be able to offer coverage. . . . Entire regions are becoming uninsurable.

Sound familiar? Fed Chair Powell used almost the exact same language. They are seeing the same thing.

This is a systemic risk. Remember what I said about systemic risk? Here is a board member of the largest insurance company on the planet, with a trillion dollars at stake, saying that this is a systemic risk that threatens ``the very foundation of the financial sector''--just like the Commodity Futures Trading Commission report threatened, just like the International Financial Stability Board warned.

This is a systemic risk that threatens ``the very foundation of the financial sector.'' How? He continues. If insurance is no longer available, ``other financial services become unavailable'' too. A house that cannot be insured cannot be mortgaged.

This is the same deal that the chief economist of Freddie Mac was predicting. No bank will issue loans for uninsurable property.

Credit markets freeze. This is a climate-induced credit crunch.

He also points out in his article something that I hadn't paid attention to. I was looking at the ``insurance to mortgage to property values'' crash. But what he points out is that, if you go to the financial sector, big wheeler-dealers in the financial world do big deals and transactions, and very often those transactions depend on an insurance component to make the deal work. And in areas where the risk involved in that transaction is uninsurable, then the transaction can't happen any longer.

So it is not just mortgages and the mortgage market that are imperiled by this insurance risk. It is the whole swath of other financial transactions, which is why the title was ``An End to Capitalism.'' That is what we are dealing with.

There is a lot more that I could go through. Here is my current binder on the economic risks of climate change, which includes these articles and more. I have circulated it to Finance Committee members. I have circulated it to Budget Committee members. I have circulated it to Environment and Public Works Committee members. I don't think anybody really wants to read it because, in this place, the fossil fuel industry gets what it wants, whatever it wants, whenever it wants. And the fossil fuel industry does not want the Senate or the House paying any attention to these looming risks, to these storm warnings that are coming.

I have been through small insurance collapses in Rhode Island--two of them. One was a banking insurance--State-backed banking insurer--that failed just as I was coming in as a new Governor's legal counsel. And as we saw this beginning to fail, he asked me to handle the issue. So it was a handful of an issue, I will tell you, because we knew that the insurer was going to fail, and we knew that all of the insured banks would no longer be able to honor their accounts. And we knew that about a third of Rhode Islanders had money in those various banking institutions and that they would lose access to their funds until we sorted this out. And it happened the day that the new Governor was sworn in.

I can remember preparing the needed papers to take over the closed institution in an all-nighter in a law firm and, in the morning, running the papers up to the Governor's office through the cold weather of a Rhode Island January as the guns were firing, signaling the start of the new administration--the ceremonial guns of probably the Newport Artillery Company.

And on day one, we had to close all of these banking institutions, and I spent the next many months of my life trying to figure out how to get them back, get depositors repaid, and clean up the insurance system.

So I know that when Ernest Hemingway was asked, ``How did you go broke?'' he said, ``Gradually, and then all at once.'' That is how these insurance crises happen.

The Rhode Island Share and Deposit Indemnity Corporation went broke gradually and then all at once. It was just a matter of days from steady state status to complete calamity, and we had to dig our way back out of it.

The next one was workers' compensation insurance--that too, gradually and then all at once.

Like the California FAIR Plan, we had a backstop insurance entity that, if you couldn't get insurance in the regular market, you would go to the State entity, and then your risk would be farmed out to all of the other companies--which is fine if it is 2 or 3 or 4 percent of the market. But when that company starts to have a huge share of the market and huge losses, the insurance companies look around and say: Wow, we are going to own our share of those losses. I don't want to do business here any longer.

They came in, and in a matter of a day or two, every single workers' comp insurer in Rhode Island had said: We are out of here. We are done. We are closing.

And we had until the end of their policy to stand up a whole new workers' compensation system that paid for itself and was fair to workers.

Between those two things, I don't think I have ever worked so hard in my life. But we solved both of those problems.

Now, you may say: Well, that is just a little problem in a little State. Yes.

Many years ago, my father set up Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict in the Defense Department. He was the first SOLOC, as they called it. And one of the things that people in Special Operations really didn't like was being told that what they were doing was low intensity.

Mr. Whitehouse, when it is you that is being shot at, it is not low intensity. We have got to get rid of that name.

So small fights can be brutally intense fights, and these were small but brutally intense situations in Rhode Island. And the lesson to me is really clear: These things happen gradually and then all at once. And we are well into the gradual part of what climate change is doing to insurance markets, and the cascade from that into mortgage markets and into property values and into economic recession is now entirely predictable--indeed, predicted by essentially anyone who is, A, paying attention to this, and, B, not on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry.

So when we are messing around with Senate parliamentary procedures, when we are actually threatening--maybe cooler heads will prevail-- threatening to go nuclear, threatening to overrule a ruling of the Parliamentarian just to run a political errand for the fossil fuel industry to help it sell more gasoline, we are doing two really evil things at once: We are doing real damage to this institution that will be very hard to walk back from; and, two, we are indulging an industry with a massive special interest and a massive conflict of interest that is simply out to sell more gasoline and that wants us to ignore the risk that its emissions are creating in the world.

And we are now, in this building, so overwhelmed by that fossil fuel political influence infrastructure--all its dark money running through super PACs, all its lies being spouted out by phony front groups, all of the fake scientists making up stuff that isn't science but sounds good because it was cooked up on Madison Avenue to sound good. And now they have actually infiltrated the office of government, and they are running the U.S. Government from the inside with a view to making sure that nobody pays attention to the climate harm.

And I will close with a different point, which is that I have spent my time so far on the floor talking about how a corrupting industry has used its influence in Congress to steer us away from paying attention to a massive economic risk that numerous expert voices have warned us is in peril--and not just expert voices but many who are under a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders.

We had in the Budget Committee the CEO of Aon, which is one of the biggest insurance companies in the world. He is their U.S. CEO. He came in to testify and give that same warning. Over and over and over again, we are getting that warning about the economic peril that is looming, where we are now in it gradually, and we are waiting for ``all at once'' to happen.

And I talk about that as an economic matter because this is the ``House of Mammon,'' where the worship of the fossil fuel god Baal and money is the No. 1 thing that we do. So I am speaking in the terms that the Senate and the House most pay attention to, which is money--money.

But know that behind the economic peril is real natural disaster, is real tumult in the natural systems of the Earth that have allowed our species to develop for 20,000 years in a relatively safe harbor of limited atmospheric carbon, a healthy climate range, moderate storm activity, and a robust ecosystem around us where that security and that safety have allowed the ecosystem to flourish.

And it happens in a million small ways. One of my favorites was the red knot. There is a bird; it is called the red knot. It lands in Delaware every year, and lots of them land in Delaware every year, and they come to Delaware every year because the horseshoe crabs in Delaware Bay come ashore to lay their eggs. So it is like social hour for horseshoe crabs, but it is also feeding frenzy for birds that like to eat the horseshoe crab eggs.

But here is the deal about the red knot. I bet you don't know where they come from to get to Delaware Bay for that moment when the horseshoe crabs are laying their eggs. They come from Brazil. They have come from all the way down in Patagonia. They have flown up to Brazil, and then they go from Brazil over the water to Delaware Bay.

Imagine how long it takes to fly from Brazil to the east coast, to Delaware, in a jet plane. These little birds, they do it on their own. They are not big. They are about that big. And they fly all that way on their own.

It is such an arduous journey that their bodies actually metamorphose a bit during the journey to make it possible. It is one of the miracles of creation that this little bird can make that astonishing journey and have the physical changes to its body that take place during that trip make it possible for that little bird to make that journey.

And the reason that species makes it and survives is because, in God's great ecosystem, they have figured out that if they land at this time in this bay, the food will be there for them. And if we screw that up with fossil fuel emissions so that the schedule of the horseshoe crabs' egg laying goes off and those red knots come all the way from Brazil and there are no eggs there for them--they are too late; they are too early--that is how populations crash.

That is just one tiny example. That is one thread of this beautiful interlocking natural planet that we have, and there are a million more such threads that put the world together that we take for granted.

Behind the looming economic risk is a disruption of the Earth's natural systems that goes well beyond just economic harm.

It means that the creek where your grandfather taught you to fish and where you want to teach your granddaughter to fish isn't going to have the fish in it any longer. Can you put a price on that? No. It means that the water flowing out of the Himalayas--fought over between Pakistan and India forever--becomes less because there is dramatically less glacier in the Himalayas to provide the glacial flow down into those rivers.

And now you have a conflict between those countries over that most elemental need of humans--water. Can you put a price on that risk? Coastal homes all over the world are being lost to sea level rise.

After Superstorm Sandy, I walked the beaches near Matunuck, RI, and there was a man standing on the shore near his house. His house was tipped over because the storm had eroded the foundations of it, and he was looking at his house. They spent time going into it. It was tipping over. It was dangerous to go in, but they were getting out as much stuff as they could.

I asked him: Tell me the story of this house. It was a nice old house, been there a long time. He said: Well, I remember being here as a baby. It was my grandparents' house. They came here in the summers. It was beautiful. We had all this beach in front of us. We even had a lawn in front of us. The thing I want most in my life is to be able to pass this home on to my grandchildren; to have that family tradition, generation after generation after generation, to be able to come to this beautiful place and enjoy this beautiful shore and continue this glorious family tradition.

How do you put a price on that when that is taken away because we are too damned lazy and indolent to clean up the fossil fuel industry's mess when they won't do it?

My point is that as I focus on the economics of this--because that is what people care about in this place--there is a whole other set of costs to mankind and to our Earth that we will be forcing future generations to bear that have nothing to do with the almighty dollar but actually may be worse in terms of humankind and the human spirit.

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, notwithstanding the distinguished majority leader's accusations of mendacity and hypocrisy and misrepresentation, the facts at heart here are quite simple: The waiver at issue is not a rule and was never a rule. Thirty years of precedent and practice at EPA and in this body prove that. So what the GAO did here was not unprecedented.

What was unprecedented was for the House to send over a document claiming falsely, according to the Parliamentarian, that the waiver is, in fact, a rule under the CRA. And to blame the GAO or the Parliamentarian for that is to mistake the referee for the player who committed the foul. The foul here is pretending that a waiver is a rule, and both the GAO and the Parliamentarian independently blew the whistle on that foul. Those are the facts.

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