Unanimous Consent Request--S. Res. 555
Floor Speech
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Ms. LUMMIS. And excuse me. Let me start with this: I reserve the right to object.
I have respect for the Senator's tenacity in making these arguments, but we are being asked, through this resolution, to accept the most dire narrative that is built on projections and models rather than proven causation. The data cited here conflates correlation with causation.
The U.S. Senate should legislate based on evidence, not based on unrealized projections and fear. The resolution cites a $7.4 billion real estate loss in five southeastern States, between 2005 and 2017, and attributes it to sea level rise.
But we shouldn't forget what also happened during those years. We lived through the 2008 financial crisis and the housing collapse, the worst real estate market in generations. Property values fell across the entire Nation, but they were particularly bad in Florida.
So future projections and predictions are a troubling thing upon which to base legislation. Models are tools, not crystal balls. Models predict outcomes based on assumptions fed to them, and those assumptions can be wrong.
There were many projections that cattle cause climate to be worse. At Oxford, in England, and in Italy, studies were done that changed the projections, and the new projections determined that cattle are good for the environment. They not only are not making things worse, but they are making things better.
So if you change the assumptions and the projections, models can produce a different result. So we should not assume that every model has been fed the right information. We cannot make policy based on worst case scenarios from computer models.
Mr. Chairman, I actually do believe that climate is changing. But even during the Obama administration, when I was on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, we had some witnesses come to the committee from National Labs and testify. And one of them was asked what percentage of climate change is caused by mankind, the activities of mankind. And the response was it is a single-digit number. And that scientist, from a U.S. National Lab, was never allowed to testify in front of our committee again because he gave an answer that didn't comport with the narrative that the administration was trying to sell.
Climate change is happening, and I wish the Senator were making his remarks in China, rather than the United States, where the air is so bad that--I was in South Korea, in Seoul, and one day the weather was beautiful, the climate was beautiful, the air was fabulous. And the next day, you couldn't see two blocks because there was so much pollution.
And I said: What happened here?
They said: We know what our air quality will be in Seoul, South Korea, when we look at what the air quality was in China 48 hours ago.
So it is coming from a very polluted environment.
The United States has been exemplary, since the passage of the Clean Air Act, in cleaning up its air. We have extremely clean air, and especially so since we are an industrialized nation. I am proud of what the United States has done to address the Senator's concerns, but climate cannot be used to address the issue of concern to the Senator.
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