Sanders Discusses Global Warming at Middlebury College

Sanders Discusses Global Warming at Middlebury College

Thank you for this opportunity to discuss an issue whose implications for our future cannot be overstated. Before I talk specifically about global warming and climate change, I would like to put the issues in a broader environmental context.

From recent dramatic increases in pollution-induced illnesses, like cancer, asthma and neurobehavioral disorders, to an unprecedented spike in severe natural disasters, like Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it is clearer than ever that we need visionary leadership in Washington that moves us away from the status quo on environmental and energy policy. We need stronger laws and stricter enforcement of them, putting the health and safety of our children above the bottom line of unscrupulous, polluting corporations. We need bold initiatives to spur research and development that truly lay the foundation for a new, green millennium.

Unfortunately, we are saddled right now with the worst environmental president in modern United States history and a rubber-stamp Congress that does nothing to stop him.

Since George Bush took office, he has given new meaning to "putting the fox in charge of the henhouse." Nearly every agency of our government with jurisdiction over the environment is now run by the polluters it is supposed to regulate.

The President appointed a timber industry lobbyist as head of the Forest Service. He put a mining industry lobbyist who believes that public lands are unconstitutional in charge of public lands. He put a utility lobbyist who has represented some of the worst air polluters in America in charge of the air division of the EPA. The last job of his choice to head up the Superfund program was teaching corporate polluters how to evade the Superfund law.

And it makes a difference.

Today lakes across Vermont and the Northeast are sterilized from acid rain. The EPA has announced that in 19 states it is now unsafe to eat any freshwater fish because of mercury contamination. A study from the Centers for Disease Control found that as many as 637,233 American children are born each year with mercury levels above 5.8 micrograms per liter, the level associated with brain damage and loss of IQ. Much of this mercury is produced by 1,100 coal burning power plants that refuse to use readily-available technology for reducing such emissions.

Not coincidentally, one of the first things that President Bush did when he came into office was to order the Justice Department and the EPA to drop a series of 75 lawsuits against the nation's worst-polluting coal burning power plants. Why? During the 2000 presidential campaign their industry contributed $48 million to the Republican Party and has given more than $58 million since. They provide campaign contributions, and Bush allows them to pollute.

The United States was once regarded as an international leader on environmental protection. Now, our environmental laws are being hacked to pieces from within for short-term profits and political gain. Now, we are an international outcast on the single biggest environmental threat faced by countries from the United States to Bangladesh: global warming.

We understand from scientists that certain things are happening to our atmosphere, and hence our climate and environment, that present an imminent threat to life as we know it on the planet. When fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil are burned, they release carbon dioxide that builds up in our atmosphere and traps heat that would otherwise escape into space. Amazingly, in the last 100 years, we have experienced a rise in the average temperature on Earth of 1 degree Fahrenheit - unprecedented over the last 1,000 years. More amazingly, the U.N. International Panel on Climate Change predicts that global temperatures will rise 2 to 10 degrees by 2100, resulting in major changes in climate and weather patterns including widespread coastal erosion and flooding around the globe.

Are these observations and predictions coming from fringe scientists screaming that the sky is falling with no hard evidence to back them up? Hardly. They are coming from thousands of leading scientists from throughout the world who are compiling mountains of evidence that global warming is upon us and that we ourselves are causing it.

In June of last year, in an unprecedented joint statement, the national academies of science for all the G-8 countries (including the United States) along with those of Brazil, India and China, called on all G-8 governments to take urgent action to avert a global catastrophe caused by pollution-induced climate change.

But President Bush is not listening. The U.S. remains the only G-8 nation not to ratify the Kyoto protocol. The Bush Administration refuses to pursue mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions - namely CO2. A Bush administration official (once a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, with no scientific training) altered government reports on climate change to "soften" words and phrases linking greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, to global warming. Fortunately, aside from the out-of-touch positions maintained by a few polluter-friendly holdouts in Congress, at last serious debate over global warming has finally switched from whether the earth is warming due to human activity to how we should go about reducing our emissions. While this is good news, reaching consensus on how to reverse course will not be easy.

Clearly, the time is long overdue for us to break our dependency on Middle East oil. The good news is that the technology is now available to move our nation forward in a major way toward energy conservation and sustainable energy. For example, I am working hard to increase and expand tax credits for investments in renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, biomass, co-generation and fuel cells, to make resources like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge permanently off-limits to oil-drilling, and to increase fuel economy standards for the U.S. auto industry.

Unfortunately, what is missing is the political will. Despite many meaningful legislative proposals, large and small, the news from Washington on climate change policy under President Bush and the Republican leadership continues to be dismal. In fact, I think it is fair to say that the Bush Administration now ranks as the worst environmental administration in modern American history. While the President keeps his head in the sand on global warming, overwhelming evidence, including disappearing permafrost, accelerated animal extinctions and more frequent and severe natural disasters continue to forge scientific certainty that our climate is changing due to human activity and that immediate, broad-ranging and aggressive action is needed if we are to change course.

As many of you know, the effects on Vermont of such climactic changes could be significant. Some forest species, for example, such as the sugar maple, are projected to disappear entirely from the U.S. over the next century if nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, threatening the traditions and livelihood of the more than 2,000 Vermont maple producers and roughly a third of the U.S. supply of maple syrup. The ski-dependent economies of Vermont will also be affected, requiring more artificial snow-making for longer periods of the winter, driving up costs and presenting new challenges to many ski areas. Global warming will also impact the diversity of native wildlife species, including Vermont's 240 birds, 59 mammals, 81 fish, 18 reptiles and 21 amphibians.

The fact is that there must be dramatic, mandatory reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide we release globally in order to curb these damaging trends. I have been an advocate for many years of taking aggressive action to curb our carbon dioxide emissions and to move toward clean and sustainable energy. I am a cosponsor of HR 759, the Climate Stewardship Act, which would provide a good start by establishing a maximum limit on carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. and foster a trading system to encourage innovative technologies for rapidly reducing such emissions in the future. I am also an advocate for higher fuel-efficiency standards for our automobile and truck fleet, and am a cosponsor of legislation to expand and extend tax incentives for the purchase of fuel-efficient hybrid automobiles. As a country that represents only 5% of the world's population but produces 25% of its greenhouse gas emissions, we have a moral obligation to lead the way toward reducing these emissions. For your sake and the sake of your children and grandchildren, we had better meet that obligation.

Thank you.

http://bernie.house.gov/documents/document.asp?issueNum=4885