Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2008

Floor Speech

LIEBERMAN-WARNER CLIMATE SECURITY ACT OF 2008 -- (Senate - June 04, 2008)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, I am proud to be an original cosponsor of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. This bill addresses the most significant environmental challenge facing our country. The scientific evidence clearly demonstrates the human contribution to climate change. According to recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, increases in greenhouse gas emissions have already increased global temperatures, and likely contributed to more extreme weather events such as droughts and floods. These emissions will continue to change the climate, causing warming in most regions of the world, and likely causing more droughts, floods, and many other societal problems.

In the United States alone, emissions of the primary greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, have risen more than 20 percent since 1990. Climate change is the most daunting environmental challenge we face and we must develop reasonable solutions to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

I have observed in person the dramatic effects of climate change and had the opportunity to be briefed by the preeminent experts. In 2006, on a trip to Antarctica and New Zealand, for example, I learned more about research by scientists at the University of Maine. Distinguished National Academy of Sciences member George Denton took us to sites in New Zealand that had been buried by massive glaciers at the beginning of the 20th century, but are now ice free. Fifty percent of the glaciers in New Zealand have melted since 1860--an event unprecedented in the last 5,000 years. We could clearly see the glacial moraines, where dirt and rocks had been pushed up in piles around the glacial terminus in 1860. I thought it was remarkable to stand in a place where some 140 years ago I would have been covered in tens or hundreds of feet of ice, and then to look far up the mountainside and see how distant the edge of the ice is today.

In Antarctica, I visited the Clean Air Station at the South Pole. Being the farthest place on Earth from major emissions sources, the South Pole has the cleanest air on Earth, and thus provides an excellent place to measure the background quality of the Earth's air. By analyzing carbon dioxide in ice cores, scientists have been able to create reliable measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide going back over hundreds of thousands of years. The measurements of carbon dioxide at Clean Air Station provide a reliable comparison to document the impact of human activity on increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in recent years compared to the last hundreds of thousands of years. The melting is even more dramatic in the Northern Hemisphere. In the last 30 years, the Arctic has lost sea ice cover over an area 10 times as large as the State of Maine, and at this rate will be ice free by 2050. In 2005 in Barrow, AK, I witnessed a melting permafrost that is causing telephone poles, planted years ago, to lean over for the first time ever.

I also learned about the potential impact of sea level rise during my trips to these regions. If the West Antarctica Ice Sheet were to collapse, for example, sea level would rise 15 feet, flooding many coastal cities. In their 2007 report, the IPCC found that due even just to gradual melting of ice sheets, the average predicted sea level rise by 2100 will be 1.6 feet, but could be as high as 1 meter, or almost 3 feet. In Maine a 1-meter rise in sea level will cause the loss of 20,000 acres of land, include 100 acres of downtown Portland--including Commercial Street, a major business thoroughfare along the water. Already in the past 94 years, a 7 inch rise in sea level has been documented in Portland.

The time has come to take meaningful action to respond to climate change. My colleagues worked tirelessly in recent months to develop legislation that will preserve our environment for future generations while providing reasonable emission reduction goals, offsets, and incentives for the industries covered by the bill.

I applaud the leadership of my colleagues from Virginia, Connecticut, and California in bringing this bill to the floor this week.

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