Energy

Floor Speech

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, before I go to the closing script, I just want to take a moment to express my sorrow and dismay that we appear to have walked away from doing anything serious about our energy posture and the hazard that carbon pollution is creating in our climate and in our atmosphere during the remainder of this Congress.

People will tell you differently, and there clearly has been a massive campaign of misinformation and disinformation funded by very powerful special interests. But I think the facts are pretty clear. History will judge us whether we are right or wrong. But I feel safe in history's judgment that if we do not act seriously to do something about our energy picture, there are real consequences coming. There are real consequences coming.

In my home State, you can go to Johnston where there are nurseries, and some of them have been owned for generations. For the first time a few years ago we had a winter bloom. A cherry tree in my yard in Providence bloomed in January. It has not happened before. I spoke to some of the nursery owners, again, going back generations; no recollection of that ever happening. Of course, you start blooming fruit trees out of season, you can put that crop in peril.

If you go out to Narragansett Bay you will see that the winter water temperature of Narragansett Bay has climbed about 4 degrees. That may not seem like much to us who do not live in those waters, but as Perry Jeffries, who is a very distinguished marine biologist at the University of Rhode Island, told me years ago, that is an ecosystem shift. Our fishermen have seen that ecosystem shift. They used to trawl for winter flounder, a very productive crop in Narragansett Bay. That is almost gone. The population has crashed 90 percent, by press reports. Now they catch scup instead. There is nothing wrong with scup, but it does not pay what winter flounder does, and it has had a real effect on that industry.

If you go out more broadly into our oceans, you go up to the Presiding Officer's home State of Alaska, into the far North, and you see ice caps that have been there for as long as the memory of the Native Alaskans runs. They have been there for as long as the memory of man runs. Now they are receding and disappearing and changing the entire arctic ecosystem.

If you go down to the Southern Ocean and the tropical coral reefs that are the nurseries of the oceans, they are bleaching, they are dying, they are going. Many are gone. If you go way offshore, you find garbage gyres in the Pacific the size of Texas and things we have dumped that are trapped out there.

You find a dead zone in seas around the world, where there simply is not the oxygen left to support life. Wherever you go, you find the acidification of the ocean. The ocean is more acid right now than it has been in 8,000 centuries, and 8,000 centuries is a long time.

We are gambling with some very dangerous consequences when we are not doing something about an ocean whose acid level is the highest it has been in 8,000 centuries. Science tells us that there have been ocean die-offs before. Very bad things can happen.

We need to take prudent action now, and it is not as if this is a choice just between a dangerous future that we need to guard against and costs that we need to impose on society now to protect against those dangers. I would be happy to have that conversation. I think it is still important because those outyear concerns for our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren are so serious that it merits a little bit of effort now and maybe even a little bit of economic pain now to spare them disaster.

But, in point of fact, when you make these investments in a new green, renewable economy, you actually win. It is not lose now to win later, it is win-win because we advance our green economy, we claw back the advantage that the Chinese, the Indians, and others--the European Union--are running away from us right now because we have not adapted our policies to the needs of the moment. You create jobs, thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of jobs.

You reduce our deficit; that was the calculation. You clearly enhance our national defense--there is literally no dispute about that--and you take a vital step toward energy independence so we are not in that terrible cycle of funding people who wish us harm and do us harm. Those are all wins.

There are people on this floor who would come and object. We did not have one Republican vote. Not one. Not one. But I think we should have had the fight anyway. I think it is an important fight to have. I think history will look back on this day, and when they are looking at the consequences of our heating planet, of all of the changes in our economy and our habitat in our home States that will accrue, and they look back and say: Why did you do nothing, it will be very hard to have an answer.

I think it would be better to answer: Well, at least we

tried. Frankly, I think because the American public is so clearly behind this, if we had taken this to the Senate floor and we had a real fight, if we had the White House behind us and ready for a fight, if the environmental community was willing to put their resources behind this moment and stand up at the same time and join that fight, and if all of the hundreds and thousands of green businesses out there were willing to go to their elected officials and say: This is good for the economy, good for our jobs, good for development, it will help put us back in the fight against China and India and the European Union, I think we could have won. I truly think we could have won.

We probably would have started with maybe 50 Democratic votes. I would hope a few more, but I think once we engaged and all of that pressure came and the logic of the debate began to happen and the magic of the Senate of real debate, of ideas clashing, of back and forth right here in the Chamber began to happen, I think we could have gotten to it.

But even if we had not, we should not have walked away. We should not have just rolled up our tent, given up, and walked away because some fights are worth having even when you lose.

There is a plaque near the pass at Thermopylae where, many years ago, a very small band of Spartans held off the Persian Army for a while. Eventually, they were all killed. There is a burial mound where their bodies rest. On the burial mound there is a plaque. The plaque says: Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, faithful to their laws, we lie.

It has been 2,000 years since those Spartans died at the Thermopylae Pass. Today on the Senate floor, a Senator from Rhode Island can talk about what they did that day. If they had said: Gosh, there are an awful lot of Persians there; I do not know if this is such a great idea; we probably are not going to win today; we will just head up into the hills for a while and see how this all works out, well, maybe they would have lived another 10 or 15 years, but they would have lived in shame. They would have lived with a little cloud of disgrace on their consciences for the rest of their days. And 2,000 years later, no one would ever have heard of them. No one would ever have thought of them. There is sometimes value in having a fight even when you cannot win. And if there is value in having a fight when you cannot win, my God, there is value in having a fight when you can.

I think it was worth trying. So I am going to keep pushing and coming to the Senate floor and urging my colleagues to ramp up and let's take on this fight. We have to do it together. We need to have a strong majority of our caucus because not one Republican is prepared to join with us on this issue. Not one.

We have to have the support of the White House. They have to be ready to have a fight. They have to be willing to enter into a fight in which they are not guaranteed a victory. But the principle I believe is, if you set as your own limit that you will not get into any fight you are not guaranteed to win, you are going to miss out on the most important fights of your day. That is no place to be when the stakes are high. So here we are, and there the plaque lies: Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, faithful to their laws, we lie.

We could have had a moment. It brings a little bit of goose bumps to my skin to say those words. To think that the sacrifice of those men that many thousands of years ago is still something in our minds, in our history, and in our consciences, I would hope that the day will soon come when we have a similar fight right here and, win or lose, our grandchildren, and our great-grandchildren, looking back on this day when we let them down, will at least know that we tried; that faithful to their benefit, faithful to their good lives, we tried.

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