Emergency Border Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2010

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I intend to speak for a few minutes on climate change and the need for a new energy strategy for this country.

I will just note that if any of my colleagues intend to seek the floor to conclude the business Senator Schumer and Senator McCain were engaged in, they can just signal me and I will yield the floor to allow them to finish that business.

Mr. President, we are now at the end of this work period, and we will shortly be going back to our home States for our home work during the August recess from Washington. We are doing so without having done anything about our dependence on fossil fuels, the carbon pollution that we subsidize going into our atmosphere, the undisputed science of what is happening in our atmosphere as a result of that, and the consequences that are beginning to pile up on our planet as a result of our negligence in addressing this pressing issue.

It is easy when you are in Washington to think that this is the center of the universe and that the little fights and quarrels that happen here and the politics of this town are what is most important. In this Chamber, which is very often a hotbed of those politics, I think that problem is particularly severe. There are political situations where, if we don't get it resolved, then it just keeps going along and there is no real harm done. But nature doesn't give a darn about our politics. Nature doesn't give a hoot about our campaign contributions. Nature doesn't care about what motivates delay. Nature doesn't care whether you are lying or telling the truth. Nature just goes on about her business, driven by chemistry, biology, physics--the basic elemental forces of nature.

We are getting ourselves into a situation where by ignoring those forces we are beginning to imperil ourselves and future generations.

It is astonishingly irresponsible to be in the predicament we are in right now, with what is fair to describe as a looming global emergency that we can't get anything done on.

The big oil companies, the big coal companies, the big energy companies are able to drop into this particular Chamber their delay, their desire to have nothing happen on this subject, and that trumps the interests of all the people of the United States, all the people of the planet, their children and grandchildren, off into our future.

I want to read into the Record a few things that have come out in the press in the last few weeks. Here is USA Today, in the middle of last month:

The world is hotter than ever. March, April, May and June set records, making 2010 the warmest year worldwide since recordkeeping began in 1880. .....

That is not some fringe group reporting this. That is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the Government of the United States of America.

In my home State, back in Rhode Island, ``July was more than 4 degrees above normal,'' quoting from the Providence Journal on August 2, ``and the second hottest month on record for Providence; 4.2 degrees higher than normal.''

Here is a newsclip about what effect these temperatures are having on our oceans:

The rising temperatures have been particularly hard on oceans, which have absorbed more than 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases over the past 50 years.

This was another NOAA report.

Oceans are taking in increasingly more carbon. The report's analysis of global ocean uptake of carbon dioxide estimates that the seas stored 33 percent more anthropogenic [man made] carbon in 2008 than they did 14 years earlier. Oceans' absorbsion of CO

2 has caused rising acidity that is damaging the ability of shellfish, crustaceans, corals and plankton to build shells and skeletons.

You might ask, who cares about shellfish, crustaceans, corals, and plankton? Shellfish keep a lot of American fishermen busy and occupied and productive, and feed an awful lot of families. Ditto crustaceans--the Rhode Island lobster in particular. Corals are the nurseries of our tropic seas. When they die, it has a pronounced effect throughout the oceanic food chain. And phytoplankton--all plankton--are the base of the oceanic food chain. When you have a collapse in the phytoplankton, you have a potential collapse of the entire oceanic food chain.

There have been massive die-offs in the historic record of the ocean and we are trending toward having another one, with an ocean that is more acidic now than it has been in 8,000 centuries. We are getting to the point where the small animals that form the base of the ocean food chain are becoming soluble in the water that is their environment.

Lobsters in particular--again from the Providence Journal of July 29:

Meanwhile, the water off our coast has been unusually warm. Lobsters like cold water and in the colder waters east of Cape Cod, the heartland of the fishery, the crustaceans seem unaffected. No moratorium has been recommended there. The lobstermen explain a decline in the local stocks by saying there has been a general migration toward cooler waters.

So the warming of our waters is having a pronounced effect on Rhode Island businesses, on Rhode Island lobstermen. I was out the other day with Rhode Island lobstermen, hauling in pots, seeing what was down there, and the fishery has not been wiped out, but it is suffering, it is under pressure, and it relates to our warming planet and to climate change.

It is a global situation. According to the Wall Street Journal, there are 400 oxygen-depleted dead zones identified by scientists in our oceans--oxygen-depleted dead zones in our oceans, 400 of them, covering an area of nearly 100,000 square miles of dead ocean because there is not enough oxygen in it to support life, as though it is on some alien planet.

Now a very recent study, July 29, reported:

Researchers at Canada's Dalhousie University say the global population of phytoplankton--

Again, the basis of the oceanic food chain--

has fallen about 40 percent since 1950. That translates to an annual drop of about 1 percent of the average plankton population between 1899 and 2008. The scientists believe that rising sea surface temperatures are to blame.

There is another side to this story and, frankly, most of it is phony baloney science. It is bought-and-paid-for mercenary science. It is not the real deal. It masquerades as the real deal, it is designed to fool the public, and it is designed to prevent us from taking action. Regrettably, for a while it is working.

Here is what Paul Krugman wrote the other day, looking at the variety of evidence that supports the need for us to do something about that for the sake of our planet, our children, and our grandchildren.

Nor is this evidence tainted by scientific misbehavior. You probably heard about the accusations leveled against climate researchers--allegations of fabricated data, the supposedly damning e-mail messages of ``Climategate,'' and so on. What you may not have heard, because it has received much less publicity, is that every one of these supposed scandals was eventually unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then bought into by many in the news media.

This should be a win-win. This is an issue that is important to us as humans trying to live on this planet as dramatic changes begin to take place in our atmosphere and ecosystems. This should be a win for us economically as green jobs grow, as we compete with China and India, as we stop losing the race to China and India for this next economy, as we stop sending money overseas to people who do not care for us much, who fund our enemies, and who drain hundreds of millions of dollars a year out of our economy.

It should be a win on national security, protecting us from those circumstances. It should be a win across the board. But the special interests will not let go, will not step into the future. They know they control enough votes in this place to make this not happen.

I promise my colleagues this is a day that the future will look back at and look at this Senate, and this will be our day of infamy. This will be the day when all of the evidence was before us, we had every chance in the world to do what was right, we in fact knew what was right, and we allowed lies and phony science, concocted evidence and the big money from big oil, from big coal, from the big polluters, to steer us away from our duty.

I hope when we come back in September we will take this back up, that we will take it up seriously. It is my strong belief that if we go at this with real diligence as a Senate--if we have the White House with us and behind us and fighting for us, if we have the environmental groups out there in the field doing their work, pushing this issue, and if we have the hundreds of thousands of Americans who work in green energy industries and who are green energy investors and who are going to grow into this green energy economy out there explaining the true economic value, and if we have our national security apparatus making the point as to how important this is, as all the national intelligence estimates have already said--we can push this over the top. Not the first time, because the lies and the money will trump the first time. But if we do it a second and a third and fourth time and force this issue, I think we can bring it home. I hope we will at least try. Some battles are worth the fight even if you are not sure you can win.

I yield the floor.

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