SBIR/STTR Reauthorization Act of 2011 - Continued
Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, we are not at this moment without votes on this important legislation for lack of effort by the distinguished Senator from Louisiana. She has been extraordinarily determined, as she was with her earlier small business legislation which she fought through to a success, and I am sure this will be fought through to a success as well.
One of the ways in which our friends on the other side are seeking to harass and impede this important piece of legislation is by putting on unrelated amendments--particularly poisonous unrelated amendments, including the one Senator Rockefeller just spoke about--to completely gut and strip the authority the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized EPA has to protect us from the hazard of carbon pollution.
Underlying this procedural maneuver which would interfere with this significant jobs-related bill is a fundamental disagreement about whether our atmosphere is being affected by the carbon pollution we have been pumping into it. I would submit the facts are entirely on one side of that debate, and the polluters are entirely on the other. It is only in a building such as this in which so many special interests have such sway that the debate has the currency it appears to have achieved.
Much of what is happening is nondebatable. Scientists know--not from theory but from observation, from calculation--what the range of parts per million of carbon dioxide has been in the atmosphere for 8,000 centuries. We can go back and find the carbon record in ice and in other ways, and we can establish what the range was of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
For the last 800,000 years, it has been between 170 and about 300 parts per million. That is the bandwidth--170 to 300 parts per million--over 800,000 years. For the first time in 800,000 years, we are out of that range. The present concentration--again, a measurement, not a theory--exceeds 391 parts per million. Scientists can draw a trajectory which is something that people do all over this world. It is not complicated. It is not theory. If you draw a trajectory based on where we are going, the trajectory puts us at 688 parts per million in the year 2095 and 1,097 parts per million in the year 2195. These are levels that not only haven't been seen in 800,000 years, they haven't been seen in millions of years.
This is an experiment in the very nature, the very physics of our planet. It has been known since just after the Civil War when the Irish scientist Tyndall discovered that CO
2 in the atmosphere had a warming effect, had a blanketing effect and warmed the atmosphere. That has been bomb-proof science for more than a century. It is in basic textbooks.
When we take that scientific theory--basic, established, more than 130, 140 years old--and then combine it with the facts as we see it, that it has been in this range, it is now out of an 8,000-century range and climbing, and we look at some of the effects that are beginning to happen that are also consistent with that, a fairly undeniable story begins to emerge.
The day will come, I am confident, when our grandchildren will look back at this moment at our unwillingness to deal with the plain scientific evidence in front of us and to instead be persuaded by merchants of doubt with big checkbooks who have a vested interest in the outcome, who have a conflict of interest. We are listening to them, and we are not listening to the plain facts and to the plain science and the theories that have been known for more than a century. People will look back at us with real shame--there is no other word for it--shame and disgust, that this was the way we addressed this problem on our planet.
We can look back at other events such as this. Galileo had a view based on his observations on science as to how the planets worked, and he was intimidated out of it by the power of the day which couldn't abide that, and he was taken before the inquisition and was forced to recant. The legend is that when he recanted, he quietly said to himself: I recant, but the planets stay their courses.
Well, the planets stay their courses, the laws of physics and chemistry don't change, and we are on a slope toward a very severe problem. We can't just simply, like the ostrich, put our heads in the sand over and over. It is just wrong.
So this amendment is wrong that would strip EPA of their authority. It will hurt people who depend on this. It has always been good for America when we have made our air and water cleaner. We simply cannot go on this way. It is bad for this bill because it puts a poisonous amendment on it when this should be a bill we should all be getting behind. It is certainly wrong from a point of view of history and science and the obligation we have to our younger people and to their children who have to live in a world that faces the consequences of our negligence this day.
I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield the floor.
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