Water Resources Development Act of 2013 - Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. As I am sure the Presiding Officer suspects, I am back on the floor again to urge that we awaken to what carbon pollution is doing to our planet, to our oceans, to our seasons, and to our storms. I wonder why is it that we are so comfortably asleep when the warnings are so many and so real. What could beguile us away from wakefulness and duty?

I was recently at a Senate meeting when I heard a Member of our Senate community say: ``God won't allow us to ruin our planet.'' Maybe that is why we do nothing. We are comfortable that God somehow will not allow us to ruin our planet. That seems like such an extraordinary notion, I thought I would reflect on it in my remarks this week.

First of all, the statement refers to God and is couched in religious terms, but is it truly an expression of religious inquiry? I think not. It is less an expression of religious thinking than it is of magical thinking. The statement that God will not allow us to ruin our planet sweeps aside ethics, responsibilities, consequences, duties, even awareness. It comforts us with the anodyne assumption that no matter what we do, some undefined presence will--through some undefined measure--make things right and clean up our mess. That is seeking magical deliverance from our troubles, not divine guidance through our troubles.

Is God truly here just to tidy up after our sins and follies, to immunize us from their consequence? If that is true, why does the Bible say in Galatians 6:7, ``Do not be deceived ..... whatever one sows, that will he also reap.'' If God is just a tidy-up-after-us God, why does the book of Job 4:8 warn that ``those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.'' If God is not a God of consequences, why does Luke 6:38 tell us, ``For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.'' Proverbs 22:8 tells us, ``Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity.''

Jeremiah 17:10 says, ``I the Lord search the heart and test the mind to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.''

So it seems we should not walk in the counsel of the wicked or sit in the seat of the scoffers and then expect there will be no bitter fruit of our deeds, no consequence.

We are warned in the Bible not to plow iniquity, not to eat the fruit of lies. Where in the Bible are we assured of safety if we do? I see no assurances of that. The Bible says in 1 Samuel 2:3 that ``the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed.'' At Thessalonians 1:6, ``God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict.''

Those who ``sow the wind,'' the Bible says, ``they shall reap the whirlwind.''

Look at our own American history. If God is just here to tidy up after our sins and follies, how could Abraham Lincoln say this about our bloody Civil War to free and redeem us from the sin of slavery? Here is what Lincoln said about that war:

Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said: ``The judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous judgment altogether.''

That was Abraham Lincoln. Blood drawn by the sword in equal measure to that drawn by the lash as the true and righteous judgment of the Lord--that doesn't sound like a God of amnesty.

Go to the very beginning. If we live in a state of God-given general amnesty from consequences, why were Adam and Eve expelled from Eden for their sin? Why was Cain sent into the wilderness, condemned to wander for the crime against his brother? If it is your assertion that God's love has no measure of tough love, wander a bit through the Old Testament before getting too married to that idea.

If the Old Testament is too bloodthirsty for you, look at Revelations 11:18:

And thy wrath is come, and the time ..... that thou ..... shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.

If we believe in an all-powerful God, we must then believe that God gave us this Earth, and we must in turn believe God gave us its laws of gravity, chemistry, and physics. We must also believe that God gave us our human powers of intellect and reason. He gives us these powers so we, his children, can learn and understand Earth's natural laws, which he also gave us, so that as his children we can use that understanding of Earth's natural laws to build and create and prosper on his Earth.

Hasn't that, in fact, been the path of human progress? We learn these natural laws, and we apply them to build and create and we prosper.

Why then when we ignore his plain, natural laws, when we ignore the obvious conclusions to be drawn by our God-given intellect and reason would God--the tidy-up God--drop in and spare us? Why would he allow an innocent child to burn its hand when it touches the hot stove but protect us from this lesson? Why would he allow a badly engineered bridge or building to fall, killing innocent people, but protect us from this mistake? Why would he allow cholera to kill in epidemics until we figure out that the well water is contaminated?

The Earth's natural laws and our capacity to divine them are God's great gift to us, allowing us to learn and build great things and cure disease. But God's gift to us of a planet with natural laws and natural order has as an integral part of that gift consequences--consequences when we get that law and order wrong. The child's hand burns, the bridge falls, the disease spreads. If it didn't matter whether we got it right or wrong, there would be no value to God's creation of that natural law and order in the first place.

So is that then to be our answer to polluting our atmosphere with carbon by the megaton and changing our climate and changing our seas? Is it to be our answer to that, that God would not allow us to ruin our planet? We are to continue to pollute our Earth with literally megatons each year of carbon, heating up our atmosphere, acidifying our seas, knowing full well by His natural laws what the consequences are? Instead of correcting our own behavior, we are going to bet on a miracle? That is the plan? Excuse me, but that is not the American way. President Kennedy described the American way as he ended his inaugural address connecting our work to God's:

..... let us go forth, to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.

That is the order of things. We are here to do God's work. He is not here to do ours. How arrogant. How very far from humility would be the self-satisfied smug assurance that God--a tidy-up-after-us God--will come and clean up our mess; that on this Earth, God's work need not be our own.

Remember the story of the man trapped in his house during a huge flood. A faithful man, he trusted God to save him. As the waters began to rise in his house, his neighbor came by and offered him a ride to safety, and he said: I am waiting for God to save me. So the neighbor got in his pickup truck and drove away.

As the water rose, the man climbed to the second floor of his house, and a boat came by his window with people who were headed for safe ground. They threw a rope and they yelled at the man to climb out and come with them, but he told them: No, I trust in God to save me. They shook their heads, and they moved on.

The flood waters kept rising, and the man clambered up onto his roof. A helicopter flew by, and a voice came over the loud speaker offering to lower a ladder to the man, let him climb up and fly to safety. The man waved the helicopter away, shouting back that he counted on God to save him, so the helicopter left.

Well, eventually the floodwaters swept over the roof, and the man was drowned. When the man reached Heaven, he had some questions for God:

God, he asked, didn't I trust in You to save me?

Why did You let me drown?

God answered: I sent you a pickup truck, I sent you a boat, I sent you a helicopter. You refused my help.

Just as God sent the pickup truck, the boat, and the helicopter to the drowning man, he has sent us everything we need to solve this carbon pollution problem. We just refuse. We just refuse. Some of us even deny that the floodwaters are rising.

As I have indicated in previous speeches, climate denial is bad science. Indeed, it is such bad science it falls into the category of falsehood. Climate denial is bad economics, ignoring that in a proper marketplace the costs of carbon pollution should be factored into the price of carbon. Climate denial is bad policy in any number of areas--bad national security policy, bad environmental policy, bad foreign policy, bad economic policy.

Although I am a Senator, not a preacher, from everything I have learned and believe, it seems to me that climate denial is also bad religion and bad morals. Hopes for a nanny God who will, with a miracle, grant us amnesty from our folly is not aligned with history or text of the Bible.

We need to face the fact that there is only one leg on which climate denial stands: money. The polluters give and spend money to create false doubt. The polluters give and spend money to buy political influence. The polluters give and spend money to keep polluting. That is it--not truth, not science, not economics, not safety, not policy, and certainly not religion, nor morality. Nothing supports climate denial--nothing except money.

But in Congress, in this temple, money rules. So here I stand in one of the last places on Earth that is still a haven to climate denial. In our arrogance, we here in Congress think we can somehow ignore or trump Earth's natural laws--laws of chemistry, laws of physics, laws of science--with our own political lawmaking, with our own political influence. But we are fools to think that. The laws of chemistry and the laws of physics neither know nor care what we say or do here.

So we need to wake up. We need to walk not in the counsel of the wicked, nor sit in the seat of scoffers, but with due humility awaken to our duty and get to work because here on Earth God's work must truly be our own.

Thank you very much. I yield the floor.

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