Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act--Continued--

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I thank my colleagues from Connecticut and Maryland and Rhode Island who are down here sharing their stories and their concerns about carbon pollution and its impact on climate around the world.

Indeed, it was just last October that I was engaged in a triathlon. In the first stage, the swimming was in the ocean in North Carolina. I had been told to expect temperatures of 62 to 65 degrees. As I went down to the water with the first group of participants getting off the transport bus, the first in front of me stepped in the water and said: Hey, folks, this water is really warm. Come on in.

The temperature was not 62 degrees or 65 degrees, the temperature of the ocean was 72 degrees. A week later Hurricane Sandy struck the Northeast with incredibly devastating consequences, powered by this much warmer ocean water. That is one of the many effects we are seeing of increased carbon in the atmosphere, trapping the Earth's heat.

Perhaps the most important number we should all be aware of is the number 400. I put the number 400 on a chart so we could ponder it--400 parts per million. What that represents is a roughly 50-percent increase in carbon dioxide as it is represented in the broader atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution, going from 270 to 400. That is a lot of heat-trapping gases added to the atmosphere.

Indeed, when we were at 350, scientists started to say, before we hit 400, we need to dramatically reduce the burning of fossil fuels so we will never hit 400 and the number will come back down and stabilize around 350.

If we were being graded as human civilization on this planet on our effectiveness in decreasing the burning of fossil fuels and keeping the concentration from increasing, we would be getting an F. We would be failing because not only did we soar from 350 to 400, but the rate of carbon pollution has doubled in the last 30 years. Thirty years ago the rate was, on average, one part per million per year. Now the average rate is two parts per million per year. So not only have we not decreased and leveled out, but the steepest of the curve has doubled, which means that 5 years from now we will be at 410 and 10 years from now we will be at 420. What this represents is a very bleak future for humans on this planet.

By various estimates, it has been somewhere between 3 million and 10 million years since our atmosphere had this level of carbon concentration. That means that in the time humans have been on this planet, which is less than 200,000 years, humans have never witnessed--have never lived in an atmosphere of this concentration. We have never left footprints in the sand when the atmosphere has this level of heat-trapping gases.

Now we see it everywhere. We see it in Oregon in terms of our cascade glaciers are getting smaller and our cascade snowpacks are getting smaller. Our pine beetle infestations--normally knocked down by cold winters--are getting larger. Our fires are getting larger, fed by drought and dead trees from the pine needles. Indeed, we have had three record-setting droughts in the Klamath Basin in the last 30 years--the worst ever droughts three times in the last 13 years.

We are even seeing it in our Pacific Ocean oysters. Those oysters, when they are tiny, are very sensitive to the acidity of the water. The acidity has gone up because carbon dioxide in the water has gone up.

We have many examples just in my home State. If we look across the rest of the United States, if we look across the globe, there are huge impacts everywhere, with multiples of impact at the poles, where the temperature change is faster.

I applaud the President for saying we must have a bold strategy to take on climate change. There are three big areas of carbon dioxide generation, and those are electricity generation, transportation, and buildings. His plan lays out strategies in all three areas, and that is good. That is a starting point for a much broader discussion on how we end our fossil fuel addiction. Addictions are hard to kick, but they are particularly hard to kick if we have someone who is trying to keep us hooked, and those who benefit from the profits of burning fossil fuels are very much trying to keep us hooked. So we have to recognize that requires an extra degree of dedication and effort on all of our parts.

I will wrap up and turn this over to my colleague from Maryland, who has been a terrific champion on this topic and who has seen firsthand in Maryland many of the effects of global warming.

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