Protecting Volunteer Firefighters and Emergency Responders Act of 2014 - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Madam President, I am now here for the 62nd weekly effort to have my colleagues wake up to the threats of climate change. Congress continues to remain sound asleep, I suspect anesthetized by the narcotic drip of polluter money into our veins. But the signs of change around us continue.

These are the Mau Loa monthly carbon dioxide concentrations. We have just passed, again, 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is the second year in a row this has happened. This year it happened 2 months earlier than last year. So why does it matter that we are at 400 parts per million? What does that mean to anybody?

We have actually gone back and measured where the carbon concentration in the atmosphere has been going way back. We can measure back in ancient ice so we know that for at least 800,000 years, our carbon concentration is between 170 and 300 parts per million. That is a long run for a species that has only been homo sapien for about 250,000 years. That has been a long and hospitable window, during which our species has developed from very primitive hunter-gatherers into the complex people that we are now.

So when you take something like that, the carbon concentration, and you bust out of a range that has sheltered us for 800,000 years, that is not nothing. It is particularly not nothing when you know that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere raises the temperature of the Earth. We have known that since Abraham Lincoln was President. This is not something that is debatable. This is not new news. This is established science for 150-plus years.

We also know--because you can replicate it in the laboratory--that when you put higher concentrations of carbon in the air over seawater, it acidifies the seawater. If you doubt any of that, you can go out and measure that it is actually happening--the known provable theories, the known principles, I should say. In fact, laws of science are actually manifest in sea level rise from the warming oceans, in warming ocean temperatures, in increased acidification. These are measurements.

As this continues, we continue to do nothing about it, but we let the big polluters continue to spew carbon pollution into our atmosphere. Some of us in Congress are tired of waiting for folks to wake up. This month 31 Senators from every part of the country held the Senate floor through the night to sharpen this Chamber's focus on the threats of climate change. I thank Senator Schatz of Hawaii for leading us through this wake-up call, and to Senator Boxer for her leadership of the Senate Climate Action Task Force, and to the Presiding Officer, the senior Senator from Massachusetts, for her enthusiastic participation and support in that effort.

The American people tuned in, tweeting over 54,000 times at the hashtag up4climate in the 24-hour period of this effort. Also, Americans added more than 200,000 signatures to online petitions urging Congress to get with it and do something about this climate problem. The public knows it is a problem and has been pushing us to act now for years.

I have heard it from Rhode Island fishermen who now have to chase their catch further offshore into cooler waters because our coastal waters have warmed. The Presiding Officer has heard it from her Massachusetts fishermen as well. I have heard it from homeowners in South Kingston, RI, whose houses are falling into the ocean as the sea level rises and they encroach further inland into what had for generations been family homes.

Rhode Island does its part to try to address climate change. We are participating in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and we are everywhere readying our coastlines for worse storms and higher seas. But the Ocean State cannot do this alone. The health, the safety, the prosperity of the people I represent in Rhode Island's communities depend on national action. We need a national groundswell of citizens and elected officials from every State.

So last week I went to Iowa to share with that State Rhode Island's climate change stories and to listen to Iowans tell me their climate change stories and how it is affecting their communities. I was invited to Iowa by Senator Rob Hogg, who is a passionate defender of the Iowan environment and way of life and a very knowledgeable expert on climate change.

I want to thank him and I also want to thank the Iowa legislature, particularly house minority leader Mark Smith and senate majority leader Michael Gronstal for their warm welcome. I also want to thank my colleague Senator Harkin and his staff for their assistance in planning and coordinating my visit.

Farming is not a big deal in Rhode Island. We are not known as an agricultural State. We have farms and we love them. But it is not quite the same as Iowa. Farming is the cornerstone of Iowa's economy. Disruption of agricultural productivity is one of the great climate risks in Iowa. The recent National Climate Assessment draft finds this:

In the long term, combined stresses associated with climate change are expected to decrease agricultural productivity, especially without significant advances in genetic and agronomic technology.

But we do not have to wait for the long term. Iowans are already being hit by extreme weather. In 2013, just last year, 155 science faculty and research staff from 36 Iowa colleges and universities--home State Iowa teachers from their colleges and universities, 155 of them--signed the Iowa Climate Statement, concerning the losses that farmers across the State are already experiencing due to climate change.

I ask unanimous consent that the Iowa Climate Statement be printed in the Record following my statement.

Iowa has had 20 Presidential Disaster Declarations since 1990 due to flooding. Damage has been more than $20 billion. Although no one particular flood can be directly connected to climate change, we know that carbon pollution loads the dice for the extreme downpours that provoke these floods in Iowa and in the Midwest.

I call it the Barry Bonds rule. You do not know which home run was caused by the steroids, but you know for sure he was hitting extra home runs because of the steroids and you can measure that. In 1993 in Iowa, a flood exceeding once-in-500-year flood levels hit Des Moines. Ted Corrigan of Des Moines Water Works told me during my visit that the city's infrastructure was overwhelmed, leaving Des Moines without clean water for more than 2 weeks.

The Des Moines Register reports that Iowa has endured at least 10 so-called 500-year floods since 1993--10 500-year floods since 1993. That includes the big 2008 flood that cost $10 billion statewide in Iowa.

Doug Newman, the executive vice president at the Cedar Rapids Economic Alliance, told me what it was like to live through that unprecedented flood. Doug explained that in Cedar Rapids, flood levels had never, for as long as they have measured it, exceeded 21 feet. This flood maxed out at 31 feet, 10 feet above the all time previous ever recorded record.

A thousand businesses were flooded. One-fifth of them were lost. More than 1,000 people lost their jobs. So it was tough. But what I saw was Iowans taking action--from college students to business leaders, from activists of the Iowa Citizens Climate Lobby to the conservationists to the Izaak Walton League. Iowans are preparing for the effects of climate change, and they want to see Federal action.

Like Rhode Islanders, they are tired of trying to carry this themselves. Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie is one of over 1,000 mayors represented on this map all across the country who have signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, pledging to meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol targets in their own cities and to press their State governments and the Federal Government--us--to enact meaningful greenhouse gas reductions.

I visited with TPI Composites. TPI Composites has a development and manufacturing facility in my home State, in Warren, RI. They are part of our composites cluster in Rhode Island. But they are also a leading Iowa manufacturer of wind turbine blades. In 10 years, TPI has manufactured more than 10,000 wind turbine blades. So when the Maytag headquarters closed, leaving as many as 4,000 workers jobless in Newton, IA, this helped the town get back on its feet.

If we allow the production tax credit or the PTC to lapse, loss of that tax incentive for wind energy producers will jeopardize the business that TPI has built. So the Iowa State Senate unanimously passed a resolution in January supporting the extension of the production tax credit--unanimously, bipartisan.

There is bipartisan support for the extension of both the production tax credit and the investment tax credit, and we should get that done in this Congress. I also heard in Iowa from Warren McKenna, the manager at the Farmer Electric Cooperative in Kalona, IA.

Kalona is a town of about 2,400 people. It has Iowa's first community solar garden, with 25 kilowatts of capacity. For the co-op's 800 owner-members, that 25 kilowatts of energy helps reduce their monthly bills. And for members who have their own solar panels, they also get paid for the energy they add into the co-op's system. And this year, off of those successes, the co-op is breaking ground on an 800,000-kilowatt solar installation, taking advantage of a State solar tax credit that was passed by a Democratic senate and a Republican house and signed into law by a Republican Governor.

This body could learn a thing or two from the Iowa State legislature. It shows what can happen when the polluter money doesn't have a Democratic institution locked down the way Congress has been.

I also visited BioProcess Algae. This is a Rhode Island-based company. The CEO, Timmy Burns, is right here--a Quidnick Islander like myself. They design, build, and operate commercial-scale algae bioreactors. The commercial demonstration project shown here is located down in the southwest corner of Iowa in Shenandoah.

BioProcess Algae uses the wastewater and the waste heat and the carbon dioxide emissions from the nearby ethanol refinery to grow algae. The algae can then be used for animal feed, can be used for biofuels, and, while it is growing, it eats up the carbon dioxide that would otherwise be emitted to pollute the atmosphere. Here in Shenandoah, American ingenuity is turning carbon pollution into economic opportunity.

I also visited this wind turbine. This is the base of a wind turbine. This is the stairway up into where you can go inside to serve it. You can see it is pretty big. There is the arc of the round steel base, and it towers up hundreds of feet. I think the blade diameter was 160 meters. It is a pretty serious-sized wind turbine. It is located in one of five wind parks which have a combined 500 wind turbines that are operated by a company called MidAmerican Energy.

Thanks to pioneering companies such as MidAmerican, and to the State tax incentives that encourage these projects, more than a quarter of Iowa's electricity is generated by wind. They are leading the country. More than a quarter of their electricity is generated by wind. It measures in the gigawatts. That is a lot of wind power. And they love it. The farmers get paid for having the wind turbine on their farm. If you look--I don't know how well the camera can see this--this is the turbine itself, the stand that it rises up on, the column. That is the doorway into it. We are standing on a gravel sort of service road ring around it so that equipment can be pulled up to it for maintenance purposes. But look right here. That is not too far away. That is maybe 25 feet. They are farming right up to 25 feet away from this thing. So you farm and you get paid for having the wind turbine located on your farm. It is a wonderful two-fer.

The conclusion I drew from all of this--from the exciting new types of energy being grown from algae, from the huge commitment to wind, from the audiences that came out and expressed their support for getting stuff done on climate, for the bipartisan support from so much of this clean energy stuff--is that Iowans have awoken to the threat of climate change. And that is important. Because Iowa plays a key role in our politics. Iowa helps determine which issues our Presidential candidates will be judged on. In 2016, I will bet that Iowans are going to insist they all address carbon pollution and they are not going to accept a lot of nonsense denial out of those candidates.

In fact, I believe if the Republican Party tries to nominate a climate denier for President, they are in big trouble. Of course, the carbon fuel-funded denial machine will do its best to change the subject, to muddy the waters, to create doubt, to use its anonymous dark political money to keep candidates quiet. But all the money in the world can't change the fact that Iowans know, just like Rhode Islanders do, that climate change is real. And those Iowans are going to put those Presidential candidates on record. If you are a denier, good luck in Iowa. Iowans see the changes taking place and they are speaking up. Farmers in Iowa and fishermen in Rhode Island may be miles from each other geographically, but they both see in their lives around them the facts of the changes that are already happening.

The time to sit on the sidelines is over. If we fight hard, if we are willing to have this fight, I am confident we can do a strong climate bill in Congress and soon--a climate bill that will strengthen our economy, because it will; a climate bill that will redirect our future, as it must; a climate bill that will protect our democracy, because the pollution of our atmosphere and oceans that the carbon polluters are doing is matched by the pollution of our democracy that they are doing with their dirty and anonymous money; and finally, a bill that will honor our duty to the generations that will follow us, because each American generation takes that duty as a very high duty. Right now we are dishonoring that duty and we are not leaving for future generations the kind of country we should.

I went recently to Ukraine. I met with one of the leaders of the Ukrainian freedom movement. His name is Vitali Klitschko. If you are a boxing fan, you know who Vitali Klitschko is because he is a huge guy who was the world heavyweight boxing champion for years, and he has now thrown himself into the struggle of Ukraine for freedom; first of all, freedom from Russian influence and control, and more recently freedom from the oligarchs who basically robbed the country blind but were finally run out after that long bloody siege at the square in Kiev, the Maidan.

Vitali has an interesting phrase that he uses. Because when he started this fight, it wasn't the least bit clear that anybody could win this thing. The oligarchs are billionaires. They have immense resources at their disposal. And they keep stealing, so there is always more. And, of course, the Russians are right there with their baleful influence, trying to make sure there is as little freedom and opportunity as possible and to keep Ukraine under their thrall. Those are some powerful forces. So people would ask him: Can you win? And he had a very simple answer. I can't imitate the good Slavic accent, and I can't imitate the basso profundo voice of a man that big, but his phrase was memorable: No fight, no win.

Well, we have had no fight in us for too long on climate. It is time to put some more fight into this thing, because I think on climate the opposite is true. This isn't a no-fight, no-win situation. This is a "if we fight, we will win'' situation. The facts are there. The public is ready. There is nothing between us and doing our duty other than the barricade of lies, the polluter-funded denial beast that is out there shopping their nonsense, and we can outdo them. It doesn't take much. Because, among other things, it is always easier for the truth to win over a lie. You just have to be willing to go out there and have that fight. So we have to wake up. When we do, we will win. I am more confident than ever, having been back from Iowa.

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:

Iowa Climate Statement 2013: A Rising Challenge to Iowa Agriculture

Our state has long held a proud tradition of helping to ``feed the world.'' Our ability to do so is now increasingly threatened by rising greenhouse gas emissions and resulting climate change. Our climate has disrupted agricultural production profoundly during the past two years and is projected to become even more harmful in coming decades as our climate continues to warm and change.

Swings from one extreme to another have characterized Iowa's 2013 weather patterns. Iowa started the year under the widespread drought that began in 2011 and persisted throughout 2012. But the spring of 2013 (March-May) was the wettest in the 140 years of record-keeping, creating conditions that hampered the timely planting of corn and soybean fields. During those months, sixty-two Iowa counties experienced storms and flooding severe enough to result in federal disaster declarations.

By mid-August, very dry conditions had returned to Iowa, subjecting many of the state's croplands to moderate drought. These types of weather extremes, which are highly detrimental to Iowa's crops, were discussed in our 2012 Iowa Climate Statement, where we also noted that globally over the past 30 years extreme high temperatures are becoming increasingly more common than extreme low temperatures. In a warming climate, wet years get wetter and dry years get dryer and hotter. The climate likely will continue to warm due to increasing emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Climate change damages agriculture in additional ways. Intense rain events, the most notable evidence of climate change in Iowa, dramatically increase soil erosion, which degrades the future of agricultural production.

As Iowa farmers continue to adjust to more intense rain events, they must also manage the negative effects of hot and dry weather. The increase in hot nights that accompanies hot, dry periods reduces dairy and egg production, weight gain of meat animals, and conception rates in breeding stock. Warmer winters and earlier springs allow disease-causing agents and parasites to proliferate, and these then require greater use of agricultural pesticides.

Local food producers, fruit producers, plant-nursery owners, and even gardeners have also felt the stresses of recent weather extremes. Following on the heels of the disastrous 2012 loss of 90% of Iowa's apple crop, the 2013 cool March and record-breaking March-through-May rainfall set most ornamental and garden plants back well behind seasonal norms. Events such as these are bringing climate change home to the many Iowans who work the land on a small scale, visit the Farmer's Market, or simply love Iowa's sweet corn and tomatoes.

Iowa's soils and agriculture remain our most important economic resources, but these resources are threatened by climate change. It is time for all Iowans to work together to limit future climate change and make Iowa more resilient to extreme weather. Doing so will allow us to pass on to future generations our proud tradition of helping to feed the world.

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