Hire More Heroes Act of 2014-Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here for the 67th time to urge my colleagues to wake up to the growing threat of climate change, and today I am joined by my friend and colleague Senator Nelson of Florida, who is a true leader in this fight.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that we be able to engage in a colloquy for the next 25 minutes.

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Florida is about 1,000 miles from Rhode Island, and it is slightly larger than my home State, but Florida and Rhode Island have a great deal in common, such as a beautiful coastline, an economy and a way of life that is tied to the sea, and as a result risk from the ocean in a changing climate.

On my recent trip down the southeast coast, I spent 2 days in Florida and heard firsthand about the unprecedented changes taking place there. Like the folks I met in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, Floridians are worried about the coastal communities they love. They are getting serious about protecting their homes and their livelihoods, and they want their representatives in Congress to get serious.

Senator Nelson hears them. He recently took the Senate commerce committee to the Miami Beach townhall to examine the dangers posed by rising seas. Here is what the Miami Herald said about his effort:

South Florida owes Senator Nelson its thanks for shining a bright light on this issue. Everyone from local residents to elected officials should follow his lead, turning awareness of this major environmental issue into action. It is critical to saving our region.

Senator Nelson and I also held a press conference at Jacksonville's Friendship Fountain with Representative Corrine Brown to highlight these serious implications of climate change. So I am grateful for Senator Nelson's bringing his passion and expertise to the floor today.

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. On my trip through Senator Nelson's State, the Army Corps of Engineers officials in Jacksonville gave me some pretty dire warnings about what the sea level rise portends for Florida, both the punch from storms that will bring the higher seas ashore and the steady encroachment of saltwater.

This is a scene from western Boynton Beach after Tropical Storm Isaac in 2012. I don't know if you can see it on the screen, but this sign says ``no wake zone.'' The family put up a ``no wake zone'' sign in their front yard because the cars going by would cause wakes and more damage.

The Corps also showed me what 2 feet of sea level rise would do to the Everglades National Park. I went down to the Everglades later on during my visit. This is what it would look like. You can see the green in the Everglades here and all the development up here. Basically, if you add 60 centimeters of sea level rise, or 2 feet, and that is all ocean again, that is a pretty serious change.

The Southeast Florida Regional Compact, which is a bipartisan coalition of four South Florida counties, predicts that the water around southeast Florida could surge up to 2 feet in less than 50 years.

So that is a preview of the coming attractions ``Everglades Under Water.''

What was interesting was that the local officials, both Republicans and Democrats, were working together. The division that exists in this body doesn't exist down there. Mayor Silva Murphy of Monroe County is a Republican and former Mayor Kristin Jacobs of Broward County is a Democrat. They both know that flooding and access to drinking water are not partisan issues in the way that it divides us here.

Here are a couple more examples from my visit. This is Castillo San Marcos, which Senator Nelson will recognize as being in St. Augustine. It is a famous and very beautiful ancient fort. It sits along the water there. If you add 3 feet of sea level rise, it turns from being part of the coast to being its own tiny little peninsula surrounded by flooding. It is the oldest masonry fort in the United States.

This is what Fort Matanzas would look like. This is a little fort built by Spanish colonists in 1742. It is right here on this inlet. If you add 3 feet of sea level rise, suddenly it is in the water. It has nothing to stand on. As it is, they have built a wall to protect it from the sea level rise that has already happened, and from time to time the high tides lap over that wall.

The Senator said there is the potential for an enormous amount of harm here that could happen to people. One of the scientists I met in Florida said that if we don't do something about this, ``people are going to get hurt and it's going to cost a lot of money.'' That is true.

One topic I would like to discuss is how the seawater will affect the freshwater supply of Florida. Senator Nelson is an expert on the geology of Florida and why it is different from my rocky New England coast.

I will yield back to Senator Nelson so he can discuss the limestone bedrock problem.

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, it is a pleasure to be here with the Senator from Florida, and his leadership is truly remarkable.

Here is another example on this picture from my tour. This is Broward County. People say it is not real. Ask the owner of this house with the for sale sign. Good luck selling that house with the ocean running through it. That was in 2010.

Another Broward County photograph. Commissioner Kristin Jacobs, who was the mayor at that time, gave me these pictures. Again, this is tide. Look at the sky. It is a beautiful day. This isn't rain. This is the tide flooding in, showing what it does to the cars. It is a mess.

As Senator Nelson described, because Florida is this limestone, kind of hard sponge, what keeps the saltwater out is the pressure of the freshwater holding it at bay. There is no wall. There is no structure that keeps the water, salt, and fresh balance. It is a hydraulic system. They have built a very complex system of canals, where they have raised the water so they have pressure, so they can push it back. As the sea level comes up, they are losing that fight. So here is a line through Broward County of how far the saltwater has already intruded into the water supply. If we drilled wells on this side of the red line, the water is no good, and all of these wells, the little green spots, all of these water areas are in the way because this line is moving.

As one Army Corps engineer in Jacksonville said, Florida is in a box, because as the sea level rises, the way we keep the freshwater available to people is by raising the fresh water, and that keeps what the engineers call the hydraulic head that pushes the sea water back and allows us to maintain freshwater for drinking water purposes, for agriculture, for Florida oranges and grapefruits and all the things we count on. If what we are worried about is flooding, we could only raise the freshwater so far, because if we raise it enough, we have freshwater flooding. There is no way out of that conundrum. There is no way out of that conundrum in Florida. He said, whether it happens in 100 years or whether it happens after the next bad hurricane, that is what is going to happen. That is a terrible predicament. It is not going to get better by pretending it is not real. It is not going to get better by denying it.

If we go offshore, we get to the problem of acidification, which happens from the carbon. This is not a theory. People say climate change is a theory. No. The acidification of the ocean from the type of carbon dioxide is something we can do in a lab. It is a scientific fact. It is a law of chemistry. So it happens, and it is starting to hit the reefs and the fisheries as the ocean warms and turns more acid.

Mayor Murphy is the mayor of Monroe County. I met her in Key Largo, which is one of the famous world destinations. I said: What is the acidification of the warm air? What does that do to your reefs?

She said: Well, the reefs are still beautiful unless you had been out to see them 10, 15 years ago. The reefs are still beautiful unless you had been out to see them 10 or 15 years ago. People see the change.

I met with the Snook and Gamefish Foundation in Florida and the marine industry folks, and they are concerned about what is happening there. In fact, the problem goes all the way up the coast. When I came down from North Carolina and South Carolina, the fishermen there told me they are starting to catch snook off the Carolinas. It is one thing when we are catching grouper and tarpon up in Rhode Island,

but what they are seeing on the South Atlantic coast is the same thing that a Rhode Islander fisherman said to me about the fishing off our coast. He said: It is getting weird out there. We are catching fish our fathers never saw in their nets in their lives. So when a snook comes up on the line off the Carolinas, that is a sign that something is dramatically changing, and these reefs are changing as well.

Last story: Mike Shirley works at the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve on the south side of St. Augustine. He moved up there from South Florida. He moved there 7 years ago. When he got there, he said there was one thing noticeable: There were no mangroves. South Florida is covered in mangroves, but there weren't any here. Now, 7 years later, the place is covered in mangroves. All that habitat migrating northward as the oceans and the water warms and it is changing things.

He said one other thing. He said: Do you know what we ought to look out for? There is going to be another migration north. It is going to be the people leaving flooded South Florida who can't get freshwater, whose homes are flooded, who can't deal with their car going hubcap deep in saltwater every high tide. They are going to be moving up. It is not just the people from the cold North coming to Florida now, it is people coming from the flooding South who are going to be coming North again.

I will say one last thing. The mayors were terrific. Sylvia Murphy, the mayor of Monroe County, is putting climate and energy policy at the very forefront of her 20-year growth plan for the county. Mayor Philip Levine of Miami Beach is hard at work. He says:

Sea-level rise is our reality in Miami Beach. We are past the point of debating the existence of climate change. We are now focusing on adapting to current and future threats.

Mayor Levine is pushing a $400 million plan to try to make the city's drainage system more resilient in the face of rising tides.

From Mayor Joe Riley in Charleston to Mayor Edna Jackson in Savannah, to Mayor Alvin Brown in Jacksonville, to the mayors in South Florida I mentioned, council members, mayors from Pinecrest, South Miami, Surfside, Miami Shores, Cutler Bay, Palmetto Bay, the Seminole Tribe, the local officials, they are all serious about tackling climate change. It is real. They see it in their neighborhoods. They see it in their districts. They see it in their towns. They are away from this poisonous place where the polluters control what people are allowed to think and see and do something about.

We have to start listening to the American people. We have to start listening to the mayors who inhabit real life and not the political fantasy in this Senate. We have to start dealing with this.

Lee Thomas worked for President Ronald Reagan. He was a member of the Reagan Cabinet. He ran the Environmental Protection Agency for Ronald Reagan. Last week he wrote an op-ed--and I know the Senator from Florida saw it--in the Tampa Bay Times urging Florida's leaders to wake up to the changes taking place in the Sunshine State. Here is what he said: ``Whether Democrat or Republican, Florida residents cannot afford to ignore the evidence of climate change.'' That is a Reagan official saying those words.

Come on, Republican mayors, Reagan officials. At some point we have to wake up. This is real.

Just last year, Thomas joined all the other former Republican EPA heads--four of them--and they wrote this:

The costs of inaction are undeniable. The lines of scientific evidence grow only stronger and more numerous, and the window of time remaining to act is growing smaller: delay could mean that warming becomes locked in. A market-based approach, like a carbon tax, would be the best path to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Bob Samuelson just said the same thing in his editorial over the weekend.

I will say that the citizens of Florida and the people of the United States are very fortunate to have a Senator such as Bill Nelson, who is aware of this problem, who is fighting hard to solve it, who is listening to his mayors, Republican and Democratic alike, who are telling him what is happening in their home State, and who was willing to bring the Commerce Committee of the U.S. Senate down to a Miami Beach townhall to make sure everybody understands what is going on. He helped bring that message back to Washington and it was a terrific thing.

So we will continue working together to get this body to wake up out of its polluter-induced slumber and face the realities that people all across this country are seeing in their daily lives. It is indeed time to wake up.

I yield the floor for any final comments the Senator from Florida may wish to make.

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