Terrorism Risk Insurance Program Authorization Act - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here for the 73rd ``time to wake up'' speech that I have done to urge my colleagues to wake up to the growing threat of climate change. The changes we are seeing, driven by carbon pollution, are far-reaching--from the coast lines of States such as Rhode Island and the Presiding Officer's State of Connecticut, to the great plateaus and mountain ranges out West; from pole to pole; from high up in the atmosphere to deep down in the oceans.

In Rhode Island, we know the oceans are ground zero for the effects of carbon pollution. Since the Industrial Revolution, the oceans have been absorbing our carbon dioxide emissions--roughly a quarter of the total excess emissions--which, by the laws of chemistry, has caused rapid changes in ocean acidity, the pH level of the oceans, changes not seen for a long time. When I say ``a long time,'' I mean at least 25 to 50 million years, potentially as many as 300 million years. To put 300 million years into perspective, we homo sapiens--the human species--have been on the Earth for about 200,000 years. So 300 million years goes way back into geologic time, back before the dinosaurs. So a change that is unprecedented in that much time is something we should pay attention to.

Recently, four Republican former EPA Administrators testified before my Environment and Public Works subcommittee on the dire need for congressional action to curb this carbon pollution that is causing these effects in our oceans.

Here is how the EPA's very first Administrator, William Ruckelshaus, put it. He said:

Since the ocean absorbs 25-30 percent of the carbon from stationary or mobile sources we thought the ocean was our friend. It was keeping significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. But our friend is paying a penalty.

As carbon dissolves in water, it makes the water more acidic--a fundamental chemical proposition--and that can upset the delicate balance of ocean life. Again, that is just basic physics and chemistry.

Ronald Reagan's EPA chief Lee Thomas--Ronald Reagan's EPA chief--warned us that thanks to the profuse carbon pollution we have emitted, oceans are now acidifying at a rate 50 times greater than known historical change--50 times.

Of course, my colleagues in the minority did not seem inclined to listen to their fellow Republicans. Instead, they took a page out of the polluters' playbook, and as usual their routine was to call into question widely accepted science.

Well, I recently visited communities around the country. I will mention my trip recently along the southeast coast--the Atlantic coast--where researchers, elected officials, and business and home owners are seeing the effects of climate change firsthand.

It does not matter what somebody thinks on the Senate floor. They are seeing it firsthand. They know better than what the polluting special interests are trying to sell. Indeed, recently the United States Conference of Mayors unanimously adopted a resolution calling for natural solutions to fight the effects of climate change to ``protect fresh water supplies, defend the Nation's coastlines, maintain a healthy tree and green space cover, and protect air quality.'' Unanimously, by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, a bipartisan organization.

So there are a lot of people who know better than the nonsense the polluting special interests are trying to sell.

I flew out during this trip to where sea level rise is gnawing away at the Outer Banks. When you fly over the North Carolina coast, you see a lot of investment along the shoreline. You see houses, big houses, nice houses. You see hotels, you see restaurants, you see roads and infrastructure, you see an entire seafront economy.

I met down there with the North Carolina Coastal Federation at their Coastal Education Center in Wilmington. This is a bipartisan group. It has joined together in concern over the exposure of their coastal communities, their homes, to rising seas. What would my colleagues here in the Senate tell this bipartisan group in North Carolina about climate change? What would they tell the United States Conference of Mayors, a bipartisan group, about climate change? Do not worry, it is not real; run along now, do not concern yourself.

Good luck with that. People know better.

King Canute could not decree that the tide not come in. Republicans in Congress cannot legislate away the changes we are seeing in our oceans. When I was down in Florida, fishermen there told me about the northward migration of species they are used to catching in Florida, species such as redfish and snook, moving north because of warming ocean temperatures.

Fishermen in South Carolina told me snook are now being caught off the coast of Charleston. I have heard that redfish are being caught as far north as Cape Cod. I believe that because Rhode Islanders are catching tarpon and grouper off the shore of Rhode Island. I have had Rhode Island fishermen tell me they are catching fish their fathers and grandfathers never saw come up in their nets.

As one Rhode Island fisherman told me, ``Sheldon, it's getting weird out there.''

It is not just Rhode Island. The Maine legislature just established a bipartisan commission to study and address the harm from ocean acidification to ecosystems and to their shell fisheries--again, bipartisan.

Once you leave this building, people are taking bipartisan action. It is only here that the polluters hold such sway.

In Virginia, which is also a coal State, a bipartisan group, including Republican U.S. Representatives Scott Rigell and Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe, are working together to prepare communities such as Hampton Roads, VA, for several feet of sea level rise.

A State commission that was first assembled under the administration of our Virginia colleague Tim Kaine, back when he was Governor, has reconvened to address the threat of climate change in the oceans.

These Virginia leaders are not wasting time quarreling and denying basic science. They are working to protect commerce and homeowners in their communities threatened as the seas continue to rise. While our Republican colleagues in Congress try their best to ignore the problem of carbon pollution, there are very serious conversations going on outside these walls.

For example, former President George W. Bush's Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson invoked ocean warming and sea level rise in a recent editorial he wrote, calling for a fee on carbon pollution. Here is the cover of this week's Newsweek: ``Deep end. What rapid changes in oceans mean for Earth.''

This would not be the first one. Last year, National Geographic came out with this issue entitled ``Rising Seas.''

Now perhaps my colleagues on the other side who pretend that climate change is a hoax will agree that Newsweek is part of the hoax; National Geographic is part of the hoax; U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is part of the hoax; the U.S. Navy is part of the hoax. We are bedeviled in this Chamber by preposterous ideas. What the Newsweek cover article highlights is the unprecedented effects of pumping all of that excess carbon into our oceans, ranging from coral bleaching to dissolving larval shellfish, to the disappearance of entire species.

BloombergView just published a recent editorial titled ``Climate Change Goes Underwater.''

I ask unanimous consent that this document be printed in the Record at the end of my comments.

This is not wild speculation. This is good old-fashioned reporting of things that are happening around us that people see. I have talked before about the humble pteropod, so let's talk a little about the pteropod, a funny type of snail which is about the size of a small pea.

The pteropod is known sometimes as the sea butterfly because its small foot has adapted into two little butterfly-like wings which propel it around in the ocean. These images show what can happen to the pteropod shell when the creature's underwater environment becomes more acidic and therefore lacks the compounds that are necessary for this little creature to make its delicate shell. It is not good for the pteropod. This is the pteropod in action with the little butterfly wings that help it to swim. Here is a clean shell from proper water. Here is a dissolving shell from exposure to acidified ocean water. This obviously is not good for the pteropod.

Recent research, which was led by NOAA scientists, has found that ocean acidification off our west coast, in what is called the California current ecosystem, is hitting the pteropod especially hard.

Let me take a minute and read from the publication of this report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, a respected publication.

The release of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning, cement production and deforestation processes has resulted in atmospheric CO2 concentrations that have increased about 40% since the beginning of the industrial era.

Now, the measure of that--we have always had atmospheric carbon concentrations between about 170 and 300 parts per million--we have broken 400. April was the first month when we were consistently, on average, above 400 parts per million.

When you think that the 170 to 300 parts per million range has lasted for thousands of years, for millennia, for longer than our species has been on the planet, the fact that we are suddenly outside of that range is a signal that ought to call our attention. That is what they are referring to.

Continuing:

The oceans have taken up approximately 28% of the total amount of CO2 produced by human activities over this time-frame, causing a variety of chemical changes known as ocean acidification (OA).

The rapid change in ocean chemistry is faster than at any time over the past 50 million years.

They go on to say, toward the end of the report, that one of the chokepoint areas, what they call the first bottleneck: ``The first bottleneck would primarily affect veligers and larvae''--which are early stages of the shell before its shell has hardened. The larvae is little, and the veliger is when it has kind of a shroud around it, but not yet a shell. It helps it to move and to consume food.

Continuing:

The first bottleneck would primarily affect veligers and larvae, life stages where complete shell dissolution in the larvae can occur within two weeks upon exposure to undersaturation.

They also note that:

Significant increases in vertical and spatial extent of conditions favouring pteropod shell dissolution are expected to make this habitat potentially unsuitable for pteropods.

So if the California current ecosystem habitat becomes unsuitable for pteropods, we have a little problem on our hands because pteropods are food for important fish like salmon, like mackerel, like herring. Pteropods are the base of the food chain. No pteropods means crashed salmon fisheries, crashed mackerel fisheries, crashed herring fisheries, crashes throughout polar and subpolar fisheries.

Dr. William Peterson is an oceanographer at NOAA's Northwest Fisheries Science Center. He is the coauthor of the study, and he said: ``We did not expect to see pteropods being affected to this extent in our coastal region for several decades.''

These ecosystems, these ocean ecosystems, are crumbling before our eyes and yet this Congress hides behind denial. In the face of inertia in Congress and in the face of the relentless truculence of the deniers, the Obama administration is trying to do what it can to push responsible policies.

Last month Secretary of State John Kerry held the State Department's ``Our Ocean'' Conference and I attended that conference for 2 days. One of the presenters there was Dr. Carol Turley of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory. She described her research on ocean acidification, including using this graph of ocean acidity over the past 25 million years. That is today minus 25 million years, today minus 20 million years, minus 15 million years, minus 10 million years, minus 5 million years, and now.

Look at how little variation there has been in ocean pH across that 25-million-year time scale. Remember, we have been on the planet around 200,000 years. We go back to about here.

The rest of this is geologic time. That is a long span of time. If we put that against what is happening now, look how sudden that change is in ocean pH, the basic acidity of the oceans.

Why is this happening? We know that human activity releases gigatons of carbon every year. That is undeniable. We know that carbon dioxide acidifies seawater. That is basic chemistry. You can do that in a high school lab.

We know the ocean's pH is changing in unprecedented ways in human history. No one in their right mind can say this is natural variability.

This acidification of our seas will have devastating effects on ecosystems such as tropical coral reefs, which, as Dr. Turley pointed out, are home to one in every four species in the marine environment. If you wanted to drive a bulldozer through God's species on this planet, it would be hard to do much better than allowing this rampant ocean acidification.

My colleague and cochair of our Senate Oceans Caucus, Senator Lisa Murkowski, and I have had the chance to address the oceans conference together. She told the conference that the waters off her Alaskan shores are growing more acidic.

I agree with Senator Murkowski that we need to understand what ocean acidification means for our fisheries and ocean ecosystems much better than we do now.

Secretary Kerry delivered a clear challenge. On this planet, with all of its many peoples, we share nothing so completely as we share the oceans. And if we are going to honor our duty to protect the oceans, to honor our duty to future generations, we are going to have to work together. These are painfully clear warnings. The facts speak volumes.

The denial propaganda has shown itself to be nonsense, to be a sham, which ought to come as no surprise because the machinery that produces the climate denial propaganda is the same machinery that denied tobacco was dangerous, the same machinery that denied there was an ozone hole, the same machinery that has always fought public health measures for industry, and has always been wrong. It has always been wrong because it is not its job to be right. It is its job to protect industry and allow them to continue to pollute and make money. That is its job. So it ought to come as no surprise that the argument it makes about climate change is nonsense and is a sham. It is time to unshackle ourselves from that machinery.

History is going to look back at this, and it will not be a shining moment for us. History will reflect that the polluters are polluting our democracy with their money and their influence just as badly as they are polluting our oceans and our atmosphere with their carbon.

We have to wake up. It will disserve our grandchildren and their grandchildren, and it will disgrace our generation to have allowed this democracy to miss this issue and to fail to act because of the propaganda machinery that has over and over again proven itself to be wrong. Our ocean economies, our ocean heritage, are all at stake.

As Secretary Kerry put it, it is our ocean, and it is our responsibility. Let us please wake up before we have completely disgraced ourselves.

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