To Approve the Keystone XL Pipeline

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank the Senator for her constant leadership on this issue. I am going to start on a somewhat unusual note because I want to compliment my lead adversary here, Senator Landrieu, who has fought so hard to bring this bill to the floor. She is passionate about getting this done, and it is because of her efforts that we are here.

I have to say I am just as passionate as she in opposition to this bill. Many of us come from coal States or oil States or natural gas States. Rhode Island doesn't have coal--at least it hasn't in generations. We used to mine coal in Portsmouth, in Cumberland, but that has been a long time ago. We don't have natural gas sources. We don't pump oil.

What we do have is a coastline, and at that coastline what coal and oil and natural gas are doing to all of us through the operation of natural laws, through the operation of the laws of science--stuff we can't get around because this isn't opinion--is very harmful to our island.

Naval Station Newport has a tide gauge. My friend Senator Manchin was kind enough to come and visit from West Virginia and we started out bright and early in the morning and our first stop was with the Navy folks down at the tide gauge. At that tide gauge what they show is that since the 1930s the water levels are up 10 inches.

We had something very big happen in Rhode Island. In the 1930s we had the hurricane of 1938. If anybody wants to take 2 minutes and Google hurricane of 1938 and hit images, they will see terrific destruction. They will see our capital city flooded to the top of the buses. They will see houses smashed to flinders and boats thrown up onto the land. That was with a sea 10 inches below what we have now, and every responsible scientist tells us the risk of worse and bigger ocean storms has increased because of the emission of carbons.

So I have a very clear perspective on this, and that is that we have to address our carbon pollution problem before it comes home to roost in very dangerous ways in my State. It is there already. As the Senator from West Virginia saw, we have fishermen who say this is not my grandfather's ocean. Their world has changed because of the way we have changed it. This pipeline, because of the filthiness of the fuel that it brings into the market, will add additional carbon dioxide in the amount of nearly 6 million cars per year on the roads--6 million cars per year on the roads--and that comes home to roost in Rhode Island. That comes home to roost in warming waters.

Narragansett Bay is nearly 4 degrees--mean winter water temperature--warmer than it was 50 years ago. I can remember driving over the Newport Bridge and Jamestown Bridge and looking down in the winter and seeing trawlers out at work--trawlers at work fishing for the winter flounder. The winter flounder is gone. It has had more than a 90-percent crash, largely because, as the scientists have told me, the warmer Narragansett Bay is no longer hospitable to the fish. Four degrees doesn't seem like a big deal to me. It probably doesn't seem like a big deal to any human, for whom the water is kind of an alien place, but for the fish that live in it, 4 degrees is an ecosystem shift. My wife, a major professor at the University of Rhode Island School of Oceanography, explained that to me several decades ago for the first time.

The argument is that this is going to bring jobs. I am all for those jobs. But let us not be selective about when we are for jobs. If we are only for jobs when it is oil pipelines, then something else is going on than the concern about jobs. Where was the concern about jobs when a bipartisan piece of legislation called Shaheen-Portman for energy efficiency was on the floor and was estimated to create not 42,000 temporary jobs, not less than 4,000 direct temporary jobs, not less than 50 permanent jobs, but 190,000 jobs? That bill got nowhere. It died here, and it died here for reasons that were very open on the front of the paper.

Jeanne Shaheen's opponent, who is a former colleague of ours, asked to have the bill die so she would not have a legislative accomplishment to her credit. So the agreement that the bill was going to pass got reworked, and the folks came back to Majority Leader Reid and said: Actually, we are not ready to support this bill. We need a vote on Keystone Pipeline. We need a sense of the Senate on Keystone Pipeline. Senator Reid said: OK. We can have a sense of the Senate on Keystone Pipeline. Agreed. Then they came back again--moved the goalpost again--and said: Well, we need more than a sense of the Senate now. We actually need a hard vote on the Keystone Pipeline. Leader Reid checked around and said: All right. I don't like this much, but sure. Fine. In order to move Shaheen-Portman, a 190,000-job bill, go ahead and have your vote. Then they came back and moved the goalpost a third time. They said: We don't just need a vote on the Keystone Pipeline, we need to win the vote, and if you can't give us a win on the vote, then you don't get Shaheen-Portman.

When the goalposts get moved that often, you can pretty much figure out there is something more going on than the merits of the bill. They didn't want the bill to pass. They didn't want it to come up. But where was the concern then about 190,000 jobs, when everybody is in an uproar about these 40,000 indirect temporary jobs?

I will stop right now and do anything to get infrastructure legislation passed and put people to work rebuilding America's roads, rebuilding America's water pipes, and rebuilding America's bridges. We can put hundreds of thousands of people to work doing that. But when we had the chance to do that, when Chairman Boxer brought a 6-year environment bill out of the Environment and Public Works Committee, where every billion dollars we invest in highway infrastructure supports 13,000 jobs, and this was a multibillion--multibillion--dollar bill, did they pass it? No, they filibustered it, stopped it, and gave us a 3-to-5-month stopgap bill, during which nobody is going to enter into any big contracts, depressing employment, and moving the bill into the next Congress where they thought they would have a majority and in fact they will.

If you want to do something about jobs, we can take your 42,000 dirty pipeline jobs and we can raise that by a factor of 5 just by doing Shaheen-Portman. We can raise it by a factor of 10 or 15 with infrastructure legislation. We can do big jobs bills, and we are ready to do them, but not when it is only dirty oil pipelines.

Because there are two sides of the ledger. There is the side that says jobs, and there is the side that says harm. My problem with this is that our friends on the other side of the aisle will not look at the second page. They pretend the second page doesn't exist.

Even in coastal States where I have been, down to Georgia, to Sapelo Island, where the University of Georgia has a terrific marine science undertaking that has been going on for decades now, they are very clear. Carbon pollution is doing real harm to the coast. It is raising the Georgia sea level at a rate that is challenging the ability of the famous marshes to keep up. If they cannot keep up, they flood. If they flood, they get washed away and you lose that entire infrastructure that supports clammers and oysterers and fishermen and tourism and all the things that are important for Georgia. I say that because I see my friend Senator Isakson on the floor.

You could use an example of everything that stays in the country, and our colleagues will never ever look at that other page. If you were the CFO of a corporation and you only looked at one side of a ledger, you would go to jail for that.

It shouldn't be asking too much to ask our colleagues to reflect on the fact that there are benefits to this pipeline and there are harms to this pipeline. From my State's point of view, it is all harm. From a net point of view, the harm vastly outweighs the value by I think virtually any State's measure--perhaps not South Dakota. There is real harm that this will cause. Six million cars' equivalent of CO2 added every year is more than we need.

So I think we need to turn the corner. More importantly, it is not what I think that matters; the American people understand we need to turn the corner on climate change and carbon pollution. It doesn't matter whom you ask. If you ask independent voters, it is better than 2 to 1. If you ask all voters, it is about 2 to 1. If you ask young voters, it is more like 4 to 1. There is a poll that shows that among young Republican voters, self-identified Republican voters under the age of 35, when asked about a politician who denies that climate change is real, they say that politician--they are asked to check off the box, and what they checked off was "ignorant, out of touch, or crazy.''

So it is time to make this turn, and there is no better moment to make this turn than on this pipeline that would bring the filthiest fuel on the planet into circulation and hurt even more those of us who are already being hurt by carbon pollution.

I yield the floor.

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