Keystone XL Pipeline Approval Act--Veto

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I rise today to address the motion to override the President's veto of S. 1, which would force approval of the construction of the Keystone Pipeline to transport tar sands heavy oil from Canada to the gulf coast. We will be having that vote in just a while from now.

My key consideration today is this. What would the impact of this bill be on global warming? The reason that is the core question I am raising is that already we are seeing extensive damage to our rural resources around the world from our warming planet. We are seeing this in Oregon, and we are seeing, therefore, an impact on our future economic prospects.

To put it very simply, the burning of fossil fuels is damaging our forests, our farming, and our fishing. By many estimates, to contain 2 degrees Celsius, which is almost 4 degrees Fahrenheit, we must transition aggressively and rapidly from burning conventional fossil fuels for energy toward the use of nonfossil renewable energy.

Now, this shift is well within our power. It is well within our technology. But do we have the political will to make this happen? And that test is before us in the vote we are taking today.

Building the Keystone Pipeline opens the faucet to rapid exploitation of massive, new, unconventional reserves called tar sands, and it takes us in exactly the opposite direction from where we need to go. Indeed, the pipeline locks us into utilizing the dirtiest fossil fuels on the planet for a generation, and it accelerates human civilization down the road towards catastrophic climate change. Thus, building this pipeline is a mistake, and there is a lot to be concerned about.

Now, global warming isn't some imaginary scenario 50 years from now about some computer model predicting something bad will happen. No, it is about facts on the ground right now.

The warmest 10 years on record for global average surface temperature have occurred in the last 12 years. And 2014, the calendar year we just passed, was the single warmest year on record. While some Senators may come to this floor and say that it is just an anomaly here or an anomaly there, it is not. The facts are in. When we have 10 of the warmest years on record within the last 12 years, we know something dramatically is happening to the globe.

The average forest fire season is getting longer. Since the 1980s the season has grown 60 to 80 days longer than it was before. That means that with each year passing the fire season is growing by an average of about 2 days, and the number of acres consumed annually by wildfires has doubled to more than 7 million acres. This is an enormous impact, and those fires themselves put additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So we start to see a feedback mechanism that is accelerating us down this road to catastrophic change.

The snowpack is decreasing in our Oregon mountains, the Cascade Mountains, which means smaller and warmer streams, which are certainly not good for trout. But it also means less water for irrigation. We have right now virtually no snow in the Cascades. At this point we should have a substantial snowpack. So the possibility of yet another major drought faces us this coming summer.

We had the worst-ever drought in the Klamath Basin, a large agricultural basin in southern Oregon, in 2001. We had another devastating drought in 2010--a near worst-ever drought--and another devastating drought in 2013. And here we are this year, with virtually no snowpack to provide irrigation water during the summer. That is a very big deal.

It isn't just farming and forestry. It is also fishing. The carbon dioxide that we are pumping into the air is absorbed through wave action. It becomes carbonic acid. We can envision mankind pouring vast vats of carbonic acids into the ocean, because that is essentially the effect of what we are doing. If you think putting all that acid into the ocean wouldn't be a good idea and would have bad effects, you are right. The ocean has become 30 percent more acidic than it was before the industrial revolution--before we started burning coal and other fossil fuels as a major source of energy--and we can start to see the impact.

At the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery on the Oregon coast, we have a big problem. The big problem is that the baby oysters are having trouble pulling enough carbon out of the water in order to create their shells because the water is too acidic. That is a little bit like the canary in the coal mine. If the oysters are having trouble, what other shellfish are being affected by the increasing level of acidity?

As humans on our planet, we have the moral responsibility to exercise wise stewardship of our resources--a responsibility to this generation but a profound responsibility to the generations to come.

Now, our youth tend to have a better understanding of this than do the lawmakers who come to the floor of the Senate. Our youth widely rank global warming as a major concern, a major issue they want to see us take on.

They will face the challenges that we will leave behind. But here is the problem: If we wait to tackle global warming until--we have pages on the floor--our 15- and 16-year-old pages are in office, when they are in their forties and their fifties, then it will be almost impossible to address this issue because of the feedback loops that are occurring.

I was watching yesterday a time-lapsed series of ice in the Arctic, and I can tell you that essentially, as viewed from North America, there was a swirling mass of ice--and this was over several decades--and that swirling mass became less with every passing year, to where we are halfway to starting to be ice-free in the summer. That is a massive change happening within a single human lifetime which is but a blink in time when you think about the age and course of this planet.

So big changes are occurring, and when those changes occur, we do have additional problems arise. All of that open water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight. That is what makes the water blue and it becomes warmer; whereas, the ice reflects the sunlight and keeps the water cooler. Therefore, we have a magnification of the effect of global warming at the poles. This is not a good thing.

So whether we are looking at the impact on our farming or the impact on our forests which are burning or the impact on our oceans and our fisheries which are becoming too acidic, we have a responsibility to address those issues. That means we are going to have to not burn all the fossil fuel that we have been clever enough to find in the crust of the Earth.

It is estimated that we would have to leave four-fifths of the fossil fuels we already have identified that are in the ground. We have to leave it in the ground rather than burn it if we are not going to exceed 2 degrees centigrade in global warming. That is a huge challenge.

That means we cannot proceed to build infrastructure designed to accelerate the extraction of these fossil fuels. The pipeline is exactly that kind of infrastructure.

Now, have no doubt, I love the idea of jobs and construction. That is why I am a huge supporter of the Partnership to Build America Act. The Partnership to Build America Act would create hundreds of thousands of construction jobs over the course of a number of years in America. That is the type of investment in jobs and construction and infrastructure we should make, but we shouldn't be investing infrastructure that is going to do profound damage to our planet. That does not honor the moral responsibility we have to the stewardship of this beautiful blue-green orb that we live on known as this planet Earth.

Let's honor our responsibility and let's not override the veto the President has put on this bill.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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