Hire More Heroes Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, the facts are undeniable. Climate change is real, it is caused by humans, it is happening now, and, it is solvable.

Today I would like to talk about a noncontroversial way to reduce 10 percent of the world's carbon pollution: fighting deforestation.

Of course, no single action will solve climate change, but stopping deforestation is underrated as a solution, with a high impact and a low cost. While we have been on this floor for years in an intense, often partisan, debate over pipelines and the EPA's rules on coal-fired powerplants, forest conservation is an area where we have always had strong bipartisan support.

As forests are cut down, two things happen. First, carbon stored in trees is released. Second, the trees stop absorbing carbon from the atmosphere.

Each year, the world loses forests the size of Ohio, and that rate is increasing. Unless we act, an area twice the size of Texas will be lost by the year 2030.

Of course, most deforestation is happening in tropical forests, in the Amazon, the Congo River Basin, and in Southeast Asia. But global demand, including demand from the United States, for palm oil, soy, beef, and timber products greatly contributes to forest loss in these regions.

This is why the United States has to lead in stopping deforestation. There are three things that we can do: First, we have to fully implement and fund the Lacey Act. This law prohibits the import of illegally harvested wood products but has only been in place since 2008. Congress hasn't given the USDA and other agencies the tools to fully implement it. We are good at catching raw products like lumber from illegally harvested forests, but we still need more tools to catch illegal wood, which is in processed products such as furniture.

Full enforcement of the Lacey Act could keep 27 million metric tons of carbon pollution out of the atmosphere each year. This is equivalent to the emissions from more than 5 million cars every year. The Lacey Act is also good for the U.S. timber industry because illegally harvested wood products undercut this industry by $1 billion in 2013 by reducing the competitive advantage of legal timber.

Second, we have to support private sector commitments to stopping deforestation. We have had some recent very good news in this space. Driven by consumer demand, 34 corporations recently committed to cutting deforestation from their products in half by 2020 and ending it by 2030. These are big companies--Walmart, McDonald's, and Unilever, among many others. These businesses were joined by 35 governments, 16 indigenous groups, and 45 NGOs. This was the first time that leaders from developed and developing countries have partnered around a timeline for ending deforestation.

One challenge in meeting these commitments is that we don't have a robust standard to verify that they are being met. Without this, we are merely taking everyone's word for it, but the United States can lead in monitoring and verifying these commitments. Publicly available satellite imagery from NASA and USGS has already allowed forest scientists to measure the magnitude of global deforestation, but we still need more accurate, real-time monitoring of the carbon content in forests, and the technologies do exist.

Finally, we have to provide forested countries with technical and financial support to protect and grow their forests. Absorbing carbon with trees is more cost-effective and more energy efficient than doing so from coal or gas powerplants. This is because trees capture carbon using energy from the Sun and powerplants capture carbon using additional energy from a powerplant.

Despite the ability of forests to capture and store carbon, we can't just tell landowners to stop cutting down their trees. They are often in a very dire financial situation on a personal level. We have to share with them our expertise in sustainable forest management--how to prosper from a forest without cutting it down and moving on to the next stand. The State Department, USAID, and USDA bring sought-after knowledge in this area from how to fight forest fires to how to combat illegal logging.

We also have to provide financial incentives for landowners to protect their forests. The economic benefit of forests is real. They store carbon, filter water, keep soil healthy, and protect against erosion.

The value of a forest's ecological services, not just its raw materials, must be recognized in the global economy. REDD-plus programs--shorthand for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation--provide a mechanism for financially rewarding countries that reduce emissions from deforestation. If we want to lead in solving climate change, we have to contribute our fair share to these programs.

Thankfully, forests in the United States absorb more carbon than they release. However, the U.S. Forest Service estimates that the loss of forests through urban growth and wildfires could make our forests a source of carbon pollution as soon as 2030. We have to ensure that our forests continue to absorb more carbon than they release and work with our allies to protect our forests abroad.

We have solutions on climate change. Stopping deforestation is one of them, and it is one of the solutions I am most excited about because it is an opportunity for bipartisan work. We know what we need to do, and we know how to do it.

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