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Mr. UDALL. Madam President, I thank the Chair for the recognition. Let me also, as my other colleagues have done, thank Senator Whitehouse for his leadership on climate change, global warming, and the work he has done in that area.
I was also part, with Senator Coons, of the Paris 10 who went to Paris and did everything we could to let the rest of the countries in the world and their representatives know, as Senator Coons knows very well, that we are in this for the long haul and we are going to make sure that it happens and that the United States will continue with all of the good policies that have been put in place.
Senator Whitehouse has shown particularly good leadership in the area of exposing a sophisticated network of climate deniers, a network of special interest groups and front groups that have all rallied around the slogan of being climate deniers. I rise to join my colleagues to draw attention to what we are calling the web of denial--interconnected corporations and special interest groups spending millions of dollars misleading the public about the harmful effects of climate change.
Contrary to what these groups want the American people to think, climate change is a fact, it is a reality, and we have to deal with it. Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas and a byproduct of fossil fuels, is a major contributor to global warming. This is not some ideological belief I share with some of my colleagues. We wish global warming did not exist and that it was not threatening our health, our livelihoods, and the environment, but it is real, and New Mexico and the Southwest are in the bull's-eye. We are seeing it in the form of more frequent droughts, increasingly severe wildfires, and rising temperatures. There is no doubt and the data cannot be denied. Scientists cannot be ignored. We can see it before our eyes in New Mexico and across the country in so many different areas.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Academy of Sciences, and independent researchers at our most esteemed universities have written extensively about this link between greenhouse gases and the warming of the Earth.
Scientists at Las Alamos and Sandia National Labs in New Mexico are key parts of this scientific effort. We trust these institutions to perform the scientific research that is critical to our Nation's national security. They ensure our arsenal of nuclear weapons is safe and secure. So when these scientists tell us that manmade climate change is real and poses a serious threat, we should listen and take them seriously.
The evidence has been mounting for decades. The research has been thorough and unbiased. Countries around the world have been pressing to address this challenge in a global manner. So why are people still trying to foster a debate? Why are they asking if global warming is really happening? That is what we are here to discuss--the web of denial.
There are many who have different agendas that are not rooted in truth or science, and those agendas are playing out in our politics in the most disgraceful way possible, through the dark money that is poisoning the system and spreading lies to benefit a few. It started when industry became concerned that this link could harm the bottom line. Over the years, industry groups have spent millions of dollars to influence the debate through dark money and front groups. Many of my colleagues have talked about this today and many more will talk about it tomorrow. The evidence of this strategy is profound.
An early example is, the Information Council for the Environment, or ICE, and the Greening Earth Society. These groups sound technical and environmental, but they aren't. They were cooked up in the boardrooms of fossil fuel industry executives--people who put profits over public health. They were designed after focus groups and market data convinced them the public trusted scientists more than politicians, more than political activists, and certainly more than industry press people. These groups, founded by the Western Fuels Association, aimed to shape the global warming discussion at a crucial time in the early 1990s, as the world was gathering in Rio and Kyoto to hammer out agreements and tackle the problem.
ICE ran several print and radio advertisements asking: ``If the Earth is getting warmer, why is Kentucky getting colder?''
Another quote: ``If the Earth is getting warmer, why is the frost line moving south?''
``Who told you the earth was warming, Chicken Little? And how much are you willing to pay to solve a problem that may not exist?''
These questions and claims were misleading and false, but they helped to stir up the public. The public was looking to trust independent scientists and analysts, not industry front groups. Even more concerning is the way global warming deniers have refocused their strategies at discrediting scientists and researchers.
We have seen a terrible trend. As the public has become more aware of these front groups, they have changed their tack. Now they are working to discredit and disavow the credible scientists who are out there, charging that scientists have hidden agendas, wanting more research dollars and more Federal funding. I find this absurd and ominous.
The funding for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Academy of Sciences, and university researchers is transparent. The money is there for the public to see. None of these folks is getting rich. They don't have profits to protect. They are providing the public with data and with research, but it is getting harder and harder to stop these outside groups from spreading their smear campaigns. These groups have an interest in making sure Congress never gets anything done to prevent climate change, and they are using our broken campaign finance system as a tool to keep it that way.
We used to have sensible laws on campaign finance. We used to have an enforcement agency, a watchdog over the Federal finance system. The laws have been gutted by the Supreme Court's devastating decisions, whether it is Citizens United, McCutcheon, or many other misguided decisions. The enforcement agency, the Federal Election Commission, has become completely dysfunctional and mired in gridlock, leaving super PACs and special interests free to pollute the political system with unlimited dark money and always to protect someone's bottom line. That is the way Western Fuels Association and so many other companies have put pollution above public health.
We need to fix the system. A few months ago, several of my colleagues and I got together to discuss the state of our democracy. The question we asked ourselves was this: What can we do to repair this damage, to return the government to the people--the government by and for the people. The product of these meetings was the bill we introduced last month, the We the People Act. It will bring dark money out of the shadows and create a real watchdog to enforce campaign finance laws and rein in the influence of special interests and lobbyists.
The ``we the people'' reform package includes my constitutional amendment to overturn Buckley, Citizens United, and other decisions. It will allow Congress and the States to enact real reform, to get the flood of money out of our political system, laws that five conservative Justices on the Supreme Court can't overturn.
I know the political climate of an election year makes bipartisanship unlikely, but I will reintroduce the ``we the people'' reform package in the next Congress and hope my Republican colleagues will join me.
Poll after poll shows that our constituents across the political spectrum want reforms tackling climate change, eliminating dark money from our political system, and standing up to groups that distort public perception. It is time we listened. Our democracy, our environment, and the planet are at stake.
I see Senator Whitehouse is here and there may be others. Once again, I thank Senator Whitehouse for his leadership. I think one of the things he has done in our caucus, on the floor, and being constantly vigilant about it is, how many of these groups are out there networking with each other. It is a very sophisticated operation that has to be exposed if we are going to get down to what is happening and get down to what we need to do.
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