Executive Session
Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, a persistent argument of my climate talks is how corrupt climate denial is. The premise of that argument is that the fossil fuel industry denial apparatus is wrong about climate change and knows it is wrong. That is my case. The fossil fuel industry denial apparatus knows it is wrong about climate change.
Well, it is a beautiful world, and every once in a while, along comes something that proves my case. Last week, on the afternoon of Black Friday, the Trump administration released its National Climate Assessment by 13 Federal agencies describing the monumental damage the United States is facing from climate change. In more than 1,000 pages, the report contradicted nearly every fake assertion Trump and his fossil fuel flunky Cabinet have made about climate change.
Trump's pro-polluter policies are predicated on the lies and nonsense of this fossil fuel industry denial apparatus, and this report is devastating to those policies and to those lies.
So how did the fossil fuel apparatus respond? What did they do to rebut the National Climate Assessment? They did nothing. They did nothing. There was all that big talk from Scott Pruitt about how they were going to ``red team'' climate science. Well here comes the climate science. Where is your red team? Nothing. Instead of engaging with this devastating report by the U.S. Government's leading scientists, they tried to bury it, timing its release for a day of the year when it would be least likely to get public attention.
Consider for a moment the environment in which they backed down from this challenge--no red team, no nothing. They just whimpered and ran away and tried to bury the report on Black Friday. At a time when their industry populates the Trump administration, at a time when the President is in their pocket, at a time when both Houses of Congress are under fossil fuel industry control, their phony climate denial front groups wield more influence than ever. This should have been their moment.
The tell here is that even in this environment, the fossil fuel industry and its bevy of stooges in the Trump administration got this report and did nothing. Why? Why nothing? There is only one answer. Because they know they are wrong. They know the real science is right. They know their science denial campaign is phony, so they backed down. They folded like a cardboard suitcase in a rainstorm.
That, my friends, is an admission. It is an admission by inaction. It is an admission that even the fossil fuel industry knows the climate science is irrefutable.
Interestingly, ``irrefutable'' is just what President Trump and his family said about climate science in this full-page advertisement they signed in the New York Times in 2009, saying that science of climate was ``irrefutable'' and that there will be ``catastrophic and irreversible'' consequences of climate change.
The new National Climate Assessment plus the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report are both very clear. The irrefutable science that these two reports disclose couldn't be more clear: Damage from climate change is already occurring; there is no credible natural explanation for it; human activity is the dominant cause; future damage from further warming will be worse than we previously thought; economies will suffer; and we are almost out of time to prevent the worst consequences of climate change.
The Bank of England report on this--they are the biggest financial regulator in the UK, and they said: The financial risks are far- reaching in their breadth and magnitude, have uncertain and extended time horizons, are foreseeable, but these risk factors will be minimized if there is an orderly transition to a carbon economy, but the window for an orderly transition is finite and closing. We are almost out of time.
These two reports are tough stuff. As the Trump administration summary states, the ``Earth's climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities. The impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future,'' which makes sense, since in the history of human civilization, the Earth has never seen atmospheric CO
Many scientists have said warming of around 3 degrees centigrade is now likely. What does that mean? Heating the planet well beyond 2 degrees centigrade would create a ``totally different world,'' says Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University. He says:
It would be indescribable, it would turn the world upside down in terms of its climate. There would be nothing like it in the history of civilization.
Here is what the Trump climate assessment chronicles: From our Ocean State, we are concerned about sea levels, ocean acidification, and warming. We note sea levels are rising, as oceans warm and upland ice melts. If fossil fuels are not constrained, the reports says, ``many coastal communities will be transformed by the latter part of this century.'' For my coastal State, that is a pretty ominous warning. Along coasts, fisheries, tourism, human health, even public safety are being ``transformed, degraded or lost due in part to climate change impacts, particularly sea level rise and higher numbers of extreme weather events.''
You get the sea level coming up, and that extreme weather event-- which is stronger to begin with now--has a lot more ocean to throw at our shores.
Out West, ``more frequent and larger wildfires, combined with increasing development at the wildland-urban interface portend increasing risks to property and human life,'' the report says. By the way, from 2000 to 2016, wildfires have burned at least 3.7 million acres of the United States in every single year except for 3. From 2000 to 2016, more than 3.7 million acres burned in all years but 3. California still smolders as I speak.
More than 100 million people in the United States live with poor air quality, and climate change will ``worsen existing air pollution levels.'' Increased wildfire smoke heightens respiratory and cardiovascular problems. With higher temperatures from global warming, asthma and hay fever rise.
Groundwater supplies have declined over the last century, and the decrease is accelerating. ``Significant changes in water quantity and quality are evident across the country,'' the report finds.
Midwest farmers take a big hit: warmer, wetter, and more humid conditions from climate change; greater incidence of crop disease and more pests; worsened conditions for stored grain. During the growing season, the Midwest will see temperatures climb more than any other region of the United States, the report says. Crop yields will suffer-- a warning that is echoed by grain giants like Cargill.
To sum it all up, the report says climate change will ``disrupt many areas of life,'' hurting the U.S. economy, affecting trade, exacerbating overseas conflicts for our military. Costs will be high: ``With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century--more than the current gross domestic product of many U.S. States.''
Danger warnings already flash in some economic sectors. Freddie Mac has warned of a coastal property value crash, saying: ``The economic losses and social disruption may happen gradually, but they are likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the housing crisis and Great Recession.'' From a coastal State, that is an ominous warning.
The insurance industry agrees. Trade publication Risk and Insurance has warned: ``Continually rising seas will damage coastal residential and commercial property values to the point that property owners will flee those markets in droves, thus precipitating a mortgage value collapse that could equal or exceed the mortgage crisis that rocked the global economy in 2008.'' By the way, the leading edge of this may already be upon us as coastal property values are beginning to lag inland property values, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Separate from the coastal property values threat is another warning about a carbon bubble in fossil fuel markets. Fossil fuel reserves, now claimed as assets, that are not developable in a 2-degrees-Centigrade world become what they call stranded assets. A recent economic publication estimated that collapse of the ``carbon bubble'' would wipe out ``around 82 percent of global coal reserves, 49 percent of global gas reserves, and 33 percent of global oil reserves.'' A separate economic review warns that $12 trillion of fossil fuel industry financial value ``could vanish off their balance sheets globally in the form of stranded assets.'' Twelve trillion dollars is over 15 percent of global GDP, which is why the Bank of England--which I quoted earlier as a financial regulator--is warning of this carbon asset bubble as a systemic economic risk. That may be the blandest set of words in the English language that convey the worst threat. If you were to graph ``blandness of language'' and ``seriousness of threat,'' you would probably come up with systemic economic risk. It basically means economic meltdown. Well, that is what we are looking at.
This level of collapse could cascade beyond the fossil fuel companies. It is not just a question of their shareholders getting wiped out. It is such a crash that it cascades out into the global economy--a crash like that, unfortunately, hits the United States particularly hard because lower cost producers can hold on and unload fossil fuel reserves into the collapsing market at fire sale prices. When they do, the economists warn, ``regions with higher marginal costs''--like the United States--``lose almost their entire oil and gas industry.''
The solution is to decarbonize, to invest in more renewables, to broaden our energy portfolio away from this asset collapse risk. One paper concludes that ``the United States is worse off if it continues to promote fossil fuel production and consumption.'' Another paper concludes--this is the good news:
If climate policies are implemented early on and in a stable and credible framework, market participants are able to smoothly anticipate the effects. In this case there would not be any large shock in asset prices and there would be no systemic risk.
So how do we get to eliminating this hazard of no systemic risk? How do we get to no systemic risk? We do what works for us anyway: move to renewables. As this graph shows, we have to make a big move to avoid this hazard. A carbon price--which is the remedy the fossil fuel industry pretends to support, while sending its political forces out to oppose exactly the laws it pretends to support--would allow this big move to happen, all while generating revenues that could be cycled back to States and citizens and help the hardest hit areas of transition.
The smart move we need to take to make this happen does not have to be painful. We avoid a lot of pain if we make the move, but that doesn't mean the move itself has to be painful. Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz says it is a win economically. He has testified:
Retrofitting the global economy for climate change would help to restore aggregate demand and growth. Climate policies, if well designed and implemented, are consistent with growth, development, and poverty reduction. The transition to a low-carbon economy is potentially a powerful, attractive, and sustainable growth story, marked by higher resilience, more innovation, more livable cities, robust agriculture, and stronger ecosystems.
We could do it the hard way--do nothing; get hit with those dire economic consequences because the status quo is not safe.
Fortune magazine summed up the Trump administration's climate report quite beautifully, so I will quote them at some length: ``The report catalogs the observed damage and accelerating financial losses projected from a climate now unmoored from a 12,000-year period of relative stability.''
What a phrase that is. The Earth's climate, which we inhabit, is unmoored from a 12,000-year period of relative stability.
It goes on:
The result is that much of what humans have built, and many of the things they are building now, are unsuited to the world as it exists. And as time goes on, the added cost of living in that world could total hundreds of billions of dollars--annually.
Which way we now go depends on the Congress of the United States--on whether Congress can put the interests of our people ahead of the interests of the fossil fuel industry.
The record is not good. I will concede that. Since the Citizens United decision, the politics of climate change have turned into a tale of industry capture and control. So far, despite the fossil fuel industry's obvious conflict of interest, could there be a more obvious conflict of interest, indeed? Despite their provable pattern of deception and despite clear warnings from, well, virtually everywhere now, the Republican Party has proven itself incapable of telling the fossil fuel industry: No, we tried our best for you. We held in for you as long as we could, and we did everything we could think of, but we are not going to wreck our economy, our climate, our oceans, our country for you.
So it doesn't look good, but the climate report does say we still have time if we act fast.
Why can't other conservatives admit it, too?'' be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.
It concludes: Why haven't other Conservatives owned up to this danger?
They are captives, first and foremost, of the fossil fuel industry. . . . It is a tragedy for the entire planet that the United States' governing party is impervious to science and reason.
I will close with a reference to ``The Gathering Storm,'' which is Winston Churchill's legendary book about a previous failure to heed warnings. Churchill quoted a poem of a train bound for destruction, rushing through the night, with the engineer asleep at the controls as disaster looms:
Who is in charge of the clattering train?
The axles creak, and the couplings strain.
. . . the pace is hot, and the points are near,
[but] Sleep hath deadened the driver's ear;
And signals flash through the night in vain.
Death is in charge of the clattering train!
I contend that we are now that sleeping driver, that the signals are flashing at us, so far, in vain, and that it is decidedly time to wake up.
Why Can't Other Conservatives Admit It, Too? (By Max Boot)
I admit it. I used to be a climate-change skeptic. I was one of those conservatives who thought that the science was inconclusive, that fears of global warming were as overblown as fears of a new ice age in the 1970s, that climate change was natural and cyclical, and that there was no need to incur any economic costs to deal with this speculative threat. I no longer think any of that, because the scientific consensus is so clear and convincing.
The Fourth National Climate Assessment, released Friday by the U.S. government, puts it starkly: ``Observations collected around the world provide significant, clear, and compelling evidence that global average temperature is much higher, and is rising more rapidly, than anything modern civilization has experienced, with widespread and growing impacts.'' The report notes that ``annual average temperatures have increased by 1.8 deg.F across the contiguous United States since the beginning of the 20th century'' and that ``annual median sea level along the U.S. coast . . . has increased by about 9 inches since the early 20th century as oceans have warmed and land ice has melted.''
The report attributes these changes to man-made greenhouse gases and warns: ``High temperature extremes, heavy precipitation events, high tide flooding events along the U.S. coastline, ocean acidification and warming, and forest fires in the western United States and Alaska are all projected to continue to increase, while land and sea ice cover, snowpack, and surface soil moisture are expected to continue to decline in the coming decades.''
The U.S. government warnings echo the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In October, it released a report that represented the work of 91 scientists from 60 countries. It describes, in the words of the New York Times, ``a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040.''
The wildfires are already here. The Camp Fire blaze this month is the most destructive in California history, charring 153,000 acres, destroying nearly 19,000 structures, and killing at least 85 people. The second-most destructive fire in California history was the one last year in Napa and Sonoma counties.
The Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies notes that climate change has contributed to these conflagrations by shortening the rainy season, drying out vegetation and whipping up Santa Ana winds. Massive hurricanes are increasing along with wildfires--and they too are influenced by climate change.
It is time to sound the planetary alarm. This is likely to be the fourth-hottest year on record. The record-holder is 2016, followed by 2015 and 2017. A climate change website notes that ``the five warmest years in the global record have all come in the 2010s'' and ``the 10 warmest years on record have all come since 1998.''
Imagine if these figures reflected a rise in terrorism--or illegal immigration. Republicans would be freaking out. Yet they are oddly blase about this climate code red. President Trump, whose minions buried the climate-change report on the day after Thanksgiving, told Axios: ``Is there climate change? Yeah. Will it go back like this, I mean will it change back? Probably.'' And, amid a recent cold snap, he tweeted: ``Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS--Whatever happened to Global Warming?''
By this point, no one should be surprised that the president can't tell the difference between short-term weather fluctuations and long-term climate trends. At least he didn't repeat his crazy suggestion that climate change is a Chinese hoax. Yet his denialism is echoed by other Republicans who should know better. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) told CNN on Sunday: ``Our climate always changes and we see those ebb and flows through time. . . . We need to always consider the impact to American industry and jobs.''
We do need to consider the impact on U.S. jobs--but that's an argument for action rather than, as Ernst suggests, inaction. The National Climate Assessment warns that global warming could cause a 10 percent decline in gross domestic product and that the ``potential for losses in some sectors could reach hundreds of billions of dollars per year by the end of this century.'' Iowa and other farm states will be particularly hard hit as crops wilt and livestock die.
Compared with the crushing costs of climate change, the action needed to curb greenhouse-gas emissions is modest and manageable--if we act now. Jerry Taylor, president of the libertarian Niskanen Center, estimates that a carbon tax would increase average electricity rates from 17 cents to 18 cents per kilowatt-hour. The average household, he writes, would see spending on energy rise ``only about $35 per month.'' That's not nothing--but it's better than allowing climate change to continue unabated.
I've owned up to the danger. Why haven't other conservatives? They are captives, first and foremost, of the fossil fuel industry, which outspent green groups 10 to 1 in lobbying on climate change from 2000 to 2016. But they are also captives of their own rigid ideology. It is a tragedy for the entire planet that the United States' governing party is impervious to science and reason.
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I note that my distinguished colleague from Massachusetts has arrived. We have an order in place in which the Senator from Massachusetts is to be recognized at the conclusion of my remarks and that the distinguished Senator from New Hampshire, Mrs. Shaheen, is to be recognized at the conclusion of Senator Markey's remarks.
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