Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act--

Floor Speech

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Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I first wish to thank Senator Whitehouse, one of my best friends in the Senate. We came to the Senate on the same day. He will go down in history as the best advocate in this body or perhaps the greatest moralist of our time combatting climate change. He has educated Members of the Senate-- some more resistant than others.

He has taken to the floor over and over. He has continued to make sure that people listen to something important, and we all appreciate that leadership.

Climate change affects Ohio jobs that rely on Lake Erie. The Great Lakes are vital to our industrial heartland, as the Rockies are to the West, as the Atlantic coastline is to New England, as the Gulf of Mexico is to the Presiding Officer's own State of Florida. In fact, 84 percent of America's freshwater is in the five Great Lakes. Only polar icecaps contain more freshwater than do the Great Lakes.

Lake Erie is one of the biggest lakes in the world. It is also the shallowest of the lakes. This is an amazing statistic. Lake Erie is the shallowest and among the smallest of the Great Lakes in surface area. Lake Erie contains 2 percent of all the water in the Great Lakes, yet it contains 50 percent of the fish in the Great Lakes because it is warmer and shallower and conducive to aquatic life and fish life.

Its shallowness makes it particularly vulnerable to storm water runoff and the algae blooms that it causes. The Maumee River runs through Toledo. The Maumee River Basin is the largest drainage basin of any of the Great Lakes, and the largest river that empties into the Great Lakes is the Maumee.

Climate change makes these algae blooms off the coast of Toledo in the western base of Lake Erie. Climate change makes those blooms worse. It contaminates our lakes, and it threatens the Ohio businesses and communities that rely on Lake Erie. Three summers ago, we had to get bottled drinking water to the citizens of Toledo and the surrounding areas of Northwest Ohio because the water was not potable at that time.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, we know that one effect of climate change in the Great Lakes region has been a 37-percent increase in the gully washers--the heavy rain events that contribute to algae blooms.

I talked to farmers who have been farming in the Western Lake Erie Basin for decades. Just a few weeks ago I did a roundtable in that part of the State. My staff member Jonathan McCracken has done a number of roundtables before. Since talking to these farmers, they tell us they are experiencing heavier rain events more often and with greater intensity compared to even 15 years ago, let alone in the lifespan of many of these farmers.

Hotter summers and shorter winters make this worse. The effects of algae blooms have a profound effect on the ecosystem. That is why this matters. Protecting our lakes is one of the biggest environmental challenges facing the entire Midwest. It is the biggest challenge facing Ohio.

We have made some progress over the last 8 years, thanks in large part to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. The GLRI is working. Everybody knows it does. Nobody claims it doesn't.

I remember how polluted Lake Erie was when I was growing up. I grew up an hour or hour and a half from there. My family, a week or two in the summer, would drive north to Gem Beach. I remember the dead fish. I remember the smell of the lake. I remember that this lake was in big, big trouble.

We have made progress cleaning up its tributaries. We increased access to the lake. We approved habitats for fish and wildlife. It has been a bipartisan success story, and it took the Federal Government to do it. The city of Cleveland couldn't do it, nor the city of Lorraine, the city of Sandusky, the city of Port Clinton, the city of Ashtabula. They couldn't clean up the lake. The State of Ohio didn't have the ability and the resources to clean this lake up. It took the Federal Government and the U.S. EPA to have the strength and the dollars and the mission to clean up this lake. That is why it has been a bipartisan success story all over our country.

We need to make sure that GLRI has the funding it needs to keep up its work and not eliminate it, as the President again proposed in his budget. Taking a hatchet to GLRI would cost Ohio jobs, and it would jeopardize public health by putting our drinking water at risk.

If you are over 50 years old, you remember what that lake looked like. You remember what that lake smelled like. You remember how people didn't swim there, how people's drinking water was threatened. You remember that before EPA, before there was this bipartisan commitment to clean up one of the greatest of the Great Lakes. You remember that.

Obviously, this President doesn't know this. This President won his election based on winning these Great Lakes States, and he has abandoned these States by drastically cutting funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.

Those of us along the Great Lakes didn't stand for a budget that eliminated GLRI last year. Nothing has changed this year. Ohioans on both sides of the aisle will go to the mat for our lake.

I am working with Senator Portman--I am a Democrat; he is a Republican--and my Ohio colleagues from both parties to protect it. Budget cuts are terrible for this; climate change will only make it worse.

When I was young, people wrote off Lake Erie as a polluted, dying lake. As I said, I remember seeing it. I remember smelling it. I remember hearing people talk about it. Many, many people thought that there wasn't much future for this Great Lake, that it would be impossible to clean up.

People in the past have had a habit of not just writing off Lake Erie but also writing off my State. We have proved them wrong time and again. We proved them wrong back then, we proved them wrong today, and we will prove them wrong in the future.

Our lake is improving. It is supporting an entire industry. It supports the jobs it creates. It is providing drinking water and recreation and so much more to communities across our State, and we can't allow climate change to ruin that progress. We cannot write off Lake Erie. We cannot write off the millions of Ohioans and people from Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota who depend on these five Great Lakes.

I see it up close. I live only 5 or 6 miles from the lake. I know what it means for my community. I know how important this is for the future--the environmental future--of our country, the economic future of my State. It is important for all of us to come together on a bipartisan basis.
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