Cloture Motion

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Thank you, Senator, and if I may congratulate the junior Senator from South Carolina on the spectacular win that Clemson had and also congratulate him about being so true to the spirit of civility he discussed and not trash-talking the other team involved.

It was a truly splendid victory between two extraordinarily talented and capable teams, and I congratulate the Senator.

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Gladly.

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Thank you, Mr. President, and happy new year. The new 116th Congress brings new hope for the Senate to face up to the clear and present danger of climate change. The House of Representatives being in Democratic hands augments that hope.

The Senate Republican majority has failed to address climate change. This is no accident. This is the Senate in the Citizens United era. I was here before Citizens United, and for years we saw Senate climate bipartisanship, before Citizens United. After Citizens United, what we see is immensely powerful climate-denying, dark-money front groups for the fossil fuel industry, all likely funded by fossil fuel interests, and we see no Republican Senator willing to cross them. The spending they do in politics--and the more silent threat of spending--is a blockade. It reeks.

Here is a case study on how dark and unlimited money play in Senate elections. In 2016, in Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin, three Democratic Senate candidates stood a good early chance of winning Republican-held seats in 2016. All were solid, experienced candidates who had been Senators before. All were ahead in early polling. Then the big influencers came in hard, launching attack ads, in some cases, well more than 1 year before the election. It is a little like strafing the other side's planes while they are still on the airfield.

The pile-on of so-called outside group spending against these three candidates came to almost $70 million. All three ultimately lost their races, and their losses meant Republicans kept majority control of this Chamber.

Let's look at that $70 million that acquired the continued Republican majority control of this Chamber. Of that $70 million, only about $11 million came from donors and PACs that appear unconnected to the fossil fuel industry. At least two-thirds of that outside spending--more than $46 million--can be directly traced to groups that received significant funding from fossil energy, and $12 million, the remainder of that 70, came through dark money channels. In this day and age in America, powerful influencers can obscure their identities by running their political spending through these dark money channels so it is impossible for us to know whether or how much of this remaining $12 million was from polluter dollars--fossil fuel dollars. I strongly suspect all of it was. In any event, when one industry can deliver that kind of political artillery, the vast majority of a $70 million barrage against three specific candidates, that gives that industry remarkable political power with the side that is advantaged--climate action stopping political power, it would seem.

As the mounting effects of climate change have grown ever more dire and the scientific understanding has grown ever more clear, what has the Senate done? Nothing. Let's look at what we learned and what we witnessed and what we failed to do in 2018.

Mr. President, 2018 saw the release of two landmark climate science reports--one from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the effects of warming 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and the second, the Trump administration's own ``National Climate Assessment.'' Together, these reports delivered the starkest warning on climate change to date. Damage from climate change is already occurring. Economies are now at risk, and we are almost out of time to prevent the worst consequences.

The IPCC report told us that accounting for the costs of carbon pollution by charging a price for carbon emissions is the ``central'' policy that will allow us to hold the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius or less. Even this dire endorsement was not enough to move a single Republican colleague to join a bill to establish a carbon fee.

More telling was the spectacle of the Trump administration's ``National Climate Assessment.'' This report, written by 13 Federal Agencies, described the monumental damage the United States is facing from climate change, flatly contradicting the climate denial assertions of the President and his fossil fuel-flunky Cabinet. The administration tried to bury the report by releasing it on Black Friday during the Thanksgiving holiday. That cynical move happily backfired, with more than 140 newspapers around the country featuring the report's stark findings on front pages and Google searches for ``climate change'' hitting their highest level for the year.

Tellingly, the fossil fuel industry and its bevy of stooges in the Trump administration did not contest the science in the report--an admission by inaction that they know their science denial campaign is phony. They know the real science is irrefutable. It is better to hide from it.

Unfortunately, we witnessed the irrefutable contribution of climate change to the most devastating natural disasters of 2018.

``Irrefutable,'' by the way, is one way to describe climate science. Another way to describe it is ``incontrovertible.'' The description of climate science as ``incontrovertible'' was published in a New York Times full-page advertisement in 2009 that was signed by, among others, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization. How things change.

Anyway, out West, wildfires in California broke records. The Mendocino Complex Fire in July and August was the largest in the State's recorded history. The Camp Fire--this photograph--was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history, killing 86 people. Scientists linked California's increasing wildfires to climate change, estimating the area burned by wildfires across the Western United States since 1984 at twice what would have burned without the human-driven changes.

Michael Mann, the professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, told PBS recently:

It's not rocket science. . . . You warm the planet, you're going to get more frequent and intense heat waves. You warm the soils, you dry them out, you get worse drought. You bring all that together, and those are all the ingredients for unprecedented wildfires.

Mr. President, 2018 saw the east coast slammed by hurricanes that were supercharged by warming oceans. Hurricanes gain strength from heat energy in the oceans they pass over. Warmer oceans also evaporate more water up into the storms, generating more storm rainfall. So stronger and wetter storms then ride ashore on higher and warmer seas and push larger storm surges ahead of them.

Hurricane Florence intensified over water 1 to 2 degrees Celsius above average and dumped record rainfall and flooding on the Carolinas. Preliminary analysis suggests that its rainfall was more than 50 percent higher due to climate change.

When Hurricane Michael hit Florida, it passed over water 2 to 3 degrees Celsius warmer than average. Passing over that heat, its winds spun up by 80 miles per hour in just 48 hours, becoming the strongest storm ever to make an October landfall in the United States and almost completely flattening the town of Mexico Beach, FL.

Scientists are increasingly able to identify the role of climate change in extreme weather. The American Meteorological Society reported in December that 15 extreme weather events in 2017 were made more likely due to human-caused climate change, including a devastating marine heat wave off the coast of Australia that would have been ``virtually impossible'' without human-induced warming. The report drew attention to the role of oceans in many of these extreme events. Jeff Rosenfeld, the Meteorological Society's editor-in-chief, said that ``the ocean is actively playing a role in the extremes that we're seeing'' and that ``we're seeing the oceans as a link in a chain of causes that ultimately tie human causes to extreme weather events on land.''

The changes occurring in the ocean are imposing an increasing threat to our coastal communities, from gulf communities in Louisiana to shoreline communities in Rhode Island.

The Union of Concerned Scientists released a report last year finding that over 300,000 coastal homes, with a collective market value of over $130 billion, are at risk of chronic flooding by 2045. By the end of the century, 2.4 million homes, worth more than $1 trillion, are expected to be at risk.

A 2018 report from Climate Central and Zillow found that thousands of homes continue to be built in risky coastal areas that are expected to suffer annual floods by 2050.

Freddie Mac, the big U.S. housing corporation, has taken a look at this and warned of a coastal property values crash as those houses become uninsurable or unmortgageable to the next buyer.

A second economic crash we face is a ``carbon bubble'' in fossil fuel companies. The ``carbon bubble'' collapse happens when fossil fuel reserves now on the books of fossil fuel companies turn out to be undevelopable ``stranded assets.'' Research published by economists in the journal Nature Climate Change estimated that in a world where we succeed in limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius, $12 trillion of financial value could vanish from balance sheets globally in the form of stranded fossil fuel assets. That is over 15 percent of global GDP, and that is why the Bank of England calls this a systemic risk--i.e., a risk to the entire global economy.

Financial managers are waking up to these risks. At the recent U.N. climate summit in December, a group of 415 global investors, managing $32 trillion of investments--these are men and women who have been trusted with managing $32 trillion worth of investments--came together to warn that the world faces a financial crash worse than the 2008 crisis unless carbon emissions are urgently cut. The group called for the end of fossil fuel subsidies and the introduction of substantial prices on carbon emissions. They understand that to limit the worst climate risks, including economic catastrophes, we must cut carbon emissions immediately and substantially.

But back home, the Trump administration--clearly and completely corrupted by the fossil fuel industry--has now taken more than 90 actions to weaken climate policies. Regrettably, after years of decline, U.S. carbon emissions grew 3.4 percent in 2018. Global carbon emissions also grew by 2.7 percent to reach a new carbon emissions record.

If the Trump administration's 2018 regulatory actions read like a fossil fuel industry wish list, it is because they are. Just one example is the fuel economy rollback for automobiles. It is a perfect example. The new, weaker standards were pushed by--guess who--the largest oil refiner in the country, Marathon Petroleum. Marathon also distinguished itself as a top donor to ethically challenged EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt during his time in political office in Oklahoma. Marathon worked with the creepy Koch Brothers' network and oil industry lobby groups to run a stealth campaign, including a Facebook ad campaign using a phony front group called Energy4US that hid its oil industry origin.

Fossil fuel energy companies claim to be cleaning up their act. They issue statements voicing support for carbon pricing. Look at what they do when the prospect of getting a carbon price on the books becomes real, as it did in Washington State's carbon fee ballot initiative. The campaign against the carbon fee outspent the campaign supporting it by 2 to 1, dumping more money into this ballot fight than any ballot initiative campaign in the State's history. And who funded the campaign against the initiative? Oil companies. BP, Phillips 66, and, of course, our friends Marathon Petroleum were the top spenders by far.

Oil companies claim to support carbon pricing, but the giant trade associations they fund to go out and do their political work--the American Petroleum Institute, the so-called U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers--all oppose any proposals to reduce carbon pollution. The CEOs say one thing, and their political electioneering and lobbying apparatus is instructed to go out and do the exact opposite.

Another telling aspect of the Washington State ballot initiative is who did not show up. Conspicuously absent are any of the good-guy corporations from the tech, financial, and food and beverage sectors that talk such a good game on climate change. That is telling because it matches what happens here in Congress. The good-guy corporations do not lift a political finger to advance climate legislation here in the Senate. In fact, these are the good guys. Set aside the fossil fuel pirates and what they are all up to through their front groups and their dark money and all the nonsense that they drive. These are the supposed good guys. In fact, they have a net negative presence here in the Senate on climate legislation because they do virtually nothing, and the trade associations they help to fund, like the Chamber of Commerce, lobby against climate action.

So you have American corporations with good climate policies taking sustainability seriously within their corporate precincts. Then, those companies come to the Senate, and their positions, as they appear here in the Senate, are against the climate policies they claim to support because they work through these intermediary groups that have been co- opted by fossil fuel interests and because they don't show up themselves. In 2019, let's hope the good-guy American corporations get off the bench, clean up the acts of their trade groups, and get onto the field on the good side of the climate policy fight.

Let me wrap up, through all of that gloom, with the good news for the new year and beyond.

Record low prices for wind and solar projects are now cheaper than fossil fuels in many places. Battery costs are falling rapidly. Amazing electric vehicles keep coming to market. New carbon capture technologies emerge. Xcel Energy, a Colorado-based utility that serves over 3 million customers, has announced a commitment to reduce carbon emissions 80 percent by 2030 and to have zero carbon emissions by 2050, which shows that players in the energy industry know to make this transition.

Out of the States, California has passed a law requiring 100-percent zero carbon electricity by 2045--100 percent. The Governors of New York and Washington States recently announced 100 percent zero carbon electricity goals. Hawaii has a law requiring 100 percent renewable electricity by 2045. On the same day in late December, the District of Columbia passed a bill requiring 100 percent renewable electricity by 2032, and nine Northeastern States--I am proud to say it includes my Rhode Island--committed to cap emissions from the transportation sector.

Here in the Senate, we can expect the new Democratic House to send climate legislation our way. Whether my Republican colleagues like it or not and whether the fossil fuel industry likes it or not, this will be an issue in the 116th Congress.

My new year's wish is that my Republican Senate colleagues will finally wake up to the damage that climate change is causing, to the looming threat that climate change presents, and will help us to pass bills addressing the huge climate risk that we face.

This is not impossible. This is the way the Senate behaved until January of 2010. From when I was sworn in in 2007, through the rest of that year and through 2008 and 2009, we had bipartisan climate bills. We had bipartisan climate hearings. We had bipartisan climate negotiations. We had bipartisan climate discussions. It was possible to do that because the five Republican judges on the Supreme Court had not yet given the fossil fuel industry the massive, new political artillery they had given them in the Citizens United decision. Once the fossil fuel industry had that new artillery, the game changed, and it brought it to bear on our friends on the other side, and there has not been a single Republican Senator on a single serious carbon emissions bill since that moment. It shows what happens when you give a big special interest a massive, new piece of political weaponry.

It doesn't mean it has to be this way. The good guys could show up and counterbalance the political hydraulics here of the fossil fuel industry's power. Our colleagues could say: Guys, we gave you a heck of a good run. For years, we did nothing, but it is time now. We have taken a look at where voters are. We have even taken a look at where Republican voters are. We have taken a look at where the science is, and we are going to do something.

There are a lot of ways that we can go back to the bipartisan legislation, the bipartisan hearings, and the bipartisan conversations that characterized this issue before Citizens United. It has been too long that big polluter donors have had their way around here. They pay the fee, but our Nation pays the price. We have a responsibility here to protect future generations from an avoidable disaster of our own making. It is time for us to wake up and do our job.

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