Strengthening America's Security in the Middle East Act of 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I am very happy to be joined by my colleague from New Hampshire, Senator Hassan.

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, we are here to talk about the risks to our New England coastal communities from the climate changes coming our way.

Despite the really dirty efforts of the fossil fuel industry to keep the truth at bay, the tide of public understanding is turning. A recent survey by Yale and George Mason Universities found that 73 percent of Americans now see global warming happening. That number is up 10 percentage points since 2015. Similarly, the percentage of Americans who consider global warming an important issue rose from 63 percent to 72 percent in the past 10 years. In just the past year, the number of Americans who say they are worried about global warming jumped from 61 to 69 percent. One author of this research explained the results to the New York Times this way:

People are beginning to understand that climate change is here in the United States, here in my state, in my community, affecting the people and places I care about, and now. This isn't happening in 50 years, 100 years from now.

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University echoed these sentiments, saying: ``Today, nearly everyone can point to a way that they are personally witnessing and are being personally affected by the impacts of a changing climate in the places where they live.''

Perhaps nowhere is this more true than along our coasts, where manmade climate change is already flooding towns, driving fisheries away from traditional fishing grounds, and bringing ashore stronger storms riding on higher seas.

Last Tuesday, I picked up my home State paper, the Providence Journal, and I saw this headline splashed across the front page regarding climate change: ``Washed Away. . . . Home values lost to rising sea levels.''

This is a study I have mentioned before. It was done by the First Street Foundation and researchers at Columbia University and looks at what escalating flood risk is doing to coastal housing markets. That study started in Florida--peer-reviewed work in Florida--and they took that methodology and have been working their way up the gulf coast and the New England coast since then. They just reached my State and Senator Hassan's State, and the report is not pleasant. They found that Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island lost a total of $403 million in expected property value between 2005 and 2017 due to increased tidal flooding risks. Just between 2005 and 2017, Rhode Island coastal properties lost nearly $45 million in expected value. The study called out these particular properties in Warren, RI, that lost over one-third of their value during that timeframe. Rhode Islanders in the town of Warwick lost over $4 million in home values due to the threat of climate change-driven sea level rise.

Several studies warned how climate change will affect coastal property values. The First Street Foundation study is the first to demonstrate value loss that has already occurred, as the study itself says. A Columbia University researcher who worked on the First Street study said this:

Each time we analyze a new state we see the same phenomenon. Increased tidal flooding leads to a loss in home value appreciation. As sea level rise accelerates, we expect the corresponding loss in relative home value to accelerate as well.

That hits home indeed. The latest scientific evidence shows sea levels rising at a faster pace than expected. NOAA data shows that Greenland lost around 280 billion tons of ice per year from 2002 to 2016. A National Geographic article covering this study noted: ``The Greenland ice sheet is 10,000 feet thick in places and contains enough ice to raise sea levels 23 feet.''

Another study shows that the Antarctic ice sheet has lost around 252 billion tons of ice per year over the last 10 years. Again, according to National Geographic, full melting of the Antarctic ice sheet could mean nearly 187 feet of sea level rise.

In Rhode Island, our Coastal Resources Management Council has been a longtime leader in modeling flooding and sea level rise risks for Rhode Island's coastal businesses, communities, and decision makers. Earlier this month, CRMC partnered with the University of Rhode Island to release a series of highly detailed risk maps for several coastal Rhode Island towns. These maps provide a damage assessment for individual structures due to flooding and storm waves for homes and businesses and critical infrastructure, like the Warren wastewater treatment plant, which is right there on the coast of Warren, RI; the facility will be almost totally wiped out. CRMC's maps turn these general risks facing our communities from a hazy sketch to a vivid, living-color, 3-D picture, and that picture is grim for these coastal communities.

Rhode Island officials are currently preparing for a worst case scenario of more than 9 feet of sea level rise overtaking our 400 miles of coastline by the end of the century. This map is from Rhode Island's CRMC's interactive STORMTOOLS application, which overlays the sea level rise projections over our current topography. The blue all through here is currently land that is flooded when 10 feet of sea level rise come. This extra little rim of green on some of the edges is when you push it up to 12 feet. As we see all of the blue here, think of homes and businesses and properties that are owned by people and that are going to literally disappear into the ocean if we don't pay attention. These are the homes and businesses of my constituents.

A 2017 report from the real estate database company Zillow identified over 4,800 homes in Rhode Island, valued at near $3 billion, that would be underwater by 2100, using an optimistic estimate of only 6 feet of sea level rise.

In this snapshot from Upper Narragansett Bay, you can see some of Rhode Island's larger coastal communities stranded as a scattered series of new islands, a Rhode Island archipelago. Today's map of Rhode Island--the map that we have known since our founding--will become unrecognizable as Warwick Neck here breaks off to become its own island, Newport south of this map splits, and Bristol through here comes apart.

A recent report from Climate Central and Zillow looked at new homes being built in risky coastal areas--ones expected to suffer from annual floods by 2050 under a moderate greenhouse gas emissions model--and they show Rhode Island has seen more growth in risk areas than in safe areas. Obviously, if emissions don't meet these moderate goals, things are going to get a good deal worse, and well before water actually overtakes your home, well before the water is coming through the front door will come the economic effects of rising oceans, and they will be big.

In 2017, GAO reported that coastal areas face particularly high financial risks and that annual coastal property losses from sea level rise and increased storms will run into the billions of dollars every year in the short run and over $50 billion every year by late century. EPA has estimated ``$5.0 trillion in economic costs to coastal property from climate change through 2100''--$5 trillion, and that is the Rhode Island part of that. The Union of Concerned Scientists reports that sea level rise will double the number of coastal communities facing what they call ``chronic inundation and possible retreat''--meaning you are out of there--by 2035.

The market is awakening to these risks. Moody's evaluates municipal bonds. It has begun evaluating the bonds of coastal communities with an eye to this flooding risk. Banks, mortgagors, insurance companies, and appraisers are starting to incorporate these risks into their work for coastal properties.

A recent issue of the Appraisal Institute's Valuation magazine quoted Rhode Island appraiser Brad Hevenor, warning that homes that receive a 30-year mortgage this year ``might be completely different types of property [by the end of their mortgage] than they are today.'' Good luck getting a 30-year mortgage on a property that the bank believes will be ``completely different'' by the end of the mortgage.

The coastal housing market is on the precipice of a dangerous financial cliff. First Street, Zillow, NOAA, GAO, EPA, Climate Central, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and others all make the same warning.

Federal home mortgage giant Freddie Mac said it this way: ``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.''

The editor of the insurance industry trade publication Risk & Insurance said this: ``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.''

These are serious warnings, and they are deadly serious warnings for our coastal States. Here in Congress, these warnings fall on deaf ears--ears plugged deaf by the fossil fuel industry's persistent mischief.

We have to get serious about our duty to our constituents. Polling shows that millions of Americans want us to face up to this threat, to safeguard their coastal property, and to curb the carbon pollution that is distorting our Earth's climate and raising our Earth's oceans. It is seriously time for us to wake up.

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