Executive Calendar
Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I thank the chairman of the Armed Services Committee for his bipartisan work with my senior Senator, Jack Reed, year after year on the National Defense authorizations. Climate Change
Mr. President, this 257th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech reports on my trip to Colorado to see how climate change is affecting the Centennial State and to learn more about the remarkable action that Coloradans are taking to confront climate change.
Colorado is the 18th State I have visited on my climate road trips. Typically, these trips land me in States where people fighting for climate action need some bucking up. Often, I remind those people that there is hope, even if their State legislature may be captured by fossil fuel interests, even if climate change is a dirty word in local hangouts. That was not the case in Colorado. In fact, it is a State on a major climate change winning streak.
Coloradans were the ones bucking me up. I saw that right off the bat at the Alliance Center in downtown Denver. The center's chief operating officer, Jason Page, took me around this LEED-certified space, which is part business incubator, part rallying point for an array of organizations fighting for climate action in Colorado and throughout the country. Jason and his colleagues hosted me and local environmental leaders to discuss the work they have done, and they have done a lot.
Just in the last year, Colorado passed and signed into law seven important climate and clean energy bills. They include legislation to set targets for cutting the State's climate pollution relative to 2005 levels by at least 90 percent by 2050. The legislature passed four measures to boost the adoption of electric vehicles, and it passed bills to help move to new energy-efficient home appliances, to ease the transition to renewable energy for Xcel, Colorado's largest utility, and to collect long-term climate data so the State can craft even more smart legislation to combat climate change and build resiliency to climate consequences.
To hear how Colorado is going to hit its renewable targets, I met with Xcel, State public utility commissioners, and Gov. Jared Polis. Their message to me was simple: It is a challenge, and we are going to do it. They certainly aren't backing away from the challenge. On top of the State's renewable goal, Xcel has committed to an 80-percent cut in carbon emissions across its portfolio by 2030 and to reach 100 percent carbon-free energy by 2050. Xcel, supported by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, is now incorporating the social cost of carbon--a key measure of the long-term damage done by carbon pollution--into its planning process.
On top of forward-looking policy, Colorado is fortunate to be a leader in developing clean energy technology. For that, I visited Panasonic's Pena Station NEXT project, they call it. It is a collaboration between the city of Denver, the utility Xcel, the Denver International Airport, the State Department of Transportation, and Panasonic. The project is designed to show what a smart city powered by renewable energy looks like. It includes two megawatts of solar, a massive battery storage system, which I am looking at right here, a facility to test autonomous vehicles, and an operation center that can integrate all that technology for better efficiency.
At the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, I saw some of the most advanced wind, solar, and other renewable energy technologies in the world. This National Lab is testing the next generation of wind turbines, hydrogen fuel cells, autonomous vehicles, solar panels, smart grid technology, and more. NREL's job isn't just to develop these technologies but also to help private industry adopt them, bringing clean energy to scale and creating jobs in the process.
This is me at NREL. I am painting a solar-activated fluid that they have come up with onto a plate and instantly generating energy from the lamp coming above. As I painted it, you could see the dials come up as energy was generated off that freshly painted plate. It was like putting nail polish down on a surface. They are doing some pretty amazing stuff. At NREL, I could not help but notice a familiar logo, TPI Composites, a company that makes top-of-the-line composite materials in Rhode Island. Naturally, because NREL needs the best, they work with this company with a Rhode Island footprint to develop next- generation materials. I am proud to report that our Composites Alliance of Rhode Island includes TPI. They have a big role in building wind turbine blades and other technologies.
Colorado feels this urgency because the Mountain West is feeling the effects of climate change more and more every day. I met with leading climate scientists for a briefing at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, overlooking the Flatirons at the feet of the Rocky Mountains. NCAR's Doctors James Done, Laura Reed, Daniel Swain, Jackie Schuman, and Bill Mahoney told me about their important research into climate change's effects in the West; how vegetation is withering; how wildfires grow more frequent, have longer duration and are more intense; how hydrology changes as weather patterns shift and temperatures rise throughout the region; and how extreme weather events like sudden downpours and prolonged droughts are becoming a new unfortunate normal.
In Fort Collins, I met with truly dedicated public servants from across the Federal Government who specialize in land management and climate adaptation and have gotten together to coordinate their efforts. These exceptional public servants spent their careers protecting our public lands. They are witnessing firsthand the devastation wrought on our public lands by climate change. They described to me their battles to safeguard stands of old-growth sequoias--a national treasure--and to rebuild beaches and dunes in the face of rising seas and stronger oceanic storms and even to cover melting glaciers with sheeting to try to help prevent them from melting quite so quickly.
They love these lands. They work all their lives to help and save and protect these lands. They do everything in their power to honor and serve these lands. The fact that they battle on in spite of the heartbreaking pace and severity of the destruction climate change is causing is a human inspiration.
Speaking of inspiration, I closed out my trip with an event organized by the group POW--Protect Our Winters--to hear what climate change means to the winter sports and outdoor industry. Skiers, snowboarders, and industry executives told me about the climate threat to the multibillion-dollar winter sports industry in Colorado, which relies on plenty of snow and cold weather to thrive. Professional skier Cody Cirillo told me:
I fear there will be no more snow by the end of the century. I fear a whole ski culture will cease to exist. I fear economic impacts on Summit County and all other mountain towns. I fear the loss of an industry that has given me so much. . . . I fear the kids will not get the opportunity to see a first snow, to feel winter's inaugural bite on the nose, and to miss out on so many wonderful lessons.
These fears are driving Cody and other world-class athletes to speak out. He and his fellow POW members aren't giving in; they are speaking up.
There are many reasons Coloradans are acting on climate and transitioning their energy mix away from fossil fuels. Colorado has the benefit of fossil fuels, but Coloradans want to protect their beautiful, natural landscape. They want to sustain their winter sports and hospitality industries. They want a healthy, prosperous future for their children, and they understand the risks of developing and using those fossil fuels. They also recognize that there are strong forces coming in the energy market--forces that will shift away from fracked natural gas and coal to carbon-free wind and solar. Coloradans know it is better to lead that shift than to wait until the bottom drops out.
We have known for a while that coal is facing big problems. Murray Energy, which is a major coal company with cozy ties to the Trump administration, just filed for bankruptcy last week. Alarms are going off about natural gas, which is a type of fuel that the fossil fuel industry touts as less dirty.
In Boulder, Paul Bodnar, the managing director of the Rocky Mountain Institute, highlighted a report RMI issued in September showing just how quickly this shift, this cost reduction across the renewable spectrum, is going to make the economics of natural gas untenable.
RMI's report foretells of ``a turning point for the relative economics of clean energy resources (including wind, solar, storage; energy efficiency; and demand flexibility) versus new gas-fired generation.''
The report continues: ``For the first time, the rapidly falling costs of renewables and batteries are allowing optimized combinations of these resources . . . to systematically outcompete gas-fired generation on a cost basis while providing all the same grid services.'' The ``same grid services'' means the same reliability and the same availability but at a lower cost.
Here is a graph showing how fast clean energy will overtake gas plants.
This has been the falling cost of clean energy. This is the cost of building and operating a new gas plant. This is the cost of operating an existing gas plant. So we are now at the crossover point where it is cheaper to use renewables--clean energy power--than it is to build new natural gas plants.
Setting aside the pollution and the other extraneous costs, all of which economists would call externalities that come with burning natural gas, which is the methane leakage, the CO
RMI has found that clean energy resources beat on price alone--on price--over 80 percent of proposed gas-fired powerplant capacity, and that clean energy will render 70 percent of proposed gas plants ``uneconomic''--can't compete--just on price by 2035. In other words, it will not make sense even to run, let alone build, those uneconomic natural gas plants. They will be shuttered, stranded assets, which will deal a financial blow to the company or the investors who own them, and if the utilities can shove that cost through to their consumers, it will leave consumers in the lurch. If over half of your fleet is stranded, that is catastrophic for a utility company just on the economics.
It actually gets worse for natural gas in a new investigation by the watchdog group Unearthed, based on data from a very respected fossil fuel industry firm, the expert consulting firm Rystad. Based on Rystad's data, the new report finds that the big oil companies' promises to curb the methane emissions from natural gas extraction appear to be completely bogus. The report found that the biggest industry players, including ExxonMobil and BP, were among the worst when it comes to wasting and burning off methane.
Natural gas is facing a double whammy. First, natural gas is worsening our climate crisis faster than we knew, and some of our biggest fossil fuel companies are driving the problem.
Now, while we are finding out how the fossil fuel industry has misled us about its methane emissions and about how much leakage and burning off there is, we are being treated to the spectacle of one of the biggest fossil fuel industry trade groups--the American Petroleum Institute--in its launching of a seven-figure ad campaign to convince America that ``we're are on it.'' We are America's natural gas industry, and we are on it when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.
Well, it is on it not so much, apparently.
This ad campaign looks like just more fossil fuel industry disinformation. It is an industry that just can't seem to help itself from saying things that aren't true.
Anyway, if you pair natural gas's rapidly becoming ``uneconomic'' against renewables with emerging data showing a much bigger methane problem for the industry, that pairing-- that combined result--is very gloomy for natural gas investors. That is why, in getting back to Colorado, it is such a smart move to unhitch your energy market from those fuels while you can.
A savvy move, Colorado.
Across this country, Americans are already acting on climate. In the face of the President's extraordinarily ill-advised decision to pursue a departure from the Paris Agreement, States, municipalities, and major corporations are all standing up and saying: Nope, we are still in.
They get the problem that we face, and they get how important it is. It is time for us in the Senate to join them in waking up and coming up with a solution to this evident problem.
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