Commerce, Justice, Science, Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, Interior, Environment, Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am thrilled and delighted to follow my outstanding colleague from Maryland coming here to talk about climate change. That is the topic that brings me to the floor today as well. Those of us who are from coastal States not only have the experience of worse flooding in our coastal communities and those coastal communities getting new conversations with their municipal bond folks about what the flooding risk means for their bond ratings, but we are also looking at projections like Maryland is of what happens if we don't act, and the very maps of our State will change.

When historians look back at why the United States failed so badly to take on climate change, they will, of course, focus on the political efforts of the world's largest oil companies: Exxon, Chevron, BP, and Shell. They will note the obstructive role of leading trade associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the American Petroleum Institute. They will chronicle the network of phony front groups set up by Big Oil, Big Coal, and the Koch brothers to sow doubt of the science and fear of climate action. Big Oil, the Kochs, the trade associations, the front groups all will deserve plenty of blame. Their climate denial apparatus and their capture of the modern Republican Party is a direct and deliberate cause of America's failure.

There are other less heralded but equally bad actors. I come to the floor today to discuss one of them. Future historians of ``anii Trumpi,'' take note of Marathon Petroleum. Marathon Petroleum is the largest oil refiner in the United States. It refines oil into gasoline, other fuels, and lubricants. It owns pipelines and gas stations. Its 4,000 Speedway locations and almost 8,000 independent gas stations selling Marathon-branded fuels reach across the country. It is No. 31 on the Fortune 500 list of U.S. companies, and it has almost $100 billion in annual revenue. This is a big company with a big stake in blocking climate action.

What does Marathon want? Well, its annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission makes one thing very clear: Marathon sees laws and regulations that reduce carbon pollution as a threat. One threat Marathon specifically cites in its annual report is fuel economy or CAFE standards. Why? Marathon's 2018 annual report reads: ``Higher CAFE standards for cars and light trucks have the potential to reduce demand for our transportation fuels.'' It is as simple as that. Fuel- efficient cars burn less gas, and that is bad for a big refiner.

Well, in 2012, automakers and the State of California and the previous administration got together, and they agreed to significantly better fuel economy standards. That was a good deal for almost everyone. Consumers were estimated to save more than $1.7 trillion in reduced fuel costs--up to $8,000 per vehicle for vehicles purchased in 2025. The air would be cleaner. Carbon emissions from cars and light trucks would be cut in half by 2025, and automakers would have a competitive spur to keep pace with new vehicle technologies being developed in Europe and China--win, win, win, win.

Well, in 2017, these automakers came back into the Trump administration and asked the Trump administration to revisit the fuel economy standards. It looks, from everything I have seen, like the auto industry primarily wanted technical changes to make the standards easier to meet. I have found no evidence that the auto industry asked the administration to totally freeze the standards or that they asked the administration then to revoke California's authority to set its own standards under the Clean Air Act.

When automakers asked the administration for these changes, someone else was watching. The oil industry sensed opportunity. The standards may have been good for consumers, the auto industry, States, our global climate, but that $1.7 trillion in reduced fuel costs that consumers would save would come directly out of oil industry revenues. So the oil industry sprang into action to hijack the rulemaking process.

The oil industry demanded weakening of the standards to the max; i.e., a freeze, and it even demanded revocation of California's longstanding authority to set its own standards, leading more than a dozen other States, including my home State of Rhode Island. We follow the California standard. An administration marbled through with fossil fuel lobbyists and attorneys heard the oil industry call. It must have been a strange experience for the automakers. One minute they are asking for technical changes to a regulation they had agreed to; the next minute the whole process has been run off with by a completely other industry.

Marathon was the ring leader. I obtained an electronic draft of a letter to the Deputy Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration urging her to weaken the fuel economy standards. The metadata of the letter was still in the letter because I got it electronically. According to the metadata in this document, it was written by a Marathon Petroleum inhouse lobbyist. Marathon then shopped this letter around to Members of the House of Representatives to convince them to send letters backing the weakened standards that they wanted.

We got those House letters, and we ran them through plagiarism software against the Marathon lobbyists' draft. Here is what we got. When we compared the Marathon letter with the letter sent by Members of Pennsylvania's congressional delegation, it was an 80-percent match. The red here is all the language that is identical. Members from Indiana and West Virginia sent similar letters also with text lifted directly from the Marathon lobbyists' draft. If you want to give this political stunt a name, you could call it a Pruitt, after Scott Pruitt, who distinguished himself for the Trump EPA Administrator's position by copying a Devon Energy text onto his own official letterhead as attorney general of his State and sending it on as if it were his letter.

Back to Marathon. Pulling a Pruitt with these Congressmen was not enough. We know from Marathon's own reports that it directly lobbied on the standards, and we know that its trade association, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, AFPM, also lobbied on the standards. We know AFPM also launched a campaign on social media urging people to support a freeze.

Marathon is a member of a front group that is called the American Legislative Exchange Council, also known as ALEC. This front group pushes the agenda of the Koch brothers' apparatus in State legislatures. It is the tool for the Koch brothers to try to work their will in State legislatures. ALEC passed a resolution in favor of weakening the standards and revoking California's State authority. We know that senior executives from Marathon met personally with EPA leadership and with senior officials in the White House to push for weakening the standards and revoking California's authority.

There is a lot we don't know. We don't know which front groups Marathon and other oil companies fund because neither of them disclose their donations or their donors. We don't know how many other groups were deployed in this effort. We don't know the extent to which Marathon coordinated its campaign with the trade association and the front groups, so we can't assess whether this lobbying effort violated the front groups' 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. We don't know what role Marathon or its front groups had in the mysterious antitrust letter that came popping out of DOJ shortly after the automakers negotiated separately with California.

When the automakers realized that their negotiations--the process they were involved with--had been hijacked by Marathon and that they were just passengers on the Marathon train at this point, they bailed. When they knew the conversation was bogus, they bailed. They negotiated directly with California, and they came up with their own deal with California. That, obviously, really ticked off the oil guys who thought they had this thing all scoped. Apparently, it even ticked off the President--all the way up to President Trump.

The next thing you know comes this truly bizarre letter out of DOJ that appears to ignore basic tenets of antitrust law, like when you are negotiating with a State government, it is not an antitrust violation. It appears also to violate DOJ's own very elaborate antitrust investigation procedures.

So who pulled those strings? We don't know. More broadly, if Marathon and other fossil fuel companies are purposefully paying a web of phony front groups and trade associations to spread deliberate, known disinformation about climate change in order to obstruct climate action in Congress, does that not warrant congressional investigation? Might it not, in fact, be fraud? It was fraud when the tobacco industry did it.

Over the past 2 weeks, two different subcommittees of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform held hearings that examined how the fossil fuel industry deploys front groups and trade associations to spread disinformation about climate change and block legislative action.

Yesterday the Senate Democrats' Special Committee on the Climate Crisis held our hearing on how dark money front groups hide the industry's role in climate denial and legislative obstruction. Fat chance we will have Senate committees investigate this masquerade in a Chamber under Republican control, but for our friends in the House, the time is ripe for congressional oversight. Follow the money and the facts wherever they lead. Let the subpoenas fly.

Congressmen Henry Waxman led a successful investigation of lies and deceit from a corrupting industry, Big Tobacco, and that precedent served our country well. It served the American public well. It ended up likely saving lives.

So we go back to Marathon again. Marathon's shareholders are interesting, too, in all of this.

Last month, 200 major investors who had $6.5 trillion in assets under management, sent a letter to 47 U.S. companies, including Marathon, urging that the companies' lobbying align with the Paris Agreement's goal of global average temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius and warning the companies that lobbying against that goal is an investment risk.

The letter went to Marathon, but, interestingly, none of Marathon's biggest investors--BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and J.P. Morgan Asset Management--signed the letter. Collectively, these four investors own, roughly, 25 percent of Marathon. BlackRock lists climate risk as one of its engagement priorities in 2019, so it says. BlackRock published a report this year that by 2060, 58 percent of U.S. metro areas will see annual average climate-related losses of at least 1 percent of GDP, with some projected to lose a staggering 15 percent of GDP.

JPMorgan's CEO, Jamie Dimon, has said: ``Business must play a leadership role in creating solutions that protect the environment and grow the economy.''

So it was interesting yesterday, in our Senate select committee hearing, to have a witness put up this slide. This slide shows the positions on climate change, regulation, and the legislation of a number of companies. It is a spectrum. Green is supporting climate regulation and legislation. Opposition is red.

We were talking about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has been identified as one of the two worst climate obstructors in America as a trade association. The U.S. Chamber and the National Association of Manufacturers take the prize. We were looking at how strange that is because their memberships don't have the positions they take. So we are going to continue to explore why it is that the board members of the National Association of Manufacturers and the board members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce appear to have let their organizations be run away with by the fossil fuel industry as well.

Here is what was notable. On this graph, this is where the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is--one of the worst climate obstructors. Yet look who is worse. In fact, look at who is the worst of all of them-- Marathon. What do you know? You have these four investors who own 25 percent of this company that is on the worst side of this spectrum. They claim to care about solving the climate problem. Yet they are 25- percent owners in the most opposed of all of these entities to the solution to the climate crisis they claim to seek.

They have to get their act together. It is not fair to be JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and say that business must play a leadership role in creating solutions that protect the environment and grow the economy and then to be part of the 25-percent largest shareholders of the company that is the worst of this.

You have to line this up, guys. You can't say one thing to the public and then do the opposite through the companies you own.

The stakes here are high. There are credible warnings of a carbon asset bubble and of crashes in coastal property values, but BlackRock hasn't introduced a single climate-related shareholder resolution since 2001. In 2018, BlackRock and Vanguard--two of these big Marathon owners--voted in favor of only 10 and 12 percent of climate-related shareholder resolutions. They say they are good at this--BlackRock 10 percent, Vanguard 12 percent. The other ones, they didn't support. In 2017, at Marathon--the worst--BlackRock voted against a shareholder proposal for Marathon to test its business operations against the 2- degree Celsius threshold that BlackRock claimed to target and support. By the way, if BlackRock had voted its shares for this proposal, it would have passed.

Just this month, Marathon finally published a report that examines its own prospects in a carbon-contained world. In one scenario, demand for petroleum-based liquids plummets 26 percent by 2040. With the demand for vehicle fuels--Marathon's primary market--it falls even more steeply. If Marathon estimates the market for its main product could shrink by one-third or more, first, you can understand why it got in there to manipulate the auto fuel efficiency standard process. You can also understand why it is that economists and sovereign banks are issuing these warnings about a carbon bubble.

We will get serious about climate change. We must. We have no choice. The costs of inaction are, as Donald Trump once said, catastrophic.

Eventually, all of the fossil fuel money and bullying in the world will not stave off action in the face of mounting climate calamities. This should be obvious to everyone and certainly to sophisticated investors with supposedly good climate policies like BlackRock and JPMorgan. So why aren't they pushing Marathon to adapt to a low-carbon economy? Why are they happy to own 25 percent of that--of the worst? That is what they want to own?

It doesn't have to be this way. Look at DSM, a Dutch multinational, with roughly $10 billion in revenues and over 23,000 employees around the world, including many here in the United States. DSM began as a coal mining company over a century ago. Its leaders realized coal mining in the Netherlands would someday end, so they reinvented the company. When the last mine closed in the 1970s, DSM had diversified. It is, today, a vibrant producer of nutritional additives for food, of pharmaceuticals, and of high-tech materials for electronics, automobiles, and construction. By contrast, Murray Coal, which is an American coal mining company that did not diversify, filed for bankruptcy this week.

To the fossil fuel industry, I say that you ought to begin adapting now. You can't ignore what is coming at you. You owe it to your shareholders, and you owe it to your employees. By God, you owe it to your children.

To BlackRock and the other big investors, this means you have to pay attention too. You say you are for climate action. Show that you mean it. Demand change at Marathon and at other fossil fuel companies that you own. Start with mandating that these companies disclose their climate obstruction funding. There is no excuse for that to be secret.

If they will not do it, Congress, let's investigate. We have slept through this mess long enough--in a state of induced narcolepsy. We have sleepwalked for far too long. It is time we woke up.

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