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Floor Speech
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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, before we begin, I would like to thank Paige Rodrigues, who first came to my office 5 years ago and has been working tirelessly over all of that time, working to protect the people of Massachusetts and the people of our country and our entire planet from the effects of climate change and environmental threats to our country and to our planet.
She is heading off to law school, and we will miss her. We will miss her brilliant work and her continual devotion to building a better world for everyone, because this world is under immediate threat.
Earlier this month, we experienced what might have been Earth's hottest day in 125,000 years. You heard that right: the hottest day in 125,000 years. And we are living through it right now. In Phoenix, AZ, the temperature has been 110 degrees or higher for nearly 3 weeks in a row.
The water off of the coast of Florida is now nearing 100 degrees. The water is boiling in our oceans off of our coastlines.
On July 15, nearly one in three Americans was living under an extreme heat alert. We are living under a heat dome right now in our Nation.
The forest fires in Canada are sending fumes down across our country. It is like an exhaust pipe from an automobile just sending these toxic fumes down across our country day after day, week after week, from Canada, from their forest fires right above us.
This year, we have experienced 17 of the hottest days ever recorded. This is nothing short of a public health crisis in our country. Extreme heat causes heat stroke, pregnancy risk, and thousands of hospitalizations and deaths every year in our country. And this extreme heat isn't a coincidence; it is the climate crisis announcing its arrival.
We did this. We did this to ourselves. Humankind's greed and negligence--America's greed and negligence--is creating a literal hell on Earth, right now. We are living through it. We took a first step last year to pass climate and clean energy legislation that will inch us closer to salvation, but it will not save us. We must take bolder action to stop the climate crisis and secure a livable future, and we also need to act with urgency to protect the people who, right now, face extreme heat risk as a result of extreme heat in our country.
We have a moral and a planetary obligation to the American people to deliver the resources communities need to combat extreme heat, especially the frontline communities where the effects of heat are worsened by unjust racial and economic divides.
We have to listen to the young people in our country. They are warning us. They are saying that they have been let down, that their generation has been left with this crisis, that not enough has been done, and that the preceding generation just enjoyed all the benefits of industrialization. And now this generation of young people who are organizing, who are lifting their voices, who are demanding a change, they understand this issue. They understand this issue better than preceding generations because they are living with the consequences of not dealing with this issue.
This generation--this young generation--are the issues-oriented generation. They are the ones who understand this issue. They are the ones who understand the problem and want even greater solutions to be put in place.
I am working with my colleagues to reintroduce my legislation, the Preventing HEAT Illness and Deaths Act, which will do just that, while giving our Federal Government the resources and the authority to track and to study and to alert Americans of all the threats posed by extreme heat.
We must meet this public health crisis with the urgency that it requires. Workers are collapsing. Wildfires are raging. And this heat isn't going anywhere. The summers are getting hotter. The storms are getting stronger. The seas are rising higher due to human-caused climate change.
In Arizona, Texas, California, Nevada, and all around the country, people are dying every single day because of this heat, and the risks of extreme heat having fallen more heavily on low-income communities and communities of color, as well as on our seniors and children in our Nation.
While most heat-related deaths and illnesses are preventable through outreach and intervention, extreme heat events have been the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States over the past 30 years. And our historic addiction to fossil fuels is what is driving all of this devastation.
So let's think about this, like a doctor would. We can name the source of this public health catastrophe: extreme heat. We know what drives the extreme heat: fossil fuels. And we know how to cure it: climate action now.
Our planet is sick. Our country is sick. Our country is running a fever right now. And there are no emergency rooms for countries. We have to engage in preventive care. We know how to cure this. It is climate action now. And if we don't, because our country is sick, because our planet is sick, it is killing us along with that planet being slowly but surely burnt to a crisp.
This is why, earlier this year, I introduced the Green New Deal for Health, a national treatment plan to build a healthcare system that delivers the care people need in a dangerous world.
The Green New Deal for Health brings together the principles of the Green New Deal--good-paying jobs, justice for all, and a livable future--to create a healthcare system where everyone doesn't just survive; they thrive.
The sirens are sounding. We are in a climate emergency, and Congress should be the first responders, not holding the matches that continue to exacerbate this crisis. A whole-of-government response is the only way to fight this whole-of-planet threat: climate action that breaks our fossil fuel addiction, a stronger healthcare system that works for workers and patients, and a commitment to a livable future.
That is where we are. This is an emergency. This heat is a warning. But it is no longer a warning of the future. It is a warning that right now we are living with the consequences of the future. It is a warning that right now we are living with the consequences of our inaction.
So my hope is that this institution can respond. Young people are demanding that we respond. We should listen to the young people of our country and the planet. We have to do more.
I see my good friend and the leader of the Environment Committee, Tom Carper, who did just so much last year to pass historic legislation to deal with methane and its impact and to deal with the need for us to move to wind and solar and all-electric vehicles and battery technologies. I can't thank Chairman Carper enough for all of his incredible leadership to make sure that we took that first huge step. But so much more needs to be done.
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