Making Continuing Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as the Senator from Wisconsin has so eloquently said, we are indeed nearing the brink of the self-imposed catastrophes of government shutdown or government default or both. Unless Speaker Boehner can find a way to restrain his rightwing tea party extremists, find a way to work sensibly with Democrats and steer us back from the brink, then an unnecessary and self-imposed calamity awaits. I should probably be more specific. It is not just self-imposed, it is tea party imposed.

While we try to find our way around this unnecessary tea-party-imposed disaster, a real disaster is looming. It is a real disaster, it is really looming, and we could address it. Instead, we are having to fend off totally unnecessary disasters cooked up by rightwing tea party extremists. It is infuriating. When the real disaster has fully hit us, folks will look back at this era and they will wonder: What was wrong with them? Who were those people? The warnings were everywhere and they did nothing? Instead, they wasted time threatening each other with cooked-up calamities, rather than deal with the real disasters? That is disgraceful.

They will be right. Of course the real and looming disaster is what unprecedented levels of carbon pollution and unprecedented levels of atmospheric carbon are doing to our weather and our oceans. That is for real. That is Mother Nature. That is not just political gamesmanship and hostage taking. That is what brings me here now for the 44th time to say it is time for us to wake up to the threat of climate change.

While Congress keeps sleepwalking on this issue, I am proud to say President Obama has awoken. Last week his administration announced important new carbon pollution standards for future powerplants. These standards will reduce the carbon pollution that has been wreaking havoc on our oceans, our atmosphere, and our health.

Those of us who believe in science and who are awake to the changes already happening all around us should rally behind the President and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy to support these proposed standards. Just look at the evidence of what carbon pollution is doing to our planet.

According to news articles, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, will soon announce it is now more certain than ever that human activity is the main cause of the recent climate changes we have seen. This may surprise some of my Republican colleagues who tried pointing to a recent slowdown in surface temperature as evidence that climate change has stopped. According to the IPCC, this phase is, unfortunately, only temporary, as other slowdowns have been in the past.

If you look at the history of global warming and of temperature, you can see that across time you can add steps in because of the variability that is inherent in our climate. But nobody could look at that and not see the constant rising thread that runs through it. No regression analysis, to use the technical term, would not show that global warming is real. The fact that we are at a step is--well, here is what Richard Muller, noted physics professor at UC-Berkeley, had to say in an article that came out today. He quoted himself from 2004 when he wrote:

If we believed that natural fluctuations in climate are small--then we might conclude (mistakenly) that the cooling could not be just a random fluctuation on top of a long-term warming trend. ..... And that might lead in turn to the mistaken conclusion that global warming predictions are a lot of hooey.

If, on the other hand, we ..... recognize that the natural fluctuations can be large, then we will not be misled by a few years of random cooling.

Which has happened over and over through the progression of climate change.

He followed on today:

The frequent rises and falls, virtually a stairstep pattern, are part of the historic record, and there is no expectation that they will stop, whatever their cause.

The land temperature record is full of fits and starts that make the upward trend vanish for short periods. Regardless of whether we understand them, there is no reason to expect them to stop. The current cause is consistent with numerous prior causes. When walking upstairs in a tall building, it is a mistake interpreting a landing as the end of the climb.

Whatever the cause of these recurring steps, even contrarian scientists understand the principle that is operating here: More carbon dioxide leads to more warming. It is as simple as that. It is a 150-year-old established basic principle of physics.

The oceans, which I talk about a lot in these speeches, have a lot to do with it. The deep oceans absorb excess heat, saving us from a lot more heat here on the surface. Researchers say the oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat over the last 50 years.

If the ocean has absorbed this much of the heat, think what a small fluctuation in what the ocean is doing will do to our atmospheric temperature: 93.4 percent, only 2.3 percent. You do not have to wiggle this much in order to create the kind of steps and changes and oscillations that we have seen in the stairstep of climate change. Oceans don't just absorb the heat, they also absorb about 30 percent of our carbon emissions chemically, emissions that would otherwise be in our atmosphere, causing more warming. Absorbing those emissions has already made the oceans more acidic, with dangerous consequences for marine life as this continues. But it has spared us even more extreme climate effects here on land.

Environment America recently released a report earlier this month highlighting the power sector's pollution, which creates an enormous amount of this. In 2011, 5.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide were emitted in the United States. The blue circle is the whole country.

Just over 40 percent of that total, 2.2 billion tons, came from the power sector. That is the green sector.

The inner circle, the red one, is the emissions just from the 50 dirtiest powerplants in America. One out of every 8 tons of America's carbon dioxide emissions, the ones that are causing these changes in the oceans--the ones that are causing these changes in the atmosphere--come from these filthy 50 powerplants, such as Luminant Generation Company's Martin Lake Plant in Texas, emitting the equivalent of 3.9 million car emissions, or Alabama Power Company's H. Miller, Jr. Plant, emitting the equivalent of 4.3 million car emissions, or the champion, Georgia Power's Scherer Plant, the largest emitter of carbon pollution in America, which emits as much pollution as 4.4 million cars.

If these 50 plants were an independent country, that country would alone be the seventh largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, just behind Germany, just ahead of South Korea.

From my State's perspective, these out-of-State powerplants are a hazard. It is out-of-State powerplants that emit the chemicals that turn into ground level ozone in downwind Rhode Island. Rhode Islanders pay the price, particularly on bad air days, and we have had six of them so far in 2013. About 12 percent of Rhode Island's children and 11 percent of our adults suffer from asthma, and ground level ozone puts them at greater risk.

We have a lot of good Rhode Island reasons to clean up the power sector. That is why I support the administration's proposed standards for new powerplants. The standards will limit the effects of climate change on future generations by telling polluting industries it is time to clean up your act, it is time to stop dumping toxic carbon pollution, it is time to get responsible about what you are doing to our environment and our health, to our children, our oceans, and our atmosphere.

We can still avoid the worst outcomes of climate change. Some changes cannot be avoided; some are already happening. But if we act now, we can avoid the worst predictions for heat waves, sea level rise, ocean acidification, storms, and other disruptions. That is why we in Congress should support the President's goal to reduce emissions to 17 percent below our 2005 output at the end of this decade and to get emissions to 80 percent of 1990 levels by 2050.

The standard for good powerplants is a good first step, but we also need to clean up existing powerplants, particularly these 50, which I will remind everybody emit more carbon dioxide than South Korea. We should get serious here in Congress and fix the market failure in our power sector that ignores the true costs of burning these fossil fuels. We should pass carbon-fee legislation.

What do we see instead, here in Congress? Here is an example. Last week a House subcommittee hearing on the President's climate action plan brought out these wildly misleading statements, such as: ``We can say over 40 years we've got almost no increase in temperature'' went one.

``The arctic ice has actually increased by 60 percent'' went another.

In reality, surface temperatures are up about 1 full degree Fahrenheit over the last 40 years. That increase in Arctic sea ice is only relative to last year's all-time record low. The National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that this year's summer minimum is the sixth lowest in the 34 years records have been kept, and it is right in line with the long-term rapidly declining ice cover trend.

The Republicans did a lot of complaining at the hearing about the President's climate action plan. To my Republican colleagues who don't like the President's plan, I say come to the table. Let's negotiate climate legislation in Congress. Republicans in Congress should support a carbon fee, as many Republicans outside of Congress do. If you do not like polluting interests having to bear 100 percent of the costs of complying with the carbon pollution standards, let's look at a carbon fee. A carbon fee, by contrast, would give those same companies an opportunity to work with Congress to share in some of the revenue generated by the fee. Or the revenue could be returned to the American people as a tax cut, if Republicans prefer; even as a corporate tax cut, if Republicans prefer. Or we could use that revenue to forgive all Federal student debt in this country--forgive all Federal student debt in this country. What a shot in the arm that would be to our economy. Or we could give struggling seniors a $1,600 Social Security raise.

There are a lot of wonderful things that could be done, but my colleagues must first come to the table. What they cannot do is deny. To deny is to lie.

The time for that has passed. It is time to wake up.

I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield the floor.

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