Keystone XL Pipeline

Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, the truth is that despite our rather big
egos, much of what we do in the Senate is pretty quickly forgotten.
People have a hard time remembering what we did 2 months ago or
yesterday, let alone last year. But I have a feeling that the Keystone
Pipeline bill we are now discussing and decisions that will be made
about that bill will not soon be forgotten--not by our children or our
grandchildren and not by people throughout the world and, in fact, not
by history. I believe that decades from now our kids and our
grandchildren will scratch their heads and they will say: What world
were these people--Members of Congress--living in in 2015 when they
voted for this Keystone Pipeline? How did it happen that they did not
listen to the overwhelming majority of scientists who told us we have
to cut greenhouse gas emissions, not increase them? I think our kids
and our grandchildren will be saying to us: Why did you do that to us?
Why did you leave this planet less habitable than it could have been?

The issue we are dealing with today is of huge consequence. I fear
very much that a majority of the Members in the Senate and in the
Congress are poised to make a very dangerous and wrong decision. In
that light, I am more than delighted that President Obama has indicated
he will veto this Keystone Pipeline bill if it is passed.

Climate change is one of the great threats not only facing our
country but facing the entire planet. It has the capability of causing
severe harm to our economy, to our food supply, to access to water, and
it raises all kinds of international national security issues.

Let me read an excerpt from a letter sent to the Senate back in
October 2009:

Observations throughout the world make it clear that
climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research
demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human
activities are the primary driver. These conclusions are
based on multiple independent lines of evidence, and contrary
assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment
of the vast body of peer-reviewed science.
Moreover, there is strong evidence that ongoing climate
change will have broad impacts on society, including the
global economy and on the environment. For the United States,
climate change impacts include sea level rise for coastal
states, greater threats of extreme weather events, and
increased risk of regional water scarcity, urban heat waves,
western wildfires, and a disturbance of biological systems
throughout the country. The severity of climate change
impacts is expected to increase substantially in the coming
decades.

This statement was signed by virtually every major scientific
organization in this country, including the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, the American
Geophysical Union, the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the
American Meteorological Society, and many other scientific
organizations.

Scientists are not the only people warning us about the danger of
climate change. Hear what the Department of Defense has to say about
the impact of climate change on international and national security.
What they point out--and I think what every sensible person
understands--is that when people are unable to grow the food they need
because of drought, when flood destroys their homes, when people
throughout the world are forced to struggle for limited natural
resources in order to survive, this lays the groundwork for the
migration of people and international conflict. That is what the
Department of Defense tells us.

Now, given all of the scientific evidence and given the concerns
raised by our own Department of Defense and national security experts
all over the world and given the fact that the most recent decade--the
last 10 years--was the Nation's warmest on record, one would think that
when the National Climate Assessment warns us that global warming could
exceed 10 degrees Fahrenheit in the United States by the end of the
century--can we imagine this planet becoming 10 degrees Fahrenheit
warmer and what this means to the planet? When sea levels have already
risen by nearly 7 inches over the last century and are expected to rise
another 10 inches to 2.6 feet by the end of the century--when all of
that is on the table, one would think this Senate would be saying: All
right, we have an international crisis. How do we reverse climate
change? Instead, what the debate is about is how we transport some of
the dirtiest oil in the world and thereby cause more carbon emissions
into the atmosphere.

I suspect our kids and our grandchildren will look back on this
period and say: What world were you living in? Why did you do that to
us?

It would seem to me that what we should be debating here is how we
impose a tax on carbon so that we can break our dependence on fossil
fuel. That is what we should be discussing, not how we increase carbon
emissions. We should be discussing what kind of legislation we bring
forward that moves us aggressively toward energy efficiency,
weatherization, and such sustainable energies as wind, solar, and
geothermal. That is the kind of bill that should be on the floor. We
should be having a debate about legislation that makes our
transportation system far more efficient, that expands rail and helps
us get cars and trucks off the road. We should be having a debate about
how we can create the kind of automobiles that run on electricity and
make them less expensive and how we can get cars running 80 to 100
miles per gallon. Those are the kinds of debates and that is the kind
of legislation we should be having on the floor, not how do we expand
the production and the transportation of some of the dirtiest oil on
the planet.

In my view, the U.S. Congress in a very profound way should not be in
the business of rejecting science because when we reject science, we
become the laughingstock of the world. How do we go forward? How do we
prepare legislation if it is not based on scientific evidence? And to
say to the overwhelming majority of scientists that we are ignoring
what they are telling us and we are going to move in exactly the wrong
direction I think makes us look like fools in front of the entire
world. How do we go forward and tell China and India and Russia and
countries around the world that climate change is a huge planetary
crisis at the same time as we are facilitating the construction of the
Keystone Pipeline?

So I am delighted the President will veto this legislation if it
happens to pass the Congress. Our job now is not to bring more carbon
into the atmosphere; it is to transform our energy system away from
coal, away from oil, away from fossil fuel, and toward energy
efficiency and sustainable energy. That should be the direction of this
country, and we should lead the world in moving in that direction.

With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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