National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, the facts are undeniable. Climate change is real. It is caused by humans. It is happening now and it is solvable.

One solution to climate change is putting a fair price on carbon pollution. Last week, Senator Whitehouse and I introduced a bill, S. 1548, to do just that and to return all of the revenue to American families and businesses.

I thank Senator Whitehouse for his leadership on this bill, but we want a Republican dance partner. We want conservative leadership on this great challenge of our time.

Climate change increases the severity and frequency of storms and natural disasters. This is not only a humanitarian problem but also an economic issue. A heat wave in Texas in 2011, for example, caused $5 billion in livestock and crop losses. Climate change makes events like this 20 times more likely to occur today than in the 1960s. Climate change's impact on the economy is particularly damaging because it creates so much uncertainty.

There is a role for the government here. The administration is doing everything it can to reduce carbon pollution within the statutory constraints of the Clean Air Act, but it will not get us to the reductions we need. Congress needs to step in and legislate to get the reductions we need to make sure we are protecting low-income and working families and growing our economy.

Regulations like the Clean Power Plan and market mechanisms such as a price on carbon are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they work together. They are mutually reinforcing. If powerplants reduce emissions under the Clean Power Plan, they will pay less in carbon fees. Market mechanisms for reducing pollution work.

In the 1990s, President George H.W. Bush used cap and trade to reduce emissions from sulfur dioxide in order to combat acid rain. The program was successful in slashing emissions, which not only meant healthier lakes and waterways but healthier communities. The health benefits for humans linked to lower sulfur dioxide emissions were estimated at $50 billion annually by 2010.

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Mr. SCHATZ. I thank the Senator from California.

Through the Chair, I will answer the first question.

First, when it comes to the Pope's encyclical, it seems to me that he is displaying the moral leadership that is going to be necessary in all sectors--in the private sector, in the public sector, among Democrats, Republicans, Independents. People across the planet are starting to understand the magnitude of the climate challenge.

One of the reasons I have been coming to the floor so frequently is not to lambaste the other party, but rather to encourage that there be conservative leadership in this space. There is certainly progressive leadership in this space. There is increasingly corporate leadership. There is leadership in the Department of Defense, in the scientific community. But what we really need is for conservatives to step up and to acknowledge the reality of this problem and propose their own set of solutions.

They may disagree with a carbon fee or a cap-and-trade program or the President's Clean Power Plan. But let's have that debate out in the open. Come down and beat up on our bill or beat up on the President's proposal. That is fine. But we need to have this great debate in this great Chamber because this is one of the greatest challenges of our time.

To the Senator's second question, talking a little bit about how cap and trade has worked in California but also how market-based mechanisms have worked all over North America and across the planet, the Senator is right. There is a cap-and-trade program in California, and the economy has continued to improve. The State's fiscal situation has continued to improve.

We have the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative. We have tripled clean energy in a very short period of time, all while unemployment has gone down. In 2008, British Columbia became the first and only jurisdiction in North America with an economy-wide price on carbon emissions. Seven years later, evidence shows that even going it alone, British Columbia was able to reduce petroleum consumption more than the rest of Canada and without any negative impact on growth.

So the Senator from California is right. We can do this and grow our economy. But we are going to need bipartisan leadership. Market mechanisms are one of the most straightforward solutions to climate change. They have growing support across the ideological spectrum. The carbon fee in our bill is predictable. It can start right away. There is no new government program to administer or to run and no need for complex financial transactions or trading.

It is simple and relatively easy to administer, and it gets the reductions that we need: an estimated 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2030. The bill, importantly, is revenue neutral. The original carbon fee legislation poured back the new revenue into a bunch of goodies that I liked in terms of dealing with the challenge of climate change. But we understand that if we are going to get Republican support, this needs to be revenue neutral or close to it, and we need to use the revenue to ameliorate the challenges that are going to occur as we transition into a clean energy economy.

It also lowers corporate tax rates, which will make our Tax Code more competitive with other countries. But reducing carbon emissions and growing our economy ought to go hand in hand. This bill lays out a clear framework for how to accomplish that. Climate change demands leadership from both progressives and conservatives. A price on carbon is a market-based solution that can appeal to people of multiple ideologies but share a common goal of solving one of the great challenges of our time.

In the tradition of Margaret Thatcher and Barry Goldwater, we need conservatives to embrace their own market-based solutions to our climate challenge. There is nothing conservative about ignoring the collective knowledge of the scientific establishment. There is nothing conservative about ignoring the warnings from our Department of Defense. There is nothing conservative about shirking our responsibility for global leadership. There is nothing conservative about conducting a dangerous experiment on the only planet that we have.

So we have no desire for this to continue to be an issue where only one party is on the floor talking about it. Let's have the argument about what the right solution set ought to be. But let's have it out in the open, and let's have it together.

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