Climate Change
Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, it is my habit to give my ``Time to Wake Up'' speeches once a week when the Senate is in session. It is also a practice of mine to go to other States--particularly States that have Republican Senators--to look at what is happening in the States and get a sense of where the local universities and the local experts are with respect to climate change. My last visit was to Ohio. I have also been to New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and Iowa. The thing that is common across all of those trips is that there is no denying climate change in those States. The denial is the function of this building, and it is the function of the wall of money the fossil fuel industry has erected around this building. But pick a State university in the country and go there, and we find there is simply not climate denial.
I am joined today by my friend Sherrod Brown, Ohio's senior Senator, who was kind enough to accompany me on the trip--on several parts of it, anyway. We went to Cleveland. We had a couple of meetings there together. Another one of my visits was to Lake Erie, which got clobbered by the cyanotic bacteria that shut down Toledo's water system, which is also climate change-related.
Let me yield to the Senator from Ohio for a few moments, and then we can talk about Cleveland and the lake.
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Well, I was very happy to join the Senator. I thought Frank Jackson was extremely impressive on this subject. He pointed out that there are times in life when we simply have to go to the future, and if you decide to hang on to the past, you will fail as a result of missing that curve. He said that the business community in Cleveland was really beginning to get that, beginning to take it on. So he has led with a Cleveland Climate Action Plan, which is one of the best ones in the country.
We went to a great place where they are growing lettuce hydroponically, 3, 4 acres in an old building, under an open glass ceiling. They are using captured rain water; they are recycling it. The people there have jobs that pay well. They were the owners of the project and they were really vested in it. Wasn't the morale of the people working there phenomenal? It was terrific.
Dr. Aparna Bole, whom Senator Brown mentioned, was very in tune to what was happening in minority communities as a result of climate change from asthma, from heat. She is seeing it with her young patients. She was wonderful, talking about that. At this point, because of toxic ground level ozone and ragweed being triggers for asthma attacks--she has seen so much of that. She said that more than one in five African-American kids in Cleveland has asthma, and she connects it to what is happening in climate change.
Of course, we understand that in Rhode Island because we have the same bad air days where we have to have kids stay indoors and elderly people stay indoors, all because of the air coming from the Midwest that has been fouled by these coal-burning powerplants.
Out on Lake Erie I met with some of the scientists from Stone Labs and a couple of the lifelong fishing captains who had been out there on the lake. Here are some of the water samples we took while we were out. It is clean now--this is what the water should look like--but back before, when the climate change-driven rain bursts were flooding Lake Erie with phosphorus from the farms in the watershed, there was an explosion of cyanotic bacteria to the point where these guys said driving their boats wasn't like driving through water, it was like driving through pudding, and the wake would slurp over instead of turning the way a regular boat's wake would. One of them had been doing this for 35 years and he said: I don't know this lake any longer. I don't know where the fish are going to be. For 35 years I have fished this lake, and now it is like a stranger to me because of all these changes that are happening.
That is exactly what my Rhode Island fishermen are telling me, too, about Narragansett Bay and Rhode Island Sound. We are here with the Senator from Massachusetts. ``Sheldon, it is getting weird out there. Sheldon, this is not my grandfather's ocean.'' We have some responsibilities to pay attention to these people and to listen to them.
One of the most impressive parts of the trip was this at Ohio State. Ohio State is host to the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center named after the famous polar explorer Admiral Byrd. These two scientists, Ellen Mosley-Thompson and Lonnie Thompson, have spent their lives traveling all over the planet going to these incredible, faraway places--the North Pole, the South Pole, to the Greenland icecap, going to glaciers high in Peru, going to glaciers in the faraway mountains of China. They drill down and take a core sample out of the glacier and get hundreds of thousands of years of data in that core sample.
Then there you are on the top of a glacier in Peru or China, and you have to figure out how to get this core sample back to Ohio--and it has to stay frozen the whole time. So they had this huge logistical challenge. They conquered all of that. They are two amazing people.
These are all the core samples from glaciers all around the globe. Some of them, because of the way climate has dissipated the glaciers, where they drilled the core sample the glacier doesn't exist anymore. It is the last record of gone glaciers.
Here is a picture they had. This is the same site. On this side is a picture of the glacier. You can see striations from the seasons and years going by, and they took this picture from the same place. You can see how the glacier used to be right in front of them and now this glacier is off in the distance. It has moved back as the climate has warmed.
They gave me this. This is a piece of plant matter. You can hardly see it. It is plants that were unearthed as the glacier moved back, and they can date them. Those plants were last out 6,626 years ago, when a snow covered those plants. Snow piled on to snow and it was buried under the glacier. It stayed and it stayed, and thousands of years went by. Then, after thousands of years had gone by, Jesus came and walked the Earth, and then thousands more years came by, and now the glaciers are melting so fast that here it is. You can look, and you can still see the leaves. It is squashed and old, but it hasn't decomposed because of the way it was preserved under the glacier that is going away now. In this laboratory they have this incredible treasure. You can go in and you can find air that was on this planet when Jesus walked the Earth, and it is still preserved just the way it was in the ice. You can find dust from dust storms that were written about in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and there is the actual dust held in the ice. This is the record that the climate science is based on, and it truly is a marvel.
The last thing I will mention is that we also stopped by the Ohio State Center for Automotive Research. Here is a brandnew Camaro in the background. They work with GM to get cars brand-spanking-new, a high-performance American Camaro. These students are going to take it apart and put it back together so it runs cheaper, faster, and with less fuel. They are going to make a hybrid Camaro with the same level of performance, and it is really very impressive what they are doing. They know climate change is here. That is why they are doing this stuff.
I will close out because I have other Senators waiting, but I thank Senator Brown for taking me around Cleveland, meeting all the people we did, and taking me on those visits. I thank the folks at Ohio State. Stone Labs out on Lake Erie is an Ohio State facility. The Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center is an Ohio State facility. I met with the John Glenn Institute folks at Ohio State University.
Look, if you are a Buckeye fan and you are listening, pay attention to what Ohio University says about climate change. Don't listen to the fossil fuel phonies. Listen to what your home State university says. These guys are deadly serious. They know it is real. I don't think there is a home State university in this country that is denying climate change, and yet this body is stuck in denial. It has nothing to do with the facts; otherwise the home State universities would say something different. You can't go home and root for the Buckeyes on the weekend and then come here and deny climate change and pretend you are being true to your home State university. I don't care what your home State is--Iowa, Oklahoma, Florida, Georgia--you name it. Go to the big State universities. They understand that climate change is real.
What prevents us from acting isn't information, it is the wall of special influence money that the fossil fuel industry has built around this place, and it is time we woke up and got on with our business. So I will close with that.
I am grateful for the people in Ohio who showed me around, particularly to Dave Spangler and Paul Pacholski, lifelong charter boat captains. They make their living out on Lake Erie. They know what it is like out there, and they know what climate change is doing to their beloved lake and their beloved way of life.
I yield the floor.
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