Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act--

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Minnesota for laying out the case so clearly on the challenge, as I like to call it, of taking on climate chaos.

My wife Mary comes from Minnesota. I know they value the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Every time I have said that before, I always say the ``Land of a Thousand Lakes,'' and Senator Klobuchar corrects me. I just can't quite envision 10,000 lakes.

Minnesota is a land with incredible wildlife, a land that certainly has seen the impacts of climate chaos, as has my home State. So thank you so much for your remarks and for being here to help celebrate our colleague and our friend, the Senator from Rhode Island, Mr. Whitehouse, who spoke tonight just a few minutes ago for his 200th time, to say: Wake up. Wake up, America.

We have a significant challenge, the sort of challenge that you may not notice from one day to the next. We may wake up tomorrow and not realize that the damage being done to our planet is greater than the day before or we may not be able to wake up a week from now and realize that the damage is more. Nonetheless, it is, if looked at over any significant span of time, a huge, huge force wreaking havoc on our planet, and it will just get worse with time if we do not take on this pollution of the atmosphere by carbon dioxide.

Back in 1959, an eminent scientist was asked to speak at the 100th anniversary of the petroleum industry. That scientist was Edward Teller. Edward Teller gave his speech at this 100th anniversary in 1959, but he said to the gathering of the fossil fuel industry: You do realize that you will eventually have to look for a different form of energy to invest in, first, because the amount of fossil fuels in the Earth's crust is limited and it will run out. He said: Second of all, there are some interesting facts that many of you might not be aware of--that when you burn fossil fuels, it creates carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide might not at first seem like a pollutant because it is invisible and it is odorless, but it has this quality where visible light passes through it, but heat energy is trapped. As a result of trapping heat energy and changing the makeup of our atmosphere, we will start to do major damage to the planet. He talked about how it would affect the melting of ice on the poles, the rising of sea levels, and that humankind lived by the oceans and, therefore, this carbon dioxide would do enormous damage and it would be important to transition off of burning carbon fuels, off of burning fossil fuels. That was in 1959, which is a long time ago that we have had the information about the damage wreaking havoc by this pollutant, carbon dioxide.

Henry David Thoreau, the philosopher, challenged us and said: What is the use of a house if you don't have a tolerable planet to put it on?

Yet everywhere we see our planet crying out for us to pay attention-- never as much, however, as in this last year. Here in America, there were fierce forest fires from Montana, across Idaho, into Washington, down to Oregon, and into California clear into December. Smoke covered much of my State for month after month this last summer, having an impact on people's health and certainly having an impact on our economy.

We could look at the storms of last year--the hurricanes of Harvey, Irma, and Maria assaulting Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Those storms were unusually damaging, and part of the reason for that is because the energy of those storms is taken from the temperature of the ocean, and the ocean has been collecting 90 percent of the increased heat on the planet from carbon dioxide pollution and, therefore, producing more powerful hurricanes.

So we saw it in the fires, and we saw it in the hurricanes, but you really can start to see it almost everywhere. You can see that the pine beetles are doing much better because the winters aren't cold enough to kill them, and the trees are doing much worse. You can see that the ticks in New England and Maine and on through Minnesota are doing much better because the winters are not cold enough to kill them. Therefore, they are killing the moose. You can see the impact of the rising ocean temperature on coral reefs around the world, which are a small part of the ocean but have a significant role in the fisheries on our planet.

In my home State in Oregon, the warmer temperatures and the acidity in the ocean caused a billion baby oysters to die in 2008. Well, that is quite an impact on our seafood industry. I can tell you that scientists were mystified because they couldn't imagine, at first, that it had to do with the water quality. They thought it must be a virus or it must be some form of bacteria, but it just turned out that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere not only results in the warming of the ocean, but it is absorbed in the ocean and becomes carbonic acid. That greater acidity of the ocean damages the ability of baby oysters to form shells. So now we have to artificially buffer the ocean water.

We see it in spreading diseases, like malaria, as they follow the mosquitoes, and Zika, as it follows the mosquitoes into greater territory, or leishmaniasis, which is a real diabolical disease that now has come to the United States with sand flies.

My point is that everywhere you look, if you open your eyes, climate chaos is having a big impact and hurting us.

The answer is simple. We have to stop burning fossil fuels. This is where the 100-percent notion comes from, from my bill of last year--100 percent by 50, 100 by 50, or, if you prefer, mission 100. It just means we have to transition from the energy that we gain from fossil fuels to substituting energy from clean and renewable sources--100 percent. Stop burning fossil fuels.

A few years ago, folks said: Well, that will cause great damage to our economy because renewable energy is so much more expensive than cheap fossil fuels. But we have been blessed. We have been blessed in taking on this challenge because it is no longer true that renewable energy is more expensive than fossil fuel energy.

We have had an incredible drop in the price of solar energy over a short period--from 35 cents per kilowatt hour down to 5 cents per kilowatt hour. Then Xcel Energy in Colorado put out a proposal this year. The proposal came back at 2 cents per kilowatt hour. In other words, it is cheaper to have new and clean renewable energy than to burn coal in an already depreciated fossil fuel coal electric plant. Wind has gone from 13 cents or so per kilowatt hour to 5 cents per kilowatt hour. Xcel Energy in Colorado brought in a bid at 3 cents per kilowatt hour.

As we have seen these prices drop dramatically on solar and wind, we have seen the installations of solar and wind surge. On the solar side, in 2017 we installed about 12 gigawatts of capacity--12 gigawatts, or 12,000 megawatts. That is a lot of energy. To put it differently, one- fourth of the total installed capacity of the United States of America went in just in 2017. That is a dramatic upsurge in installation. Think of a world where we can have every flat business roof and every manufacturing plant with solar rays on its surface or canopies over its parking lot because this energy is so cheap to collect, and we can collect it in places where the grid already exists. For wind, in 2016, 8 gigawatts of new capacity went in. Again, there is a tremendous upsurge in the amount of wind installed.

Now we are seeing roughly half of our utilities scale new capacity with renewable energy rather than with fossil fuel energy. The transition is underway, but we need to accelerate it. We need to move it much more quickly, and then we need to move our consumption of energy over to the electric grid. What does that mean? For example, it means heating your house with a heat pump, which uses electricity, rather than a gas furnace. It means changing the way you heat water from a gas hot water heater to an electric hot water heater. It means getting a plug-in vehicle, an electric vehicle.

Let's stop and talk a little bit about electric vehicles. While we have been seeing the production of carbon dioxide from making electricity come down in America, we are seeing the carbon dioxide from driving vehicles go up, so it is a major area we have to take on.

Five years ago, I bought a Volt, which is a plug-in hybrid. It has a range of about 35 miles of electricity, and it also has a gas backup. That car really worked exceedingly well. We drove 3 out of 4 miles on electricity, even though we used gasoline to drive all the way to South Dakota and back. What we found was that the cost per mile on electricity was only about 3 cents a mile, and the cost of running it on gasoline--with oil, maintenance, and so forth--was closer to 10 cents a mile. So it is three times cheaper to drive it on electricity. So there is a big incentive.

Unfortunately, my son had an auto accident, and we had to replace that car. Because the range has increased over 5 years, we were able to get a fully electric car, a Nissan LEAF. The range had gone up in 2016 from roughly 80 miles to about 107. That extra 27 miles is enough that my wife could do her work in home hospice, potentially being assigned to a house way on the west side of the Monona County area and then way on the east side and back and forth several times a day and still make it completely on a single-charged battery.

With the proliferation of driving stations, now we are starting to see the ability to operate much more closely to the way we behaved, if you will, previously with gasoline vehicles--being able to drive hundreds of miles and then recharge. We have seen that with the Volt that just came out to replace the Bolt, which now goes over 200 miles on just its battery alone and more if you drive cautiously.

Buses are another big piece of this. I went down to Eugene, OR, a couple of weekends ago and rode on their first electric bus, the first one in the State of Oregon. That bus looked just like the old diesel buses that we have had serving our metro systems across America, but it cost a lot more. It cost $200,000 more than a diesel bus.

You might say ``Well, that is way too much,'' but here is the interesting thing: It saves about $40,000 to $45,000 a year on fuel. It doesn't take a math genius to then realize that after 5 years of service, you have paid off that cost, and after that, you are saving money. We are going to see a huge transition simply on the economics.

This is the challenge before us, that we have been given the gift of affordable solar that is cheaper than fossil fuel energy, affordable wind that is cheaper than fossil fuel energy, a greatly declining cost of battery power to help supply meet demand, but at the Federal level, we are paralyzed.

Unfortunately, the Koch brothers are really the puppet masters of this body, this Chamber I am in. This wonderful Senate is supposed to be the place where we deliberate to have government of, by, and for the people, but right now we have deliberations here that are of, by, and for the Koch brothers; of, by, and for the wealthy and the well- connected. That is not the vision of America. We have to reclaim the vision of America. The people of America understand that we have this enormous challenge that we must undertake to save our beautiful, blue and green planet.

Since the Federal Government isn't operating, we see companies and cities and places of worship jumping in to fill the gap, adopting 100 percent resolutions--resolutions to transition to 100 percent cleaner renewable energy, to stop burning the fossil fuels that are damaging our planet.

Burlington, VT, is now using a mixture of biomass and hydro wind and solar so that 100 percent of electricity comes from renewable generation. Fifty-eight other cities across America have committed to making that 100 percent transition, and they are handing out an action plan--this year we can do this, and this year we can do that. Families can do the same, places of worship can do the same, and companies are doing the same all across our Nation. We see many of our Fortune 500 companies stepping forward to be real leaders in this. They want to attract employees who know that they care about our planet. They care about stopping this pollution that Edward Teller, an eminent scientist, pointed out in 1959.

When Henry David Thoreau said ``What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?'' he asked a question we should always ask ourselves in terms of the different threats to this beautiful orb that we call home. So let's fight to save this beautiful planet. It is the only one we have. We have no other. It is under serious threat, and we in this Chamber need to tell the Koch brothers to go and sit on their fossil fuel fortune, invest it as they want somewhere else, but to join us in the most important work they could possibly be part of in the years that they have remaining to live here in America, and that is this fight to take on climate chaos and win.

Thank you, Mr. President.

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