Executive Calendar

Floor Speech

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Mr. KING. Mr. President, I first want to thank Professor--I mean Senator Whitehouse for the information he shared. It was compelling, important, and very worthy of our deep consideration.

To talk about renewing the Magnuson-Stevens Act without talking about the effects of climate change and the effects on the water itself would be an enormous missed opportunity.

First, I commend Senator Whitehouse, the Senator from Rhode Island, for his longstanding commitment to the issue of climate change, the well-worn ``Time to Wake Up'' poster, and the work he has done over the years to force us to pay attention to this issue.

I am, as he indicated, going to talk about what is going on in the Gulf of Maine, but I want to broaden the discussion just for a few moments to talk about the issue of climate change as a broader question before us.

This isn't some environmental dream. It is not something that was invented by someone. It was discovered by scientists, and it is dollars and cents. It is the most practical problem that we have to deal with.

I am on the Armed Services Committee. We are talking about military bases all over the world--some as close as right down in this region and then down toward Norfolk, VA--that are under a severe threat from rising sea levels and that are going to cost us billions, if not trillions, of dollars to upgrade and maintain because of rising sea levels. This isn't something abstract. This is something that is happening today, and it is something that we are going to have to deal with that is going to have an enormous cost. The longer we put off preventing and dealing with this issue, the higher that cost is going to be.

There is a second reason this is a national security issue, and that is the aggravation of conflict and the initiation of migration. The number of refugees from Syria--which has disrupted the politics of Europe and disrupted many of the European countries and, indeed, has had a reflection here in this country--is roughly 3 to 4 million people. The estimate for refugees from climate change--from extreme temperature, from drought, from famine--is in the hundreds of millions as opposed to 3 to 4 million from Syria. Imagine the disruption to all of the countries of the world that are destinations for these refugees who are fleeing places that have become uninhabitable.

This is a question we are going to have to address, and, as our military characterizes it, it is a threat multiplier because when you have people moving from one region to another, you have conflict. From time immemorial, conflict has largely been based on things like access to water and access to arable land, and we are talking about an enormous accelerator of that across the world.

Now let me talk about the effects in my home State. First the good news. Lobster landings in Maine are up. We have ridden a lobster boom over the past 30 years. Since the 1980s, the poundage of lobsters harvested in Maine has grown 500 percent. When I was Governor, a good harvest of lobsters was 50 to 60 million pounds; 2 years ago, it was 127 million pounds--more than double. That is the good news.

The bad news is that it is starting to change, and we may have seen the turning point in this boom. We don't know that, but the last 2 years have been down substantially from the peak in 2016. We will see what happens this year. Hopefully, it is a blip and not a trend.

By the way, one of the reasons the lobster industry has survived and flourished in Maine is not only the favorable impact of gradual increases in temperature but because of the conservation ethic of the lobstermen themselves, who voluntarily throw back egg-bearing females. They cut a V-notch in their tails so they won't be caught again. If they are too small or too large, they throw them back. An amazing ethic of conservation has been imbued in the culture of lobstering and also in our laws for many years. So the fact that we still have a lobster fishery and that it is as vigorous and as productive as it is, is due in large measure to the creativity and conservation ethic of our lobstermen.

Here is the bad news. The bad news is, when water temperature gets to about 68 degrees, it is like turning a switch. It stresses the lobster population to the point where they can't survive. The good news is, it gets warmer, and they multiply. The bad news is, once it reaches a certain critical point, the species could collapse. Indeed, that is what has happened, as the Senator from Rhode Island has indicated, to the once-plentiful lobster population of New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.

The problem is, over recent years--and I have talked to a lobsterman friend today, just this afternoon--the center of gravity of lobstering along the Maine coast is steadily moving north and east. He told me it has moved about 50 miles in the last 10 years.

The other problem that is occurring is that the lobsters are going further offshore to seek cooler water, which means the lobstermen have to go further. They have to have bigger boats. They have to make more of an investment in order to make a living.

Right now, we are in good shape, but the trend is not good. We are seeing other changes that have magnified both the boom, and what we are worried about is the bust. We have seen changes decline in some fish species like the cod that fed on baby lobsters. Now, as Senator Whitehouse mentioned, we are seeing a growth of a fish that was never seen in Maine in the recent past, the black sea bass.

My friend tells me, today they are catching triggerfish in the Gulf of Maine, which is a North Carolina species. They have even caught seahorses in lobster traps. This is a dramatic change as the waters warm.

As I mentioned, if they get close to the 68-degree level, the lobster population is in trouble. It is not only lobsters. By the way, lobstering is a serious business in Maine--half a billion dollars just in land value, a billion and a half dollars in the overall economic impact of this species to our State.

By the way, before I leave the question of lobsters, I have to acknowledge the comments made by the Senator from Pennsylvania earlier when he was talking about the economy, and he flashed a warning light at the end of his remarks about trade and tariffs. We are already seeing the negative impact of what I consider ill-considered tariffs on China. The first place they retaliated was against lobsters. Twenty percent of the entire lobster catch in Maine is sold and exported to China. It is our fastest growing market. If the Chinese tariffs they have already announced are imposed and fully implemented, it could cut that to zero.

Canada doesn't have those tariffs. Canada is not engaging in a trade war with China. Canada and other countries are moving into the vacuum we have created. The idea that we can impose tariffs on other countries without any ill effects here just isn't true.

Right now, it looks like the lobster industry, soybeans in the Midwest, maple syrup in Vermont, other agricultural products across the country are going to be collateral damage in an incipient trade war that I don't understand where it is going.

I would like to know what the strategy is. What is the end game? Where does this go? So far, I haven't seen any indication of that. What I have seen an indication of is severely dangerous impacts on our economy industry.

Another part of our ocean ecosystem is clams. There is a massive decrease in harvest because of two reasons: One, acidification. As the Senator from Rhode Island indicated, 30 percent of all the carbon dioxide that has been emitted during the Industrial Revolution has ended up in acidification in the ocean and, two, nonnative green crabs, which are exploding because they like the warmer water. They have been around for 100 years, but that population is growing enormously. They are just devastating the clams. Green crabs can consume 40 half-inch clams a day. Those crabs have decimated blue mussels and scallops along the shore. They are going for clams, and we are concerned that maybe lobsters could be next.

Warming water and shifting predators are not the only challenges we face: more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, absorbed into the ocean, and one-quarter of what is emitted goes into the ocean. The ocean then becomes more acidic. Any kind of shelled animals--lobsters, clams, oysters--expend evermore energy maintaining the pH balance in their bodies, and that means they can't grow and reproduce. The world's oceans have become 30 percent more acidic since the Industrial Revolution.

Oysters have become a great new product for Maine. We are growing them in oyster farms along the Damariscotta River and other places. You can go to fancy restaurants and see Damariscotta oysters. They are wonderful.

My friend Bill Mook, who is one of the pioneers of the oyster industry in Maine, has had to move the incubation of his oysters out of the ocean, out of the natural river, onshore, and into tanks so he can buffer the water to minimize the acidification and then put them back in the water to grow out. That is a pure result of climate change and acidification of the ocean.

Freshwater runoff is another issue that increases the acidification. We have had an enormous increase in the amount of freshwater rainfall in this country, and in Maine that has increased the acidification in the oceans. What do we do? The first thing we do is admit there is a problem. You can't solve a problem if you act like there is nothing wrong. The first thing we have to do is admit there is a problem. I think more and more people are coming to that conclusion.

When this administration was nominating people, the refrain I heard in all of the hearings was climate is changing, man has an impact on it, but we don't know how much.

That is progress. At least it is an admission that something is happening. What do we do? We admit there is a problem. I think we are close to reaching that point.

The second thing we have to do is more research. We have to continue to fund the science to do the research to understand what is happening, to understand what we can do to mitigate these risks. Research and scientific data is crucial. For some of our great agencies that have the people who have been researching this for years, to be suppressing the research or not supporting it or burying it is not a service to our country. Research is crucial. We need the facts. We need the data. We need mitigation strategies. We also need to pay attention to the underlying cause of climate change, which is a combustion of fossil fuels and the enormous amount of carbon dioxide that is being added to the atmosphere.

This is a long-term challenge. It is not something we can solve in the next 1 or 2 years. Some people ask: Well, it is such a long-term challenge, why are we doing it? Because it may not be solved for 50 years.

In my office is Edmund Muskie's desk. I sit behind Edmund Muskie's desk--one of the greatest Senators of the 20th century and one of the greatest citizens Maine has ever produced. Fifty years ago--2 years from now, 1970--Edmond Muskie led the passage of the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, which are two of the greatest and most important pieces of legislation passed in this body in the last 100 years; the first real recognition that we had a responsibility to the environment, that we had a responsibility to our children and our grandchildren. By the way, astoundingly, the Clean Water Act passed the U.S. Senate unanimously. Can you imagine? We can't agree on the time of day unanimously in this body. In 1970, under Ed Muskie's leadership, the Clean Water Act was passed unanimously.

The point I want to make is, the steps they took almost 50 years ago have cleaned up our rivers, have cleaned up our atmosphere, have made parts of our country blossom again.

In Maine, we are working on our rivers. The towns that turned their backs on the rivers are now turning back toward the rivers because people can fish, swim, and enjoy the rivers. When Ed Muskie started his lonely crusade in the late 1960s, the rivers were essentially open sewers.

Fifty years ago, Ed Muskie started that work. We see the benefit of it today. We should be doing the same thing. The fact that it may not come to fruition for 20, 30, 40, or 50 years is no reason to not start now. We have to start. This isn't pie in the sky. This isn't somebody trying to impose new regulations. This isn't something that is made up by environmentalists or people who just don't want to see any development. No. This is lives and livelihood. These are families, communities. It is responsible stewardship and just plain common sense.

There is a lot of science, and there is a lot of complexity to this issue. It seems to me we can take inspiration from Ed Muskie, Howard Baker, and all those a generation ago who built the edifice upon which we have a cleaner, healthier, stronger economy and stronger society.

I remember those days. The great debate was payrolls versus pickerel. You couldn't have payrolls if you preserved the pickerel. It turned out to not be true. We have developed the strongest economy in the history of the world. Yet we paid attention to the environment. We have paid attention to our responsibilities, to our children and our grandchildren, and we created the economy at the same time we were able to clean up the environment.

I remember those debates. They were bitter. You can't do it. If you do this, you are going to put everything out of business. There will be no economy. That was the argument. It hasn't happened.

Finally, you can talk about the science. You can get caught up in all the data. To me, there is a really easy rule that makes this easy to understand what our responsibilities are. I call it the ``Maine rototiller rule.'' Many people in Maine have gardens, but it is a small garden. It is in your backyard, so it doesn't make sense for everybody to buy a rototiller--the machine you use once or twice a year to clean your garden and till over the ground and begin to plant. We borrow them. I used to borrow one from my neighbor Peter Cox. The ``Maine rototiller rule'' goes like this. When you borrow your neighbor's rototiller, you return it to them in as good a shape as you got it, with a full tank of gas.

That is all you need to know about environmental stewardship. Do you know what? We have the planet on loan. We don't own it. We own a little piece of land for a generation, but we don't own it. We have it on loan from our children and our grandchildren and their children and their grandchildren. Therefore, we have a sacred responsibility to turn over the planet to them in the same or better shape than we found it. That is our responsibility. It is very simple. When you borrow something from your neighbor, you return it in as good a shape as you found it. That is what we should be doing today.

We can do this. There will be costs, but the costs of not doing it will dwarf the costs we can undertake today to protect the Gulf of Maine, the coast of the United States, the fields of Africa, the forests of North America, and the land and water and air that our children and grandchildren deserve to have passed on to them in better shape than we found it.

We can do this. We can start today. We may not live to see the results, but we will know we have done something important, something meaningful, something that will make a difference in the lives of generations we don't know. They will know what we do or what we don't do. I myself choose the side of action--recognizing the problem, analyzing it, understanding it, and acting to mitigate the harms that otherwise will befall our children.

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