Climate Change

Floor Speech

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Mr. McNERNEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman, my friend, for yielding.

I want to thank my colleagues here tonight, Mr. Payne, Mr. Schneider, and especially Mr. Garamendi, who has been an absolute fierce advocate for action on climate and other issues. He is untiring, and I really have a lot of respect and admiration for that.

Let me talk a little bit about the report first. This is a scientific report. It was created over a period of years by scientists. It is not an opinion paper. It is a paper that is based on facts, and it is based on modeling.

If you do modeling, then you know what happens is you create a model. You test it against the facts. You adjust the model. You test it against the facts. You adjust it, and you reiterate until your model is pretty accurate. Then you make predictions.

That is what has happened here. They have some very well-tested models that are predicting very bad things. So it is an important piece of scientific literature, and I think science should be at least involved in the decisionmaking in our great country.

Now, I think it is almost laughable that the administration tried to limit the exposure of this report by putting it out on Black Friday. I guess that didn't work because a lot of people are excited in a negative way about this report and what it says.

I think most Americans recognize that there is a problem here. Most all Americans recognize it, especially the millennials and the younger Americans. They know because it is going to affect their lives. Their lives are going to be directly affected more and more as we go forward, so they are very engaged in this issue.

I think everyone knows in their hearts that there is a problem here, but I think one of the things that is a challenge is: How do we move forward on this?

People don't like change. People like to assume that their lives are going to go on, and they will do things the way they have always done them. But I think one of the things they are worried about is jobs.

Well, let's talk about that for a second. Mr. Garamendi mentioned that I worked on windmills. I worked on windmills for 25 years. I climbed a lot of windmills. It is a pretty exciting thing to do. You are up there working on something that is cool. You are looking down on the natural environment around you. If I was a coal miner, I would say: That is a pretty good alternative to going down into coals mine and breathing dust as to go up on windmills--kind of cold sometimes--but to go up on windmills and work your heart out and create clean energy.

So another thing to think about is the number of jobs per energy produced. Renewable energies create a lot more jobs per unit of energy produced. That is an important consideration.

So why can't we move forward?

I think the economy is going to improve if we reduce our consumption of fossil fuels. It will create jobs. It will make the environment cleaner. We will have less health impacts than we are seeing from fossil fuels, from coal, from oil, and certainly see a lot less climate impacts.

There are a lot of really good reasons to move forward on this. I think if you can look at what America and the world would be like if we weaned ourselves off fossil fuels, it is a beautiful picture. We will have a lot of clean energy. We will have people employed. We will have people using electricity for transportation. We will have energy generated from windmills, solar, geothermal, and from all of these technologies that are there today that are economic and cost-effective. In fact, wind and solar are more than competitive with fossil fuels. You can produce more energy per cost of energy with wind and solar than you can with oil and coal.

They say natural gas is a great transition fuel, but if you only lose 2 percent of natural gas emissions in the process of creating energy, then you are already undoing the energy efficiency advantage of natural gas because natural gas methane is so effective as a climate change gas.

I think we have a lot to look forward to if we determine and decide that we are going to move forward with this transition.

One last thing. I want to say I have a challenge to the President.

Mr. President, we know that climate change is happening. If you want to go down as a great President, if you want to go down in history as someone that changed history, as someone who changed history for the better, than embrace climate change action. Make a difference.

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