Cloture Motion
Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am both pleased and honored that my distinguished friend Senator Feinstein is joining me today to discuss how climate change is affecting our country, from the East to the West, from one of the biggest States to the smallest one. Of course, we are small in size, but we are long on coastline.
As the Presiding Officer will understand, as coastal States, Rhode Island, California, and the coastal States along the South Atlantic coasts are on the frontlines of climate change. Sea levels are already rising, and as they do, Rhode Island's coastal communities are having to spend more and more money on resiliency projects to protect their roads, their bridges, their beaches, their water treatment plants, their harbors, and other infrastructure.
A 2000 study by our DEM found that 7 of 19 water treatment facilities in Rhode Island are expected to be overwashed by floodwaters driven by climate change. Frankly, just figuring out what this risk looks like is hard for coastal municipalities, so our State's Coastal Resources Management Council developed a project called STORMTOOLS, which allows Rhode Islanders to see how sea level rise is expected to affect their homes, their businesses, their beaches, and their parks.
This is a STORMTOOLS-generated map of Upper Narragansett Bay. The blue color you see here is all land. People have homes and businesses and facilities there. All of this blue is now land, but it is land that gets covered by 10 feet of sea level rise. Ten feet of sea level rise is within STORMTOOLS' business-as-usual scenario in which we continue to burn fossil fuels unabated.
As you can see, some of Rhode Island's peninsulas get cut off to become islands, some of our islands disappear or fracture. Rhode Island becomes an archipelago. I hope my colleagues on the other side can appreciate that changes like this to my State are things I have to respond to.
A recent New York Times article suggested we may have to retreat from the coasts in order to protect ourselves from rising waters and more powerful storms. Why should Rhode Islanders have to retreat from our coasts just to protect polluters? It makes no sense. It is fundamentally unjust.
Many of us not only live near the sea but work and sail and fish on it, so climate change threatens Rhode Islanders' lifestyles, our livelihoods, and our lives.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has estimated for the United States that by 2100, nearly 2.5 million residential and commercial properties, collectively valued at $1.07 trillion today, will be at risk of chronic flooding, and that is just from sea level rise alone. Storm surge and rain-driven flooding amplify that risk.
Drill down to Rhode Island, and Zillow, the real estate firm, has estimated that over 5,300 homes worth almost $3 billion will be lost if the sea level rises just 6 feet. And that is just homes that are already there. People are still building in Rhode Island's coastal areas, so there are more new homes every day.
Why should Rhode Islanders have to face this risk? Why should 5,300 people have to risk losing their homes just to protect polluters? It is not right.
Rising water isn't the only way in which climate change is affecting the oceans off our coasts. Warming oceans are disrupting our traditional fishing grounds and driving valuable species like lobster out of Rhode Island waters altogether.
The just-released National Climate Assessment warns of falling catches. Last week I met with charter boat captains and recreational fishing enthusiasts from Rhode Island and nearby New England. They, like their peers in Louisiana, are facing changes in the size, geographic range, and number of fish that they catch.
Our commercial fishermen tell the same story. They are worried that their kids and grandkids will not be able to experience the traditions and lifestyles they cherish or pursue the same career on the water.
Why should Rhode Island have to lose this heritage just to protect polluters?
Senator Feinstein has seen similar changes in California, and I welcome her remarks.
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Senator Feinstein, the fires have affected us-- nothing like what you describe. Our State has not burned. Our State is not like California today, still smoldering from such a massive fire. We don't have the devastation of the photograph that you just showed us, but it has sure affected our air quality.
All the way across the continent, the fires we have had in California, Oregon, and Canada have affected the Atlantic States as far south as North Carolina. As you know, these fires lost tremendous amounts of what they call fine particulates into the atmosphere, and those fine particulates exacerbate asthma and other respiratory conditions, increase the risk of diseases like lung cancer. In a nutshell, bad air equals bad health, and we are getting bad air from these fires.
Of course, forest fires aren't the only way that climate change degrades Rhode Island's air quality. You just make the air warmer, which global warming is doing, and hotter temperatures help to form more ozone. Ozone, as we know, is dangerous for children and the elderly and anybody with a respiratory condition.
One in ten Rhode Islanders has asthma. Our air quality receives a grade of C from the American Lung Association, largely from forces out of our control--out-of-State sources and ozone coming in from upwind States.
This is not just an inconvenience. Across the country, air pollution, much of it made worse by climate change, causes a staggering 200,000 premature deaths each year. Why should Rhode Islanders have to put up with that just to protect polluters?
Of course, those aren't the only ways that climate change affects human health. Temperature extremes worsen health. There have been studies both in Rhode Island and in Senator Feinstein's State that show that as temperatures rise, there are more deaths, often not associated in the coroner's report with heat but clearly statistically following the heat.
ER visits in Rhode Island skyrocket when daily temperatures pass 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and the National Climate Assessment, based on a study of Rhode Island hospitals, predicts that the number of ER visits will increase from these conditions by 400 per year by 2050 and up to an additional 1,500 a year by 2095.
Of course, the list of health consequences goes on: disease-carrying insects, such as ticks and mosquitoes; noxious algal blooms, as the Senator from California mentioned, that produce water-borne toxins and pathogens; longer pollen seasons ramping up people's allergies.
Why should Rhode Islanders or Californians have to put up with these conditions just to protect polluters?
Of course, it is not just the doctors who are worried; economists are starting to paint some very grim pictures. Freddie Mac, our great housing corporation, warns of a coastal property values crash that will rival the 2008 mortgage meltdown. I quote them:
The economic losses and social disruption [ . . . ] are likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the housing crisis and Great Recession.
The Bank of England and numerous academic economists warn of a ``carbon bubble''--a separate economic risk that poses what they call a systemic risk to the global economy.
Of course, the National Climate Assessment details grim economic consequences that climate change will have for our U.S. economy. Of course, it doesn't have to be bad economic news. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz testified that ``retrofitting the global economy for climate change would help to restore aggregate demand and growth. . . . [C]limate policies, if well designed and implemented, are consistent with growth, development, and poverty reduction. The transition to a low-carbon economy is potentially a powerful, attractive, and sustainable growth story, marked by higher resilience, more innovation, more liveable cities, robust agriculture, and stronger ecosystems.''
Why would we not want that? That is the advice of a Nobel Prize- winning economist.
A 2018 report from the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate estimates that this green energy transition may increase global economic growth by $26 trillion through 2030 and create 65 million low- carbon jobs. Growth will come not just from those new jobs but also from lower energy costs. As Stiglitz points out, transitioning to renewables can reduce costs. To quote him, ``Many energy efficiency technologies actually have a negative cost to implement.''
Renewable energy, electric cars, battery storage, carbon capture, energy efficiency, low-carbon and zero-carbon fuels--these are technologies of the future, promising millions of great jobs. The question is whether these will be American technologies and American jobs or whether China, Germany, Japan, or other countries will win the transition to a low-carbon economy. Why should America lose that competition just to protect polluters?
Senator Feinstein can eloquently tell us how innovation is California's bread and butter, so let me inquire of the distinguished chairman/ranking member. What kind of exciting developments are you seeing in California?
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Exciting developments in innovation are you seeing in California.
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank the Senator. Of course, California's massive economy is a vitally important part of the innovation that is going to help solve this problem if we can get the political will and the economic alignments to do this.
Rhode Island, of course, has its own small innovation story. We are the first State to get offshore wind, steel in the water, and electrons on the grid. We are very proud of the company that did it. Indeed, the market has responded quite favorably. They have been bought for half a billion dollars by a larger company. That is great progress for Rhode Island.
We are a leader in the composites industry. One of our composites companies, TPI Composites, is manufacturing wind blades for wind towers that spin turbines and generate electricity. We also got our first electric buses in Providence, and the electric bus bodies were built by the same group in Warren, RI, to be light, clean, and efficient. In 10 years, TPI has manufactured more than 10,000 wind blades and is gearing up to provide more than 3,350 bus bodies. So things are moving.
Our university is following on. It received $19 million in funding from the National Science Foundation for ``developing a new research infrastructure to assess, predict and respond to the effects of climate variability on coastal ecosystems.'' We have to bring innovation to bear on the changes that are coming, and we have to bring innovation to bear to protect against the changes that will be devastating if we don't act responsibly.
I hope that we as a body in the Senate take the message from what is happening around us--your fires, Louisiana's floods, Rhode Island's sea level rise, and predictions for turning ourselves into an archipelago-- and begin to take this seriously, or we could just keep protecting the polluters.
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank the Senator.
Senator Feinstein may remember, I came here in 2007. I was sworn in in January of 2007. In 2007 and in 2008 and in 2009, just what we would expect to be happening on an issue like this was actually happening in the Senate. By my recollection, we had four bipartisan climate bills, we had bipartisan climate hearings, and we had constant bipartisan climate conversations. This was an issue which was being taken seriously by this body through 2009, then in 2010 something happened, and all of that bipartisan work came to a screeching, dead halt. What happened was that the Supreme Court--five Republican Justices on the Supreme Court--issued a decision called Citizens United, which told big industries, big special interests like the fossil fuel industry: You can now spend as much money as you want in politics. There are no limits on what you can spend. That industry took off like a gunshot, like a runner from the start with that decision--I suspect they anticipated it--and instantly shut down all bipartisanship on climate change by virtue of the political spending and threats that Citizens United allowed them to do.
If we could do it before Citizens United, we ought to be able to do it still now that we have a better understanding of what the threats are. This is a very real proposition to get something done, and I thank the Senator for her leadership over many years on this and many causes.
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