Climate Change

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I am pleased to come to the floor with my colleagues from Massachusetts and Delaware to address the grave threat to America and to our planet from carbon pollution and climate chaos.

Over the last 2 weeks, representatives from nearly 200 countries have gathered together in Poland to continue the fight against climate chaos. They know that in each and every country we are seeing the impacts across this planet. There are more powerful hurricanes, like we have seen here in the United States, more destructive wildfires, like those we see in the Northwest of the United States, record breaking heat waves, air quality deterioration, loss of glaciers, loss of global ice, Arctic ice, insect-borne diseases that spread, and coral reefs dying. We are in trouble.

The scientists tell us we are now driving the sixth great extinction on planet Earth. It is being driven by human conduct, and a big factor in that is our burning of fossil fuels. We are, in fact, facing the greatest threat humankind has known on the planet. When you begin to damage your own home, you really are in a situation that needs to be immediately addressed.

It was back in 1959 that Edward Teller, a famed scientist, gave a speech to the 100th anniversary of the petroleum industry. He said: This energy that you have unleashed has done amazing things on the planet. It has given so much ability for humankind to magnify their efforts.

There was a lot of positive in that, but then the scientist, Edward Teller, went on to say: But there are a couple of challenges here, one of which is that there are only so many fossil fuels in the ground and so, at some point, we will run out.

Of course, we know that there are a lot more fossil fuels in the ground now than we knew about in 1959.

He said that there is a second problem. When you burn this stuff, it creates an invisible, odorless gas. So it doesn't really sound like a challenge, but it traps heat. He said that because it traps heat, it will melt the poles, it will raise the oceans, and that will be a problem for humankind because humankind lives along the waterways.

He didn't go into more details than that, but it was one of the first direct commentaries--in 1959--about how the age of fossil fuels was going to produce significant problems for human kind.

Now, that speech he gave in 1959. That was 59 years ago, and what have we seen in the ensuing period? We have seen a roughly 100-point increase in carbon pollution on the planet. Or to take my lifetime, for example, in 1956, when I was born, we had about 312 parts per million of carbon.

I will just put this chart up. What we see here on the red is the rising line of carbon, going back to roughly when I was born. About in here, 1956 until now, we see that it is accelerating, but essentially there is a 100 parts-per-million increase. We started at about 312 when I was born. We are at about almost 412 now at the very peak. That is a 30-percent increase in my single lifetime, just a little flash of time in terms of the life of this planet--a 32-percent increase in carbon in the atmosphere, and it is having a significant impact.

The most obvious way to look at this impact is the global temperature year after year. So here we see the 10 hottest years on record. We see that only one of those years, 1998, was before the turn of the century. The rest of them have all been since the turn of the century. In fact, 17 of the 18 hottest years on record have occurred since the year 2000. Not only that, but look at the dramatic, dramatic change for 2014, and 2015, and 2016, and 2017--these last four years--and how much hotter the planet is than it was just a few years before. That should trouble all of us.

We have seen all of this when global leaders came together in 2015 in Paris--the largest gathering of world leaders in human history. They said we have to put limits on what we are doing. We all have to apply a strategy of each reducing our carbon dioxide production. I would like to say that they have been successful, but they have not. Total global carbon production is still going up and, because of that, we are still in deep trouble.

If we didn't have the information just from these bars of the hottest years on record, we could turn to a more complicated analysis, or several of them, that have come out just recently. Just back in October, we had the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, bringing the work of scientists across the planet together, and it painted a very stark picture of where we are right now and how this will only get a lot worse in the years ahead.

Or we can turn to the Trump administration's report that came out the day after Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving, we give thanks for a lot of things. The day after, the administration informed us that we here on the planet have a big problem. What did they say in that report? Again, this is the Trump administration speaking: ``Earth's climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities.''

Or we could turn to a third report that just came out called the ``Global Carbon Project,'' and it says that after plateauing for several years, in 2018, global carbon emissions rose 2.7 percent. So we are back on an upward trajectory. We hit a recordbreaking 37 billion metric tons.

How did the United States do? Well, similarly, our carbon emissions here in the United States went up about 2.5 percent.

Over the last 2 years, the Trump administration has tried to do everything it can to make the situation worse. There were rules in place to cut methane leaks because methane is much more of a potent global warming gas than is carbon dioxide. So you never want to let it out of the pipe. But they worked to weaken those rules. They worked to weaken vehicle emission standards so we get more pollution for each mile, rather than less pollution.

I did find one thing of interest; that is, when Judith Garber, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, went over to Poland to give a report for the United States. She bragged about our carbon capture utilization and storage technology, and how one powerplant in Texas is capturing more than 90 percent of the emissions from its blue gas stream. So she was holding this up as a vision of what the United States is doing to contribute to the technology in the world and to help things be better.

What she didn't say is, the previous week, on December 6, the Trump administration issued a draft rule exempting new powerplants from carbon capture. That would have been a much more complete story about the record of this administration.

Of the 20 nations represented at the recent G20 summit in Argentina, only the United States refused to sign a nonbinding statement saying countries were committed to fighting climate chaos. All we had to do is say, yes, we are aware it is a problem, and we are committed to fighting it, but the United States turned that down. Over in Poland, we joined with Russia and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait--three oil-rich nations--to weaken a statement recognizing the international report about the challenges we face.

We need global leadership. Without our help, countries still came together in Poland to write a rule book to try to go forward without the involvement and leadership of the United States. They worked very hard on that rule book, and it addressed things like transparency and accountability; it addressed issues related to carbon credits; it addressed issues that were designed to develop a strategy for technical experts and exactly how you count carbon in your country. It wasn't a perfect rule book, but we now have one, and we can make improvements on it in the future.

Think about how much faster we would go forward in tackling this problem if we had American leadership. We need this leadership. The world needs this leadership to tackle climate chaos. It is not something you can do just as good a job 10 years or 20 years from now as you can now because you can't get this carbon out of the atmosphere easily once it is in there. It stays for hundreds of years. It keeps adding to the trapping of heat for hundreds of years. We need to act now.

We are facing the big challenge of feedback loops. What do I mean? Up in the Arctic, when you have less ice, you have blue ocean, the sunshine goes into the water, and it heats it up more than if it were reflecting off ice. So it gets warmer and warmer and warmer.

How about this? Just a couple weeks ago, a picture was published of a lake in Alaska that was boiling--not with heat, but with methane; methane bubbling up out of the permafrost underneath the lake at such a rapid pace, it was a heavy boiling motion on the top of the water. That is a feedback loop that should scare us all because of the enormous heat-trapping properties of methane. All across the planet, as it gets warmer, permafrost and heat start off-gassing this methane.

So there we are. We have to move fast. We need American leadership to be fully engaged in the vision of Mission 100, going to 100 percent clean and renewable energy in the fastest possible time. We have to quit subsidizing fossil fuels and start subsidizing renewable energy or at least put them on a level playing field with each other. We need a green new deal to completely rebuild our energy economy in the United States of America and create all kinds of jobs--all kinds of working American jobs: sheet metal jobs, electrician jobs, pipefitting jobs, jobs of every kind--as we rework the energy economy to build that vision of 100 percent renewable energy. Think how many jobs you would create if you just proceeded to renovate your house. Now think of the tens of millions of jobs if you renovate the entire energy economy of the United States of America.

We need American leadership to work in partnership with other nations so every nation holds each other accountable to this vision of transitioning to renewable energy.

We need American leadership to say to Germany: Yes, you have done some things very well on solar, but why are you building a Nord Stream 2 pipeline to bring massive amounts of natural gas from Russia for the next-generation dependence on fossil fuel?

We need to say to Japan: You are putting your entire energy economy onto liquid natural gas. How can you meet your Paris obligations? How can you be a partner with the rest of the world if you are not willing to pursue renewable energy?

We need leadership in America that says to Australia: You are doubling down on coal while your outback is burning in the middle of your winter, and your Great Barrier Reef is half dead over the last couple of years from water that is too warm and too acidic due to climate chaos.

We need American leadership to tell China: Yes, you are investing in renewable energy at home. Great. Speed it up, but why are you financing 200 coal-powered plants around the world? That is not acceptable. Shut that down.

We have to have American leadership. This is not a question between economic development and the environment. Quite the contrary. In this case, renovating our energy economy creates a strong environment. It allows us to go to the cheapest form of energy on the planet, solar and wind.

Why is it the cheapest? Because there is no fuel. The fuel for solar is the Sun. We don't have to pay for that. The fuel for wind are the breezes that blow. We don't have to pay for that. In fact, just a few months ago Xcel Energy did a request for proposals for new electric generating capacity, and it came out at 2 cents per kilowatt hour for solar and 3 cents for wind. That is less than burning coal in an existing fossil fuel plant.

If you believe nothing about the damage to our planet because it is just too terrifying, and you don't want to hear that bad news, then at least turn to the economic opportunity of taking America forward to the cheapest, cleanest energy we can possibly have.

Wells Griffith, the administration's top adviser cop, said: ``We strongly believe that no country should have to sacrifice economic prosperity or energy security in pursuit of environmental sustainability.'' That is the big lie. That is the big Koch brothers lie to the planet; that somehow we must sacrifice our economy in order to pursue cleaner energy, when in fact the opposite is true.

American leadership has helped take the world forward in all kinds of technology. Some of those famous moments was our leadership in splitting the atom and creating atomic energy, putting a man on the Moon, creating the internet, taking on significant diseases, and leading the world in wiping them out--diseases like polio. We need that kind of leadership today, leadership to work in partnership with the world to save our planet.

I yield to my colleague from Florida.

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Mr. MERKLEY. I appreciate so much the comments of my colleague from Florida.

I had the chance to go down to Florida at the end of October at a rally to address the challenge of red tide, algae that was growing in the ocean that produces a toxin. The toxin is so powerful that it was causing a lot of respiratory problems for people who live along the gulf coast, and it was killing a lot of animals. People were talking about manatees, dolphins, turtles, and fish washing up on the beach. Not only did they have the toxins from the red algae, but they had the stench from the dying sea life.

The sense of people who gathered to talk about this was that dramatic action is needed; that this was completely compromising the quality of life, the health of the oceans, and the ability to harvest food out of the ocean. People were saying they were actually taking inland vacations; that is, leaving the coast until the air would get better. They said that, unfortunately, the circumstances had been in that bad condition for 10 months of the last 12 months--meaning they might not actually want to go back, at least not keep a home there.

I thought of the parallel from your State in Florida to my State in Oregon because we have an area in Southern Oregon that has been deeply afflicted by fire smoke the last two summers. The smoke has tainted furniture being sold. It has shut down outdoor events. It has stopped people from hiking the Cascade Trail. It is affecting the economy. House prices are changing. People are thinking twice about booking for--there is a different set of economic impacts. These are only the indirect impacts.

There is the direct impact on the Panhandle of Florida. I just saw the pictures of complete devastation when the hurricane came across earlier this year. Of course, we saw the pictures of complete devastation for some of the communities that the forest fires on the West Coast burned to a crisp.

So our two States and our citizens know there is a problem. Not everyone wants to face the underlying cause of methane and carbon pollution driving it, but everybody knows there is a problem.

We are fortunate to have your scientists--your NOAA scientists, your NASA scientists--and all the satellite information they are feeding us so we can study it and stand on the floor of the Senate and say: We do know the cause, and it is our responsibility as leaders of this Nation, leaders in the Senate, to proceed to make sure we act aggressively in partnership with the world.

I just want to say I thank you so much for your service in this Chamber and your knowledge about the scientific facts and willingness to never look away from them and to confront what those facts mean for the policies we need to adopt.

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