Cloture Motion

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, there is now no doubt that climate change is happening, that it is caused by human activity, and that we must act now to avoid the worse of it.

As science guy, Bill Nye, has said: "Climate change is happening, it's our fault, and we've got to get to work on this.''

For too long we have seen the fossil fuel industry and its army of front groups use manufactured doubt, phony doubt, as their weapon of choice to obstruct any solution. Well, science studies things, and it even studies doubt. A scientific study published by Nature has found that the evidence of human-caused climate change occurring has now achieved what scientists call the five sigma level of certainty.

What does that mean? This scientific standard means there is 99.9999 percent confidence that Earth is warming due to human activity. Put another way, there is a 1 in 3.5 million chance that human-caused warming is not occurring.

To compare, you have a 1 in 15,000 chance that you will be struck by lightning in your life. You have a 1 in 100,000 chance of being born a conjoined twin, and you have a 1 in 3.5 million chance the fossil fuel industry's phony doubt about climate change is true.

Yet, just one Republican has signed on to Senator Carper's resolution stating the basics--that climate change is real and caused by human activity, and Congress should take action now to address it.

In an editorial last week--this one here--even the middle-of-the-road USA Today said climate change is ``a true crisis facing the United States and the world,'' that "fossil fuel polluters keep using the atmosphere as a free waste dump,'' and, finally, that "[t]he public is growing impatient.''

Well, last week, here on the Senate floor, we actually had something resembling a climate debate break out. It was a little weird. As a debate, it coughed and banged and sputtered, and we didn't really engage. Many of our Republican colleagues had a very hard time mentioning the actual phrase "climate change.'' They found it impossible to talk at all about the costs of climate change--the floods, the fires, the rising seas, the worst yet to come. No one could mention the 1.5 degree centigrade limit that we need to meet.

They mostly wanted to have fun bashing an imaginary Koch brothers- invented version of the Green New Deal. However, some did say that they accepted the science. In particular, I was happy to see the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee clearly accept that climate change is real, that it is caused by humans, and that we have a responsibility to do something about it.

I appreciate that he pointed to the bipartisan work he and I have done on carbon capture and removal. I enjoyed working with him on that legislation, and I hope we can get its successor bill passed too. We just had a very good bipartisan committee hearing on it, but put those two bills together, and you are still nowhere near the scale of action that science demands.

Our scientists report that we must aim for net zero carbon emissions by the middle of this century to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Carbon capture will be a part of that, but there is zero chance it alone will be sufficient, and any plan that falls short of that mark amounts to its own diluted brand of climate denial. Bashing the Green New Deal doesn't solve the problem.

This is a good moment for me to interrupt my remarks because I see the majority leader on the floor. If I may, I will yield to him to close out the Senate and then have myself and Senator Van Hollen recognized at the conclusion of the majority leader's comments.

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