Climate Change
Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, it is my great honor and pleasure to be joined on the floor today by my senior Senator from Rhode Island, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Jack Reed. We are here today on the Senate floor to speak about the perils that climate change poses to America's national security.
I am going to frame my remarks around a fact and a proposition.
The fact, as reported in the 2017 climate science report, is that the oceans of the world are absorbing more than 9 zettajoules of heat energy each year.
The proposition is one that I think most of us agree with--that America is and remains the world's indispensable Nation, exceptional and exemplary.
Let's unpack that fact a little bit. More than 9 zettajoules of heat energy go into the ocean every year.
First, what is a zettajoule? A zettajoule is sextillion joules, or 10 to the 21st power joules. That is a lot of zeros. More practically, 9 zettajoules is around a dozen times humankind's total annual energy consumption.
More kinetically speaking, the added heat in our oceans is equivalent to four Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs exploding in the oceans every second--every second. So every minute, 240 Hiroshima blasts in the ocean--in the time of my remarks, probably 3,000 Hiroshima explosions-- with the oceans capturing all of that heat energy.
Let's go back to the proposition that America is the world's indispensable and exemplary Nation. Years ago, Daniel Webster probably said it best, describing the work of our Founders as having ``set the world an example.'' His was not a unique vision of America. From Jonathan Winthrop at the beginning to Ronald Reagan recently, we have called ourselves a city on a hill, set high for the world to witness. From President Kennedy to President Obama, inaugural addresses have noted that the glow of our ideals ``light[s] the world.'' President Clinton argued that ``[p]eople the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than the example of our power.''
When Daniel Webster said that our Founding Fathers had set the world an example, he went on to say this: ``The last hopes of mankind, therefore, rest with us; and if it should be proclaimed that our example had become an argument against the experiment, the knell''-- meaning the death nail--``of popular liberty would be sounded throughout the earth.''
How does the fact of 9 zettajoules and the proposition of America's role relate to each other? First is the climate chaos mankind will increasingly have to bear. A recent study published by Nature found with 99.9999 percent confidence that Earth is warming due to human activity. I could give you any number of risks, such as global sea level rise or increasing wildfires and droughts or the unprecedented CO
Through the years, America's national security experts could not have made it much plainer. Fifty-eight former military and national security leaders sent this letter this month to President Trump warning that ``[c]limate change is real, it is happening now, it is driven by humans, and it is accelerating.'' They went on to say that the administration's denial of climate science will ``erode our national security.'' They warned that the effects of climate change are already being ``used by our adversaries as a weapon of war,'' citing ISIS's control of water during climate change-exacerbated drought. This letter urges President Trump to ``drop the politics, and allow our national security and science agencies to do their jobs.''
They are not alone. The Pentagon's 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review described climate change as a ``global threat multiplier,'' warning that ``the pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world.''
Former admiral Samuel Locklear, as head of U.S. Pacific Command, warned in 2013 that climate change was the biggest long-term security threat in his area of operation, noting the need for the military to organize for, as he called it, ``when the effects of climate change start to impact these massive populations.''
``If it goes bad,'' he said, ``you could have hundreds of thousands or millions of people displaced and then security will start to crumble pretty quickly.''
A recent survey of nearly 300 Active-Duty and veteran servicemembers found that 77 percent ``consider it fairly or very likely that military bases in coastal or island regions will be damaged by flooding or severe storms as a result of climate change.''
In response to a provision championed by Rhode Island Congressman Jim Langevin in the House and by Senator Reed in the Senate, the last NDAA bill instructed the Department of Defense to provide a report examining the effects of climate change on the military. Of 79 DOD installations evaluated, 53 currently experience recurrent flooding, 43 are experiencing drought conditions, 36 are prone to wildfires, 6 are seeing desertification, and 1 is dealing with thawing permafrost. That is what is happening now. In 20 years, the DOD predicts, an additional seven installations will experience flooding, five more will see drought conditions, and seven will see wildfire risks.
Of course, all of those risks will get worse. This report failed to list the top 10 most vulnerable installations and ignores the Marine Corps, but it nevertheless warned that ``[t]he effects of a changing climate are a national security issue with potential impacts to Department of Defense missions, operational plans, and installations.''
The national security ties to climate change begin with our military.
A second point. Henry Kissinger once told me that the great revolutions of the world have always come from what he called a ``confluence of resentments.'' I have not forgotten that phrase since he used it, a ``confluence of resentments.'' The poorest on the planet, those who live closest to the land, who lead subsistence lives, will suffer most the brunt of the coming change, and they will resent it. It is human nature.
If you divide the world into three groups, you can call one group the very poorest, who will starve when, for instance, their fisheries collapse. The middle group is distressed when fisheries collapse but has the resources to find alternative food sources. At the top, the fish in our air-conditioned supermarket may cost a bit more and come from a different part of the ocean, and we may drive home in our air- conditioned SUV with a slightly larger grocery bill, but that will be it for us. The first two groups will resent it when they feel the pain caused by the SUV crowd. If you turn that pain up high enough, good luck defending with those injured people the parliamentary democracy and market capitalism system that brought this on. The injustice will amplify the resentments.
My final point. How does America fare as the exemplary Nation through all of this? Well, very badly. Democracy and capitalism are the hallmarks of our country, and the failure of those institutions to address climate change will not be a good story.
Worse than the failure is the reason for it. The climate denial apparatus that has won unseemly influence in Congress now will surely lose the test of time. The consequences of climate change are determined by laws of chemistry, of physics, and of biology. Those laws can't be repealed or wished away. Propaganda can manipulate people and passions and politics, but it has no effect on the immutable laws of nature. So the fossil fuel industry's denial apparatus will ultimately be exposed as a fraud and a scandal, and history will lament and condemn it as one of the great American frauds and scandals. History's judgment will come harshly, and it will fall harshly on an American democracy that let itself be overborne by this apparatus.
James Madison, in the Federalist Papers, warned of ``moments in public affairs when the people [can be] misled by artful misrepresentations of interested men.'' By that, of course, he meant people with a conflict of interest. He went on to say that misled people ``may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.'' We have certainly been misled by artful misrepresentations of the interested men of the fossil fuel industry.
It may be hard for us in our world of air-conditioning, SUVs, and imported fresh fish to contemplate resentment and revolution, but the harms to the oceans of 9 zettajoules of heat--4.5 Hiroshima explosions worth of heat per second that we are adding to the oceans--those harms are on a collision course with our destiny as a city on a hill. We urgently need to show the world that market capitalism and democracy don't fail when presented with big problems if we are to head off a confluence of resentments that we are now making inevitable.
With that, I yield to my distinguished senior Senator, Mr. Jack Reed.
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