Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I will speak very briefly.

Rhode Island is a coastal State, and we are now looking at maps that our coastal agency, the local university, and the scientists at NOAA tell us will create a new face of Rhode Island in the decades ahead if we don't address climate change. We turn into an archipelago. We lose enormous amounts of waterfront, and as a small State, frankly, we don't have a lot to give back to the ocean. This is deadly serious for us.

I join in my colleague's sense of offense that the other side thinks this is something funny. This is not funny for Rhode Islanders; this is deadly real. You may disagree with us, but the one thing that, I think, we are owed on this subject is sincerity, but there is nothing sincere about the vote that is going to be held on the Green New Deal.

This is a vote that will be based on a cartoon version of the Green New Deal that was cooked up by the Koch brothers, who have their oily hands all over this mess, and it was instructed by the fossil fuel mouthpiece of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. It took only days for the majority leader to hop up and do the bidding of these farces.

We are owed better than this. If you disagree with our measures, fine. Have one of your own. We have five or six different bills and strategies that we are willing to work on. This is the time to be serious, to be sincere, and to quit mocking a concern that across the board is recognized as real. In fact, there is not a Republican here who can't go to his home State university and be told about the truth of climate change.

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