Executive Calendar

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as the Presiding Officer knows, I have often spoken about how climate change is affecting Rhode Island. Rising sea levels will remake my State's map. Warming seas are shifting our traditional fisheries away from Rhode Island. A hotter climate creates public health risks for Rhode Islanders. And the list goes on.

In the Senate, I have also tried to learn how climate change is affecting other States. The Presiding Officer was courteous about joining me in Louisiana when I made a trip to his State. I have been doing a fair amount of traveling, and last month I visited Wyoming to hear about climate change in the Cowboy State. That was the 17th State I visited on these climate trips.

Here is a little background on Wyoming. It is big. It is a lot bigger than Rhode Island. It is almost 400 miles wide by almost 300 miles north to south. Although it has some lovely lakes, Wyoming ain't coastal. Its lowest point is more than 3,000 feet above sea level-- three times higher than Rhode Island's highest point, Jerimoth Hill-- and its highest point, Gannett Peak, is almost 14,000 feet.

Wyomingites have a reputation for being conservative skeptics about climate change, but polling data shows that even in Wyoming, 60 percent of people think climate change is happening, 43 percent think humans are driving it, 69 percent say they support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and 68 percent think their schools should teach about global warming.

My trip began in Teton County, which I was repeatedly told is the liberal part of the State. Teton County is home to Jackson Hole and Grand Teton National Park, as well as a large chunk of America's legendary Yellowstone National Park. From Jackson, I went up to visit Yellowstone and then came back down over Togwotee Pass and down here to Dubois and then around on to Lake of the Woods, to the Wind River Indian Reservation, to Lander, to Pinedale, and back to Jackson.

In Teton County, I met with local elected officials from Jackson, from the Teton County council, and from the Wyoming Legislature. I learned that roughly two-thirds of Wyoming's revenues come from mineral extraction--mostly coal, oil, and natural gas. With all this fossil fuel money pouring into its coffers, Wyoming has no State income tax, sales tax of 4 percent, and one of the lowest effective property tax rates in the Nation. Indeed, I was told that Wyomingites get around $9 in services for every $1 they pay in taxes. It is a sweet deal. And fossil fuel picks up the rest of the tab.

There are problems with this political-economic model, however-- problems that folks in Wyoming repeatedly pointed out to me. First, it exposes Wyoming heavily to boom/bust cycles. Three coal companies have gone bankrupt just this year. It will also expose Wyoming to the devastating bust coming if, as predicted, fossil fuel assets crash. Almost all of Wyoming's eggs are in one fossil fuel basket.

Moreover, a political-economic model based on fossil fuel harms Wyoming's other economic driver: outdoor recreation--skiing and snowboarding, river rafting, backpacking, hiking, rock climbing, and fly fishing. Wyoming has abundant outdoor recreation.

During my trip, I heard how lucky I was to enjoy clear and smokeless skies in August and that this August was like August of times gone by. The new normal across the West is hotter, dryer summers driven by climate change, and that makes massive forest fires, filling the skies with smoke for weeks and months on end. We enjoyed clear skies.

In addition to the threat to life and property, wildfires harm Wyoming's tourism and outdoor recreation economies. Obviously, fewer people visit when iconic landscapes are obscured or when places they want to explore are at risk of fire. A representative from the Fremont County lodging tax board told me that fires can shut down roads to the national parks and forests, cutting hotels and motels off from the attractions to draw people there.

At the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, I sat down with over a dozen business leaders from the outdoor recreation industry who told me that outdoor recreation generates $5.6 billion in Wyoming and supports 50,000 jobs--actually more jobs than the fossil fuel industry. For the winter sports business, climate change is an existential threat, shortening ski seasons, worsening snow cover, and affecting these beautiful landscapes. For this industry, this problem is deadly serious, and the industry is struggling to learn how to get the political attention that the fossil fuel industry enjoys.

In Lander, I met with leaders from the renowned National Outdoor Leadership School, NOLS. NOLS draws people from around the world to learn about the outdoors, develop leadership skills, and study mountaineering and outdoor survival. It is the largest nongovernment employer in Fremont County. The president of NOLS told me: ``Without question, the number one risk the school faces is climate change.'' For instance, the risk of wildfire is up dramatically and along with it, property insurance rates. Climate change has disrupted NOLS's schedule at its outdoor campuses around the world, as wildfires, melting glaciers and permafrost, and upended stream flows make it difficult, impossible, or dangerous to access these course sites. For people who love these places, this hurts the heart as much as it hurts the pocketbook.

In Jackson, I met winter sports athletes from the group Protect Our Winters. These are amazing athletes who spoke about their passion for snow sports and magnificent mountain landscapes. They also spoke of climate change threatening the future of the sports they love. I listened to Lynsey Dyer deliver a wonderful presentation to a packed house in Jackson about how climate change is altering alpine environments. She is summoning the same inner strength that allows her to ski death-defying drops. I will tell you, look at the film of some of what she skis off of, and it will stun you. She is using that inner strength to build national support for climate action.

In Pinedale I heard how climate change threatens Wyoming's cold water fisheries. The Upper Green River and its tributaries are some of the most storied trout streams in the world, drawing in a big fishing business. I spent an afternoon with a fly fishing guy and a representative from Wyoming Trout Unlimited. They told me how higher temperatures and lower water flows, both caused by climate change, harm Wyoming's iconic trout, which need cold water with plenty of oxygen.

I also visited local scientists who study climate change. Dr. Michael Tercek and Dr. Andy Ray gave me a tour of Yellowstone National Park to show me how climate change is already changing the park's ecosystem, with vaster changes expected ahead. Dr. Tercek is an ecologist who has worked in Yellowstone for over two decades. Dr. Ray's specialty is amphibians, which may not be as iconic as Yellowstone's bison but are on the frontlines of climate change.

The scientists told me that just over the last 70 years, the average annual temperature in the greater Yellowstone area has risen by 2 degrees Fahrenheit. In parts of the region, there are now 60 fewer days a year with below-freezing temperatures than there were just 30 years ago. Summers are drier, and in winter there is less snowpack, meaning less snowmelt and less water in the spring and early summer.

You can already see changes in the park. Take cheatgrass. Cheatgrass is an invasive species whose roots don't hold the soil as well as the native sage brush. As temperatures warm, cheatgrass spreads to higher and higher elevations, supplanting the sage brush. The result is this: large gullies carved in hillsides as rain and snowmelt wash away the soil.

Consider Dr. Ray's amphibians. We visited several small ponds and tarns that dot the Yellowstone landscape. As temperatures warm and precipitation declines, water levels in many ponds fall, reducing habitat for these amphibians and making them more vulnerable to predators.

In this photo, you can see a line here along the edge of this pond. Most of the rocks here are gray. They are gray because they are covered by lichen that turns them that color. But if you look just above these grasses here, you will see rocks that are nearly pink in color. These are rocks that were submerged until recently, and the lichen hasn't yet had time to colonize--clear evidence that the water level at this pond has fallen rapidly.

We climbed up into some dead forests to look at what bark beetles are doing to the Rocky Mountains' conifers. Here is a photo I took of a branch from a tree killed by bark beetles. The beetles bore through the bark, and then their larvae eat the thin cambium layer between the bark and the wood of the tree trunk. This ultimately girdles and kills the tree. You can see in this photo the marks left by the bark beetles. This J-shaped mark you see here is particularly characteristic of bark beetles.

This chart shows how beetle kill spreads through forests once winter temperatures began warming. You see these temperature climbs here from 1980 forward, and you see a matching climb in beetle-killed trees in Colorado and Wyoming. Hotter, drier summers also stress the trees, making them more vulnerable to infestation. Once they are dead, they become wildfire tinder.

Bark beetles might seem like esoteric little creatures until you see the damage they have done throughout the Mountain West. Everywhere there is red on this map there is kill by bark beetles. Bark beetles have killed enough acres of western forest to cover the entire State of Wyoming and then some. You can see a lot of this kill is in Wyoming.

On the road from Yellowstone to Dubois, you cross Togwatee Pass, between the Absaroka and Wind River mountain ranges. You traverse miles and miles that look like this--dead trees as far as the eye can see, killed by beetle infestation.

In the Wind River Indian Reservation, I met a man named Jim Pogue. He said they call these gray, dead forests ``doghair forests.''

Here is a landscape dramatically altered by climate change. This forest died in less than a decade.

Before I met Dr. Tercek, I read an article in which he was quoted as saying: ``By the time my daughter is an old woman, the climate will be as different for her as the last ice age seems to us.'' I didn't fully grasp what he meant until I met another scientist studying climate change in Wyoming, the University of Wyoming's Bryan Shuman.

Dr. Shuman took me up to one of his research sites--the Lake of the Woods--high in the foothills of the Wind River Range. At this lake and others, Dr. Shuman extracts sediment cores and conducts radar scans of the lake bottom and then reconstructs the climate of the region 10,000 years back to the last ice age. During the last ice age, global average temperatures were 3.5 degrees colder than our preindustrial average.

The 3.5 degrees colder temperatures resulted in a radically different landscape in Wyoming. Massive glaciers spread across the Wind River Range. On this map, you can see just how much territory these vast glaciers covered. That legend shows 10 kilometers. So that is essentially the whole Wind River Range.

The 3.5 degrees change in temperature created a huge effect. I say that because the Earth is predicted to warm at least 3.5 degrees by the end of the century if we don't cut carbon emissions. So think about it for a minute. In a little bit more than 100 years, the temperature on Earth will have changed as much as it did in the 10,000 years from the end of the last ice age. From 10,000 years ago to the beginning of the Industrial Age, there was a change of 3.5 degrees, and in the following 100 years, we are expecting another 3.5 degrees. Instead of climate change driving forward at 1 mile an hour, it started driving forward, thanks to fossil fuel emissions, at 100 miles an hour.

This shows how dishonest the smug statement is that the climate is always changing. Not like this, it is not. When you know that 3.5 degrees Celsius is the difference between being covered in ice and having the forest and sage brush steppe ecosystems there now, you can see that another 3.5 degrees of warming will cause massive changes.

Dr. Tercek was not exaggerating. When his daughter is an old woman at the end of the century, the climate will have changed as much as it changed since the last ice age, and our climate then will seem as foreign to her as the ice age seems to us.

There are still glaciers--some--in the Wind River Range. They were tiny compared to the ice age glaciers that once dominated northwestern Wyoming, but they are the largest glaciers in the Rocky Mountains. For the last several summers, a team of professors and students from Central Wyoming College have studied these glaciers. Their work is featured in an Emmy-winning documentary produced by PBS Wyoming called ``Glaciers of the Winds.'' It is actually available on YouTube, and I highly recommend it. Again, it is called ``Glaciers of the Winds.''

I visited around their campfire the night before the Central Wyoming College team set off on a 20-plus mile expedition up to the base of Dinwoody Glacier. The students are measuring the size of the glaciers to determine how quickly they are melting. They will analyze water quality, and they will search for archeological artifacts to better understand how Native peoples lived up in this alpine environment.

The archeology team told me that based on artifacts they have unearthed, they believe that early Native peoples worshipped the glaciers. A spiritual reverence for glaciers began to make a little more sense to me when I visited the Wind River Indian Reservation. The land to the east of the reservation is deathly arid. Agriculture depends on irrigation, and irrigation depends on glaciers. Leaders of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribal councils said that after the winter snow melts away, their irrigation depends entirely on the glaciers, which hold water back as ice and release it through the long summer as meltwater--key after annual snows have melted away. They told me that ``once the glaciers are gone, our main resource for life will be gone.''

I won't pretend I met no climate skeptics in Wyoming. An innkeeper at a motel told me that climate change was a ``goddamned hoax'' and for sure wasn't happening in Wyoming. Many of the student scientists at Central Wyoming College recounted difficulty explaining their interest in climate change to family and friends. They called it having ``the conversation.''

I also met with an employee at the Jim Bridger coal-fired powerplant. She made a strong case that climate solutions must protect workers. I couldn't agree more. Wyoming has lost three coal companies to bankruptcy just this year.

One of the great lies of the rotten, crooked climate denial operation is that reducing carbon emissions is bad for the economy and bad for jobs, when, in fact, the opposite is true. Another great lie is that the industry cares much about its workers. Carbon pricing would give an economic reason for carbon removal, which in turn could help keep some plants operating a little longer and ease the workers' transition. But, no, like we saw when coal companies looted miners' pensions, took care of the CEOs, and ducked into bankruptcy, the climate denial path is a dead-end for workers.

In spite of some Wyomingites' skepticism, my trip underscored how attitudes are changing even in the reddest parts of the country. Over and over again, Wyomingites told me that they cherish the stunning landscapes around them. They live in Wyoming to be able to hunt and fish and explore these amazing places. As climate change bears down on Wyoming's wild places, even current skeptics will come to accept that we must fight climate change to protect things they love.

The younger generation already gets it. I won't forget the fire-lit, passionate faces of the Central Wyoming College students, nor the determination and drive of Lynsey Dyer and the winter sports athletes, nor a young instructor at NOLS who gave an impassioned argument for climate action. With powerful and knowledgeable voices like these speaking, with an economy so vulnerable and no plan B, and with such risk to Wyoming's natural wonders, I am hopeful that voters in Wyoming and across the country will start to send a clear message that we must take action to reduce carbon emissions and soon--it is the smart, prudent, and economically best course--and to ask the people whom they elect: Listen, let's do this. If you won't lead, at least get out of the way. Help us protect what we love while there is still time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source