Climate Change
Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I have hastened to the floor because I was upstairs, waiting for the House managers to bring the article over, and I heard my friend, the distinguished Senator from Alaska, talking about his concern about the fossil fuel part of the energy sector and his dissatisfaction with what the Secretary of the Treasury was able to assure him of in that regard.
I just wanted to note that I missed a moment of the Senator's remarks when I came walking down here, but as best as I could tell, the Senator never mentioned the term ``climate change,'' and he never referenced ``carbon emissions.'' I have to say, if we are going to deal with our energy sector, we have to deal with it in a way that takes into account carbon emissions and climate change. You can't just whistle past those things and pretend that they are not real and act as if we can continue to go forward in the way we always have--releasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, poisoning our oceans with acidification, warming the planet, and putting coastal communities like mine at grave risk from sea level rise and storm surge. We have to address those things.
As we go forward in this new Congress, I very much hope that my friend Senator Sullivan and I will be able to work together to address that exact problem to make sure that not only is our energy mix strong for our economy but to make absolutely sure that we are not sacrificing the safety of our planet, the economic security of our future generations, and the health of people all around the planet who have, really, no choice but to live close to the land and feel the pounding of climate change in their immediate lives every day. We have to address those things, and I hope we will.
So, in having heard his side of the argument, I just wanted to come back to the floor and offer the other side. Somewhere between us there is a resolution because I know perfectly well that the State of Alaska is getting hit by the acidification and warming side and by the sea level rise and storm surge side of this problem, just as much as Rhode Island is. Perhaps, because, as my friend constantly reminds me, Alaska has a huge advantage of size over Rhode Island, one could even imagine that it is having more of an effect than Rhode Island.
Madam President, I would just close by suggesting that perhaps my friend, the Senator from Alaska, can sympathize, since he fears that the interests that he came to the floor here to defend will not be listened to. Perhaps he can sympathize with the fact that, for 4 years, an entire administration wouldn't give the time of day to the sea level rise concerns that are threatening my State. We are talking about Freddie Mac. We are talking about a property value crash across all of our coasts that is going to cause enormous harm to Rhode Island, and we just left an administration that wouldn't pay one iota of attention to that. It had fossil fuel industry climate deniers, and there is such a thing. Not everybody in the fossil fuel industry is that way, but they picked the bottom feeders to bring into government.
I share the Senator's frustration, but let me say I have got it about 10,000 times over after having lived with the Trump administration for the past 4 years and gotten nothing and after having tried to bring serious climate debate to the floor, knowing that the Republican leader was going to block it. So, yes, I sympathize with his distress, and I hope he sympathizes with my, rather, greater, cumulative distress from the last 4 years.
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