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Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. But let me observe that disasters have taken place not only in Florida but in the Presiding Officer's home State of Hawaii, in Vermont, in New York, in Louisiana, and other States as well.

And in response to that, what President Biden did was made a request to Congress in August to pass a comprehensive emergency supplemental that includes an increase in funding for FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund. It also includes $45 million for the Department of Ag and $15 million for the Department of Interior to support more than 20,000 firefighters who are out there braving this explosion in new wildfires that are taking place across our country.

This is driven by climate change. Let's be clear about that. We have had 14 named storms so far in the 2023 hurricane season. If you look back at last year, weather-related damage in the United States topped 165 billion. We have had testimony in my Budget Committee from OMB that climate change will cost the Federal budget $2 trillion per year.

We cannot address this piecemeal, and we cannot address it only by providing disaster relief and not doing anything useful to head off these risks. Some of these are what economists call systemic risks. ``Systemic'' doesn't sound like it is a very big word, but what it means is the risk cascades out of the area where the economic harm is taking place to trash the whole economy. Just the way the 2008 mortgage meltdown didn't just trash the banks that had the bad mortgages, it took down the whole U.S. economy--that is predicted for coastal property value crash; that is predicted for a wildfire uninsurability crash; that is predicted for a carbon bubble crash.

And the insurance meltdown has already begun in Florida, in Louisiana, and in Texas. So the warning signs of another 2008-scale financial crisis are already flashing red. And behind those immediate warning signs looms the collapse of Earth's basic natural operating systems that science has predicted for decades and with real precision.

We need to do a lot more than just clean up. We do need to clean up the disasters, but we also need to get the predisaster preparation resources in because we know this is coming, and we know it is getting worse. And we absolutely need to head off the root cause of all of this, which is fossil fuel emissions choking our atmosphere with greenhouse gases, heating up the Earth, and causing us to spin out from basic conditions of habitability of the Earth that have existed for tens of thousands of years.

So what we should do is pass the continuing resolution with full funding for the President's supplemental request for FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund, for the Department of Agriculture firefighter money, for the Department of Interior firefighter money, and while we are at it, because President Zelenskyy was here today, I will also add that it is really important to continue to support Ukraine.

For those reasons, I will object.

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