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Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am a friend of the distinguished Senator from Wyoming, but on this matter, we disagree quite a lot. I think, clearly, everybody likes clean air and clean water. My opposition to Lee Zeldin is founded on where he is likely to be on a different issue--climate change.

Climate change is coming at us, and the context for Lee Zeldin's nomination, I believe, is this: We went through a long period of science on climate change, starting with the early days of Dr. Hansen and NASA's work, work by Exxon and other Big Oil majors themselves, lots of work at universities and in U.S. and State government. And the science pretty well nailed it. They pretty much got it right. They warned what was going to happen, and it began to happen, and it has continued to happen.

Based on those warnings, we moved into phase 2, which was the political era of climate, where it was our job here in this building to listen to those warnings and figure out what the best and smartest thing was to do about them. The problem was that the fossil fuel industry got involved with Citizens United climate money in the hundreds of millions behind it, and they squelched that conversation. As a result, Congress has failed to address the looming climate crisis purely from fossil fuel-funded Republican opposition.

That takes us now into era 3, the era of the ``forewarned but not prevented'' consequences, and the place in which those consequences are most saliently making themselves felt is in the homeowners insurance industry.

Homeowners insurance is in crisis in this country and is in near meltdown in various States and counties in this country because the risk that the insurers have to bear is now unpredictable to them. So what we are seeing is homeowners insurance prices skyrocketing. We are seeing homeowners insurance companies going bankrupt, leaving States, firing their long-time clients because they don't want to provide coverage in these danger areas, which include coastal areas--Florida, as a result, is kind of first and worst in the home insurance meltdown--and wildfire-adjacent areas second, which puts California and a lot of other Western States very much in harm's way.

Now, the problem with that is it doesn't just end with an insurance crisis. When you get a sufficient number of properties that cannot get affordable home insurance or cannot get home insurance at all, those properties become unmortgageable.

If you are a billionaire living in Palm Beach, you can find another billionaire to buy your property who can write a check, but if you are a real-life person--a plumber in Orlando, living in a development, who paid for their home with a mortgage--you are going to want to sell that home to somebody who can get a mortgage. When your home can't be mortgaged any longer, that will crash its property value. In fact, if your homeowners insurance goes from $4,000 to $16,000--a case we heard of--then that crashes your property value, too, because a $16,000 carrying cost on a piece of property knocks its value way down.

So not from the ``greenies,'' not from the environmental community, but from Freddie Mac, the mortgage giant, we heard the warning that an insurance crash turns into a mortgage crash, turns into a coastal property values crash, which is serious enough that it redoes 2008: We have another national recession.

It is in that context that we need to understand that we need an EPA Administrator who will take climate change seriously, treat the science honestly, and stand up where necessary to the political pressure that will be coming from the White House, where we have a President who actually thinks it is a hoax, and from the huge fossil fuel forces that propelled him into office with enormous amounts of political money and who now think they own the place.

The fossil fuel industry has done nothing but lie about this and use their power for evil. President Trump is completely mistaken and under the thumb of the fossil fuel industry. And against that will stand the EPA Administrator who has to be truthful and factual and support and defend our environment and our safety from climate change.

In that context, I have nothing against Lee Zeldin personally, but the likelihood of him standing against that fossil fuel bulldozer that is coming at him is, essentially, zero. And that fossil fuel bulldozer is also going to be bulldozing their way into American homes in the form of an insurance crisis that is looming. So this is going to become very real very fast. And in that context, this is very much the wrong guy.

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