Climate Change

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I come to the Senate floor today for the 298th time in my ``Time to Wake Up'' speech series to once again call attention to the looming climate calamity.

I went last week to the Our Ocean Conference--a conference founded by the United States of America and dedicated to protecting our oceans before the damage to them and ultimately to us becomes irrecoverable. It was the 10th such conference, which made it a bit of a benchmark.

I was the entirety of the U.S. delegation. You are looking at it--100 percent of the entire U.S. delegation. Ordinarily, many executive branch officials come. In this case, not one executive branch official attended from the United States. And of course not. This administration is nothing more than hirelings of the fossil fuel industry, and the conference, of course, addressed the harm that fossil fuel emissions are doing in the oceans and the harm that petrochemical plastics are doing in the oceans.

Fossil fuel emissions are heating up the oceans in zettajoules. It is a massive number. The joule, as you probably know, is the unit measure for heat energy. ``Zetta'' means it has 21 zeroes behind it. In more commonly articulated big numbers, it is a billion trillion joules. It looks something like this: 14 zettajoules of heat going into the oceans every single year.

To give a more practical definition, the entire energy production of the human species across the entire planet Earth amounts to one-half of a zettajoule of energy--everything. All the energy sources of humankind produce one-half of a zettajoule of energy every year. That is how much our species relies on.

The price to all of us of the fossil fuel component of that half- zettajoule is that those 14 zettajoules get pushed into the ocean, get absorbed by the ocean, every single year. The heating of the oceans from fossil fuel pollution is more than 30 times the energy used that causes the heating. It is not a part of it; it is multiple of it, magnified by the greenhouse effect. It is not that fossil fuel creates some excess heat and some of that goes into the oceans; the fossil fuel creates changes in the Earth's physical environment that magnify the heat retention of the planet, the so-called greenhouse effect. So for the component of the half zettajoule of human energy use that comprises the entire species' energy, 14 zettajoules of heat go into the ocean.

Put another way, if you imagine the heat energy given off by the nuclear bomb explosion over Hiroshima, multiply that by seven. Seven Hiroshima nuclear detonations' worth of excess heat is what fossil fuel emissions are driving into our oceans every single second--every single second. Every second, seven Hiroshimas' worth of heat.

In the 10 minutes that it takes me to give this speech, the oceans will absorb 4,000 Hiroshima detonations' worth of heat. That is why seawater off the Florida Keys hit jacuzzi temperatures. That is why measuring devices along our coasts show a foot of sea level rise already. That is why fish species are moving about and fisheries are collapsing. That is why the world's coral reefs are bleaching out--over 80 percent of the world's reefs hit in the last ocean heating surge caused by fossil fuel.

The physical disruption of the ocean with this massive injection of multiple Hiroshimas-per-second of excess physical heat is matched by a chemical effect--acidification.

The excess carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by fossil fuel pollution interacts with the surface of the ocean, covering 70 percent of our planet--so a lot of surface to interact--and it causes the seawater chemically to acidify.

I actually did an experiment here at my desk, blowing the carbon dioxide in my breath through an aquarium bubbler into my water glass. And, sure enough, pH strips showed that the water in the glass acidified, measurably, just from my breath.

Acidification in the ocean degrades structures that are made up of calcium. It injures coral reefs, worsening the problems of pollution and warming. We are headed for a world of dead reefs at this rate. It makes life harder for shelled creatures, particularly in their larval stages, to grow. There are many of them, but one species measurably hit is the pteropod.

Who cares about the humble pteropod, you may ask. Well, you might, and your kids likely will because it is an important part of the oceanic food web. Crash the pteropod, and a lot of other species fall.

A trawl survey a few years ago off the Pacific Northwest found that most of the pteropod caught in the trawl survey showed what the scientists called severe shell damage--severe shell damage. Pteropods don't survive well in acidified oceans. That much severe shell damage in a foundational species is a bad harbinger of things to come, and it is just one of many harms from fossil fuel emissions acidifying the world's oceans.

Then we get to the other petrochemical problem, plastics. The ocean is awash with marine plastic waste. Unlike natural substances that biodegrade into basic elements that return into the cycle of life that other beings can consume, plastics are manmade. Unlike natural substances, they break down eventually into microplastic and even nanoplastic particles that have no use to anything.

Ocean plastic waste is a menace. Large ocean plastic waste ends up in the bellies of whales, indigestibly, killing them. Ghost gear made of plastic goes about its lethal business with no fisherman ever retrieving the catch, just killing, killing, killing.

Pretty much every sea bird consumes plastic, lodging in its belly, starving its young of real food. You can walk midway island and see the cadavers of dead young birds with stomachs full of indigestible plastic unwittingly fed to them by their parents.

Small creatures consume tiny plastic particles. Bigger creatures consume the small creatures. We consume the bigger creatures. And now we find plastic particles in mothers' breast milk, in human brain tissue samples, even in rain drops over Colorado. Unless we change direction, there will soon be more plastic by weight in the world's oceans than the weight of living fish in the world's oceans.

The plastics and fossil fuel industry may chortle about their profits, but none of this is good for humans. These industries are damaging the natural systems of the planet, the natural systems to which we have adapted as a species, the natural systems that make Earth so beautifully and abundantly livable. And there comes a reckoning. As Pope Francis said, you slap Mother Nature, she will slap you back.

Regrettably, the plastics and fossil fuel industries are also damaging the political systems of the planet, corrupting government so as to disable our ability to remedy their pollution. The question of the moment that people should be asking is why are so many politicians lying to us about climate change? The answer, of course, is money. Fossil fuel money floods our political system, pours into it, much of it secretly.

Politicians, whose home State universities teach about climate change, lie about climate change. How is that possible? It is not like there is some unfathomable mystery about how climate change works that eludes human understanding. No, it is known. There is a counterforce at work against knowledge. Fossil fuel money and political pressure is that counterforce.

That force--that malign, corrupt, political operation of the fossil fuel industry--has now become dangerous. If you delay treatment of a disease, things get worse and a treatable disease can become lethal. If you delay dealing with termites in your house, things get worse, and it is no longer a repair but a teardown.

The fossil fuel political operation, for very selfish reasons, has delayed the remedies that would have given us a broad pathway to climate safety, and it is now getting dangerous.

The control of our government by this political operation is right now complete. Neither House of Congress will do anything right now to avert the looming danger. After asking for $1 billion from the fossil fuel industry and getting massive donations, our madman President says there is no danger--a supposedly educated man calling our climate perils a ``hoax.''

His executive officials are all in tow to the fossil fuel industry, doing exactly as they are told--puppets on a fossil fuel string. They even put Justices on the Supreme Court to ignore the facts about climate danger.

Here is their problem, which is our problem as well: Politics responds to money, but nature, she can't be bought. She couldn't care less. Nature will keep administering the consequences dictated by natural laws, by laws of physics and chemistry, and biology.

I flew home from the Our Ocean Conference, thanks to our understanding of those natural laws when you honor those laws, aerodynamics and metallurgy, and make flying from Seoul, Korea, to Dulles airport outside Washington, DC, possible. Dishonoring those laws is foolhardy and dangerous. Dishonoring those laws for money is reprehensible and dangerous.

A corrupted U.S. Government, a polluted planet, and trillions-- literally trillions--of dollars in economic harm is headed our way fast, well and completely predicted, all from the bad behavior of a greedy and amoral industry that knows no bounds--not of decency, not of honesty, and certainly, not of protection for our planet. If taking that fight on is not a fight worth having, I don't know what is.

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