Unanimous Consent Request--S. Res. 551

Floor Speech

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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak in support of the Senator from Rhode Island's resolution, S. Res. 551, and applaud him for recognizing that sea level risings are accelerating the rates that we are seeing and driving measurable impact.

So my colleague from the Midwest objecting to this is very disturbing because even our colleague from Maine and I--the Senator from Maine, Senator Collins--had gotten CBO to do two different reports over the last 8 or 9 years to say: How much is climate change costing the Federal Government and Federal taxpayers?

The first study came back and said it is costing us billions of dollars, and the most recent one said it is costing us trillions of dollars.

So, literally, you are costing taxpayers trillions of dollars because you don't want to adapt or mitigate those impacts. I can tell you that these are real-world impacts, and, certainly, when 45 percent of the U.S. economy is happening in coastal areas, that means those coastal economies can be impacted by rising sea levels, and that means that our economic output can be impacted. So we were trying to do something about that.

So I want to thank Senator Whitehouse for his leadership on this important issue. He is out here, time and time again, talking about this, articulating the issues, actually traveling his State, traveling the country, being an articulate voice on why rising levels of our oceans are important, why ocean acidification is important, why protecting fisheries is important, why helping shellfish growers is.

You know, we did some research, Senator Whitehouse, at the University of Washington. It was only a few hundred thousand dollars. But we had five generations of shellfish growers about to go out of business because of the fact that ocean acidification had changed the temperature in the water, and we could not figure out how to seed for those shellfish. And the science that was done at the University of Washington helped us come up with a new process and saved the day.

But what is the next challenge going to be? So we need to strengthen our coastal resiliency in the face of this climate change.

So I really also applaud our colleague Senator Markey, who is a member of the Commerce Committee, also from an ocean State, very dependent on an ocean economy for lots of different issues. He wants to make sure that we are applying the best science to protecting these economies.

As I mentioned, a nonpartisan Government Accountability Office cost report found that climate change will cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion by 2039.

So I know the Presiding Officer knows all about what happens when FEMA and disasters happen and we need to help States. But just imagine that that bill is now going to be $1 trillion by 2039, and rising sea levels are going to be part of that cost.

Washington, my State, is already seeing real-world impacts from this, particularly in sea level rise. Puget Sound levels are projected to rise 1.6 feet by 2050 and as much as 10 feet by 2100. And statewide, we are expecting to see 1 to 3 feet by the end of the century.

So that does have an impact. And the kind of changes that we are talking about can have impacts specifically on infrastructure. Sea level rise will worsen coastal flooding. It will impact storm surge. It will likely--just for example, what does that mean? We have a highway system that runs right up and down our Puget Sound area that can be impacted at times.

We have had a lot of erosion lately, now twice, right outside of Bellingham, and I-5 has been closed. OK, why is I-5 closing? Because we have had so much rain, we have had so much impact-changing environment that we basically have had to have I-5 shut twice just to clean up from the mudslides.

Our Amtrak service, which runs all the way from California up to British Columbia, also has been impacted by huge slides after rain and after these swollen rivers.

And the increased likelihood of ground instability during earthquakes also magnifies devastating events and threatens critical areas like roads, bridges, and fiberoptic cables in greater Seattle, which could all be underwater as early as 2030.

So we just had a massive flood out in the Northwest, in December, and that impact was just unbelievable--one of the biggest. You know, thank God we had the information from NOAA. And thank God, what did we do?

In King, Pierce, and Snohomish Counties, we basically, over the last decade, planned for mitigation and adaptation. We built a canal system. We built a system that allowed us to take some of that water and create a flow of the massive amount of water that happened during that flood. And we were able to, literally--we lost one individual. That was it.

We were so proud that we had made it through most of that, until one individual drove into a flooded area and, unfortunately, lost their life. We are very, very sorry for them and their family.

But when we planned and did adaptation and mitigation, when we looked at culverts, when we looked at diking systems, when we looked at relieving the pressure, we were able to lessen the impact.

So it is not unlikely that any of these floods or any of these rising water issues impact a major transportation system in our State, whether it is I-5, I-90, or Highway 2, or some of these other facilities.

So we pay a lot of attention to this because we have got a lot of product going to the Pacific right through our State. And so if any of these infrastructure resources are closed, it is literally millions and millions and millions of dollars a day.

So rising wastewater is also an issue. So treatment facilities around Puget Sound and Elliott Bay are increasingly vulnerable to flooding and overflow, threatening the release of bacteria, toxic chemicals, and other pollutants into our waterways and our drinking water. Those risks and costs only grow as the water rises.

In the State of Washington alone, 2 million people live in areas susceptible to flooding, with $86 billion of infrastructure at risk. And that number continues to grow as sea levels rise.

Nationally, 34 million Americans live in low-elevation areas at risk to sea level rise. That is literally 1 in 10 Americans. So why ignore it?

All my colleague was trying to do is to say we should recognize this threat and start to work toward solutions.

Sea level rise endangers one of the cornerstones of our State's heritage and economy, and that is salmon. We all in the Northwest want to make sure that rising sea levels do not impact our estuaries and our wetlands, but that is exactly what these rising sea levels are supposed to do, significantly reduce estuaries and wetlands by 2100. These areas are critical for juvenile salmon as they migrate to the ocean, as well as birds and important wildlife.

Just this week, Isabella Breda at the Seattle Times wrote a piece about how the Chinook salmon--I think I have got to get this for the Senator from Rhode Island because it is a great story. It is on the front page of the Seattle Times. But it is literally about monitors in the river because we are trying to monitor these storms, because when we have--this is the area where, several years ago, we had a massive mudslide in Oso, which killed dozens and dozens of people, unfortunately.

And so we know we can have major events, and we need to do better.

So, basically, it is about how Chinook salmon in the Stillaguamish River are vulnerable to the flooding that disrupts the riverbed sediments that are needed for spawning. So we are trying to understand this because it is kind of like a massive amount of flooding can just wash away the salmon beds. And in this river alone, Chinook populations are down to roughly 10 percent of their historic levels.

So this is really important to us. As a State, we want salmon. We want to understand rising sea levels. We want to understand what flooding is going to do to create damage. When are those spawning grounds going to be lost, and when are Chinook survival rates going to continue to drop? We want to know.

Many of the 29 federally recognized Tribes in my State have already been seeing the impacts of climate change and are already preparing for the worst. And I know some people may not know the geography of our country, but we are talking--OK, let's just say that we are talking way out on the Pacific coast. Tribes like the Hoh Indian Tribe, the Quinault Indian Tribe, the Quileute Tribe, and the Shoalwater Bay Tribe are all located along the Pacific coast, and the threat of sea level rise has forced them to take aggressive, unprecedented actions to move parts of their reservations to higher land. Some have had to plan for full-scale relocation of coastal villages to mitigate the increasing dire threat of floods due to sea level.

Trust me, the Army Corps of Engineers is out there, practically on a monthly basis, trying to come up with a plan to mitigate the impacts of the Pacific on the Shoalwater Tribe.

Others are working tirelessly to mitigate the cumulative effects of coastal erosion, including inland flooding and extreme weather events.

For some of our coastal Tribes, the situation is incredibly dire. Not long ago, when I was visiting the Shoalwater in Tokeland, WA, many of the homes and government buildings that were there on the beach and the shoreline you could just tell were quickly eroding.

And so this is about whether we give them a resolution. This resolution that we were talking about makes clear that we cannot bury our heads in the sand while climate change and sea level rise put billions of dollars of infrastructure and millions of Americans at risk.

If we want to protect our economy and these communities, we need the data and the science to understand the problem. We need to take the necessary steps to protect our communities and our infrastructure and our economy.

So I urge my colleagues to reconsider. I hope that we will have S. Res. 551 before us again. I hope that some of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle that represent coastal States will talk to our colleague from Wisconsin and encourage him to, instead, support this legislation.

We have to do better planning. We have to do better adaptation and mitigation. We have to use better science. And we have to recognize that the impacts of rising sea levels in our oceans really, really do affect our economy.

I am so proud of our fishing economy in the Northwest. I think we sometimes--the Senator from Massachusetts and I, you know, basically debate back and forth about best seafood and best aquaculture. And I know the Senator from Rhode Island also has a lot to brag about.

But that number--45 percent of the economy being in coastal regions of the United States of America and us doing nothing to think about what is the adaptation and mitigation that we need to do is just wrongheaded. We need these. I don't even know if the Senator has got any data on this, but I would assume he has thought about this from a military perspective.

I have got a lot of military bases in our State, and they are very close to water. What are they going to do when sea level rises? What do we have to do to mitigate and adapt so that those bases continue to be successful, particularly at a moment when the Pacific is becoming even more interesting?

So, again, I thank the Senator from Rhode Island for helping lead this charge every night but particularly tonight.

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