Global Warming

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I am glad to have a chance to join with you today. I appreciate very much Senator Sanders convening us on this day when we have agreed, it appears, to extend the payroll tax; we have agreed, it appears, to extend unemployment insurance; and we have agreed, it appears, to extend the payments for doctors under Medicare, under the so-called doc fix. And the one piece that has fallen out was the tax extenders that support our clean energy industry.

Our clean energy industry has more employees than Big Oil, and there are well-paying jobs. It is a growing industry, and it creates American manufacturing and American installation.

Senator Udall was talking about the economic value of these wind farms. I know that in his home State, there are plenty of wind farms that are built on the land. In my home State, we are working toward having wind farms that are built offshore. And the ability to construct those giant turbines at Quonset Point in Rhode Island, in order to install them offshore and enjoy the power and the jobs that result, is something that is really important to us.

So I am glad the Senator has called us together to focus on this question of the tax extenders and also to focus on the environmental harm of climate change. I will turn it back to the Senator, but I wish to make one last point before I do, which is that there is a certain amount of sort of snickering around Washington about climate change, which is a unique feature to Washington. If you go out in the scientific community, nobody is laughing. They are very anxious. They are worried.

The major scientific organizations have all signed off on public letters urging us to do something about this because it is so significant. We have looked out at the first dozen billion-dollar storms year that we have had. Wherever you look around the world, we are seeing extreme weather. And the notion that when the scientists predicted extreme weather and now we are seeing it--if that should not be cause for additional concern, that really flies in the face of both prudence and reality.

The last area where we are really getting clobbered is with our oceans. As we pump, in human time, unprecedented amounts of carbon into our atmosphere, it is taken up by the oceans. It is absorbed by the oceans. During the course of the Industrial Revolution and to now, the oceans have absorbed enormous amounts of carbon. It is changing the oceans. It is killing off coral reefs in the tropical areas. It is making the oceans so acidic that the little organisms that are at the base of the food chain are having trouble growing to their proper size. It is becoming a hostile environment. Creatures do not live well in an environment in which they are increasingly soluble.

These are not theories, these are measurements by scientists who go out and actually measure what is happening. The blindness in Washington to this problem is something that is not only a cause for concern now but is going to be a cause for harsh judgment in history's eyes.

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Special interests would be my answer. We have seen it before. We saw the science mocked that tobacco was injurious to human health. We saw the science

mocked that the lead in paint was injurious to children. And now we have seen mockery of the science that shows that when you put unprecedented amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, it changes things.

The science is actually not new. The scientist who created the global warming theory was a scientist named Tindall who published his work around the time of the American Civil War, and it has never been controversial. The idea that when you put enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, it creates a warming effect, a blanketing effect, we have known this literally since the horse-and-buggy era. The difference is that there are now powerful special interests that are involved.

To Senator Udall's points, we are at a point of choice. We can choose to go toward having the environmental needs of the country met and the energy needs of the country met with clean, American-made, manufactured power that is renewable. The Senator is right about the capabilities of offshore wind on the east coast, but that is not the only road we can take. We can continue to support multinational mega-corporations that have no loyalty to any flag or nation, that traffic internationally in oil, and that want to make sure that we stay, as President Bush said, addicted to oil. There is a choice, and I think those special interests have a clear desire as to what choice this country should make. I happen to believe it is contrary to this country's national interests, so that is why we are here fighting to try to steer in the other direction.

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. And the results are really profound.

I will close with this point in this discussion. For as long essentially as mankind has been on this Earth, for 800,000 years--to put 800,000 years in scale, we have probably been engaged in agriculture as a species for 10,000 or 15,000 years. Before that we were pure hunter-gatherers. So 800,000 years--8,000 centuries--is an enormous period of time in human history. It is essentially the entire sweep of the human species on the face of the Earth. Throughout that period, we have existed within an atmosphere that stayed within a range of carbon concentration. For the first time in 8,000 centuries, we have now rocketed outside of that range. That ought to be a pretty significant warning to us that we are in new and untested territory in terms of the basic conditions of the environment that supports our species. And because the concentrations in the atmosphere have grown so greatly, so has the acidity of our oceans. If you go back into geological time to look at what changes such as these can potentially lead to, you see really massive adverse events such as catastrophic die-offs of species.

So we are playing with potentially very big consequences. We are playing outside of the boundaries that have governed our planet for 800,000 years, and we are refusing to correct what is going on, I believe, as both of you have pointed out, because of one predominant reason; that is, the power of special interests to phony-up a debate in this town.

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