Climate Change
Floor Speech
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The Senator's point about China makes me think that if you look at the behavior of the Chinese with respect to this power, you see a couple things. You see, first of all, that they have worked very hard to try to undercut our domestic innovation by dropping prices on solar artificially. You see that particularly if you are involved on the Intelligence and Armed Services side, the extraordinary efforts they have made to hack into our intellectual property and to try to steal it back to China so their companies can compete unfairly against ours.
When you see this activity, particularly in the area of solar and renewables, and you see the extent to which the Chinese are investing in solar and renewables, what conclusion must one draw about what the Chinese see as the future of solar and renewables?
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On the point the Senator from New Jersey makes about economic power being the foundation for military power and the power of persuasion around the globe, one really does not have to look any further than back to the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, which is widely viewed as being based on a country that spent so much on its military without an underlying economic engine powerful enough to support it that it finally fell in.
So when we are looking out at a clean energy market that has been estimated to be a $6 trillion market, the idea that it is in America's interest to cede that entire market to the Chinese, to let them be the manufacturers, to trust that we will be fine if they are manufacturing solar and wind and all of the new battery technologies and that we are just consumers of that, is crazy. That economic weakness has national security overtones.
In addition, as the distinguished Senator from New Jersey pointed out, in addition to Admiral Locklear--and the distinguished Senator from Hawaii mentioned Admiral Locklear as well, but he is not alone. Secretary Mabus, Secretary of the Navy, has pointed out the same thing. We are at risk from global warming from a national security perspective. The Joint Chiefs of Staff is on record about the national security consequences of climate change to our country. As the Senator from New Mexico knows from his time on the Intelligence Committee, there are NIEs--National Intelligence Estimates--that speak to the danger climate change presents for America, for our national security interests when it happens in other lands. The Defense
Quadrennial Review, which is the key document that drives our defense policy, has over and over again emphasized climate change as a national security risk, as a liability for our country. So, yes, it is very important that we deal with this.
I had a conversation with Henry Kissinger the other day. He was speaking generally. He used an interesting phrase. He said that the big upheavals and revolutions in the world have always come from a confluence of resentment--a confluence of resentment.
So I would add to the immediate risk of climate change causing upheaval and causing military problems that threaten our national security interest the larger problem is that America stands for something in this world, and we all benefit because America stands for something in this world, and the rest of the world knows it. If we come to the point where around the world people are seeing in their homes, in their lives, in their villages, in their hamlets, and on their shores the effects of climate change and it is bad for them--the fish they used to catch are not there; the crops they used to grow will not grow any longer; the river they used to irrigate is not running as strong any longer; and their lives have been hurt as a result of that, and they look around, what greater resentment could there be than a resentment of the country that knew this was coming, that said it was a leadership nation, and that did nothing about it when it knew.
Now, there is a confluence of resentment around the world. That, too, creates a national security risk for our country.
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Michael Brune, who is the head of the Sierra Club, came in to see a number of Senators the other day. He told an interesting story that lines up with what Senator Schatz said about how solar is a pocketbook issue and not a political issue.
This story involves Atlanta, GA, which is not exactly a hotbed of liberal sentiment. In Atlanta, the cost of solar on a residential rooftop--the cost of putting a solar panel on your home--has now leveled out with the cost of electricity at the plug in your home. As a result, residential installations of solar energy started to boom.
Now, for economic reasons, the fossil fuel polluters were against that, and so the Koch brothers and the polluters got behind this group called ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is basically a front group for them. They tried to put through a tax on rooftop solar installations so that if you put a solar panel on your roof, you would get taxed for it because they didn't like the fact that solar had actually caught up to polluting fossil fuel power at the plug.
Who came together to fight that tax? The Sierra Club and the tea party. The Sierra Club and the tea party worked together to beat that tax and to beat ALEC and to beat the Koch brothers and the polluters back on that. Again, if you have the Sierra Club and the tea party pulling side by side, you know it is not ideology. You know at that point it is a pocketbook issue, and that people are starting to see savings from putting solar on their own home and they don't want anybody to interfere with that. That is a story that is a long way from Hawaii, but it helps to illustrate that point.
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It is interesting that my friend should mention his Chamber of Commerce. In Rhode Island, we too are seeing very active participation by our local Chambers of Commerce in green, solar, alternative energy, energy efficiency, and other such endeavors. They see it is a pocketbook issue. They see it makes sense.
It is a stark comparison with the so-called U.S. Chamber of Commerce--the national organization--which tends to represent the multinational corporations which have very little, if any, allegiance to this country and the big polluters. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been an absolute menace in terms of any responsible dealings with climate change. But as soon as you get away from the so-called U.S. Chamber of Commerce--the multinational Chamber of Commerce is what it should probably be called--and get down to these Chambers of Commerce that are grounded with our States, grounded with local businesses, grounded in commonsense, you immediately see that they step right up and want to be a part of this solution.
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Let me mention one thing. The Senator from Hawaii was good enough to mention that our hashtag tonight is up4climate, with the ``4'' being a numeral, so up numeral 4 climate. There was a remark made earlier that we are just going to be up late at night talking to ourselves and that nobody is going to be paying attention. The reports I have are that the League of Conservation Voters is tracking this with a Web site and 70,000 people have gone to their Web site to support us in our effort tonight. 350.org has 15,000 people who have gone to their Web site to support us. Our own Web site has 40,000 people, for a total of 120,000 signatories just on these Web sites. We also have people who have been going out on Twitter on this. We have people such as Leader Pelosi from the other side of the Capitol. They are locked down hard by the polluters over in the House right now. Nevertheless, Leader Pelosi wanted her voice to be heard, and so she has tweeted out and put out a release about this. OFA has tweeted out about what we are doing tonight, and they reach 42 million people.
So if anybody thinks nobody is listening to what is going on tonight, wrong. Millions of people are following this on Twitter, have been notified about it on Twitter, and literally over 100,000 people have joined these Web sites with more to come, I hope.
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I think this is an important turning point, an important launch point for the final phase of getting to responsible climate legislation. We were so close. We were heartbreakingly close when the House passed Waxman-Markey and in the Senate we failed to bring up any bill that could have gone to conference. We just failed to do it.
There was a period after that when the White House would barely mention climate change. It was deeply discouraging for people across the country to see the Senate fail that way and the White House retreat that way, but that has changed. The White House is back. The President is reengaged. He has announced a very strong climate action plan that has as a critical element putting some regulation on the big powerplants that are doing so much of the polluting. By the way, when I say big powerplants that are doing so much of the polluting, I mean 50 top polluting powerplants in this country put out more carbon than Korea, which is a very industrialized country, put out more carbon than Canada. That is just the top 50 polluting powerplants.
So that was a big shift when the White House did that, and this signals a shift that is coming to the Senate. The next big shift we need to get to is one where this line in the Senate, marking Democrat from Republican, is not such a harsh line on this issue. There is no need for it to be. This has in the past been a bipartisan issue.
Senator Lieberman on our side and Senator Warner on the Republican side did one of the early climate bills. This is an issue where Republican candidates for President who served here still campaigned for President on the issue of climate change. There is a Member on the other side of the aisle who was the original cosponsor of a climate fee bill. There are Republican Members who when they were in the House voted for Waxman-Markey. There are a number of Republican Senators who have publicly said they think a carbon tax or a carbon fee is a sensible idea or is an idea they would support under the right circumstances.
So there is a great opportunity to reach out to colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Once we get past people who are elected politically, we see Republicans in abundance supporting doing something about climate.
The Presiding Officer, the distinguished Senator from New Jersey, discussed earlier the Republican former EPA Administrators who came forward to say: Hey, guys, time to wake up. This is serious. You have to be responsible about it.
George Schultz has campaigned for a carbon fee, to put a proper price on carbon so we can deal with this issue. Former Representative Bob Inglis is out barnstorming around the country arguing that there should be a Republican conservative carbon fee proposal.
So even though that side of the Senate has been empty all night since Senator Inhofe left--and he was here to deny there is a problem--so there has been no voice for doing anything responsible about climate change all night from that side of the aisle. It has been absolutely silent, absolutely empty. But it is closer than it looks when we actually look at the history of Members on that side of the aisle, when we look at the position of Republicans who are not up for election.
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Here is a fairly well-known Republican conservationist; indeed, perhaps the greatest conservationist President in American history: Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican. He had two very important characteristics that there is no reason the Republican Party should not be following today; one was he cared about America as a physical and spiritual space. It wasn't just about the money. It wasn't just about who could make money buying and selling what, who could make money extracting this or doing the other. He cared about America as a physical and a spiritual place. He would go out and camp in the forests with John Muir to get the experience and to embody the value of America as a physical and a spiritual space.
So that was one characteristic that was very important.
Here is the other one: He was willing to stand up against the big money. He was willing to tell the big money, basically: I am against you. I am willing to have a fight with you. The fact that you are big money is not alone enough for your argument to prevail with me. He went after the big trusts and he stuck up for the little guy against the big money. There is nothing that says the Republican Party couldn't do that again, although right now that is not their situation.
I mentioned earlier how we had a former Republican Presidential candidate who campaigned on climate change, how we have a Republican Senator who was a cosponsor of a climate fee bill, how we have a Republican Senator who voted for Waxman-Markey when he was in the House, how we have Republican Senators who have spoken for a carbon fee. All of that happened before 2010. What happened in 2010 that drove every Republican back underground on this issue? I will tell my colleagues what happened. The U.S. Supreme Court decided a case called Citizens United, and the instant they decided Citizens United, the Koch brothers and the big polluters put enormous amounts of money into elections. They didn't just put the money into elections between Republicans and Democrats, they put money into elections between Republicans and Republicans. They went into primary elections and they went after Republicans who were not consistent with their orthodoxy on climate change. Unless you are a denier, they either punish you or threaten you.
Since that time, that is why there has been silence on the Republican side. It is not because there is not a tradition of Republicans caring about the environment. The Environmental Protection Agency was established by a Republican President. Theodore Roosevelt was our greatest conservationist. There is a Republican tradition of this. There is a Republican tradition of standing up to the big money and sticking up for regular people but not since Citizens United, not since that baleful decision cast an absolute avalanche of dark money--of unlimited money and anonymous money--into the elections. I will speak more about that later, but that is what the problem has been. The only thing it takes to cure that is for the Republican Party to become more worried about the reality of climate change and the opinion of the American public than they are about the Koch brothers' millions and what is going to be spent against them.
If the American public makes it clear in the coming months that they are tired of Congress being stuck, if the American public decides it is time to wake up here in Congress, then the choice becomes inevitable. As the Senator from Hawaii said, the dance partners on the Republican side have to come off the wall and come back onto the dance floor. There is a conservative way to do a carbon fee, as Secretary Schultz and Representative Inglis and Reagan's budget officer, Laffer, have all come forward to say.
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I would love to. But before I do that let me follow up on the point Senator Schatz was making because you do not have to go to faraway island nations to see people who are being hurt by rising sea levels and eroding shorelines. You do not have to go to island nations. You can go to Rhode Island and you can see it.
Here is a photograph of some homes at Roy Carpenter's Beach on the south shore coast of Rhode Island in Washington County after Hurricane Sandy.
This is Governor Chafee, former Senator Chafee, who used to serve in this body. These homes--I remember speaking to a lady who was with us that day, and I do not remember if it was this house in the picture or this house that was hers. But she had started coming as a very little girl. Her childhood memories were on this beach. This house used to have a lawn in front of it. She can remember playing badminton on the lawn in front of her house. On the other side of the lawn was a road--just a dirt road--so cars could come in and out. On the other side of the road was a parking lot, where the cars could park, and on the other side of the parking lot began the beach.
She can remember, as many little children who have been to the beach can remember, that when that hot Sun beats down on the sand, it gets hot, and on the child's little feet that heat can hurt. So she would have to run. She would have to run across this long, expansive beach. She can remember the distance running across the hot sand until her feet got into the cool, sparkling waters of the ocean.
Those were her memories of a Rhode Island summer: playing on the lawn, seeing the cars come to the beach, running across the hot sand to the cool water.
In her lifetime the beach is gone, the parking lot is gone, the road is gone, the lawn is gone, and the ocean is tearing out the underpinnings of these homes.
You can go as far away from Rhode Island in the United States as you can get on the mainland and where do you end up? Alaska. What do you see? A very similar phenomenon of houses falling into the sea. This is a town called Shishmaref. It is a little bit different in Alaska as to the reasons. It is often because the ice that protects the shore from winter storms--because the waves break against the ice and not the shore--the ice is not there. The ice has melted away. So now the winter storms beat directly against the shore.
There are villages like Shishmaref that have been at their location for as long as the memories and the traditions of the indigenous tribes who live there go. For as long as the memory of man runneth in those areas, those villages have been there. But now, in a generation, they are going.
We see it in comparisons like this. This was, again, after Sandy. Here is a beachfront building at the South Kingstown Town Beach in Rhode Island. You can see the ocean right up against it.
That is what it used to look like not too long ago, as shown in this picture, in just 1994. This building is that building now shown in this other picture. This walkway is that walkway. As you can see, this walkway was broken up by the storm. The ocean has now come to here. The entire beach has gone.
So we see it in Rhode Island, I say to the Senator, as much as we do in faraway island kingdoms. But to the Senator's point about acidification, the seas are an honest witness. The oceans do not lie. You can measure what the oceans are telling us about climate change, and they are telling us they are getting warmer. It is not complicated. You measure that with a thermometer. They are getting bigger, higher. The law of thermal expansion means that when you warm fluids, they expand and the seas, therefore, rise. You measure that with, more or less, the equivalent of a yardstick. Thermometers and yardsticks--it is not complicated. It is undeniable.
The third piece, as the Senator mentioned, is ocean acidification, which everybody who has an aquarium knows how to measure acidity. It is a litmus test. You can do it in any laboratory. You do it in school. It is not complicated. You can take measurements like that of the ocean and you can see it is acidifying.
It is acidifying for very simple reasons. One-third of the carbon that goes into our atmosphere gets absorbed by the oceans. Ninety percent of the heat from climate change gets absorbed into the oceans; 30 percent of the carbon. The oceans bear witness to what is happening, and right now, if you look at the rate at which the oceans are acidifying, it is happening--here is a graphic on the effects. Where does the heat go? Mr. President, 93.4 percent goes into the ocean; 2.3 percent goes into the atmosphere. The oceans are getting bombarded with this heat, and they are also acidifying.
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When the carbon is absorbed by the ocean, it makes it more acidic; and when the ocean becomes more acidic, it makes it more difficult for all the little critters that live in the oceans that have a shell to make that shell. Because shells are made out of something called calcium carbonate, and the calcium carbonate is eaten away by acidic waters. So it means a small creature such as a pteropod has a harder time making its little shell, so they do not grow as well, and ultimately they could be eliminated by acidified waters.
Who cares about the humble pteropod? Most people have never heard of the humble pteropod. I will tell you who cares about the humble pteropod. Salmon care about the pteropod. For some species, it is a huge part of their diet.
So if they are not there, then the salmon are in trouble. If the salmon are in trouble, the salmon fisherman and the salmon industry are in trouble. It really hit home on the west coast of America a few years ago when oyster fisheries--on the coast of Washington I think it was, but Oregon was hit as well--literally got wiped out when a sudden upwelling of Pacific waters that had become heavily acidified washed into where the young oysters were being grown. The waters were so acidic that the little baby oysters, the little spat, could not grow their shells. The water was too acidic for them to grow their shells.
Again, you can say: Who cares about an oyster? Well, people who grow oysters care a lot about them. It is a big industry in a lot of places. We are actually rather proud of our Rhode Island oysters.
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I will turn it back to you. Because one of the things that Hawaii is famous for that we do not have much of in Rhode Island is tropical coral reefs. Coral reefs are affected by acidification, by runoff, by warming, and they can bleach. When they do, what once was a healthy reef, rich with fish, a nursery for all of the species that we end up consuming, can end up looking like this, dead remnants of what was once living coral. I know Hawaii faces that problem. So why don't I turn to you to discuss that.
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May I tell you story about a Rhode Island fisherman. There is a fishing captain, Christopher Brown, who came recently to testify before the Environment and Public Works Committee. He has been fishing all of his life. He is a real Rhode Island fisherman. He used to go out with his dad, who was a Rhode Island fisherman. When he was probably 20 years old, he built himself a fishing boat and then went out and began fishing on his own. He fished that fishing boat he built for 30 years. He is the real deal when it comes to fishing.
He can remember as a boy fishing offshore with his dad, dragging nets behind them, trawlers. Now he goes out to those same waters, and he gets completely different fish. He says he pulled up a net full of spot. When he was out with his dad, his dad virtually never saw a spot. He said now he is catching fish like grouper and tarpon that his dad never saw in his life. The waters are changing.
When you have regulations over what you can and cannot catch that are not keeping up with the changing fisheries, it is a nightmare for fishermen. So we are going to do our best to update our fisheries laws, but the underlying problem is that fisheries that have existed for as long as Rhode Island fishermen remember them are changing in unprecedented ways.
I will close. As one fisherman said to me when he came to visit here in Washington maybe a year ago, he said something unforgettable. He said, ``Sheldon, it's getting weird out there.''
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To follow up on Senator Schatz's point in terms of the bipartisanship we can hope for here sooner or later, on the skiing question and snowboarding question that was raised, the Park City Foundation in Utah, which runs all of the Park City resorts, the Park City Foundation in Utah predicts an annual local temperature increase of 6.8 degrees Fahrenheit by 2075. That would cause a complete loss of snowpack in the lower Park City resort area--a complete loss of snowpack. The foundation--this Utah foundation--estimates it will result in thousands of lost jobs, tens of millions in lost earnings, and hundreds of millions in lost economic growth.
We have to be able to find a way to work with Senators from Utah on that. The point that Senator Schatz made about the northeast comes home because when you drill down into the report a little further, they say the number of economically viable ski locations in New Hampshire and Maine will be cut in half; that skiing in New York will be cut by three-quarters. I do not know what that does to skiing in New Jersey, but I will say that they said there will be no ski areas in Connecticut or Massachusetts. They overlooked Rhode Island. They did not mention Rhode Island. But I can promise you, knowing geography, if there is no ski area that can survive in Connecticut or Massachusetts, then Yawgoo Valley in Rhode Island is in trouble. That is our sky slope. So this really does hit home.
I want to mention, the bicameral task force that Henry Waxman and I run brought in all of the major sports leagues to talk about how climate change is affecting their sports. We had the National Basketball Association, we had Major League Baseball, we had the U.S. Olympic Committee, we had the National Football League and the National Hockey League. They all agreed we need to take action on climate change. In particular, the NHL talked about the history of their sport, with kids growing up and playing on frozen ponds. Many of those frozen ponds do not freeze any longer or they freeze so little that a child does not have a chance to learn to skate and develop that skill out on the pond. So the NHL has been active. I appreciate that.
The other point I wanted to mention is a lot of these winter sports are part of the Winter Olympics. There was a study done by the University of Waterloo that took a look at all of the different locations in which there have been Winter Olympics, all of the way up to Sochi. The green shows that from 1981 to 2010, all of these locations for the Winter Olympics were climate reliable for snow conditions.
Then they run a couple of different scenarios, 2050s with low emissions, 2050s with high emission; 2080s with low emissions, 2080s with high carbon emissions; and one by one the sites of previous Winter Olympics fall away as reasonable sites. If we go to the 2050s low-emissions scenario, there goes Sochi and there goes Grenoble. If we go a little bit further, Vancouver, Squaw Valley, Sarajevo are in trouble. When we go to this part of the chart, a number of the sites where we have had Winter Olympics are no longer climate suitable for Winter Olympics, including Lillehammer, Nagano, Torino, Innsbruck, Oslo, Sarajevo, Squaw Valley, Vancouver, Chamonix, Grenoble, and on.
So the people who are involved in these winter sports know about this. One hundred athletes of the Sochi Olympics from 10 different nations wrote a letter saying we have to take climate change seriously. They particularly focused on the small towns in the mountains where skiers and snowboarders train and where the economy is based on snowboarding, skiing, and winter sports, and the devastation that would happen in those small towns if that economy collapsed because of climate change.
I yield to the Senator from Hawaii.
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If I may, let me ask people who are listening to think back in time. Think back in time to many years ago when Abraham Lincoln was President of
the United States, when this room was just under construction and soldiers coming down occupied it, camped here, camped in the lounge, and actually made fires in the lounge across the way to cook their bacon. One could hear cannon fire from the Capitol. The Civil War was happening in America.
When that took place, there was a scientist named John Tyndall who delivered a paper that showed that when you added carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, it warmed the Earth. That is how long it has been that we have known that when you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, it warms the Earth.
Since that time, we have probably added close on 2,000 gigatons, 2,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. What happens when we do that? This goes back to 800,000 BC. That is nearly 1 million years. We can see that in the time we have measured here, 800,000 years, there has been a very clear range of carbon concentration in the planet.
We kicked in around 200,000 years ago as human beings. This is about where homo sapiens showed up. So long before there were homo sapiens, the Earth stayed between about 170 and 300 parts per million of carbon dioxide. For every single year human beings have inhabited this planet, we stayed within that window. But then that 2,000 gigatons started to kick in, and here it goes, up through 250, up through 300, up through 350, and for the first time it hit 400 parts per million. So that is very real.
If people are worried about deniers out there, we can't deny Tyndall's theory. Nobody denies that when we add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, it has this effect. Nobody denies that we have put roughly close on 2,000 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere since then, and nobody denies these measurements. These are measurements. This isn't theory; these are measurements.
It is one thing if the Republican Party wants to be the party that is against science. I doubt they want to go so far as to be the party that is against measurement, but here we are at 400.
Sure enough, some strange behavior is showing up, and this shows where all the land and ocean temperature anomalies are showing up. If we look, starting in 1880 it goes from blue--the cold anomalies--to red, and we can see a very distinct line.
People who look at it say: Well, that is that undeniable climate change happening. That is that 400 parts per million. That is the increase in carbon dioxide.
How many people think that? Well, about 14,000 peer-reviewed articles think that; 24 reject global warming. That is the little red line if you are comparing the two. The blue is the universe of peer-reviewed articles on climate change, and that tiny little red line is the 24 out of 14,000 who reject climate change.
I ask my friends on the other side of the aisle, you are betting the reputation of the Republican Party on your current de facto premise that climate change isn't real? Do you really want to take a 24 out of 14,000 article bet? Is that the smart place to put the reputation and the honor of the Republican Party? I don't think so.
That is another reason I am confident we can get to a bipartisan solution. I don't think it is smart for Republicans to take the reputation and honor of their party and bet it on a theory that is 24 out of 14,000.
If we look a little bit behind the climate denial operation, we will see that it is actually very sketchy. It is very sketchy. A lot of these organizations have a tradition of denial. They denied that the ozone hole was growing. They denied that tobacco caused cancer. Heck, some of them probably even denied that seatbelts made auto travel safer. That has been their industry. They have been in the denial industry. But that is a dangerous place to be, particularly because the oceans don't lie. The oceans tell the story, and they tell it in ways we can't deny.
It is big--what happens in the oceans--because 93 percent of the heat goes into the oceans. What do we see? We know perfectly well what happens to liquids when they get warmer. That is a law of science. It is called the law of thermal expansion. When liquids get bigger--get warmer, they get bigger. Sure enough, when the ocean gets bigger, the sea level rises.
Here is a time series showing the sea level rise taking place.
So we have the principle of carbon dioxide warming the temperature of the Earth. We have the addition of the carbon dioxide. We have the measurement in the atmosphere of the effect of that addition. We have the laws of nature which show what happens when the ocean warms and rises. Then we go back out, measure, and we see it coming through exactly as predicted.
By the way, it is 93 percent of the heat, but it is 30 percent of the carbon.
We can go into a regular chemistry lab and we can do the experiment of adding carbon dioxide to saltwater and watching its acidification go up. Sure enough, we can go to the ocean and do this as well. Again, this isn't theory; this is measurement.
Does the Republican Party want to be the party that doesn't just deny science but denies measurement? I don't think so. There is no future in that.
Responsible people who back the Republican Party need to bring their party back from the brink of one of the most embarrassing fiascos any political party could get itself into.
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The one we hear the most often right now is: Don't worry, climate change has leveled off. Global warming and the temperature increases have leveled off.
Well, as you just saw, 93 percent of the heat goes into the ocean. So if you are measuring just the atmosphere, a tiny wobble in the 93-percent share the oceans take up will make a massive effect in the atmosphere.
But more to the point, if you take a graph, here is the leveling they show over the last 15 years. The problem is, if you go back through the data, you can show it leveled here, and then it leveled here, and then it leveled here, and then it leveled here, and then it leveled here, and then it leveled here. There are constant levels in an upward-going staircase. If you cherry-pick the data, you can say: OK, it has gotten level for that period. But if you really look at the trend of the identical data, that is the real trend. That is the actual trendline through the data.
So when somebody comes to you and says: Ignore that trendline; instead look at it having gotten flat. And by the way, forget all those other times it got flat before. What do you think about somebody who makes an argument to you like that. It is a ridiculous argument. It ruins the credibility of the person who makes it. How you can believe that is astonishing.
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Climate science doesn't tell you that every day is going to get a tiny little bit warmer. Climate science tells you that putting that extra energy into the system will make the weather extremes worse, both warmer and colder. So the fact there have been cold snaps is actually perfectly consistent with climate science. Not only does that argument ignore the difference between weather and climate, it also takes advantage of people who haven't drilled into the climate science. Because if you knew the least little bit about the underlying science, you would know the point made no sense because that is exactly what the people who predict global warming predicted would happen. If anything, it confirms the argument that people are trying to rebut. So it really, really is a dishonest argument.
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We are seeing the same thing in Rhode Island. Indeed, Newport, RI, is known for being a summer destination. The first summer visitors to Newport, RI, the first people who made it the summer capital of the United States were traders from the Carolinas, who sailed up the coast with their families to get away from the baking fetid heat of the Carolinas and enjoy the cool shores of Narragansett Bay.
Well, what is happening is that due to climate change and the warming climate, that very climate those Carolina traders sailed up to Newport, RI, to get away from is inching its way up the coast and will soon be the climate in Newport, RI.
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The Senator knows better than I what is happening in New Jersey. You know how hard New York and New Jersey in particular were hit by Sandy. You have our sympathies, because we had some Sandy damage in Rhode Island but we just caught a glancing blow. The full thrust of that hit was on New York and New Jersey, and you guys paid the price.
In the recovery, FEMA and other Federal agencies and your State agencies are starting to look at this in a whole new way. They are saying: We can't build back the same. The same didn't work last time. And by the way, with that sea level rising, the same is probably going to not only not be enough for the last time, it is going to be way less than is necessary for next time. So the very way in which the U.S. Government, the State of New York government, the State of New Jersey government, the city of New York government are taking a look at how they respond to Sandy and how they recover and how they rebuild for the future is a perfect living example of the point my colleague is making. For that purpose, it doesn't matter whether this is manmade. The fact that it is happening, the fact you can predict it means it would be reckless and foolish not to take that into account as you rebuild.
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The bipartisan work I think is mostly being done at the local level--at the level of Governors and mayors, at the level of local city councils.
One example which comes to mind is the City of Miami. Miami is really ground zero for climate change. On high-tide days, their streets already flood with water which is pushing up through what should be ways for water to flow off the streets but comes up into the streets--saltwater. The freshwater supply is already being inundated by saltwater as it pushes through the porous limestone the Miami area is built on. They realize they have a real problem. So four county governments came together to deal with this. The four counties are led two by Democrats and two by Republicans.
I mentioned earlier we used to have bipartisanship on this issue until Citizens United was decided by the Supreme Courts, until all the big money came in, until all the dark money came in, until people on the Republican side who were willing to speak up about climate change were punished and threatened so badly they could no longer do it. The Citizens United effect hasn't worked its way down to Governors and counties, so they still see the real action.
I think the Senator as a mayor will also remember there were reality-based problems to be dealt with--not every day but 10 times a day or 15 times a day.
Abraham Lincoln in the movie ``Lincoln'' said: I like to get my public opinion bath by having real people in. The Senator got a reality bath every day as mayor, and every mayor out there is getting a reality bath every day. Here, we don't deal with that. Here, it is different. We don't have to live in the same real world. We live in a more political world. So people can say things which are, frankly, irresponsible, untrue, and get away with it longer. The intimidation factor of big money is worse here.
So where is the bipartisanship? It will be back here. It is inevitable. But we know there can be bipartisanship here by looking at bipartisanship live and healthy and in action on climate at the municipal, State, and county level.
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And the particularly vicious looking duck. The solution on climate is not the equivalent of piranhas, alligators, snakes, and a vicious duck. The solution on climate is actually a triple win.
The Senator mentioned the earlier limits on pollutants. We found over and over that despite the regular claims by the industry that this was going to be the end of civilization as we know it and an economic catastrophe would ensue, when we actually look back, people saved money because of the harm they were spared. I think the Clean Air Act is $30 saved for every $1 we had to invest in cleaning up. So the limits actually saved money.
In this case, we will add--as the Senator mentioned before--the growth in new industries, the $6 trillion clean-energy industry we want to be in rather than trailing behind and buying from China. Finally, if we believe in market theory, if we believe markets are the most efficient way to make choices, then we have to set up a market which is a fair one. This business the Senator mentioned of a business being able to externalize its costs by saying, ``That is not my responsibility. I don't have to pay for that. I am just going to dump it.'' This is no more fair than a New Jersey neighbor or a Hawaii neighbor or a Connecticut neighbor or a Rhode Island neighbor, instead of cleaning up their lawn, just shoveling their leaves over to the next guy's wall. We don't get to do that. We are responsible for cleaning up our own lawn when the leaves fall, in the same way these companies that are making this mess are responsible for cleaning it up.
So it is actually a triple win. We have markets which work correctly, limits which save money for people in the long run, and the proper investment in green industries which are going to grow. So if that is alligators, snakes, and piranhas, I think it is the exact opposite. It is abundance and opportunity and innovation.
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The energy is definitely out there. There is no doubt about it. Poll after poll shows how strongly Americans feel about climate change.
My favorite one, because it involves Republicans, is a poll taken of self-identified Republican voters under the age of 35--young voters, the future of the party, the future of the country, the future demographic they need to reach out to. When asked what they feel about climate denial, 53 percent of young Republican voters described climate denial with three words: Ignorant, out of touch or crazy.
So there are lots of reasons to have confidence. But one reason to have confidence is young people in this party view the climate denial strategy which we heard here earlier this evening from the one Republican who came--they view that theory as ignorant, out of touch or crazy. If this is what the young people in their own party think about it, that is not a position they can hold. Up against the common sense and the reality, up against the force of public opinion, and up against the effort of this evening which Senator Schatz has done so much to make happen, there shows a new spirit of stirring in the Senate. Then I think we win. I think the American people win, more to the point.
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If you have two factories working side-by-side and one factory is paying attention to making its products and doing the best it can and being as efficient as it can and making a great product and going out and selling it, and then the factory next to it has figured out a way to take a big chunk of its costs and push them off on to other people--let's say one factory has to clean up its effluent, and the other one just dumps it in the river; let's say one factory has to pay for cleanup of its trash and disposal and the other just shovels it in the neighbor's yard at night; no matter how that second factory is cheating by offloading costs onto other people instead of putting them in, you do not have a fair market between those two factories. You have one that is playing by the rules, playing by market theory, and you have one it cannot compete with because the other one is cheating.
When fossil fuels dump carbon into our atmosphere and we now know the harm it causes, and it comes home to folks at Roy Carpenter's Beach in Rhode Island, and people's homes are falling into the water; when it comes to storms that smash on the shorefront of New Jersey; when it comes to the wildfires and droughts that we heard of tearing through New Mexico and Colorado; when it comes to ocean acidification, those are real costs to real people, and they have been pushed onto the rest of us by those polluters, and it simply isn't fair. It is a violation of basic market theory. So, if as the Republican party so often says, ``We want to be the free market party,'' fine, be the free market party, but have it be a fair market. It cannot be a racket of a market. It has to be a free and fair market in which the costs of a product are in the price of a product. Otherwise it is just picking winners and losers.
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Here are two families. Here are two families who paid a price. That wasn't built into the price of fossil fuels, but they sure as heck paid it and they just didn't pay it in the wrecked front of a building and entirely ruined their little house there. They paid it also in the loss of all the memories of all the summers where they grew up back when this was their summer home. That is a real price. People paid a lot when this happened. And to write that off as if it is nothing, and have the polluters just keep going at it--no, that is not right.
I yield the floor.
Senator Schatz, I know you have some remarks you would like to make, and let me take another opportunity to thank you again for your leadership in bringing us together.
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May I inquire through the Presiding Officer if the Senator from Connecticut would be willing to engage in a brief colloquy. If the answer to that is yes, I would propound the following question:
I know the senior Senator from Connecticut to be a very deeply believing patriot. He spoke in his remarks about how each American generation takes upon itself a covenant. I also know the senior Senator from Connecticut serves on the Armed Services Committee and has to consider, as part of his responsibilities in the Senate, the power that America projects around the world, which is sometimes military power, but also sometimes the soft power that comes from our role.
I know also, as a student of history, Senator Blumenthal knows that President Lincoln described the United States of America as the ``last best hope of earth'' and that Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural, described this American government as the ``world's best hope.''
Finally, I heard the Senator say that climate change will have consequences. I wonder if he would care to comment on what a failure to address climate change by the United States of America, knowing the information we know, would mean in terms of the kind of hope America is to the world, in terms of the kind of credibility America needs to project its soft power. Is there a consequence the Senator could foresee in our foreign policy and in our national security from fumbling and dropping this ball at this time?
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Mr. President, before I yield the floor to Senator Udall of New Mexico, this may be my last chance to speak before the all-night session comes to its end, because I am about to relieve the Presiding Officer. In fact, I am overdue for that.
But I did want to take this moment to say a few thank-yous. As one of the instigators of this episode, I thank my staff in particular for all the work that went into this. I thank the parliamentarians and the Senate clerk staff, who had a long night with us, and I appreciate it very, very much. There is only one page I see on the floor remaining--no, there is another one. I want to thank all the pages. Many of them stayed here through the night, and it was a very long night for them, and I appreciate very much their effort. Then throughout the building, because the Senate had to be kept open, there were people who were kept here--the Capitol police and others--and it is much appreciated.
One of the things about the Senate is when we are in session, the light on the top of the Capitol stays on. So all night last night, people across the city could look and see that the light on the Capitol stayed on. I hope that wasn't the only light that was shed last night, but at least it is an example, and I just express my appreciation to all of the people who we have inconvenienced in order to make this point.
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