Making Continuing Appropriations During a Government Shutdown

Floor Speech

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Mr. COONS. Madam President, I come to the floor of the Senate to speak about an issue that is of urgent concern to me and should be of urgent concern to all of us. That issue is global warming or climate change.

This is a personal issue for me. As the father of three, along with any other parent, my kids are never far from my mind and my heart. This is true for me as a father as well as a Senator, where every day I have to ask the question: What kind of example am I setting? What kind of a world are my actions going to lead to? What sort of a world will I leave my children, and will it be better than the one my parents left to me?

Last summer I experienced one of the great joys of parenthood--a family trip. My wife Annie and I took our three children Maggie, Michael, and Jack on a visit to one of our Nation's most spectacular places: the mountains and glaciers of Glacier National Park in Montana. There was one hike in particular on our summer trip that I will never forget. It was our hike up to visit historic Grinnell Glacier. If we had taken this hike more than 60 years ago, here is what we would have seen, as this picture shows: mountains deep in glaciers, thick with ice and snow, covered in the glaciers that gave this national park its name. Yet last year as we took a long and winding hike up the trails, we came up and over the last rise, and what we saw was noticeably different--strikingly so--because most of what is left of the iconic Grinnell Glacier in the summer is a chilly pool of water in a largely empty valley pool. We can see the difference in these two pictures, and this is just in one lifetime.

Since 1966, Grinnell Glacier has lost half its total acreage, and as we continue to warm our planet, these changes will only accelerate. My children--our children--will not just lose the chance to see beautiful glaciers and an iconic national park but the chance to live in a world as robust and safe and healthy and vibrant as the one their parents were born into. As our global population keeps growing toward 9 billion and developing nations keep seeking higher living standards and climate change accelerates, this is the foundational challenge of the 21st century.

Climate change impacts everything: human health, agriculture, national security, migration patterns for animals and fish and birds. As parents and as a nation, I think it is our responsibility, our challenge, and our opportunity to lead the way, to show that prosperity does not need to mean doom for our future.

I also think in my view that, simply put, there is no alternative to action. The world where we don't act isn't a world of vibrant economic growth, it is a world with more frequent and extreme natural disasters, with increased droughts and famine, with displaced populations and cities--even regions and in a few cases even nations--plunged under water.

I represent the lowest mean elevation State in America, the State of Delaware. It has been documented in a broad study led by our Governor's Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control that rising sea levels could put up to 11 percent of my home State of Delaware under water by the end of the century. We know these changes are coming. They are slow. They are gradual. They are cumulative. At times they are hard to perceive, but they have already started and will only get more extreme and more expensive the longer we wait to act. The cost of our inaction will be borne by our children and generations to come.

We are not the only ones seeing these impacts, and although the debate over science raged for many years, and I think is settled, I have also had an opportunity to hear from folks who live well outside the Western scientific world but have a profound insight into what these impacts are and how they are seen in the world.

Several years ago, along with the senior Senator, a friend of mine, our President pro tempore, Senator Leahy, I visited the Kogi tribe in the remote Santa Marta Mountains of Colombia. These equatorial mountains have massive glaciers up at the very top of very high mountains but are also right at the edge of the Caribbean Sea. The folks who make up this pre-Colombian tribe, the Kogi tribe, don't have sophisticated technology that monitors and tracks climate change, but as they sat with us they shared with us what they see as starkly as our best weather-monitoring satellites. By observing changes in migratory patterns and weather and the snowpack on the glacial mountains they worship, they see, more every year, that there is a fundamental change happening in our environment, in our climate. Their purpose in calling us to meet with them was to warn us that climate change is impacting the way of life that has passed down from generation to generation for centuries in their people, and it has moved them to speak out to the world, to tell their story, and to urge the rest of us not to hurt Mother Earth and to understand the consequences of the changes we are making.

Whether the voices we listen to come from our own children, from our science community or from remote corners of the world, all of them call us to act, to act in a way that prevents the worst from happening and to ensure that the benefits outweigh the costs.

This isn't just wild-eyed or rosy thinking. It is possible for us to make meaningful change in a bipartisan way. We have done it before. Back in 1990, when acid rain was a real and pressing challenge that was threatening the vitality and the vibrancy of many of the lakes and the mountain places in the American West, I remember well that under then-Republican President George H.W. Bush, Congress came together in a bipartisan way and passed the Clean Air Act amendments. These were designed to reduce the contributing elements to acid rain: powerplant emissions that produce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide that in combination caused acid rain, damaging historic property, monuments, injuring forests and lakes and ecosystems all over our country.

So Congress came together to create a novel, market-based, flexible cap-and-trade program that allowed powerplants to find cost-effective alternatives, solutions to limit pollution. Rather than tanking our economy, that cap-and-trade plan to fight acid rain ended up finding new ways to power our country and to improve energy efficiency without so much pollution. We adapted, we changed, and in some ways we thrived.

As a study done 13 years later shows, those standards adopted in 1990 have saved lives at a cost well worth it: $70 billion in health benefits every year, cumulatively, compared to $1.7 billion in costs--a 40-to-1 tradeoff that I think most Americans would take any day of the week as a return on their investment.

More recently, in my own State of Delaware and eight of our northeastern neighbors, we showed how we can act together to begin to curb climate change and grow our economies at the same time. In 2003, a bipartisan group of regional leaders, this time led by New York State's Republican Gov. George Pataki, built a regional cap-and-trade system, similar to the Acid Rain Prevention Program I just referenced. But the one in our region was called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI for short. It is flexible, market-based, and it has been effective. States choose to cut pollution in a number of ways, from closing older coal-fired powerplants or opening renewable energy projects to investing in important and valuable energy efficiency.

As the New York Times reported just last week, since that program started in 2009, our economies in these regional States have actually grown more than the 41 other States that are not part of RGGI--by several percentage points--while we have cut our emissions over four times more than the rest of the Nation.

We have created jobs, we have invested in innovation, we have cut pollution, and we saved millions of families money on their energy bills. That is why I think we should feel optimistic about the important steps the administration has just taken. The President's strong standards for vehicle fuel efficiency were a great start. At first many argued that pushing car companies to make cleaner, more efficient cars would end up costing a huge amount of money with little to show for it. But the opposite has happened.

We set more aggressive national standards. Engineers have gotten to work. They have innovated. They have invented. America's leading car companies have met the challenge, and the improvement in fuel efficiency has been dramatic. Although there is a cost in upfront research and development, it is well worth it, as drivers save money at the pump, America becomes less dependent on foreign oil, and we all get to breathe cleaner air.

Just last week the Obama administration took another step and proposed our Nation's first rules to limit carbon pollution from existing powerplants. Although they will not be finalized for another year, these limits represent the most significant action that any country has taken to halt the devastating warming of our planet.

They will have real and lasting health benefits. By cutting powerplant pollution over the next 15 years, we will be able to prevent 100,000 asthma attacks in children, 2,100 heart attacks, and thousands of premature deaths. That will mean nearly 500,000 fewer missed days of school and work and will save $7 in health costs for every $1 required of new investment.

Over the long term, curbing climate change will make large, lasting, and meaningful differences--from reduced hunger and heat waves, to reducing the spread of infectious diseases or conflicts over scarce resources.

Cynics will argue that even with these limits we will not stop climate change, and that is true. They will point out that renewable energy technology is not yet ready to fully replace fossil fuels. They will say that America acting alone cannot solve the problem, and that is true. We need global action, especially from large developing nations such as China and India that are on pace to pollute the most going forward.

As an exercise in cynicism, they get a lot of things wrong. These rules alone, yes, will not halt our rising seas. But, then again, no one is claiming they will alone. But they are a crucial step, and we owe it to posterity, to our country, to our future to take what action we can to send a powerful signal to America's entrepreneurs and engineers, our innovators and inventors, that this is a challenge we intend to take on. By acting now, we can begin to birth the innovations that will be at the heart of our planet's clean energy future.

Innovation in America has never stood still. We have done incredible things that even a few years before we might not have predicted. Remember, just a few years ago, natural gas prices were volatile, unreliable, and solar power was too expensive for most households. Yet in just the last few years new technologies have flipped those on their head and we are seeing remarkable changes. Solar prices have fallen 60 percent in just the last 3 years, and natural gas is today cheaper than coal. There are dramatic changes in our energy future going on because of a huge resurgence in natural gas production in this country. We have every reason to believe that by focusing our greatest minds on this challenge, American ingenuity can change and even save the world.

If the United States is going to lead the 21st century, we have to be at the forefront of combating climate change. Although we know meeting this challenge will take global action, the United States needs to lead the way. This is our responsibility. We cannot expect other poor nations to act if a leading, wealthy nation such as the United States is not willing to take even the most minimal responsible actions. We are the second largest polluter of greenhouse gases on the planet, only just eclipsed by the Chinese in the last decade.

For more than a century our economic growth and our strong middle class--built on American industry and innovation--made us the envy of the world, but they have also contributed to putting our planet in a dangerous position.

As developing nations work to lift hundreds of millions of people out of desperate poverty, they are looking at us to show that it is possible. Also, a great but urgent opportunity here lies before us. We have a moral obligation to lead because others are looking at competing examples and are not waiting around.

China, our greatest economic competitor, now and into the future, is itself choking on the byproducts of coal and investing heavily in cleaner air and cleaner energy. The country that figures out how to prosper without deadly pollution is the country that will dominate the technologies that our world uses and depends on in the decades to come. Are we really going to miss out on this chance to be the country that makes the clean cars, the clean powerplants, the clean technologies of the future? I hope not.

We in Congress have the opportunity and the obligation to pull together and to act responsibly as well. We can pass the bipartisan Shaheen-Portman energy efficiency bill today, create great jobs, and make it easy for families to spend less on energy and save money while doing it. We can put clean energy on a level playing field by passing the bipartisan Master Limited Partnership Parity Act, of which I am a cosponsor, to stop giving coal, oil, and natural gas a leg up without an even playing field for renewables and energy efficiency. We can invest in the research that will unlock the energy innovations of the future.

These are actions we could take today. There will be costs. But if we act now, they will be far outweighed by the benefits today and into the future. If we wait, these costs will only grow.

I understand this is a difficult issue politically for us to take on. Many of the most dire consequences of global warming are still into the future. As I know, as a person who struggles to make long-term, delayed decisions--whether it is investing for retirement or losing the weight my doctor keeps suggesting would help improve my long-term health--humans are not really good at taking the small but powerful steps today that over time will lead to a healthier, more secure future. Even if the costs are low, when the benefits are farther out, it is so hard for us to take action.

What will we say--what will we say--when our children ask, what did we do, when the science was clear, when the options were before us, and when we had the chance? Just as we rightly worry in this Chamber about the financial debts we are going to leave to future generations, leaving this debt, leaving the burdens of unaddressed, unresolved global warming and climate change to our children and future generations is a debt too deep for us not to address.

We are in danger--if we do not act--of leaving behind not only a worse off world but of leaving ourselves a future where we cannot look our children in the eye and say that we stepped up to the greatest global challenge of this century.

What will it mean when my own daughter, at some point in the future, goes to Glacier National Park with her future family? Will it even have glaciers? How will she explain to them how that amazing national park has changed? And what will she say about what this Senate and her own father did to take action? It is my hope, my prayer, that on that future trip they will reflect on how we found the will, how we found the determination, to act together to change the trajectory of our future and to save it for everyone's future.

With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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