Keystone XL Pipeline Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I first wish to thank the distinguished chairman of the energy committee and her ranking member for allowing this process to go forward to the point where I am able to call up this amendment.

It is a convention here when amendments are called up to ask unanimous consent that the reading be dispensed with, but in this amendment, the effective language is only eight words: ``Climate change is real and not a hoax.'' So I went ahead and allowed the clerical staff to read the whole operative text of this amendment.

This is an extremely simple amendment. We are here in this remarkable body in which so much history has taken place and in which so many great achievements have been fought through, many of them with powerful interests and strong arguments on opposite sides. And through that conflict, here in this body, we have been able to generate some of the great compromises and some of the great resolutions that have defined the course of the history of this country. So what a wonderful place this is to have the opportunity to serve.

Now, in this great deliberative body, called by many the greatest deliberative body, we have a great issue before us--perhaps as many say, the issue of our time--and that is what our carbon pollution--the excess carbon that we burn when we burn fossil fuels--is doing to our atmosphere and what it is doing to our oceans. There is no factual debate about what it is doing to our atmosphere and our oceans. It is crystal clear, and the consequences are crystal clear as well.

If my colleagues don't believe me, fine, go ask the U.S. military. Ask Admiral Locklear. Ask the Secretary of the Navy. Ask the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If my colleagues don't want to believe in the military, ask our religious leaders. Ask the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. If my colleagues only believe what corporations tell us, ask some of our biggest and most successful American corporations. Ask Walmart. Ask Coca-Cola. Ask Nike, ask Apple, ask Google. Go on through the corporate heraldry, and virtually every American corporation that is not actively involved in the fossil fuel industry will tell us this is a real and serious problem. And many of them are dedicating an enormous amount of internal effort to try to solve it within their corporate boundaries. Again, Walmart and Coca-Cola come right to the head of the list.

Of course, we don't have to ask our scientists any longer. They are pretty clear. They use words such as ``unequivocal'' and ``undeniable'' at every single scientific society that represents the major elements of the profession in this country. Every single one has made this a priority. If people just want to go out to farmers, foresters, and fishermen, they are already seeing the changes around them.

So here we are in this great deliberative body with this extraordinarily important issue that we have to face, and what do we see? Silence, virtually dead silence, because one side of this body won't even discuss the question. Many refuse to believe that climate change even exists, and for those who do, the political perils of using that phrase have now become so great that there is no serious conversation back and forth about climate change.

In the first week we debated the Keystone Pipeline, which the environmental impact statement said will have a dramatic effect on climate change--the equivalent of 6 million added cars on our highways for 50 years, not to mention the petcoke and the byproducts, and just the carbon effect of it--no mention. The only time it was mentioned was when our distinguished energy committee chairman mentioned the testimony of a witness in her committee. She was good enough to make sure that climate change was raised in her committee, and she mentioned that there had been a witness who in turn mentioned climate change. But there was no direct mention in all of the debate that we heard in that week about climate change. It is the word that cannot be said.

That is wrong. We cannot ignore this problem. It is too real for my fishermen in Rhode Island. It is to real for the people who are living near coasts and are seeing beaches they used to be able to play on eaten away. It is too real for the people whose homes have fallen into the sea. It is too real for us not to discuss it.

Now, it is not going to be easy, and we have to start somewhere. So this is a start. I am going to ask my colleagues to vote on such a simple question: Is climate change real or is it a hoax? Both points of view have been expressed in this body. Where do we come down? Let's actually find out if there are people on the Republican side of the aisle who are willing to say climate change is real. My moose up in New Hampshire, one could say, are suffering unprecedented infestations of ticks because there is no snow for them to fall off and die, and the moose are getting overwhelmed. We could say that in the University of Oklahoma, the leading dean is an IPCC member and led the establishment of Climate Central. One could go to the Carolina coasts and hear from the coastal agencies about sea level rise. One could go to Arizona and hear about the desertification and the drought. We can go all over the place and find these things, and they are real.

We have to have this conversation. It has to begin with as simple a proposition as this. Then, I hope if we can build off this if we can find a few Republican Senators who will say publicly that climate change is real. We can then go on to if it is real, let's have a conversation about what we do about it, because recklessly continuing to dump megatons of carbon into the atmosphere every year is not a solution. And I don't want to be a part of a generation of which our kids and our grandchildren look back and ask: Where were they? Why could they not address this question? There they were in this great deliberative body. There they were with this great issue of our time. Why would they not even discuss it?

So I hope this amendment gets the conversation under way. It is one I look forward to. I think there are very sensible ways to solve this problem, including ways that have been supported by everyone from Republican Secretaries of the Treasury to the lead economist for Ronald Reagan, the famous Mr. Laffer. There are ways we can make these adjustments. But we have to have the conversation, and I hope this begins it.

With that, I yield the floor. Again, I thank the distinguished chairman of the energy committee for her courtesy in allowing us to proceed.

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