[Senate Hearing 118-292]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 118-292
THE SCIENCE OF EXTREME EVENT ATTRIBUTION:
HOW CLIMATE CHANGE IS FUELING
SEVERE WEATHER EVENTS
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HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON
ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC WORKS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
NOVEMBER 1, 2023
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Environment and Public Works
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.govinfo.gov
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
55-612 PDF WASHINGTON : 2024
COMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC WORKS
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware, Chairman
SHELLEY MOORE CAPITO, West Virginia, Ranking Member
BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, Maryland KEVIN CRAMER, North Dakota
BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont CYNTHIA M. LUMMIS, Wyoming
SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, Rhode Island MARKWAYNE MULLIN, Oklahoma
JEFF MERKLEY, Oregon PETE RICKETTS, Nebraska
EDWARD J. MARKEY, Massachusetts JOHN BOOZMAN, Arkansas
DEBBIE STABENOW, Michigan ROGER WICKER, Mississippi
MARK KELLY, Arizona DAN SULLIVAN, Alaska
ALEX PADILLA, California LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina
JOHN FETTERMAN, Pennsylvania
Courtney Taylor, Democratic Staff Director
Adam Tomlinson, Republican Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
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Page
NOVEMBER 1, 2023
OPENING STATEMENTS
Carper, Hon. Thomas R., U.S. Senator from the State of Delaware.. 1
Capito, Hon. Shelley Moore, U.S. Senator from the State of West
Virginia....................................................... 3
WITNESSES
Wehner, Michael F., Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Applied Mathematics
and Computational Research Division, Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory..................................................... 6
Prepared statement........................................... 9
Responses to additional questions from Senator Carper........ 18
Jurado, Jennifer, Ph.D., Chief Resilience Officer and Deputy
Director, Resilient Environment Department, Broward County,
State of Florida............................................... 22
Prepared statement........................................... 24
Responses to additional questions from Senator Carper........ 88
Dabbar, Hon. Paul, former Under Secretary for Science, Department
of Energy, Senior Research Scholar, Columbia University........ 90
Prepared statement........................................... 92
Responses to additional questions from Senator Capito........ 95
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
Letter to Hon. Michael S. Regan, Administrator, U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency from the Public Service
Commission of West Virginia and the Delaware Public Service
Commission, October 4, 2023.................................... 105
What can't extreme event attribution tell us?.................... 131
Turning Down the Temperature on Extreme Claims About Extreme
Weather, the Breakthrough Institute, August 21, 2023........... 132
Number of deaths from disasters, accessed May 8, 2024............ 138
Death rate from disasters, accessed May 8, 2024.................. 139
Decadal average: Annual death rate from disasters, accessed May
8, 2024........................................................ 140
THE SCIENCE OF EXTREME EVENT ATTRIBUTION:
HOW CLIMATE CHANGE IS FUELING
SEVERE WEATHER EVENTS
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WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2023
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Environment and Public Works,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:01 a.m. in
room 406, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Thomas R. Carper
(Chairman of the Committee) presiding.
Present: Senators Carper, Capito, Whitehouse, Merkley,
Markey, Kelly, Padilla, and Boozman.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. THOMAS R. CARPER,
U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF DELAWARE
Senator Carper. Good morning, everyone. I am pleased to
call the hearing to order.
Today, as you know, we are gathered to discuss a field of
climate science known as extreme event attribution. My guess is
you ask 100 people in this country what they think that means,
they wouldn't have a clue. Until a couple of weeks ago, some of
us would not have, either. But when we leave here today,
hopefully we will know it and not just understand it ourselves,
but actually be able to explain it to others.
I am told that this may be the first ever congressional
hearing on the topic of extreme event attribution. To
understand why we are holding today's hearing, I think it might
be helpful to ask and answer a few questions.
First, what is extreme event attribution anyway? Besides
being quite a mouthful, extreme event attribution looks at how
a specific extreme weather event, such as a particular heat
wave or flood, was made worse by climate change.
Second, why is this kind of climate science important, real
important? To answer that question, we need to first
acknowledge the fact that human caused climate change is
increasing the frequency of extreme weather events.
Earlier this year, the American Meteorological Society
issued a report by many of our Nation's leading climate
scientists and meteorologists. That report detailed, as I am
sure our witnesses know, how climate change has driven
unprecedented heat waves, floods, and droughts this year and in
recent years. We know that continues to be the case.
When Phoenix, Arizona, experiences an unprecedented 31 days
of temperatures at or above 110 degrees Fahrenheit as they did
this summer, or when historic rainfall leads to severe flooding
in places like Florida and Vermont as it did this year, many of
us find ourselves asking, is climate change to blame for this?
The honest answer is yes, yes, it is.
It is true that we have always had heat waves, at least for
as long as I have been around, 76 years. But it is also true
that climate change is making them more intense. So, the better
question to ask ourselves is, how much worse did climate change
make this heat wave, or how much worse did it make that flood?
That is the kind of question that extreme event attribution
scientists, including at least one of our witnesses, Dr.
Wehner, work to answer. These questions matter because the
human harms and costs of climate change are massive, and sadly,
they are growing.
As many of our colleagues know, I represent the lowest
lying State in our Nation, Delaware. In Delaware, we are
already losing our dunes, we are losing our wetlands to sea
level rise and nor'easters. As we work to repair our homes,
businesses, and infrastructure and replenish our beaches
damaged by these events, we are already paying for the costs of
climate change.
But this hearing is not just about Delaware. It is a
hearing about 49 other States and a planet that we all share
with people around the world. We are grappling with the costs
of climate change.
Today, we are going to focus on how it is fueling extreme
weather, and maybe even more important, what we can do about
it.
Now, in one sense, climate change is already affecting
every aspect of our weather. Overall, NASA tells us that global
temperatures have increased a little more than 1 degree
Celsius, that is about 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since 1880. That
is due mostly to human caused climate change.
Because our planet is warmer, on average, the hot days are
becoming hotter. And because a warmer atmosphere holds more
water vapor, rain storms are growing more intense.
Warmer oceans are also producing stronger hurricanes. Last
week, we saw Hurricane Otis wreak havoc, wreak devastation in
Mexico when it rapidly intensified from a Category 1 storm to a
Category 5 in less than 10 hours. Think about that. Less than
10 hours. I couldn't believe it, but it is true.
Let me close and turn it over to Senator Capito, but first
let me say, you and I don't experience planetary averages. We
live through, and we clean up from, and we pay for specific
weather disasters. Extreme event attribution science helps us
to explain these events.
So, recognizing that we as a planet must prepare for more
frequent and intense weather in the future, and as elected
leaders we also need to understand what to expect in our States
and our communities. How much worse will our heat waves become
in the years to come? How likely is it that a community will
experience an even larger flood next time?
Extreme event attribution science is helping us answer
those questions, as well. The ability to do so will be critical
as we plan future infrastructure projects, we work a lot on
that kind of stuff here in this Committee. We wrote big parts
of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, this lady right here and
I, and we had the privilege of managing it on the floor, one of
the biggest infrastructure bills in the history of the country.
Making more informed policy decisions will help us protect
more Americans from extreme weather and allow us to use
taxpayer dollars more effectively.
Let me close by reminding everyone that while climate
change is driving extreme weather, we are not helpless, and we
are not hopeless. The situation is not hopeless. Working
together, we can prevent the worst impacts of global warming by
reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And that is what we are
doing.
Thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill that I just
mentioned and the Inflation Reduction Act, we are beginning to
turn this adversity into opportunity. Importantly, we are doing
so in a way that invests in American made clean energy, lowers
energy costs, creates good paying jobs all over the country,
and makes communities all over the country more resilient.
Still, it is important to acknowledge that we have a lot
more work to do ahead of us to tackle this challenge. So, as we
take those steps to better prepare for extreme weather and
manage its impacts, extreme event attribution can be an
important tool.
With that, we look forward to hearing from our witnesses
today about how communities can better understand and
anticipate what is coming and increase their resilience to
climate fueled extreme weather.
Before we do that, we will hear from our Ranking Member,
Senator Capito, for her opening statement.
Senator Capito, welcome. You are recognized. Thank you.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. SHELLEY MOORE CAPITO,
U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF WEST VIRGINIA
Senator Capito. Thank you, Chairman Carper.
Before I begin, I have a throat lozenge in my mouth, so if
I sound weird, or if I start choking, I would ask you to help
me out.
[Laughter.]
Senator Capito. So I apologize for that. It is preventing
me from coughing.
Senator Carper. I can see the headline: ``Carper saves
Capito from throat lozenge.''
Senator Capito. An extreme throat event.
Anyway, I want to thank our witnesses and our Committee for
its strong bipartisan work to reduce emissions and make our
infrastructure more resilient. The Chairman talked about that.
Legislation such as the USE IT Act, reducing barriers to
the deployment of carbon capture, the AIM Act, directing a
phasedown of heat trapping HFCs, the Nuclear Energy Innovation
and Modernization Act, supporting carbon free nuclear energy,
and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that the
Chairman talked about, with its investments in emissions
reductions and resiliency, all passed in a bipartisan way.
As we continue to build on that record by passing the
ADVANCE Act in the NDAA to help deploy advanced nuclear
reactors and technologies, as well as to renew our efforts on
passing a permitting bill that will allow us to unlock American
innovation across all types of technologies and bring American
manufacturing back home.
Several provisions of the IIJA are especially relevant to
today's topic. That law's reauthorization of our surface
transportation programs included a climate title for the very
first time, establishing formula programs to help States build
more resilient infrastructure and reduce certain emissions.
The law also included funding for hydrogen hubs, like the
Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub, known as ARCH2, that
will benefit my State of West Virginia and our region.
And the IIJA included $25 million to help EPA process Class
VI permits and $50 million to help States obtain primacy for
permitting Class VI wells, a necessary step toward broader
deployment of carbon capture and storage.
Despite the resources we provided in the IIJA, the EPA has
not granted Class VI primacy to any State under this
Administration, nor has EPA granted an individual Class VI
permit to store carbon dioxide since the Obama administration,
with 169 Class VI wells now waiting to be permitted, under the
EPA.
Commercial scale deployment of carbon capture and storage I
think is vital if we are to meet our energy reliability needs
while also addressing emissions. The Administration must
quickly review and process Class VI primacy applications from
States, as well as individual permit applications for projects
in States without primacy.
As our bipartisan work continues, there is widespread
agreement that the climate is changing and that greenhouse gas
emissions are contributing to that change. But I am not sure
that is the focus of the hearing. I am not sure that the focus
of the hearing is on that scientific consensus.
At the end of the Obama administration, the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published a question and
answer page about extreme event attribution that remains on the
agency's climate.gov website today.
One question posed there is, ``What can't extreme event
attribution tell us?'' I will enter the entirety of the answer
into the hearing record, but the short answer is it can't tell
us whether global warming caused a specific event. With global
warming and extreme events, it is not a yes or no question.
I want to be clear: This does not mean that climate change
has no impact on the intensity of weather patterns. The trends
are clear, and we need to be ready, and with technologies and
adaptation strategies like those I have described, are policy
areas about which this Committee has demonstrated expertise.
It is critical and crucial that we have effective solutions
that reduce flood risk and coastal storm risk across the
country.
Since 2014, the Committee has kept to a biennial schedule
of passing bipartisan water resources legislation to advance
these solutions. And I look forward to continuing this track
record; we have already had several hearings, with our next,
latest WRDA bill.
By contrast, I think some regressive regulatory policies or
carbon taxes that pick winners and losers could inhibit our
U.S. energy production disproportionately and will harm our
most vulnerable communities through lost opportunities and
displaced jobs. Rising energy costs and weakening of our grid
will leave these constituents without access to affordable
electricity and other basic necessities. Recognizing this, the
government should not put in place a one size fits all
regulatory mandate.
Successful climate technologies of the future may not even
exist today, so we need to make sure we provide the adequate
conditions for necessary innovation to take place. So I think
there are reasons to be optimistic, and the Chairman shared
that optimism. American innovation will rise to the occasion.
I am interested in today's discussion of developing
research, but I will be more interested to hear from our panel
on what we should do today to build on the Committee's record
of bipartisan solutions.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Carper. Thank you very much, Senator Capito. ARCH
is the name of your hydrogen hub, ARCH2?
Senator Capito. It is, ARCH2.
Senator Carper. That includes also Ohio and Pennsylvania?
Senator Capito. Southwest Pennsylvania, yes.
Senator Carper. First time I had ever heard of Arch, Arch
One, was your father.
Senator Capito. That is why I can remember the name.
Senator Carper. He was Governor of West Virginia when my
sister and I were little kids in Lavinia and Raleigh Counties,
West Virginia. Arch Three could be another member of your
family.
Senator Capito. I have a grandson named Arch, so I have
Arch Two.
Senator Carper. And she has a son who, off the record, is
running for Governor of the State of West Virginia, which is a
great job.
Now we are going to turn to our panel of esteemed
witnesses.
We are grateful to each of you for joining us today to
discuss this important topic.
We are going to hear from our witnesses in this order. Dr.
Michael Wehner is our lead off hitter. The second witness will
be Jennifer Jurado, and last but not least, we are going to
hear from Paul Dabbar.
Let me just say a word about each of our witnesses.
Dr. Michael Wehner is a senior scientist within the Applied
Mathematics and Computational Research Division at the U.S.
Department of Energy Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, whose
research focuses on extreme weather and a changing climate. Dr.
Wehner was the lead author for the 2013 Fifth and 2021 Sixth
Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change. He was also lead author for the second, third, fourth,
and upcoming fifth U.S. National Climate Assessment.
Our second witness is Dr. Jennifer Jurado, Chief Resilience
Officer and Deputy Department Director for Broward County,
Florida. In this role, Dr. Jurado is responsible for leading
climate resilience and environmental planning initiatives for
Broward County.
Then we are going to hear from Paul Dabbar, Former Under
Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy. Mr.
Dabbar is also a senior research scholar at Columbia University
and serves as CEO of Bohr Quantum Technology.
In reading through the bios, I came across someone who may
have served in the Navy, is that true?
Mr. Wehner. Yes, sir, Naval Academy.
Senator Carper. Naval Academy, good for you. I got wait
listed there, I had to go to Ohio State. But I turned out OK.
So did you.
All right, with that in mind, we are going to hear from Dr.
Wehner.
Please proceed with your statement. Your entire statement
will be made part of the record. Then we will hear from our
other witnesses; then we will ask some questions.
Thank you. Welcome.
STATEMENT OF MICHAEL F. WEHNER, PH.D., SENIOR SCIENTIST,
APPLIED MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH DIVISION,
LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY
Mr. Wehner. Thank you, Chairman Carper, Ranking Member
Capito, and distinguished members of the Committee.
Good morning, and thank you for the invitation to testify
at this important hearing on the science of extreme weather
event attribution.
As you said, my research focuses on the behavior of extreme
weather events and the changing climate. I must say that my
remarks are my own, and not intended to represent positions of
the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of
California, or the United States Department of Energy.
According to the U.S. National Climate Assessments Annual
Report to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is
unequivocal that humans have heated the Earth's climate. The
best estimate is that human activities, principally the use of
oil, coal, and gas, is responsible for all of the observed
global warming since 1900.
Our understanding about the effects of this human caused
global warming on specific, individual weather events has
advanced considerably in the past two decades. For many types
of weather events, scientists can identify and quantify the
ways that the human interference in the climate system has
influenced extreme weather.
Obviously, as you said, we have always experienced extreme
weather: Heatwaves, droughts, extreme storms, and the like. But
extreme weather attribution science attempts to quantify the
influence of climate change on these specific individual events
by answering two related questions. First, has global warming
affected the severity of an event of a particular frequency,
say, once in 100 years? And second, given the observed
intensity of an event, has global warming affected how rare it
is? And I detailed this a little bit more in my written
testimony.
Because we have only one planet Earth, to answer these
questions, scientists must use both climate and statistical
models to compare representations of weather events in the
actual ``world that was'' to a ``world that might have been''
without climate change. Confidence is increased when multiple
independent research teams use different approaches and arrive
at similar conclusions consistent with observed trends.
Confidence in quantitative attribution statements is very
high about the human influence on heatwaves, agricultural
drought, and certain classes of severe storms, including
hurricanes. Indeed, as the Earth warms, every heatwave that we
now experience is hotter than it would have been without
climate change, including those this past summer in the United
States and throughout the Northern Hemisphere.
Throughout the lower 48 States, I estimate that any
heatwave we now experience is 2 and a half to 5 degrees
Fahrenheit hotter than it would have been. All Americans face
increased health risks from these hotter heatwaves,
particularly the very young, the very old, and the very poor in
our society.
Extreme storms have been made wetter by climate change as
well. For instance, of the more than 30 different hurricanes
have been studied in an attribution context, all analyses
reveals significant human fingerprint on the total rainfall
amounts.
Recent advances in attribution science have gone beyond
studying the human influence on the meteorology of extreme
weather events to include the impacts of these events on real
people. Take Hurricane Harvey and the record flooding it caused
in the greater Houston area, for example. Global warming made
the surface waters of the Gulf of Mexico about 2 degrees
Fahrenheit warmer, increasing the rainfall during Hurricane
Harvey by about 20 percent. This increased the area flooded by
about 14 percent, importantly leading to a 32 percent increase
in the number of flooded homes in Harris County.
I estimate that global warming is then responsible for
about a third of the $150 billion in damages estimated by NOAA
during Hurricane Harvey. These damages were not equally
distributed across socioeconomic groups. Half of these flooded
homes were in low income, Hispanic neighborhoods. As about a
third of Harris County is characterized as low income Hispanic,
this disproportionate impact represents an environmental
injustice, in my opinion. We are finding similar injustice to
the most vulnerable of our society in an analysis of flooding
in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania from the remnants of
Hurricane Ida.
This recent extension of attribution science from weather
to impacts could be informative in negotiation for the Loss and
Damages Fund to aid nations particularly vulnerable to climate
change. This fund was established but not financed at last
year's meeting of the Conference of Parties, the COP27, part of
the United Nations framework convention on climate change, and
will certainly be one of the topics discussed later this month
at the COP28 in Dubai.
The human influence on extreme weather and its impacts on
people is quite clear. I am often asked, why do we do these
attribution studies? I have three answers to this question.
First, the public demand for information about how climate
change affects them personally is very high. People want to
know.
Second, increasing the number and variety of individual
extreme events studied increases our understanding of the
extent of the human influence on them. And third, and perhaps
most importantly, our quantitative understanding can aid
decisionmakers, increasing the resilience of our society to a
future, hotter world.
Extreme weather event attribution has shown us that
dangerous climate change is already happening. How much more
dangerous we let it become is up to us.
Thank you, and I welcome your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Wehner follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Senator Carper. Thanks very much for your testimony.
You mentioned one planet Earth, I heard that at one point
in your testimony, you said one planet Earth. That reminds me
of something, that, not a witness here, but a fellow who came
from France a couple of years ago and spoke at a joint session
of Congress, President Macron, he didn't say one planet Earth,
but he did say, no planet B. He said, there is no planet B. We
are only going to get one planet; this is it. We have to take
care of it. I was reminded of his comments when you said that.
Next, we are going to hear from Dr. Jurado.
Dr. Jurado, we have already talked a little bit about your
background. We are delighted that you are here. Please proceed.
STATEMENT OF JENNIFER JURADO, PH.D., CHIEF RESILIENCE OFFICER
AND DEPUTY DIRECTOR, RESILIENT ENVIRONMENT DEPARTMENT, BROWARD
COUNTY, STATE OF FLORIDA
Ms. Jurado. Good morning, Chairman Carper, Ranking Member
Capito. Thank you for your leadership in convening this hearing
today.
As you shared, I am the Chief Resilience Officer for
Broward County, the 17th largest county in the U.S. and the
second most populous in the State of Florida, with nearly 2
million residents. While we are leaders in many ways in
adapting to a changing climate, we remain at the forefront of
significant impacts.
South Florida is no stranger to extreme weather. To manage
nearly 60 inches of rainfall we receive annually, we have made
extensive investments in drainage, flood control, stormwater
management systems. Even so, as we grapple with the impacts of
climate change, the limitations of these investments are
evident and record breaking events are becoming more damaging.
Most recently, on April 12th, 2023, a thunderstorm
delivered an unprecedented 26 inches of rainfall in 12 hours,
impacting much of our community. A 30 minute commute became a 3
hour navigation of flood waters. Flooded vehicles were
abandoned en masse. The Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International
Airport closed for 40 hours. Fuel distribution from Port
Everglades was disrupted, affecting 12 counties and 5
international airports. Water levels reached 2 to 3 feet in
several older neighborhoods, and the city of Fort Lauderdale
remains without a city hall. Yet this event occurred outside
the hurricane season, a one in a 1,000 year rainfall event.
Less than 3 years earlier, Tropical Storm Eta delivered 22
inches of rainfall in 3 days. The 6 week rainfall total was
four times the historic average in inland areas, some of which
remained flooded for 2 weeks.
In 2017, an 18 inch rainfall event closed Sawgrass Mills,
the region's largest shopping center, for 3 days. The economic
loss was $30 million. These three extreme events all in the
last 6 years account for the highest annual rainfall totals in
the last 30, exceeding 88 inches in 2020.
Congress has helped to ensure South Florida remains dry
during wet weather events. In 1948, Congress authorized the
Central and Southern Florida Flood Control Project, the C&SF.
It was constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers. Today, it
serves 11 million residents, but it is under substantial
stress, especially due to intense rainfall events and sea level
rise.
Given these new extremes, we have advocated for a new look
at the C&SF system, and thank the Committee for its
authorization of the comprehensive study of this flood control
project as part of the 2022 WRDA. Without this study and
funding for improvements, our local efforts would not be as
effective.
Of course, extreme conditions are not limited to flooding.
This year, Broward County experienced 37 days with a heat index
over 105 degrees Fahrenheit compared to an average of 5 days
per year historically. We know that extreme heat
disproportionately impacts the under-represented residents,
outdoor workers, health compromised individuals, our youth and
elders, affecting finances, earnings, and physical health.
To better prepare for extremes, Broward County has
incorporated sea level rise and rainfall intensification in
updated design standards for our drainage systems, seawalls,
and building elevations. We are developing a countywide
resilience plan to address both flood and heat risks with
emphasis on green infrastructure, especially where heat islands
and vulnerable communities intersect.
Although I am formally representing Broward County, I would
like to highlight the efforts of our Southeast Florida Regional
Climate Change Compact, a collaboration amongst Broward, Palm
Beach, Miami Dade, and Monroe Counties to address shared
climate challenges. Jointly, we are developing the priority
climate action plan supported by the EPA's Climate Pollution
Reduction Grant program under the Inflation Reduction Act, and
expect to emphasize energy efficiency improvements in lower
income housing.
We have also pursued grant proposals under NOAA's recent
Coastal Resilience Challenge, and strongly support additional
funding along these lines.
Additional Federal collaborations and programs aiding our
efforts include modeling and monitoring supported by the USGS,
technical assistance of NOAA, the Corps, USGS in providing
future conditions guidance for planning, DOE grant support for
electric vehicle charging infrastructure, the IRA's Direct Pay
Tax Credits, aiding clean energy and energy efficient
investments by local governments, FEMA's Brick and Hazard
Mitigation grant programs, and the totality of the Corps'
resilience efforts in our region, including shoreline
protection, Everglades restoration, the C&SF project, Back Bay,
and navigation studies.
Climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing
our region. Continued leadership and support for transitions to
clean energy, alongside aggressive adaptation actions, is
critical to our economic and community vitality. We look
forward to continued collaborations with our Federal agency
partners, and thank you again for the opportunity to speak
today.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Jurado follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Senator Carper. Thank you, Dr. Jurado. You packed a lot
into 5 minutes. That is pretty impressive. I could learn from
you.
Finally, we are going to hear from Mr. Dabbar.
You are recognized. Thanks so much for joining us. Please
proceed.
STATEMENT OF HON. PAUL DABBAR, FORMER UNDER SECRETARY FOR
SCIENCE, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY, SENIOR RESEARCH SCHOLAR,
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Mr. Dabbar. Chair Carper, Ranking Member Capito, I am
honored to be before the Senate again, for the first time
before this Committee, to discuss climate impact, energy
innovation, and policy.
Over my career, I have been engaged on all the various
aspects of energy, including liberating neutrons at a reactor,
and addressing solutions for the environment, in particular as
Under Secretary for Science at the Department of Energy.
Other than Senator Kelly, I have likely traveled to more
remote locations to collect climate data. I am one of the few
people who has been to both the geographic North and South
Poles, both in government service, and in part both missions
were around climate data gathering.
As Under Secretary, we supported gathering data and
computer simulation of the climate, including the work of Dr.
Wehner, at many of the national labs I ran including Lawrence
Berkeley, as well as at NETL and others in support of research
at universities in everyone's State here at the Committee.
The world has been successful at reducing different types
of emissions, due to innovation. And I believe the right
strategy for the world today is to continue discovery,
innovation, and deployment of new options. America has been the
dominant country at investing in discovery, and the lead in
deployment of new energy technologies, and America is the
global leader of the pipeline of new prospects.
I am quite positive about these prospects due to the U.S.
being the world's leader in public and private energy R&D,
including at the world's leading universities and national
labs, the dominant winner of Nobel prizes in the physical
sciences, and the global leader in venture capital and
startups.
I reach this positive conclusion based on a lot of data.
Most of what we are deploying today was invented within the
last generation, such as commercially effective lithium-ion
battery chemistry, wind turbines, innovative drilling
technologies, and PV solar. As Under Secretary I enjoyed the
Nobel prize reception in the Senate vestibule for winning the
Nobel for the lithium-ion chemistry.
The pipeline of future innovation is very strong. For
example, Form Energy, which has recently opened a plant in West
Virginia, has developed an iron-air battery, that literally
rusts and de-rusts for its chemistry, that produces power for
25 times longer than lithium-ion, and is 80 percent cheaper. X-
energy, an SMR fission company, is in the process of building
the next generation of nuclear all over the country. And
Montana Technology has developed a MOF based HVAC cooling
technology that uses up to 75 percent less energy and emissions
than current compressor systems, and no freon. American
innovation has and will continue to lead the way to solutions.
One final innovation take away that we should consider is
that regulators or elected officials mandating winning energy
technologies is poor technology policy. The innovation
ecosystem has a track record of inventing new options that were
not predicted.
For example, President Bush's famous 2001 energy assessment
had a long list of predictions of winning energy technologies,
and most them were significantly wrong. Unpredicted innovations
in drilling, solar, and batteries came along and remade the
landscape, including for emissions. It is better policy for the
EPA and States to allow for technology neutral, innovation open
strategies, that allow for the competition of discovery.
We need balance in energy policy. We need to concurrently
care about increasing energy availability, lowering energy
costs, lowering emissions, and national security. Due to
American innovation and a solid all of the above bipartisan
pro-supply policies over the last generation, we were able to
deliver on all those concurrently. I have confidence we can do
that again this generation.
While we certainly need to understand the drivers of
climate change, we should focus on solutions also. America is
the global energy superpower. We went from the largest energy
importer in the world to the largest energy exporter. We
invented for us and the world a portfolio of technologies that
are making an impact on emissions. And there is a pipeline of
even better ones to come. Policy to allow the ingenuity of
Americans to harness and allow deployment of their new ideas,
will be the solution.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Dabbar follows:]
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Senator Carper. Great, thank you very much.
Let me start with Dr. Wehner.
Your colleague to your right, Dr. Jurado, has told us that
Fort Lauderdale and surrounding communities in southeast
Florida have experienced several devastating torrential
rainfall events over the last couple of years, including 26
inches of rainfall over 12 hours last April. Twenty-six inches
over 12 hours. My question, Dr. Wehner, is would you consider
this torrential rainfall event unusual? Should we expect to see
more extreme rainfall events as climate change worsens?
Mr. Wehner. Thank you, Senator.
Yes, indeed, we talked briefly prior to the hearing about
this storm. And what she said to me about this astonishing
amount of rainfall, and most of it falling in a very short
period of time, is completely consistent with my previous work
on extreme storms, showing that the rainfall increases at a
rate greater than humidity increases.
Now, humidity increases at a certain rate determined, that
we know, very rigorously from first principles. But rainfall
seems to be supercharged from climate change.
So what I would interpret is that this storm has been made
more violent and hence more efficient at increasing this
available moisture. And we would expect yet more of that
throughout the country, not just in Florida, actually
throughout the world.
Senator Carper. How about heat waves? Absent climate
change, would we be experiencing events such as the Pacific
Northwest 2021 heatwave, or this past summer's heatwave in the
U.S.?
Mr. Wehner. It is interesting that you would highlight the
2021 heatwave in the Pacific Northwest. I consider this one a
teachable moment for climate scientists. If you had asked me
before that event when it would be 120 degrees in Canada, I
would have said not for a long time.
Senator Carper. Would you have said when hell freezes over?
Mr. Wehner. No, I would have said about 2060.
[Laughter.]
Senator Carper. That is when it is scheduled to freeze
over.
Mr. Wehner. So that was a surprise to us. This will be an
event that is probably the most stunning extreme weather event
of all time. Currently, there are at least 20 different papers
on an event that happened just over a year ago. I have three
myself, three of those 20 are mine.
We are learning a lot. And it is kind of scary, because it
was scary beforehand, and clearly this event was unprecedented,
caused a lot of people to die. How many more died because of
climate change is not something I know.
But I would say that it was at least 2 degrees warmer from
climate change, possibly 4, not much more than that. That
doesn't sound like a lot. But when you look at the effect of
high temperatures on mortality, a small change from 110 degrees
to 114 degrees actually has a large effect on the number of
people that die. So that is important.
Senator Carper. One last question of you, Dr. Wehner, then
we will turn it over to Senator Capito.
We have been joined by two of our colleagues; welcome,
gentlemen.
Dr. Wehner, as communities across our Nation experience
increasingly extreme weather events, resiliency, and adaptation
are front of mind for State and local officials, in Delaware
and West Virginia and every State that is represented here. Our
infrastructure, our roads, our bridges, our pipes, our wires,
are essential to our daily lives. They have to be able to
withstand more frequent and severe weather events.
My question is, would you please share an example of how
attribution science can inform the design and engineering of
infrastructure projects to better manage the impacts of these
extreme weather events when they occur?
Mr. Wehner. Yes, Senator, I can. I had a project with the
San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which I believe is
the first time that a city actually funded research at a
national laboratory. The city of San Francisco is charged with
rebuilding the wastewater management, the sewers. And they are
charged with considering climate change in this. They had
people telling them about sea level rise.
They asked me about extreme precipitation. So what we did
is we asked them to give us a dozen storms since the satellite
era that were impactful, and we would take a look at them. We
were able to analyze six of those. The atmospheric river storms
that had the so called bomb cyclone associated with them
responded in a way that again I was surprised about twice the
expected rate. and that was used by their consultants to modify
their IDF curves.
Senator Carper. What are IDF curves?
Mr. Wehner. Intensity Duration and Frequency. It is a
design tool that engineers use. And that is the extent of my
knowledge.
I will quote what Susan Leal said, who was the former
director of the Public Utilities Commission, and now one of
their consultants. She said, ``There ain't no pipe big
enough.'' That has sent the engineers and designers back to the
drawing room, saying, how are we going to accommodate these
storms, in a world that might be considerably warmer.
Senator Carper. I am going to ask you to hold it right
there.
Dr. Jurado, I am going to come back to my next round to ask
another question, and ask you to follow up on what he has
already said.
But now, Senator Capito. Thank you.
Senator Capito. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Dabbar, I love this one term that you used in your
statement, ``technology neutral, innovation open.'' I think we
need to focus on solutions. Everybody has talked about it.
As one of the things we have seen in the data, that
mortality from natural disasters is significantly lower in more
technologically advanced societies with access to energy and
resilient infrastructure. Recent reports by reliability experts
show that we are projected to go, we as a Nation, are projected
to go backward on our grid reliability this decade. And many
point to some regulations that will lead to early power plant
retirements. We also see the rise of the electric economy that
is being moved forward rather rapidly.
Everybody has mentioned that the most vulnerable are those
that are in the lower economic echelon of our society. That is
troublesome, obviously, for me.
How will extreme weather impact energy demand, and how do
you think grid reliability will impact our vulnerability in
these events?
Mr. Dabbar. Yes, Senator. I agree with your point that
greater reliability has actually been decreasing. I think the
most stark example that most people don't know about is that
there have actually been more power plant shutdowns in many
areas of the country. New England is one, New York is another,
Texas is another, it is actually all over.
More power plants are being decommissioned, for various
reasons, than are being built. The ones that are getting built
have a lower capacity factor, so the number of megawatt hours
is way lower.
So I think we should be concerned about that. That gets to
regulatory processes and siting, whether it is State or
Federal. In the kind of world that we are trying to electrify,
we are actually de-electrifying. I think that is a long and
complicated process that needs to be streamlined.
Senator Capito. OK, thank you.
We have had near term emission reductions, but we are still
and will continue, I think everybody is in agreement here,
experience climate change impacts until globally our greenhouse
gases are reduced. But it may continue then. There is stuff we
don't know, that we don't know into our future.
How do we create economic conditions for innovative
solutions, for technology neutral innovation opened, that would
increase our resilience and our disaster readiness? At the
Department of Energy you probably saw this, you probably see
this as well, certainly overseeing the national labs. Dr.
Wehner is at a national lab.
Are there near term technologies that can be deployed to
improve our adaptation strategies?
Mr. Dabbar. Yes, Senator. As I mentioned, we don't know, we
cannot clearly see which technologies are going to be best. So
having regulatory processes or mandates from States and so on
that allow for those new things, instead of mandating, we are
only going to have this type of technology, we are only going
to have EVs, we are only going to have nuclear, we are only
going to have wind, whatever it is, is poor technology policy.
We should be allowing all of those to be neutrally supported,
whether it is through EPA or State approvals or through
funding. Because if you overly fund one area, you are going to
get more of that. Being more neutral across that for regulatory
and funding purposes is better technology policy.
Senator Capito. Thank you.
In terms of where we are headed, I thought it was
interesting in your statement you mentioned that President Bush
in 2001 was trying to predict, his commission was trying to
predict over 20 years where we are going to go. How do you see
what accelerated now? I feel like we are on a much more
accelerated path through some of the bills that we have passed.
How do you see that developing? Are we the global leader here,
or are there other technologies around the globe that we are
looking at?
Mr. Dabbar. America by far leads the world in energy
discovery. Manufacturing is a different topic. But when it
comes to energy discovery, America rules the roost on many
different metrics.
So there are many things; we are accelerating, Senator.
There is a reason why that process has improved significantly.
But you can look at California, or you can look at what is
going on in Massachusetts, fusion is much more likely than it
used to be for various reasons. And many others.
So I think the acceleration of discovery has dramatically
improved. We are in a much better space on that front.
Senator Capito. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, I want to go back to my first question, when
I talked about electricity reliability. I want to submit a
letter, it is to Administrator Regan from the Chairman of the
West Virginia Public Service Commission and the Chairman of the
Delaware Public Service Commission, that is cautioning what the
Administration is doing on the Clean Power Plan to look at how
it will impact our States.
Senator Carper. Without objection.
Senator Capito. Thank you.
[The referenced information follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Senator Carper. I was reminded in that exchange that just
took place that we can be proud as Americans that we are
leading the pack in terms of addressing climate change. There
is a statement, I don't know if it is in the Bible or what, to
whom much is given, much is expected. We are a Nation richly
blessed, as you know. And we are, frankly, a leader in putting
emissions in the air in our planet that are actually leading to
climate change and global warming.
So, given that we helped create this problem we have maybe
an oversized obligation into addressing it. I think we are. I
think we are, we are doing good work in this panel, we are
doing good work with this Administration, and hopefully with
the next Administration that comes, much will be put around the
country. Thank you.
OK, we have been joined by Senator Markey. Senator Markey
has been working on these things for a long time, and we are
delighted that has joined us, along with Senator Boozman and
Senator Padilla.
Senator Markey.
Senator Markey. Thank you so much.
So we are the first generation to suffer from climate
change, but the last generation which can do anything about it.
That is our challenge. In answer to Senator Capito, in terms of
innovation, up in Massachusetts we have a center, it is called
Green Town, there are 300 companies up there all doing, like
MIT, Harvard, Tufts related research. One of the companies is
called Form Energy, which is actually creating a manufacturing
plant down in West Virginia for 800 jobs.
Senator Capito. Mr. Dabbar talked about that in his
opening.
Senator Markey. Great. That is a perfect partnership
between the innovation community up in Massachusetts, the
manufacturing capacity in West Virginia, and there are many
more companies up there who are looking at West Virginia, for
example, for where they will be doing the manufacturing to
accelerate this.
By the way, their breakthrough is, for batteries, it is not
lithium-ion, it is iron, I-R-O-N, which is going to be the
battery, the third most common element in the world. So that is
a big breakthrough in terms of battery technology.
There is just so much that is happening, because of the
IRA, the tax benefits that flow, and then the State of West
Virginia or other States then have initial benefits to
manufacture there. So I think it is a good team effort to
accelerate this transformation.
And just like the many things historically, this year alone
we have seen severe flooding and deadly heatwaves. And we need
to be able to do something about it.
Dr. Jurado, you mentioned in your testimony that Melrose
Park, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Broward County, was
disproportionately affected by flooding in April. Dr. Jurado,
does effectively managing climate fueled disasters, including
flood management, mean prioritizing investment in
infrastructure in neighborhoods that have suffered from chronic
disinvestment for decades, environmental justice communities
like Melrose Park? Would they be benefited?
Ms. Jurado. Yes, Senator, absolutely. We are conducting
comprehensive modeling, overlaying vulnerability and disease,
really focusing on the combined impacts and exposures with
flood risks, damages, heat exposures, economic conditions,
economic burden, all of those things being overlaid. We are
desperately concerned about uninsured losses. We saw with the
April event many residents lost their homes in addition to
their vehicles. And in the circumstance of Melrose Park, this
is a community that is not in a flood zone and has been hit
twice in the last 6 years with this level of flood impacts.
So it is bringing to light these very dramatic exposures,
and the need to bring all of our community into the solutions
to support their well being.
Senator Markey. Thank you.
And we know it is not a coincidence that disproportionately
Black, Brown, and low income communities are more likely to
struggle with extreme weather events fueled by climate change.
Dr. Wehner, in your research, do disasters fueled by climate
change hit some neighborhoods harder than others? And does that
drive increasing inequality resulting from climate injustices?
Mr. Wehner. Yes, it certainly does. But I would caution
that every event, every disaster is different, and affected
differently. I think the important point is that the very poor
are indeed the most vulnerable, because they are the least able
to recover from these kinds of events. So that is pretty
obvious.
Senator Markey. Yes, it is obvious. And do you agree with
the research that says that extreme weather events are up from
three times per year in the United States in the 1980s to 20
per year now in the 2020s? Do you agree with that?
Mr. Wehner. I might have written that.
[Laughter.]
Senator Markey. Please expand. Because obviously that is a
sevenfold increase in the number of extreme weather events in
the United States over the last 40 years. We know it hits poor
people disproportionately, although it hits all people who are
impacted.
Mr. Wehner. Senator Capito made a point that climate change
didn't cause these events. I think that is something I
completely agree with. We borrow from epidemiology techniques
to sort of understand how climate change has affected these
events. Some events might be less frequent, blizzards, for
instance, in a warmer world, they become rainstorms.
But certainly for heatwaves and violent rainstorms, like
hurricanes or this one that hit Fort Lauderdale, are more
frequent.
Senator Markey. Let me ask another way. NOAA data shows
that disasters that cause more than $1 billion in damage rose
from three per year in the 1980s to more than 20 a year in the
2020s. Do you agree with that?
Mr. Wehner. Yes, absolutely.
Senator Markey. Dr. Wehner, does climate attribution
science show that fossil fuel pollution is underpinning this
rapid increase in devastating, expensive disasters?
Mr. Wehner. I would agree with that, too.
Senator Markey. OK. I think that is the important factor,
it has gone from three to 20, it is not all attributable to one
thing, but from your research, it is the underpinning of the
rapid increase, is that correct?
Mr. Wehner. Yes, it is.
Senator Markey. Yes. And then we know that poor people are
going to be ultimately disproportionately negatively impacted.
Thank you so much, sir.
Senator Carper. Senator Padilla, welcome. You are on.
Thanks.
Senator Whitehouse, nice to see you. Thanks for joining us.
Senator Padilla. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I know I am speaking a little bit to the choir here, but
for the record, according to the Fourth National Climate
Assessment, which is a report from a congressionally mandated
program, climate attribution studies have indicated that
throughout the western United States human induced climate
change is substantially reducing winter and spring snow pack,
which is then increasing the likelihood of chronic drought.
The report also indicates that under no change to water
management practices, several important western U.S. snow pack
reservoirs, including in Sierra Nevada, California, will
effectively disappear by the end of this century. Dr. Wehner,
as a contributor to the assessment, can you walk us through the
impact of snow pack loss for California and other western
States?
Mr. Wehner. Yes, Senator, I can. In fact, our research was
initially performed by Dr. Alan Rhoades at Berkeley Lab when he
was a graduate student.
In that we are basically, if we continue on a business as
usual or a no policy scenario of emissions, by the end of the
century the snow pack in the Sierra would be effectively gone,
as it would also in the Wasatch Mountains, which is an
important source of water for Utah and Salt Lake City.
So in California and throughout the West, we rely on the
snow pack as a temporary reservoir to supply water for both
agricultural needs and for our urban requirements. And that
infrastructure was built over the past century and was assuming
that the snow would melt on a schedule that was in the past.
And that has changed. There are studies that show that the snow
melt has begun earlier. As that continues, it will overwhelm
our ability to manage water, so we will run out in the latter
parts of, before it starts snowing again or raining again.
Senator Padilla. Yes, we are just compounding the effect.
This last winter was an anomaly, so we have less precipitation
earlier, quicker runoff that leads to very difficult scenarios
later in the summer and early fall each and every year, with a
growing population and a growing economy. So just laying that
out for my colleagues. We need to do different going forward,
and we need both policy and investments building on what we
have done with the Inflation Reduction Act, building on what we
have done with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Now, speaking of precipitation, I do want to also
acknowledge the historic summer events that took place this
last winter that illustrated our Nation's vulnerability to
heavy precipitation and flooding, when we get the little rain
that we do get too much too quickly. Atmospheric river
rainstorms are responsible for nearly 85 percent of flooding on
the West Coast, which threatens our vital infrastructure and
vulnerable communities. In California specifically, we had nine
successive atmospheric rivers in January, which caused
flooding, power outrages and mudslides resulting in an
estimated $4.6 billion worth of damages.
I lay that out because it is important to get the data to
better understand what we are grappling with here, so we can
inform how we adapt and how we respond. So I was actually glad
to see the President's supplemental request funding for NOAA's
acquisition of two hurricane hunter aircraft replacements,
which is something that both Senator Graham and I, both members
of the Committee, pushed hard on.
These plans can help provide real time data from inside
atmospheric rivers to increase vital decisionmaking which is
important to protect life and property.
Dr. Wehner, back to you, in your testimony you mentioned
that climate attribution research in heatwaves and hurricanes
is more advanced. Can you talk more about the need for research
and development around atmospheric river events?
Mr. Wehner. Indeed, the literature on hurricanes is long
and detailed. Although we don't know everything, obviously,
about hurricanes. Atmospheric rivers weren't even named such
until about 20 years ago. And so it is a much younger field of
research, and there is much more to be done.
In fact, what you mentioned about sending airplanes out
into these storms has only just begun. But it is really
critical to get that kind of data, so we understand why some of
these disturbing findings that we have found about atmospheric
rivers, particularly the ones that are associated with the so
called bomb cyclones, have such a sensitive response, large
response in their precipitation amounts from climate change.
Senator Padilla. Thank you.
I know my time is up. I will just end with this. Having
been briefed post these atmospheric river events earlier this
year, a lot of the impact on the ground to communities,
particularly vulnerable communities, were a result of the
atmospheric river storms not behaving as they were initially
predicted, again, because of the lack of research historically
when it comes to atmospheric rivers.
So the quicker and better we can understand how they are
more likely to behave, whether they just stay stationary over a
certain geographic area or move further north, south, east,
west depending on greater climate factors, the more we can
prepare to protect life and property on the ground.
I appreciate all your research and testimony here today.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Senator Capito [presiding.] Senator Whitehouse.
Senator Whitehouse. Thank you.
Dr. Jurado, I am a Senator from Rhode Island, a fellow
ocean State. So I think I will focus my questions on you. I
gather you are seeing continuing and increasing tidal flooding,
sometimes referred to as sunny day flooding that has nothing to
do with a rainstorm, but has to do with sea level rise and
tidal action?
Ms. Jurado. Yes, Senator, absolutely. I think that these
events were first observed with increased regularity about 10
years ago. Then we began to see longer fall tidal flooding.
Now, the flooding also occurs into the spring months.
So you can really set your clock by the expansiveness and
frequency of these events. They are particularly compounding
flood conditions, because when it rains and we are having this
high tide flooding, none of our flat landscape can drain. We
actually find tidal flooding contributing to inland flooding
miles inside the county, because of the interconnectedness of
these systems.
Senator Whitehouse. A head up to my next question, well
done. So if you are nowhere near the coast in Rhode Island, but
you are potentially in a riparian zone, near a river that is
going by, or a canal that is going by, you could well be
flooded with fresh water because of the sea level rise creating
hydraulic back pressure on the escape of that fresh water from
Florida's land surfaces?
Ms. Jurado. That is exactly the condition. In fact, some of
our most western communities, we see tidal signals in the canal
network that are 15 miles inland. And so that increase in water
level that carries through the entire network is not
constrained to the coast by any means. But clearly the most
severe impacts are happening in the coastal area. But that can
extend 6 miles inland.
And it is not only affecting what happens with surface
water flooding, but we also find a rise in the groundwater
table that is extending 6 miles inland as well. And that
affects all of the drainage infrastructure associated with site
development, roadways, transportation projects as a whole.
Senator Whitehouse. Along with the rise in the groundwater
from effectively hydraulic sea level rise pressure, are you
also seeing that salt water is intruding through the limestone
into what previously were freshwater wells and water sources
for homes and businesses?
Ms. Jurado. That too is absolutely the case. We have
estimated that we have lost about 30 percent of the coastal
wells, or will, to salt water intrusion by about the year 2050,
2060. We partnered with Palm Beach County to develop a very
large surface water reservoir as an alternative water supply,
holding 35 million gallons of water to help compensate for what
is happening with salt water intrusion. It is very much driving
the practices as we look at long term water supply investments,
and impacts on our wastewater collection system as well.
Because that water is driving into those connections.
Senator Whitehouse. And is the warming of the ocean
offshore, including measured up to literally Jacuzzi
recommended temperatures, causing an effect on the strength of
storms that hit Florida, particularly hurricane level storms
that come from the ocean?
Ms. Jurado. I believe the science is well documented that
the warming is causing an intensification of these systems that
contributes to additional rainfall that indeed, these storms
move more slowly, they carry more rain, they dump more water on
communities. So those impacts are very real, in addition to the
environmental consequences for the reefs, which are suffering
under 100+ temperatures.
I think we are very much interested in looking at, in
addition, how much of this additional warming is going to drive
sea level in the short term and what types of measures can we
take to really work to constrain the upper limit on sea level
rise in addition to just talking about temperature, what can we
do to really drive a cap on how much we're willing to
accommodate in additional rise in sea level and as it impacts
our infrastructure.
Senator Whitehouse. How is the insurance industry
responding to all these new risks?
Ms. Jurado. Certainly we have seen sizable adjustments in
what is happening with flood insurance policies. And then we
have our windstorm policies on top of that. I shared at a
roundtable at the White House a couple of weeks ago while the
national average on homeowner's policies is about $1,400, most
of the people I know in Florida are paying about $8,000 a year
currently. That is just windstorm, not counting flood.
Senator Whitehouse. And from what I understand, nearly a
dozen local insurance companies have gone bankrupt facing
claims, others have stopped renewing policies in order to avoid
future risk. National companies are walking away entirely from
Florida markets. And there is a resulting flood, if you wish,
to a flight to your State backed insurance company. How much of
a burden do you think your State backed Citizens Property
Insurance Company will end up carrying?
Ms. Jurado. It is hard to say. But currently, the Citizens
program is trying to depopulate, and I know that many are
receiving notices that they are required to consider these
alternative policies. And one I read about recently was a 450
percent increase in the annual premium to move to a private
holder.
So the options are significantly reduced. The costs are
escalating beyond the level of affordability. And I think that
it is one of the most treacherous conditions affecting home
ownership. And the ability to live in South Florida, where we
need people to be able to work and prosper, they can't even
afford an annual insurance premium.
Senator Whitehouse. Thanks very much.
I have gone over my time. I appreciate the indulgence of my
colleagues.
I would only add that when I last checked, Citizens
Property Insurance had reserves of $4 billion, Idalia so far is
over $10 billion, Hurricane Ian was over $110 billion. So there
is an enormous gap there.
Senator Carper [presiding]. There certainly is. Thank you,
Sheldon.
Senator Merkley, good to see you. Welcome. Delighted you
have joined us.
Senator Merkley. Thank you very much.
I want to continue the impact on insurance. I picture
middle class families who have a mortgage, and their mortgage
generally says, you must maintain homeowner insurance. And so
the family gets a notice saying, sorry, we are canceling your
homeowner insurance. And the family has to go out and find
separate homeowner insurance, otherwise the mortgage company
will put the homeowner insurance on a very, very expensive
policy. But it becomes increasingly hard to find that.
So are middle class families who are really in the middle
of a mortgage, they are not buying a new house, if you will,
finding that they are in trouble in terms of securing the
insurance they need to maintain their mortgage in good
standing?
Ms. Jurado. Thank you, Senator.
I think the circumstance is one of, again, affordability.
There is a lot of conversation of people simply needing to move
out of the area because they can't afford the insurance options
that allow them to afford their mortgage payment that allow
them to stay in their home. Most recently, as well, the
Citizens insurance provider has also required flood insurance
coupled with the hurricane coverage.
So again, it is another cost that somebody who was able to
barely afford a mortgage at the time, at which they secured it
may be just in a situation of having to let go. We do see many
individuals leaving the State as a result.
Senator Merkley. We do see in Oregon a lot of families
affected by flood insurance issues. But I really want to focus,
when you think about Oregon and climate chaos, you might hear
people talk about the pine beetle infestation, you might hear
them talk about the decreasing snow pack in the Cascades, which
has dropped by an average of 240 inches over 90 years, so
basically half the snow pack is gone. You might hear them talk
about ocean acidification affecting the sea life off our coast.
We have one of the richest grounds in the combination of the
Pacific upwelling, the California current.
But the thing that really is on people's minds are fires.
We have seen such a growth in forest fires. In 2020, we had
three simultaneous fires in three major watersheds. We had the
Santiam Canyon fire, the Almeda Fire, the South Oberchain, and
Echo Mountain, more than three. Essentially, we lost 4,000
homes. I traveled 600 miles up and down the State, never got
out of the smoke. We had massive collapse of communities
turning up at the fairgrounds in refugee status. Seeing the
burnt remains of towns, some 12 different towns were either
obliterated or deeply damaged by those fires.
I think maybe this is more for you, Dr. Wehner. People used
to talk about 100 year events, they used to talk about 1,000
year events. I think you framed in your testimony that things
that occurred every 1,500 years have become once in a century
events. Things that are very rare are happening with increasing
frequency.
You didn't mention in your testimony wildfires as a
category of extreme weather which can be attributed with
reasonable certainty. What can climate attribution science tell
us about individual wildfires?
Mr. Wehner. It can tell us quite a bit, Senator. I was the
chapter lead author on chapter eight of the Fourth National
Climate Assessment, Volume One, and fires was part of that
chapter. That was back in 2017, and we saw a clear trend,
particularly in Washington, Oregon, and California, of large
wildfires, an increasing trend. That of course is much worse
since 2017, there have been a lot of major fires in all those
States.
In anticipation of your question, I did do a little more
research last night, trying to find specific things to Oregon.
I don't have one. I have some more general statements, though.
The leaders in this actually turned out to be Environment
Canada and Victoria. They of course studied Canadian fires. But
that is not all that different than Oregon.
They found that the fire weather metrics that led to that
big fire in 2018 in British Columbia were made 2 to 4 times
more likely, and more importantly, that the area of the fire
was increased by a factor of 7 to 11. So it became a record
kind of fire.
Senator Merkley. The fire was 7 to 11 times more
destructive?
Mr. Wehner. The area burned was 7 times larger, at least.
Another study said that nearly all the observed increase of
the burned area in California over the past half-century is
attributable to anthropogenic climate change. So I am sure this
is true in Oregon as well.
Fire is very difficult, and perhaps one of the more
challenging areas for event attribution, because there are, as
all these kinds of extreme events, multiple causes. Wind is an
instigator, and one of the things that my research and some
others have found is that there is little trend in extreme
wind. And so this increase in fire weather conditions is almost
entirely due to higher temperatures drawing out the fuel of the
forest, so that the fire seasons are longer. This is also
reflected in the budgets of firefighters, wildfire fighters.
They have to pay more because they are out there longer.
Senator Merkley. We used to, if you asked an Oregonian 20
years ago, when to come to Oregon, they would be like, oh,
well, July, August, into early September are our golden time.
Now if you ask Oregonians, they will kind of pause and go, you
know, we have had a lot of smoke in July and August and
September. It is just a huge change. We have furniture stores
that can't sell their inventory because of smoke damage, we
have wine grapes that have been contaminated by smoke damage,
we have people in the hospital with asthma aggravated by smoke,
we have communities trying to set up clean air sectors.
In other words, it is so palpable, the change within a few
decades is so real. If you are trying to hike the Pacific Crest
Trail, there were hikers that used to come through in August,
you cannot come through. There are so many fires on the Pacific
Crest Trail or near it, threatening it. My wife and I have had
to change our plans a number of times for those hikes. You
don't want to be in the middle of wilderness with no cell phone
connection or knowledge of fires erupting and be on a very
remote trail. It is so many dimensions of our life in Oregon
that have been affected. The Ashland Shakespeare Festival, huge
challenge with cancellations due to air smoke quality.
So it is very important for us to be able to capture this.
We have seen the fire season grow longer. That one set of fires
on Labor Day, 2020 burned over a million acres, and 4,000
homes. A dozen communities were affected. It sent a very
powerful messages to people across the country. They remember
Paradise, California.
Well, the devastation was greater in Oregon, but it was
kind of like, oh, well, now it is not new, devastating fires
that burn a community to the ground, and you see cast iron
bathtubs and steel staircases still standing in beds of ashes
and molybdenum wheels, where they melted and ran across the
ground, creating strange sculptures. It is an architecture that
we have just never witnessed before, or a scene we have never
witnessed.
So I think understanding this continued impact is
incredibly important. Thank you all for bringing your insights
to bear on the evolution and dynamics in many dimensions,
certainly floods, droughts, and fires.
Thank you.
Senator Carper. Thanks for those very thoughtful questions.
We are going to start a second round. You are both welcome
to stick around if you can, and have another shot.
I want to go back to Dr. Jurado. We had a question earlier,
and I said I was going to ask you to pick it up. I think the
question I asked was of Dr. Wehner, I asked him if he would
give us an example or two of how attribution science can inform
the design and engineering of infrastructure projects to better
manage the impacts of these extreme events when they occur. I
just want to ask, Dr. Jurado, are you the Chief Resilience
Officer for Broward County?
Ms. Jurado. Correct.
Senator Carper. How important is it to have scientific
information about the size of events that we may be faced with
next? How important is that? And how can results of attribution
studies inform local infrastructure planning and
decisionmaking?
Ms. Jurado. Thank you.
It is an absolute criticality. One of the greatest
challenges that we faced in South Florida was trying to account
for rainfall intensification. We knew it was taking place. We
have to be able to accommodate this additional volume of
rainfall. If a one in 100 year event used to deliver 13 inches,
but now it delivers 15 or 18, it alters the whole of
infrastructure across the community, not just how we plan
locally, but the integration with all of the State funded and
federally funded projects as well.
So we need to have harmonization across infrastructure, and
we need to know with certainty, at a decent level of certainty,
what is the percent change that we should be accommodating in
our infrastructure for this intensification. So we worked very
deliberately with our Federal agency partners to account for
initially a 13 percent increase in rainfall, and ultimately
made that adjustment to 20 percent.
So this 20 percent intensification for rainfall events is
now embedded in the design standards that we have for drainage
infrastructure, surface water management infrastructure, we are
ensuring that the improvements to the C&SF project also account
for this rainfall intensification. It drives our flood
elevations.
So absolutely, we needed to be able to embed this in the
various types of design infrastructure, and then be able to
account for how it influences change in groundwater table, plus
the flood elevation, plus the conveyance and storage needs.
Very critical.
And having that information allows us to not only design
appropriately but also consider to the extent to which our
mitigation activities in terms of reducing emissions and
decreasing the intensity of these events can work to make a
longer term difference over the course of the next several
decades, how much of that can we mitigate through our missions
improvements.
Senator Carper. Thanks for that.
I am going to come back to Dr. Wehner for another question,
one dealing with beliefs and attitudes.
In fact, I will hold off on that. We have been joined by
one of the two retired Navy captains who serves in the U.S.
Senate these days, and a former astronaut, a guy who has done
all kinds of things in life, a guy who married up, as I did,
Mark Kelly.
Mark, thank you.
Senator Kelly. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Clearly married up,
no doubt about that.
Thank you, everybody, for being here today. I apologize for
running a little late.
Every summer in Arizona, it is hot. We know that. But this
year, the heatwave hit a whole new level. In the month of July,
Phoenix had a 31 day streak where the average temperature was
above 110 degrees Fahrenheit, 31 days in a row. And in total,
we had in Phoenix 55 days above 110 this summer. And that is
unprecedented.
The one stat that I saw describing this summer's heat
stands out above the rest. I was just looking at a plot, this
is a couple months ago, this is actually a global plot on
worldwide temperature. And when you look at the summer of 2023,
it kind of stands out. Data from the Copernicus Climate Change
Service found that the average global temperature, which is
what I am talking about, when I looked at this, it was a 3
sigma variation, three standard deviations away from the norm.
To me, as somebody who used to do a lot of stuff with data as a
test pilot, it could be a bad data point. Could be.
But you know, temperature is a pretty easy thing to
measure. So in my view, and in my mind, it is either bad data,
which it is not, or something very unusual has happened. That
same data shows that in July and August of this year, we were
1.5 degrees Centigrade warmer than pre-industrial levels.
Dr. Wehner, when we see data like this, how easy or
difficult is it to attribute all or even part of this to a
change in the climate? When we see data increases like the
change in summer temperatures from last year to this one, it is
sometimes hard to communicate why this is such a big deal.
So how does climate attribution shape the ways that we talk
about the impact of climate change on data? If you can address
those.
Mr. Wehner. Thank you, Senator.
Yes, this year is a particularly unusual one. Arizona
wasn't the only place that had a heatwave. At the same time we
had heatwaves in the United States, we had heatwaves in Europe
and China simultaneously. So the whole northern hemisphere was
hot. That is part of the reason why the global mean is a 3
sigma event.
Now, some of that is going to be an El Nino effect, we can
quantify that. But not nearly all of it. Some part of it is
quite clearly the anthropogenic effect, the human caused effect
from our consumption of fossil fuels and our changes to the
composition of the atmosphere.
Senator Kelly. Dr. Wehner, could I ask you, if you go back
decades or over the last 100 years, has there been another 3
sigma event in temperature?
Mr. Wehner. Not that I am aware of. But my knowledge isn't
complete on that.
So it is an unusual event. When I was coaching ice hockey,
I would call this, in the words of the great basketball coach
John Wooten, a teachable moment. This is a teachable moment for
many of us, including climate scientists, so that we can better
understand that. And attribution science is part of the key to
understanding how all these different factors led to this 3
sigma event.
Senator Kelly. So part of it could be El Nino?
Mr. Wehner. Some of it certainly is. Some of it could be
natural.
Senator Kelly. We have had El Ninos in the past.
Mr. Wehner. Of course.
Senator Kelly. What is the cycle on an El Nino?
Mr. Wehner. It is every 4 to 7 years. But 1988 was another
huge El Nino year, and then years afterwards were cooler. I had
to write papers afterwards saying, the title of the paper was,
``Is the Climate Warming or Cooling?'' It is because people
were saying, well, climate change stopped. That is wrong, of
course, you can't just start your analysis in the hottest time
of the year, or hottest data point.
Senator Kelly. Yes, the CO2, methane, carbon
monoxide just didn't vanish from the atmosphere.
Mr. Wehner. No. So the longer the data records, the more
informative it is.
Senator Kelly. And do you expect future 3 sigma events to
occur more frequently?
Mr. Wehner. That I cannot say. I don't think we understand
changes in variability nearly as well as we do changes in the
average. But I certainly can tell you that this summer event
throughout the world was unusual. But it will be the norm in a
very short period of time.
Senator Kelly. And do you feel that the messaging in the
United States and across the planet on this issue and this 3
sigma event is sufficient, or do you feel like maybe media and
others are falling short?
Mr. Wehner. I am not sure how to answer that question. To
me, the data always speaks for itself. But I am not an expert
on media relations. So I think I will defer on that question,
if you don't mind.
Senator Kelly. When I saw the data, I was reading an
article and just saw the plot. My reaction was wow, that is
different.
Mr. Wehner. One of the things my colleagues and I are
working on is would this temperature have been impossible
without climate change, would this summer have been impossible
without climate change. Give me a few more months and we will
get back to you on that.
Senator Kelly. Yes, please, let me know. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Carper. Thank you.
Did you say that you were an ice hockey coach?
Mr. Wehner. Yes. I coached teenagers. It was fun.
Senator Carper. Do you still do it?
Mr. Wehner. Not any longer. I can't skate any more,
unfortunately.
Senator Carper. Who do you think was maybe the greatest
hockey player who ever played the sport?
Mr. Wehner. Wayne Gretsky.
Senator Carper. Wayne Gretsky was once asked, Mr. Gretsky,
why are you the greatest hockey player on the planet? He
replied, as you probably recall, he said, I go where the puck
will be, not where the puck is. I go where the puck will be,
not where the puck is. That is a little bit like attribution
science, you are going to help figure out where the puck is
going to be to be able to address this. It works pretty well.
I was just coming back to Dr. Wehner for some follow up
questions. We may be joined by another colleague or two. I
think every other committee in the Senate is meeting almost at
the same time. We have a big bipartisan forum going on right
now on artificial intelligence. This is our hearing here today,
so we have some people who would like to be here and just can't
be here. But they are very much interested. Some are watching,
this is being televised live, and some are watching it along
with their staffs. So the impact you are having is probably far
greater than you might imagine. It is really important.
I want to finish my question of you, and then I am going to
tell a story and then maybe wrap it up. I was saying earlier,
when we were joined by one of our colleagues, I said, in a
recent poll on attitudes toward climate change, 55 percent of
Americans said they had not personally felt the effects of
climate change. During the July heatwave that Senator Kelly and
others have alluded to, however, two-thirds of the U.S.
population were under heat alerts and other climate driven
events from wildfires to hurricanes. It harmed a lot of folks.
It is worth noting that only 5 percent of TV news coverage
of the heatwave even mentioned climate change. Didn't even
mention climate change. So I think attribution science provides
an opportunity to help Americans understand that what they are
experiencing is actually the effect of climate change, it is
not their imagination, it is not something that may or not be
happening, it is actually explainable.
As you explained in your testimony, Dr. Wehner, attribution
studies detail the effects of climate change on extreme weather
events. What are some specific ways that we can use this
information to help the public better understand how climate
change impacts their daily lives?
Joe Biden, he and I have a lot of sayings that we swap back
and forth. We rode the trains together to DC for years. I think
I know every one of his, and he knows all of mine. One of my
favorite Biden words is ``splainer,'' as in explainer. He is
always looking for good splainers, I am surrounded on either
side by good splainers. We are looking for ways that we can be
better splainers. How do we do a better job helping the public
understand how climate change impacts their daily lives?
Mr. Wehner. In some sense, that is my job, is to try to put
numbers on what has mainly this past few years become very
painfully obvious. Maybe you don't even need me to tell you the
climate is changing, and the weather is getting worse. All you
have to do is pay attention.
We talked about fires. I have lived in California now for
almost 40 years, and I don't remember bad air days like we have
had. I have a photograph taken from near my house where the sky
was orange, an orange like an unnatural orange, like orange
soda. It was apocalyptic; it was frightening.
You don't need to be a climate scientists to know that that
is weird, and that is unusual. These heat waves have affected a
lot of people, they have killed a lot of people. They have
killed a lot of people's grandparents. I think that is a very
personal and very distressing thing, if that were to happen.
These storms, Hurricane Ian in Florida was a very
devastating storm. We wrote recently that climate change made
the storm 20 percent wetter, but that is only part of the
damages. We had this huge storm surge in Fort Myers, like 15 or
20 feet, that wiped homes right off their foundations. Then a
few days later, the fresh water, the rainfall ran through the
systems and flooded a large fraction, a large number of homes
outside of Tampa.
So the insurance rates are an issue, it is an issue in
California. Mine went from $2,000 to $5,000, my own. How this
information is used I think is a question for you. I can tell
you what happened, what is going to happen, our best guess as
to what is going to happen. But what we do about it is up to
you, it is not something I decide. That is something that the
people decide through their elected representatives.
Senator Carper. Thank you.
I want to follow up with Dr. Jurado. How could policymakers
and the media more effectively communicate this information
that we are talking about here to the public?
Ms. Jurado. Thank you for the question.
I think the media conversation is the significant one. It
is interesting; I have been in DC over the years and hear
meteorologists speaking about climate change as part of the
weather delivery. When it happens, it is almost stunning.
But why aren't our weather forecasters integrating
discussion of climate as part of the weather forecast? When was
the last time that we collectively looked at the CO2
concentrations at Mauna Loa? I remember when it passed 400
parts per million. Do we ever talk about having lost that
benchmark, and where we are going, and how these conditions
relate to on the ground effects?
Government at the local level, we are not the best
communicators. We need assistance with this. No matter how many
presentations we give and websites we deliver, the majority of
the public are not aware of the conversation or the amount of
work that is taking place.
So I think it is about recognizing impacts, celebrating
wins, celebrating investments, talking about the change in
individual circumstance that comes with investing in
resilience, broadcasting the types of programs that are
available because of the concerns that are being expressed,
providing more funding for the types of projects that the EPA,
the Climate Production Reduction grant, great start. But $4.3
billion across all of the communities in the United States is
just one shot at a much larger problem that we have in terms of
helping residents adapt and celebrating the types of
investments that are making quality of life improvements as
climate change is taking place.
Senator Carper. Thanks for that response.
As if things couldn't get any busier, the Senate is now
beginning to vote. So we have all these hearings going on, this
big bipartisan forum that is going on on AI, and we are trying
to solve climate change here for the morning.
Senator Capito has gone to vote, and I don't know that she
is going to be able to come back and finish up with another
round of questions. I have one or two more that I am going to
ask, then we will wrap it up.
One of the closing questions, I will ask you to think about
this, I talked about ice hockey, and I am going to use a
baseball metaphor, telegraphing my pitch. You can tell in
baseball the way the pitcher holds the ball, maybe delivers the
baseball to the batter, you can tell what kind of pitch it is,
fast ball, curve ball, slider. But I am going to tell you my
pitch. I am going to ask a question: Where do we agree? Where
do the three of you agree? Maybe 10, 15, or 20 years ago there
wouldn't have been as much agreement in this room, at this
table.
One of the Ranking Members here was a fellow named Jim
Inhofe from Oklahoma, who was a climate change denier. He
readily admitted it. I remember when it snowed here one time in
warm weather, and we had about six inches of snow in the lawn
in the front of the Capitol. He went out and made snowballs. He
brought the snowballs onto the Senate floor and said, climate
change, I don't believe that is real, look at these snowballs
here in August. By the time he left here, he was a senior
Republican on this Committee, he was my lead Republican on the
Diesel Emission Reduction Act.
So people can change their minds. They can learn.
Quick question, then we will move toward wrapping it up. A
question about how Inflation Reduction Act programs boost
resiliency. The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan
Infrastructure Law, which I am proud to say were largely
written in this room, but in any event, they include programs
to help States, programs to help Tribes, to help cities, to
help counties reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to improve
their resiliency.
One example is the EPA's Climate Pollution Reduction
grants. My question, Dr. Jurado, is, does your community down
in Broward County want and need this Federal assistance? A
follow up question to that is, how are you using Federal grant
programs and clean energy tax credits? Is this assistance
sufficient for communities to address climate change by driving
down emissions and increasing resilience?
Ms. Jurado. Thank you for the question, Senator.
The support is absolutely needed. I am sure that many are
aware that our State passed on the CPRG funding, and most
recently on the solar project funding for residential
investment. If that money is not made directly available to
communities, meaning municipalities, Tribes, and counties, many
of us will not be able to take advantage of these very
critically needed investments. There frankly aren't alternative
funding sources.
Another challenge that we have is we have no investment in
energy efficiency by our local energy utility. There are no
programs. The statement is made that it is not cost effective.
Well, it is not cost effective for the utility provider, but no
matter how clean the energy is that is being produced, you
still have many lower income individuals who are contending
with significant rise in temperature. They are already energy
burdened, and many are struggling with how to provide air
conditioning just to sleep through the night.
Older individuals who need that cooling, children cannot
sleep and study well if they don't have an opportunity for
their bodies to cool at night. The CPRG funding, that Climate
Pollution Reduction Act funding, is critical for being able to
aid with investments that help energy efficiency in single
family, multi-family residences that need that support. We are
also very eager to take advantage of that funding to support
solid waste improvements where we have clean energy
initiatives, with waste energy plants and those investments
that are taking place in our community.
It is a great initial start. We hope to see that funding
renewed, or a continuation of that funding in some form. We
know that those plans that are underway will be ignited with
this individual investment, but the plans that are being worked
on by our communities are intended to go far beyond the next 5
years and continued investment there would go a long way to
help meet our own goals, which include net zero by 2050.
In addition, with regard to the direct pay tax credits,
certainly in Broward County, we have been looking for
innovative models to help support renewable energy projects
over the years. We have maybe 14, 15 very large scale solar
projects. But these tax credits are now allowing us to increase
the size of our solar projects by 30 percent beyond what we
could have otherwise.
So it is a tremendous benefit to our ability to participate
proactively with clean energy solutions that are coupled with
our infrastructure and our sites, as well as electric vehicle
charging networks, transitions within our fleets, support for
community and local government projects.
Senator Carper. Thank you for that response.
I telegraphed my pitch, and said I was going to ask before
we adjourned that, where do you all agree. Do you think there
is a consensus in this panel, we might not have had it in this
room at a similar hearing a couple of years ago, I won't ask
you what has happened, I could ask you what has happened here,
but let me start with Mr. Dabbar.
Go ahead, if you would, please.
Mr. Dabbar. Yes, Senator.
I think as we collect more data and look at new solutions,
I think that is a consensus driver. I think coming out of the
sequester, very large bipartisan support for innovation, which
has led to a lot of these technologies like Form Energy and
others that we have been talking about here today.
I would like to comment to the data aspect of fire that was
brought up previously. There are solutions, and once again, you
have these problems, but there are solutions.
Let me give you one example around data and solutions on
fire, which is, you could use, I ran the National Quantum
Initiative for the United States, you could use the photons on
the fiber that go down the power lines, and you can detect the
power quality and ergo, the resistance of the power lines. You
can predict when they are going to fall. We haven't been able
to do that.
So, using quantum networking and quantum sensing for these
things going on in California and elsewhere, you could use that
sort of new technology and detect meter by meter as the
resistance of that line is degrading, and you could go fix it
before the line falls.
So this is an example of innovation that I think, back to
your question, Senator, around consensus. I think the consensus
around innovation, American leadership, things like the example
I just gave you that would probably save lots of lives in
Hawaii or California or elsewhere, I think that is part of the
reason why things are moving forward.
Senator Carper. Good.
Dr. Wehner, same question, please.
Mr. Wehner. I think we are in agreement on a lot of things.
John Holdren, who was the science advisor for President Obama,
said we have three choices. We can mitigate, we can adapt, or
we can suffer. I would like to minimize the suffering. That
means we have to mitigate more, and adapt more.
So the things that Mr. Dabbar has talked about in terms of
making our energy systems more, reducing the emissions of these
technologies, is something this country can lead in. I strongly
support that. But I think we also have to recognize that no
matter what we do, we are going to be continuing to experience
more severe and more frequent weather disasters, and so we need
to adapt.
One thing I did not get to say with the fires, in
particular, is all of us, myself included, are exposed to this
smoke. The eastern part of the United States this year was
exposed to, for the first time, I think, to the levels that
westerners are used to. I am particularly concerned about the
effect on children. I raised this with a local politician
recently. He told me something I didn't know, that there is a
program in California to distribute HEPA air filters to
families in need. I think those kinds of actions are things
that are really necessary if we are to protect our most
vulnerable, especially our children.
Senator Carper. Great. Thank you for that.
Dr. Jurado.
Ms. Jurado. I think as we have moved on through time, we
just see more in the way of personal impacts, friends and
family that have been impacted in one way or another. It
becomes undeniable that these conditions are being more broadly
experienced.
We have also, though, I think, appreciated with time that
there is a great ability to take advantage of an opportunity to
innovate, to look at the economic opportunity that comes with
new technology, new investments, community betterment, areas
where we have needed to make investments anyway, but we can add
to the benefits being delivered.
So it isn't just about adaptation; it is about economic
innovation and really embracing an opportunity to create a much
better future through coupled investments that address energy
and adaptation and community betterment and economic
opportunity all tied together. So I think being able to look at
it as not just a burden or exposure, but an opportunity for
repositioning our communities at the same time.
Senator Carper. Thank you.
Before we close, Senator Whitehouse is trying to get back
here. He has already voted; I need to go vote very shortly.
Our staffs, Democrat and Republican staffs, have heard me
tell this story before, so I will ask their indulgence. I like
to take the train; I love the train, and I take the train a lot
up and down the Northeast corridor. Albert Einstein used to
take the train a lot, too. I think he taught at Princeton. He
would get on the train at Princeton and go to New York, he
would come down here. He was a regular on the train, similar to
how Joe Biden and I have been over the years.
One day he got on the train and found a seat and started
looking for his ticket. He reached into his pockets and his
trousers and his briefcase, and he couldn't find his ticket.
And finally, the conductor came up to him and said, Dr.
Einstein, you ride the train a lot; we know who you are. You
don't have to worry about it; we know who you are.
Dr. Einstein kept looking for his ticket. The conductor
walked away, and the conductor started walking into the next
car, he turned around and looked back. Dr. Einstein was down on
his hands and knees looking for his ticket. The conductor
rushed back and said, Dr. Einstein, you don't have to do this.
We know who you are.
And Dr. Einstein looked up at the conductor, on his hands
and knees he looked up to the conductor and said, ``I know who
I am too, I just don't know where I am going.''
[Laughter.]
Senator Carper. I think we know where we are going if we
don't work together, pull together. We use science to guide us.
I must say, I wish you could all have been here, I have been on
this Committee 22 years, I wanted to be on this Committee when
I got here 22 years ago. But to have heard the kinds of
conversations we had then on climate change compared to what we
had in this incredibly constructive conversation. I applaud
each of you for taking the time to join us.
Everything, as proud as I am of the work we have done in
the Inflation Reduction Act and the work we have done on the
climate change provisions within the Bipartisan Infrastructure
Bill, everything I do, everything we do we can do better.
Everything we do, everything we do we can do better.
It is one thing to write legislation and get it signed into
law. The really important piece now is implementation. One of
the things that Senator Whitehouse and my colleague, Senator
Capito, are interested in doing is making sure we do a good job
on the implementation. We don't just write legislation on this
Committee; we actually help implement, we do oversight. We need
to do a whole lot of that in the days going forward.
I am going to hand the gavel over to Senator Whitehouse. I
leave it in good hands.
Folks around the country think we don't like each other
here, Democrats and Republicans hate each other, we never want
to work together. I have people who say to me, at least every
week, Sheldon, when I am getting on the train station and
getting on a train here or up in Delaware, people say, can't
you guys just work together? Can't you work together? Can't you
get something done?
I wish they could have sat through this hearing. They might
have been encouraged a little bit, because I think we have a
pretty good idea of what is wrong. And we have a lot of good
ideas about how to address it. If the American people would
hear that, I think they would be encouraged.
There was once a woman who ran for President not long ago,
and her campaign slogan was stronger together. Stronger
together. And I think that really applies here. I think that we
are largely together, and we are stronger because of that. I
just love getting things done. I love getting things done, and
we are getting some good things done. If we keep this attitude
going, we will do better still.
Thank you for what you do with your lives, and thank you
for joining us today.
With that, a fellow who does great things with his life,
from a small State, but as we know from Delaware, small States
do great things, and they produce, at least in his case, in his
State's case, great legislators.
Sheldon.
Senator Whitehouse. Small coastal States are the best, I
think.
Senator Carper. I am going to run and vote.
Senator Whitehouse [presiding]. I will close out the
hearing after my questions.
I want to go back to Dr. Jurado again, because of the
experience that you have had. In Rhode Island, our CZMA agency,
the Coastal Resources Management Council, took a look at the
FEMA flood maps and determined that they were defective. We
have seen, for instance, in the Houston flooding, that it hit
about 50 percent accuracy rate. So FEMA really seriously needs
to upgrade its mapping.
What has been your experience in your geographic area with
respect to FEMA flood mapping and its predictive quality?
Ms. Jurado. Thank you, Senator Whitehouse.
I know that when our last FEMA flood map, well, let me say
two things. First of all, FEMA utilizes our, Broward County's,
hydrologic model. We developed a fully integrated surface
groundwater model. FEMA has used our model; they have improved
our model. The South Florida Water Management District has used
our model and improved the model. Now we are utilizing the same
model again. So we have the benefit of all of us utilizing the
same model for existing planning, existing conditions and
future conditions planning.
Senator Whitehouse. Just let me interject for 1 second. In
working on future conditions, do you take things like climate
change and resulting sea level rise and storm severity into
account?
Ms. Jurado. Yes, sir. In fact, right now in our current
modeling effort, we are coupling, we are evaluating 2 and 3
foot sea level rise scenarios, carrying the modeling out to
2070. It is actually 3.3 feet of sea level rise. We account for
the change in the groundwater table.
We account for the high tide condition under each of those
sea level rise scenarios. We account for various storm surge
conditions including 25, 50, 100 year storm surge. And we
couple that with a variety of what we call design storm events.
So 10, 25, 15, 100 year rainfall conditions, and look at the
compound flooding under all those scenarios.
So we are utilizing that now as the basis for our
countywide water management planning and redevelopment
strategies. How far can we adapt through infrastructure
investments and development approaches, versus how much can we
not address, such as with the one in 1,000 year rainfall event.
There is going to be some element of flooding that again, just
can't build a large enough pipe or have enough storage area.
But with the FEMA flood mapping, I know at the time of our
last update, we actually had 60 percent of the existing parcels
that were removed from the map. Our engineers would say that
that map by and large more accurately reflected current
condition today flooding only because of a lot of refinements
in the data. It was just better data, like LIDAR data that came
into the modeling effort.
However, just like Melrose Park, we still have communities
that are not in a flood zone, which is always the case, that
are still vulnerable to flooding. So we knew that when that 60
percent of those parcels moved out that they would come right
back in as climate conditions continue to evolve.
So we actually use our own future conditions flood map that
is not what we use a variety of tools for setting finished
floor elevations. FEMA is one. But we require the highest of
all of our tools be used for planning. And we have a future
conditions flood map that integrates much of what I just
described as one of those tools.
So in many areas of the county, we are not relying upon the
FEMA flood map. The FEMA flood map is most impressive where it
now incorporates the coastal A zone. The distinction there was
that we account for sea level rise, but hadn't accounted for
storm surge. FEMA was accounting for storm surge, but not sea
level rise. And that is why this current modeling effort is so
critical, because it brings everything together.
Senator Whitehouse. So the multi-party effort has been a
significant improvement over FEMA alone in the wild doing
mapping?
Ms. Jurado. Improving the models with time and everyone
jointly using the same models, but also integrating future
conditions. Because we have to account for risk tomorrow, not
just the risk today for all of our infrastructure. That is our
perspective.
Senator Whitehouse. Do you think the flood insurance
program requirement that you build back in place needs
adjustment where properties are predictably going to be flooded
over and over and over again in order to protect the integrity
of the Federal Flood Insurance program?
Ms. Jurado. I think that we need to allow for a lot of
flexibility in terms of where we reinvest and how we reinvest.
We need to ensure that we are building for future conditions in
terms of the design approach. But there will be areas where it
will become increasingly evident that it would be beneficial to
not replace infrastructure in the same area, maybe utilize that
land for storage and buffer the storm surge, and alternatives
to allow densification in other areas that may not be as
exposed.
Senator Whitehouse. Agreed.
My time is now expired, and you have all had a long
morning. So let me follow Chairman Carper's lead and close out
the hearing.
The housekeeping rule before we adjourn is that Senators
must submit questions for the record by close of business
Wednesday, November 15th. And we will compile those questions
and send them to the witnesses, and we urge that you reply by
Wednesday, December 6th. It is a pain in the neck to have to
chase you, so we hope we can get, if there are questions for
the record, timely and punctual responses.
I thank you all for your presence here. And with that, the
hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:53 a.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
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