[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 34 (Wednesday, March 14, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2300-S2302]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      CLEAN AIR AND GLOBAL WARMING

  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I rise to make a few remarks about the 
rather stunning announcement we read this morning on the front page of 
a number of newspapers about President Bush's reversal of a campaign 
promise he made with great clarity in the course of the last year. That 
is the reversal of a very clear promise by the President to support 
efforts to reduce pollution, particularly carbon dioxide emissions from 
powerplants in this country.
  On the campaign trail last year, then-candidate Bush made clear his 
support for legislation to reduce nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, 
mercury, and carbon dioxide from powerplants, the so-called four 
pollutants. There has been a great deal of science, a great deal of 
research done over these last years with respect to the impact of these 
pollutants on the quality of our life on this planet.
  On September 29, 2000, President Bush could not have been more clear. 
He said:

       With the help of Congress, environmental groups and 
     industry, we will require all powerplants to meet clean air 
     standards in order to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide, 
     nitrogen oxide, mercury and carbon dioxide within a 
     reasonable period of time.

  Only 10 days ago, EPA Administrator Christie Whitman reaffirmed the 
President's position that he would support and seek legislation to cut 
global warming pollution from powerplants.
  This is the second time in 2 weeks that a policy announcement by a 
Secretary in the Bush administration has been reversed by the White 
House only a few days after that policy announcement was made. I am 
referring to the prior policy announcement made by Secretary Powell 
with respect to the efforts to renew negotiations left off by the 
Clinton administration with North Korea. Two days after Secretary 
Powell said, indeed, that is what the administration would do, the 
President and the White House announced they would not, and the rug was 
essentially pulled out from under Secretary Powell. Now we see the same 
thing with Secretary Whitman. She announces that, indeed, she intends 
to enforce the President's campaign promise, and many groups around the 
country welcomed having a President of the United States who was 
prepared to offer leadership and to move us in the right direction.
  Yesterday it became clear, all of a sudden, that the President was no 
longer interested in doing what he said, helping Congress and 
environmental groups and industry and, apparently, even his own EPA 
Administrator in that effort. It turns out that the President not only 
does not support it but he opposes it.
  A lot of Americans will have their own judgments about what happens 
when people run for office and within a few months of running for 
office renege on the promises they make to the American people about 
why it is they ought to be elected. In a letter to Senator Hagel and 
others, the President said:

       I do not believe that the government should impose on power 
     plants mandatory emissions reductions for carbon dioxide, 
     which is not a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

  The White House has offered explanations for the President's flipflop 
by saying that the President did not understand that carbon dioxide 
emissions from powerplants is currently not regulated. Therefore, his 
pledge was misinformed, and the mistake.
  With all due respect, I find that statement to be an inadequate 
explanation, not so much because the President didn't know the current 
implementation requirements of the Clean Air Act but because, despite 
that lack of awareness, he proceeded to make such a sweeping promise to 
the American people and to allow his EPA Administrator to continue that 
promise for a few weeks while in office.

  The second reason for the President's reversal, the White House 
claims, is a ``new'' study by the Department of Energy that concludes 
that the cost of environmental protections is too great. Let me 
underscore that: The cost of environmental protections is too great.
  I don't think that analysis properly balances the many different 
variables in how you arrive at the true cost because that cost has to 
be balanced, not just based on the exact cost of putting in the 
implementing technology, you also have to measure the downside cost to 
the United States of America, indeed to the globe, for not taking the 
kinds of steps we need to take.
  Our country, I regret to say, has been the largest emitter in the 
world, growing at the fastest rate in the world in terms of energy use, 
and the least responsive in terms of the steps we should be taking to 
deal with this. This country has to come to grips at sometime with the 
realities of the profligate energy policies we are pursuing that wind 
up using extraordinary amounts of resources relative to our population 
without the kind of balance necessary to create what is called a 
sustainable energy policy, a sustainable environmental policy.
  I find it also troubling that this one study, called ``Analysis of 
Strategies for Reducing Multiple Emissions from Power Plants,'' is 
deemed to be somehow a new revelation. The study was a request of the 
Department of Energy by former Congressman David McIntosh who, it 
happens, has been one of the harshest critics of environmental 
protections who has served in the Congress. The study is a classic case 
of bad information in, bad information out. Some would call it, with 
respect to the technology world, computers: Garbage in, garbage out. It 
purposefully restricts market mechanisms, and it assumes highest cost 
generation. As a result, its conclusions are entirely prefixed, 
preordained to come out with an expense factor that does not reflect 
where the technology is, where the state of the art is, or where the 
realities are economically.
  I recommend that the President review a series of other economic 
analyses that embrace market mechanisms, that reflect real costs, and 
other kinds of environmental protections. This includes a different and 
more recent study by the Department of Energy that concludes that a 
multipollutant approach can reduce pollutions from large generators 
with net savings to the consumer.
  I am not someone who comes to the floor as an environmentalist and 
suggests that the environmental movement has not on occasion pressed 
for a solution that may, in fact, demand too much too quickly, or 
sometimes, I agree, we have environmental rules that are not even 
thoughtfully applied. There are times when we require of small 
businesses the same meeting of standards as we require for large 
businesses. It obviously does not make sense to the economies of scale 
or the gains or the capacities of those businesses to perform.
  I readily accept the notion that there are some places that we can do 
better, there are some ways in which we can harness the energy of the 
marketplace and use market forces to find solutions. I believe 
Republican and Democrat alike in past administrations have been 
negligent in being creative about reaching out to the private sector 
and putting the private sector at the table and asking the private 
sector for ways in which we could do things with least cost, least 
regulation, least intrusiveness from Washington, and harness the energy 
of the marketplace in finding some of these solutions.
  Regrettably, even when that has happened, when companies have stepped 
forward and shown that there are cheaper ways of doing things, we now

[[Page S2301]]

see the President embracing a study that reflects none of that 
creativity and none of that capacity on the part of the private sector.
  Let me be very specific about that. A number of companies have 
stepped forward to embrace the four pollutant approach I am talking 
about. They include Consolidated Edison, PG&E, Northeast Utilities, 
PECO, and others. These companies have found a way to embrace a four 
pollutant reduction strategy and do so in a way that benefits their 
company's bottom line and also benefit the consumers at the same time.
  I want to put this in a context, if I may. Why is this so important 
to our country and to the concerns we have about global warming and 
about pollutants in the air and the quality of life? I don't know a 
thoughtful Republican or Democrat who doesn't understand the linkage of 
some of the things we emit into the air and water in various forms of 
pollution, which have a terrible impact on the lives of our fellow 
citizens.
  The country has been treated to a couple of movies recently that 
showed what happens when you have that kind of pollution taking place--
the impact of it on the lives of our fellow citizens. I had the 
privilege of attending, as an official observer for the Senate, the 
discussions in Rio when President Bush's father was President in 1992--
the Earth Summit, when the United States said we would try to hold 
ourselves to the emissions baseline of 1990 levels. We never took the 
steps necessary to live up to that voluntarily agreed-upon goal. Since 
then, I have been to Kyoto, to The Hague, and Buenos Aires, in each 
place where global negotiations were taking place, where Presidents and 
prime ministers and environmental ministers and financial ministers 
were all struggling together to find a way to reduce emissions. In 
every one of those discussions, all of the less developed countries, 
and our European partners, looked at the United States of America as a 
culprit, as the problem, because we weren't willing to embrace some of 
the steps they were taking, or were prepared to take, in order to enter 
a global solution that has an impact on all of us.
  I say to my colleagues, I am not talking about politics, I am talking 
about facts--scientific facts. Just recently, 2,500-plus scientists at 
the United Nations, through the IPCC, released increased data regarding 
our status with respect to global warming.
  The decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in all of human 
history. The glaciers on five continents are receding at record rates. 
One thousand square miles of the Larsen ice shelf in Antarctic has 
collapsed into the ocean. Arctic sea ice has thinned by 40 percent in 
only 20 years.
  For the first time, boats are traversing the Canadian Arctic without 
hitting ice pack. What used to take 2 years as a journey has now taken 
only 2 months. Permafrost in Alaska and Siberia is defying its name by 
thawing. Ocean temperatures throughout the world are rising, and a 
quarter of the world's reefs have been bleached.
  The scientific evidence that pollution is dangerously altering the 
atmosphere is becoming more compelling as each year passes. This is 
peer-reviewed, hard science--reviewed science from the best researchers 
in the world. I believe it is compelling and it demands action.
  In January of 2000, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 
released its third assessment report. The IPCC involves thousands of 
scientists from around the world and many of the very best American 
scientists. It was organized in the early nineties by President Bush to 
assist governments in assessing the state of the global climate and 
what threat pollution may or may not pose to it.

  This January, the IPCC released its strongest, most conclusive and 
most alarming assessment of the global climate. It warned that rising 
temperatures are attributable to human activities; that temperatures 
may rise at a far faster rate than previously expected--as high as 10.4 
degrees over the next 100 years--and that the consequences will be 
adverse and far reaching. The potential consequences include droughts, 
floods, rising seas, the displacement of tens of millions of people 
living in coastal areas, and the massive die of plant and animal 
species.
  The chair of IPCC, Dr. Robert Watson, put it his way:

       We see changes in climate, we believe we humans are 
     involved, and we're projecting future climate changes more 
     significant over the next 100 years than the last 100 years.

  And the IPCC report is only the latest in a body of science that 
demands action.
  October 2000, ``Coral Reefs Dying; Most May Be Dead In 20 Years.''

       Addressing the International the Coral Reef Symposium on 
     the island of Bali, researchers warn that more than a quarter 
     of the world's coral reefs have been destroyed and remaining 
     reefs could be dead in 20 years. The most serious threat to 
     the reefs is global warming. Coral reefs are crucial anchors 
     for marine ecosystems, and more than a half billion people 
     depend on reefs for their livelihood, researchers at the 
     conference say.

  March 2000, ``NOAA Finds Oceans Warming.''

       Scientists at the National Oceanographic Data Center find 
     that the world's oceans have soaked up much of the warming of 
     the last four decades, delaying its full effect on air 
     temperatures. Scientists speculate that perhaps half of 
     human-caused climate change is not yet in evidence in the 
     form of higher air temperatures, because of the delay caused 
     by oceans.

  January 2000, ``NAS Concludes Warming Is `Undoubtedly Real.' ''

       A study by the National Research Council of the National 
     Academy of Sciences concludes that the warming of the Earth's 
     surface is ``undoubtedly real'' and that surface temperatures 
     in the last two decades have risen at a rate substantially 
     greater than the average for the past 100 years. This study 
     put to rest charges that satellite data contradicted land-
     based data.

  December 1999, ``Arctic Melting Almost Certainly The Result of 
Pollution.''

       A computer-based study by the University of Maryland and 
     NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center finds less than a 2 
     percent chance that observed melting of Arctic sea ice is the 
     result of normal climatic variations--and less than a 0.1 
     percent chance that melting over the last 46 years is the 
     result of normal variations. Arctic sea ice is melting at a 
     rate of 14,000 square miles per year, an area larger than 
     Maryland and Delaware combined. Melting of arctic ice 
     accelerates global warming, since ice reflects 80 percent of 
     solar energy back into space and water absorbs solar energy. 
     Meanwhile, the melting of arctic ice could disrupt ocean 
     currents and salinity levels.

  June 1999, ``Greenhouse Gases Higher Now Than Any Time In 420,000 
Years.''

       A two-mile-long ice core drilled out of an Antarctic ice 
     sheet shows that levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are 
     higher now than at any time in the past 420,000 years. 
     Scientists with the National Center for Scientific Research 
     in Grenoble, France, find that carbon dioxide levels rose 
     from about 180 parts per million during ice ages to 280-300 
     parts per million in warm periods--far below the current 
     CO2 concentration of 360 parts per million. 
     Methane levels, meanwhile, rose from 320-350 parts per 
     billion during ice ages to 650-770 parts per billion during 
     the warm spells. The current methane concentration is about 
     1,700 parts per billion.

  April 1998, ``20th Century Was The Warmest In 600 Years.''

       Based on annual growth rings in trees and chemical evidence 
     contained in marine fossils, corals and ancient ice, 
     scientists at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst find 
     that the 20th century was the warmest in 600 years, and that 
     1990, 1995 and 1997 were the warmest years in all of the 600-
     year period. Scientist conclude that the warming ``appears to 
     be closely tied to emission of greenhouse gases by humans and 
     not any of the natural factors,'' such as solar radiation and 
     volcanic haze.

  January 1998, ``Changes May Happen Quickly With A Climate Shock.''

       A University of Rhode Island study of ice cores from 
     Greenland shows that when the last ice age ended, the change 
     was sudden. In Greenland, a 9 to 18 degree F increase in 
     temperatures probably took place in less than a decade. The 
     finding challenges the widespread assumption that climate 
     changes are in all cases gradual, and suggests that human-
     induced climate change could occur rapidly rather than 
     slowly.

  I could go on; the science is compelling.
  I committed to finding a solution to the problem of global warming. 
Some of my colleagues--and now the President--have charged that dealing 
with this problem will bankrupt the American economy. I disagree. I 
believe that America can have a strong economy and a healthy 
environment. Fortunately, more and more companies are stepping forward 
to solve this problem and lead the way where government won't. BP will 
reduce its emission to 10 percent below its 1990 levels by 2010. 
Polaroid will cut its emissions to 20 percent below 1994 levels by 
2005. Johnson & Johnson will reduce its emissions to 7 percent below 
1990 levels by

[[Page S2302]]

2010. IBM will cut emissions by 4 percent each year till 2004 based on 
1994 emissions. And, Shell International, DuPont, Suncor Energy Inc., 
Ontario Power Generation have all made similar commitments.
  All the dire predictions of economic calamity from entrenched 
polluters just is not credible when leading companies are doing exactly 
what they say cannot be done. We know the power of technology to 
transform an industry--just look at the impact of technology on 
information and medicine--and technology and innovation can transform 
how we produce and use energy.
  President Bush's reversal will also weigh heavily on the 
international talks to fight global warming. As a Senate observer to 
the talks, I have seen firsthand how America's inaction has prevented 
progress. In 1992 the U.S. pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas 
emissions to 1990 levels by 2000 through the strictly voluntary 
Framework Convention on Climate Change. We will miss that goal and end 
the year with emissions 13 percent above 1990 levels.

  Our failure goes beyond numbers alone. In the past eight years, we 
have not taken a single meaningful step toward our commitment. We have 
not seized opportunities to increase efficiency and reduce pollution 
from automobiles, appliances, electric utilities, housing, commercial 
buildings, industry or transportation. Nor have we provided sufficient 
economic incentives for the development and proliferation of solar, 
wind, hydrogen and other clean energy technologies. A range of sound 
proposals have been floated in Congress, but almost all have been 
relegated to the legislative scrap heap.
  Instead, Congress has enacted budget riders to keep us mired in the 
unsustainable status quo. An unwise mix of politics and special 
interests has produced laws prohibiting the government from even 
studying the efficacy of strengthening efficiency standards for cars 
and light trucks, laws blocking stronger efficiency standards for 
appliances, and laws hampering energy and environmental programs 
because, their sponsors mistakenly argue, these programs represent an 
unconstitutional implementation of the unratified Kyoto Protocol.
  This regressive record is fatal to the international effort. It 
heightens distrust, undermines the credibility essential to success, 
and gives opening to our sharpest critics to seek advantage. For 
example, the U.S. has insisted that unrestricted, international 
emissions trading be part of the global warming pact. Trading is a 
proven method to achieve greater environmental benefits at lower costs; 
it has halved the cost and accelerated the environmental gains of Clean 
Air Act. But European nations--led by Germany and France--charge the 
trading program must be severely restricted or it will become a 
loophole by which the U.S. will avoid domestic action. They make that 
charge as much for reasons of economic and political self-interest as 
they do for environmental concerns, but, nonetheless, our paltry 
environmental record at home lends dangerous credibility to their 
charge, and that makes the work of our negotiators all more difficult. 
Moreover our inaction has an equally dangerous practical effect. Every 
year we fail to act, our environmental goals become more difficult to 
achieve.
  Mr. President, it is early in this Congress and even earlier in 
President Bush's new administration. I remain hopeful, but being 
hopeful is becoming increasingly difficult, particularly today. 
President Bush has rejected a policy that can work, that can benefit 
the environment and the nation. He did it really before the debate even 
started. And he broke the most important campaign pledge he made 
regarding the environment. And it took him less than two months to do 
it.
  Let me just say that I wanted to review for my colleagues--and I hope 
some will perhaps take an interest in reviewing these other 
assessments--a number of major assessments of the negative impact on 
crops, on quality of health, on sea life, on major areas that should be 
of enormous concern to all of us, not as Republicans and Democrats, but 
as thinking U.S. Senators. I don't want to approach this in a 
doctrinaire way, but I know that we have a responsibility to contribute 
our part to a major solution and reduction in global greenhouse gases, 
as well as to contribute to the better quality and health of our 
citizens.
  This decision by the President which, once again, gives increased 
power to the large energy interests of the country is the wrong 
decision for our Nation and the wrong decision in the long run for 
creating the sustainable environmental approach. My hope is that my 
colleagues and the administration itself will review and come up with 
an approach that will better serve the interests of our Nation.

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