[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 173 (Wednesday, December 22, 2010)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10997-S10999]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             ENERGY REFORM

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, we come to the end of this Congress 
having once again failed to harness the economic potential achievable 
through reform of our Nation's energy portfolio or to heed the dire 
warnings put forth by our planet about the effects of our relentless 
carbon pollution.
  The results of our failure are many and are significant.
  With our economy now at the forefront of our minds, you would think 
we would have paid more attention to the economic imperative of energy 
reform. As the global economic race to clean energy rushes by around 
us, you would think we would have exhibited more concern at the 
prospect of being left behind.
  Instead, we remain engaged as a nation in a de facto policy of 
unilateral economic disarmament in the battle for command of tomorrow's 
energy economy. We are surrendering to China, to the European Union, to 
competitors around the world.
  The United States invented the first solar cell, but we now rank 
fifth among countries that manufacture solar components. Other 
countries see the demand for clean energy, and they are moving their 
companies ahead of ours in the race to meet that demand. The United 
States is now home to only 1 of the top 10 companies manufacturing 
solar energy components and to only 1 of the top 10 companies 
manufacturing wind turbines.
  Half of America's existing wind turbines were manufactured overseas. 
In Portsmouth, RI, we have installed two wind turbines. One was 
manufactured by a Danish company. The other was manufactured by an 
Austrian company, its components delivered to Rhode Island by a 
Canadian distributor.
  Even in coal sequestration, in a country where half our power still 
comes from coal, we are not leading. Only one plant is under 
construction now with the capability to capture any significant portion 
of its carbon emissions.
  The new energy economy that beckons us has been described in 
congressional testimony as bigger by far than the tech revolution that 
brought us our laptops and our iPads and our BlackBerries and the 
Internet services that are now so important a part of our daily lives. 
The tech economy is $1 trillion; the energy economy is $6 trillion.
  In the race for commanding position in this new energy economy, 
America designed much of the underlying energy technology that the 
world is using, but other countries have put the propulsive effect of 
their government behind their industries, and they are pulling ahead of 
us in bringing those new technologies--our new technologies--to market. 
Our competitors are moving to seize an irretrievable advantage in the 
development and distribution of new energy technologies, and we are 
letting them.
  Our children, I fear, will judge us sternly for failing to protect 
America's economic self-interest at this pivotal time. But they will 
judge us for that less sternly than they will judge us for our failure 
to protect their lands and waters, the air and climate they will 
inherit. For this, their verdict will be harsh.
  Nature's warnings abound. Nature is giving us every signal of 
distress a prudent person could want or need to begin to take prudent 
precautions. Nature's voice is clear.
  According to NASA, 2010 was the hottest climate year on record, 
surpassing 2005 as the previous record year.
  The acidification of our oceans has reached levels not seen in 8,000 
centuries--that is quite a bandwidth to fall out of.
  September 2010 saw the lowest recorded Arctic ice volume, at 78 
percent below the 1979 level. Researchers warn that the Arctic Sea 
could be ice free by 2030 and Glacier National Park without glaciers.
  Western forests, as Senator Udall just described, are falling by the 
mile to the ravages of spruce and mountain beetles, as warmer winters 
fail to kill off these pests.

[[Page S10998]]

  A warming climate adds energy to our weather systems, loading the 
meteorological dice for worse and more frequent storms, and we are 
seeing worse and more frequent storms.
  I am particularly alert to our Earth's alarm signals since I 
represent Rhode Island, the Ocean State. Rhode Island and other coastal 
States face a triple whammy.
  First, we get the same terrestrial effects from climate change as all 
States: warming climates, changing habitats, and harsher and more 
frequent storms. Second, we will also suffer from changes affecting our 
ocean economies: species shifts as bays and oceans warm, lost 
fisheries, and the pervasive danger of ocean acidification. Rhode 
Island's productive winter flounder fishery, for instance, is already 
virtually gone. Third, we coastal States face the local consequences of 
rising sea levels: protecting coastal infrastructure, rezoning to 
compensate for new storm surge velocity zones, perhaps even diking and 
damming to protect low-lying areas from inundation.
  We can foresee these consequences, and we can foresee the devastation 
they will bring.
  Beyond our economic self-interest and beyond our responsibility as 
caretakers of the planet is the fact that climate change presents a 
threat to our national security.
  Leaders of our defense and intelligence communities from both 
Republican and Democratic administrations and from the career military, 
outside of politics, have come forward to express their concern.
  Respected leaders such as GEN Wesley Clark and former CIA Director 
James Woolsey have called for us to aggressively reduce our reliance on 
fossil fuels. In 2007, the nonprofit CNA Military Advisory Board 
gathered a dozen of the Nation's most respected retired admirals and 
generals, including former Chief of Staff of the Army GEN Gordon 
Sullivan and former commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command GEN 
Anthony Zinni, to produce a report called ``National Security and the 
Threat of Climate Change.''
  Its principal conclusion is that climate change poses a serious 
threat to national security by acting as a ``threat multiplier'' for 
instability in some of the world's most volatile regions and presents 
significant national security challenges for the United States.
  As former ADM T. Joseph Lopez states in the report:

       More poverty, more forced migrations, higher unemployment. 
     Those conditions are ripe for extremists and terrorists.

  The official position of the U.S. Government is the same--not just at 
EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, not just in the political 
elements of the administration. In 2008, the intelligence organizations 
within our national security structure prepared a national intelligence 
assessment on the national security implications of climate change.
  Testifying before Congress on the report, chairman of the National 
Intelligence Council, Dr. Thomas Finger, said the impacts of climate 
change:

       . . . will worsen existing problems--such as poverty, 
     social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual 
     leadership, and weak political institutions. Climate change 
     could threaten domestic stability in some states, potentially 
     contributing to intra- or, less likely, interstate conflict, 
     particularly over access to increasingly scarce water 
     resources.

  The Department of Defense Quadrennial Defense Review for 2010 
concurred, declaring that climate change will play a ``significant role 
in shaping the future security environment.''
  The review stated:

       While climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may 
     act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a 
     burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries 
     around the world.

  So here we have it, an enormous missed opportunity economically in a 
time of economic hardship, an unthinkable failure to safeguard the 
world our children will inherit, an accelerant of instability and 
conflict at a time when our security is threatened by both and still no 
action. How could we have ended up here again?

  We have ended up here again because of a very unfortunate situation 
in our country right now.
  I will confess, I am an American exceptionalist. Over and over, I 
have spoken on the floor about this country as a city on a hill, as a 
beacon in the darkness, as mankind's last, best hope, as leading the 
world by our example. These are trite comments perhaps, but I say them 
unashamedly. Our balanced system of government, our founding principles 
of ordered liberty, our embrace of our diversity, our willingness to 
fight and die for freedom in foreign lands and then come home, without 
conquest, with other nations' freedom our only prize, these are 
exceptional American virtues, and they have changed the course of 
humanity.
  But our exceptional place in the human story does not give us an 
excuse. It does not give us a pass. It gives us, as Americans, a 
responsibility. Our American exceptionalism confers on Americans a 
responsibility. To ignore, as we have, the calm and constant counsels 
of science is not consistent with that responsibility. To ignore facts 
that are so plain as to be defacing our planet--her great glaciers and 
seas, her lands and species--is not consistent with that 
responsibility. To turn away from leadership at a time when other 
nations are turning to us for leadership is not consistent with that 
responsibility. It is not American exceptionalism to be exceptionally 
wrong or exceptionally blind or exceptionally timid.
  James Fallows wrote in a recent Atlantic article about clean coal 
technology that:

       . . . the Chinese government can decide to transform the 
     country's energy system in 10 years, and no one doubts that 
     it will. An incoming U.S. Administration can promise to 
     create a clean-energy revolution, but only naifs believe that 
     it will.

  Is this what the United States has come to, a country so mired in its 
internal quarrels and bickering, so slave to special interests that we 
cannot dream big, cannot do what others say is impossible?
  An eminent historian once counseled his students about the harsh 
judgments which it is history's power to inflict on the wrong. We are, 
by our inaction, by our folly, by our unwillingness to face facts, by 
our refusal to pick up the mantle of leadership, earning such a harsh 
judgment. We have chosen to ignore the plain and indisputable signals 
of our planet, signals that should warn us about the dangers of the 
path on which we are embarked. We have chosen to ignore both the clear 
and present dangers apparent around us now and those looming dangers 
our God-given intelligence gives us the ability to foresee. We have 
instead chosen to listen to a siren song: the siren song of propaganda, 
marketed by special interests, indeed, by the very polluters whose 
carbon pollution is wreaking this damage. That is our choice, and it is 
a choice for which history's judgment will be justifiably harsh.
  The judgment will be harsh because the answer to that choice is 
wrong--because the perils are real, because the Earth acts by the laws 
of physics and chemistry and biology. Atmospheric carbon levels cannot 
be talked down by propaganda; our warming bays and seas cannot be 
cooled down by corporate spin; our petty politics simply are not part 
of the equation when these great forces of nature are set in motion. 
Similar to King Canute, we cannot change this tide by proclamation, let 
alone by propaganda.
  I see the majority leader on the floor. I wish to inquire if he would 
like me to yield for a moment to him as a courtesy.
  Mr. REID. Has my friend completed his statement?
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I have not.
  Mr. REID. I say to the Senator, please complete your statement.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Thank you, Leader.
  Some say we do not have to worry about the consequences that will 
come from what we see happening around us, that we do not have to 
attend to nature's warnings about the effects of what we are doing 
because God will get us out of the mess we are making. Perhaps, but 
history shows how often God's work is done through the work of human 
hands, through the gifts of the human mind, through the responsibility 
of the human conscience. In this, as in so many other things, God's 
work must be our own. The task for our hands is to address the facts 
science has long told us will bear on the problem: First and foremost, 
the rise in carbon pollution. We are now dumping 37 billion tons, or 37 
gigatons, of CO a year into our atmosphere. Twenty

[[Page S10999]]

years ago, that number was less than 25 gigatons. Twenty years from now 
it might be over 50 gigatons.

  We know what that means. Carbon dioxide persists in the environment 
for decades. We know that. So as we pile on the gigatons every year, it 
piles up in our atmosphere. We know that. The concentration of carbon 
dioxide in the atmosphere has fluctuated in a range between 180 and 280 
parts per million over most of the last million years. In 1900, the 
CO2 concentration had popped out of that range up to 300 
parts per million, and today the concentration exceeds 390 parts per 
million and is climbing at about 2 parts per million every year. We 
know what that means too.
  We have known since the Irish scientist, John Tyndall, figured it out 
in 1859--the year Oregon was admitted as the 33rd State, when James 
Buchanan was President, and when, ironically, the first U.S. oil well 
was drilled--that carbon dioxide traps heat in our atmosphere. It is 
basic textbook science.
  Unfortunately, basic textbook science has encountered basic textbook 
politics and lost.
  The oil-and-gas sector spent $250 million in lobbying expenses while 
we were working on a climate change bill between January 2009 and June 
2010. The electric utilities kicked in another $264 million in lobbying 
expenditures. The mining industry topped it off with $29 million, for a 
grand total industry lobbying expense during this period of more than 
$\1/2\ billion--$543 million, to be exact.
  So the judgment of history will be harsh not just because we were 
wrong, nor just because we were wrong in ways that we were able to 
understand were wrong. It will be harsh because we in this generation 
were entrusted with America's great democracy, as other generations 
before us have been entrusted with America's great democracy, and we 
will have failed that trust by failing in this challenge to meet the 
standards of a great democracy.
  We fail that trust because this is no innocent mistake. This is not 
getting it wrong even though we tried our best. This is not even 
getting it wrong because we were lazy and not paying attention. This is 
no innocent mistake. This is the power of money in politics. This is 
the power of propaganda over truth. This is the deliberate poisoning of 
the public square with defective information, with manufactured doubt, 
with false choices, with a campaign of calculated deception. In the 
same ``Atlantic'' article I quoted earlier, James Fallows observed:

       Heads of the major coal-mining and electric-power utilities 
     in United States and China accept as settled fact that 
     greenhouse gas emissions are an emergency they must confront 
     because of the likely disruptive effect on the world climate.

  Even they get it but not us. We, the generation that lives today, the 
Congress that serves today, the public servants in office today can 
begin to turn the tide, and we must if we are to live up to our legacy 
as Americans and face up to the judgment of history. We can fight the 
propaganda. We can be servants of the truth. We can prevent 
manufactured doubt from ruling the day. But we haven't.
  Losing another year in which we could have taken the action demanded 
of us by our economy, by our national security, by our planet was a 
mistake. Losing this great democracy to the inertia and cynicism of 
these political times would be a disaster.
  But beyond the four walls of this Chamber, I believe there is reason 
to hope. Each day Americans are waking up to this challenge. Each day 
young people are joining together in their neighborhoods attempting 
small but significant local solutions to this large and imposing global 
problem. Each day our entrepreneurs seek new rays of opportunity in the 
clouds of dismay, finding ways to serve both their business instincts 
and their duty as citizens of the planet. Each day business leaders are 
looking at our inaction with growing regret and worry. And each day 
ordinary citizens from every walk of life are more and more, with clear 
eyes, seeing what we must face in the years ahead.
  Many things influence our political institutions. Yes, money does; 
yes, partisanship does. But more than anything else, we are all 
servants. Each of us, given loud enough calls from our country, from 
our States, from our communities, will have no choice but to listen.
  So even as I communicate to my colleagues my disappointment at this 
year's failure, I wish to challenge Americans to take into their own 
hands the job of creating next year's success. Call us. Write to us. 
Make us do this. You know we will be a stronger America if we do. You 
know we will be a safer America if we do. You know we will be a more 
respected America if we do. Make us do this.
  Every American generation is given its chance to meet with honor, 
energy, and wisdom the great challenges of its day. Every American 
generation can rise to meet those challenges in a way that burnishes 
the gleam of our city on a hill, in a way that brightens the lamp 
America holds out in the darkness. That moment is upon us in this time 
and place, and we must rise to it.
  I yield the floor, and I thank the majority leader for his courtesy.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.

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