[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 66 (Thursday, May 10, 2012)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3073-S3075]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            CARBON POLLUTION

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I want to speak about the ongoing and 
deliberately overlooked problem of carbon pollution and what it is 
doing to our planet.
  In the context of these remarks, I ask unanimous consent to have 
printed in the Record an article entitled ``Game Over for the 
Climate,'' written by Jim Hansen and published in yesterday's New York 
Times.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                 [From The New York Times, May 9, 2012]

                       Game Over for the Climate

                           (By James Hansen)

       GLOBAL warming isn't a prediction. It is happening. That is 
     why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with 
     President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada 
     would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves 
     ``regardless of what we do.''
       If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over 
     for the climate.
       Canada's tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with 
     bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted 
     by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully 
     exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our 
     conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of 
     carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach 
     levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million 
     years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it 
     is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that 
     the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of 
     control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. 
     Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 
     percent of the planet's species would be driven to 
     extinction. Civilization would be at risk.
       That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will 
     be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western 
     United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to 
     Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it 
     does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. 
     Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the 
     Midwest would be a dust bowl. California's Central Valley 
     could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to 
     unprecedented levels.
       If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to 
     reduce emissions dramatically. President Obama has the power 
     not only to deny tar sands oil additional access to Gulf 
     Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export 
     markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave 
     tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground.
       The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of 
     random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the 
     journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased 
     noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent 
     heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 
     2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural 
     events--they were caused by human-induced climate change.
       We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps 
     heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate 
     conducive to human life. But add too much, as we are doing 
     now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This is 
     not the result of natural variability, as some argue. The 
     earth is currently in the part of its long-term orbit cycle 
     where temperatures would normally be cooling. But they are 
     rising--and it's because we are forcing them higher with 
     fossil fuel emissions.
       The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has 
     risen from 280 parts per million to 393 p.p.m. over the last 
     150 years. The tar sands contain enough carbon--240 
     gigatons--to add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close cousin of tar 
     sands found mainly in the United States, contains at least an 
     additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If we turn to these 
     dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our 
     addiction to fossil fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon 
     concentrations below 500 p.p.m.--a level that would, as 
     earth's history shows, leave our children a climate system 
     that is out of their control.
       We need to start reducing emissions significantly, not 
     create new ways to increase them. We should impose a 
     gradually rising carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel 
     companies, then distribute 100 percent of the collections to 
     all Americans on a per-capita

[[Page S3074]]

     basis every month. The government would not get a penny. This 
     market-based approach would stimulate innovation, jobs and 
     economic growth, avoid enlarging government or having it pick 
     winners or losers. Most Americans, except the heaviest energy 
     users, would get more back than they paid in increased 
     prices. Not only that, the reduction in oil use resulting 
     from the carbon price would be nearly six times as great as 
     the oil supply from the proposed pipeline from Canada, 
     rendering the pipeline superfluous, according to economic 
     models driven by a slowly rising carbon price.
       But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to 
     make fossil fuels pay their true costs, leveling the energy 
     playing field, the world's governments are forcing the public 
     to subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of billions of 
     dollars per year. This encourages a frantic stampede to 
     extract every fossil fuel through mountaintop removal, 
     longwall mining, hydraulic fracturing, tar sands and tar 
     shale extraction, and deep ocean and Arctic drilling.
       President Obama speaks of a ``planet in peril,'' but he 
     does not provide the leadership needed to change the world's 
     course. Our leaders must speak candidly to the public--which 
     yearns for open, honest discussion--explaining that our 
     continued technological leadership and economic well-being 
     demand a reasoned change of our energy course. History has 
     shown that the American public can rise to the challenge, but 
     leadership is essential.
       The science of the situation is clear--it's time for the 
     politics to follow. This is a plan that can unify 
     conservatives and liberals, environmentalists and business. 
     Every major national science academy in the world has 
     reported that global warming is real, caused mostly by 
     humans, and requires urgent action. The cost of acting goes 
     far higher the longer we wait--we can't wait any longer to 
     avoid the worst and be judged immoral by coming generations.

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. The article begins with two simple sentences: 
``Global warming isn't a prediction. It is happening.''
  He talks about the dangers of the Canada tar sands and what that 
means for us if we go ahead with that project. His conclusion is this:

       If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over 
     for the climate.
       Canada's tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with 
     bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted 
     by global oil use in our entire history.

  He looks at the recent extreme weather that people--not only across 
the country but across the world--have been noticing. He concludes:

       We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves 
     in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which 
     killed tens of thousands, were not natural events--they were 
     caused by human-induced climate change.

  So the risk we face is a real one, and we are actually seeing it 
begin to happen in present time. He says:
  The tar sands contain enough carbon--240 gigatons--to add 120 parts 
per million to our atmosphere. As I have said before on the Senate 
floor, we have lived for 8,000 centuries within a range between 170 and 
300 parts per million of carbon in our atmosphere. That is the 
bandwidth within which the human species has lived on this planet, and 
we have gone rocketing out of that bandwidth in recent years. We are 
now at 390 parts per million out of a bandwidth, for 800,000 years, 
between 170 and 300 parts per million. The tar sands would add 120 
parts per million to that. That would take us to 510, if my math is 
right.
  Tar shale--a close cousin of tar sands found mainly in the United 
States--contains at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon.
  This shows the folly of what Dr. Hansen describes:

       . . . as a frantic stampede to extract every fossil fuel 
     through mountaintop removal, longwall mining, hydraulic 
     fracturing, tar sands and tar shale extraction, and deep 
     ocean and Arctic drilling.

  Jim Hansen is somebody who is worth listening to. He has been writing 
about this now for more than 30 years,
  I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a posting by 
Neil Wagner entitled ``Hansen Had It Right in 1981 Climate Report.''
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

               Hansen Had It Right in 1981 Climate Report

                            (By Neil Wagner)

       A recently rediscovered 1981 paper, written by NASA 
     atmospheric physicist James Hansen and others, has been 
     analyzed and found to be impressively accurate about the 
     course of climate change since its publication.
       The 10-page paper (available at this link), which was 
     published in the journal Science, had been overlooked for 
     decades when researchers Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and Rein 
     Haarsma from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute 
     uncovered it and began scouring its contents.
       The paper's impressive prognostication is the best kind of 
     vindication for Hansen, who has suffered more than his share 
     of the slings and arrows from climate deniers in the media, 
     such as Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Andrew Breitbart. He's 
     also taken hits from ``climate confusionist'' Physicist 
     Freeman Dyson, and has charged that the Bush administration 
     tried to silence his warnings about global warming's urgency.
       Deniers of climate change often look for boogeymen in their 
     attempts to disprove the phenomenon's existence. As a means 
     of putting a face on the ``global warming hoax,'' an 
     individual is often singled out for attack. In his new book, 
     The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, scientist Michael E. 
     Mann calls this technique the Serengeti Strategy, since the 
     technique is akin to lions singling out vulnerable prey from 
     a herd.
       The links below provide current information about some of 
     the paper's projections: Atmospheric carbon increase, 
     Formation of drought prone regions, Sea level rise, Antarctic 
     ice erosion, Opening of the Northwest Passage.
       The complex world of climate science rarely enjoys such 
     clear and simple validation. When such an opportunity 
     presents itself, we owe it to ourselves to make some noise 
     about it. Haarsma and van Oldenborgh's findings should be 
     shouted from the rooftops.

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. He says:

       A recently rediscovered 1981 paper, written by NASA 
     atmospheric physicist Jim Hansen and others, has been 
     analyzed and found to be impressively accurate about the 
     course of climate change since its publication.
       The 10-page paper . . . which was published in the journal 
     Science, had been overlooked for decades when researchers 
     Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and Rein Haarsma from the Royal 
     Netherlands Meteorological Institute, uncovered it and began 
     scouring its contents.
       The paper's impressive prognostication is the best kind of 
     vindication for Hansen, who has suffered more than his share 
     of the slings and arrows from climate deniers in the media . 
     . .

  He concludes:

       The complex world of climate science rarely enjoys such 
     clear and simple validation. When such opportunity presents 
     itself, we owe it to ourselves to make some noise about it.

  With appreciation to Jim Hansen, how the actual science has borne him 
out over the past 30 years, and with respect for the predictions he 
makes, we should as soon as we can begin to address ourselves to this 
problem.
  Jim is not alone. An array of scientific organizations wrote us all a 
letter back in October of 2009 whose conclusion is pretty clear and 
stark in scientific language:

       Observations throughout the world make it clear that 
     climate change is occurring and rigorous scientific research 
     demonstrates that the greenhouse gasses emitted by human 
     activities are the primary driver. These conclusions are 
     based on multiple independent lines of evidence and contrary 
     assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of 
     the vast body of peer reviewed science.

  We act as if it is something new, but, in fact, it is not. The 
determination that carbon dioxide would warm the planet as it increased 
its concentration in the atmosphere was figured out around the time of 
the American Civil War by an Irish scientist who worked in England 
named John Tyndall. What Tyndall discovered we have proven to be true, 
as since then we have dumped gigaton after gigaton of carbon into our 
atmosphere, loading it up to the point now, as I said before, that we 
are well outside the bounds that have protected our species for 800,000 
years on this planet.
  The scale of what 8,000 centuries means is perhaps best measured 
against the time that scientists now believe man first began to engage 
in agriculture, first started scratching the earth and putting seeds 
into the ground. Before then, we were primarily hunter-gatherers, 
leading a very primitive life. So we have gone from beginning to 
scratch the earth and plant things to be, 10,000 years later, the 
species we are. We lived within this bandwidth of 170 to 300 parts per 
million for 8,000 centuries. To veer outside of it is significant and 
hazardous.
  I am delighted that Mr. Hansen, despite all the abuse that has been 
heaped on him, continues his work. I hope the time comes when we start 
to listen to the voice of what our planet is telling us, the voice of 
what our scientists are telling us, the voice of what our children are 
telling us, and not just the voice of what the lobbyists for the 
polluting industries--particularly the oil and gas industries--are 
telling us.
  Frankly, the lobbyists for the polluting oil and gas industries are 
not

[[Page S3075]]

telling us the truth. They are not telling us the truth. The truth is 
becoming increasingly apparent, and the problem is that as time goes by 
you can reach tipping points that are irrecoverable. It would be really 
tragic for us to look back and think, if we had been able to act on 
time, if we had listened on time to the signals of our Earth, our 
planet, the signals that are plainly in our face, we could have made a 
world that was better and safer for our children. But, instead, in our 
folly, in our greed, in our willingness to listen to the falsehoods of 
these polluters, we shot past that point, and there is no way to 
recover it now.

                          ____________________