[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 39 (Monday, March 10, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1371-S1373]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CLIMATE CHANGE
Mr. SESSIONS. It has been reported that a number of our colleagues in
the Democratic majority in the Senate intend to speak on the Senate
floor tonight on the question of climate change. Sometimes they will
say ``global warming,'' and I guess that is ceasing to be the No. 1
phrase now.
An article in the USA Today said this ``effort is cause for some
confusion because these Senators are calling for action in a chamber
they control but without any specific legislation to offer up for a
vote.''
No legislation--this is, indeed, confusing. Why wouldn't the majority
leader bring a bill to the floor of the Senate to expressly approve
President Obama's climate agenda or to approve his rigorous regulations
that constrict Americans with it.
Why not? The answer is it wouldn't pass. The American people do not
support this and neither does Congress. A lot of his Democratic
colleagues, I would suggest, don't want to vote on it. It raises a lot
of questions about what the deal is and what we need to do as a Nation
to handle pollution, carbon dioxide, climate change, and how we need to
deal with it and how we should think about it. There was an article in
today's Washington Times by Mr. William C. Triplett II that points out
the following:
[[Page S1372]]
In mid-February, billionaire and major Democratic National
Committee donor Tom Steyer held a dinner at his palatial San
Francisco home for 70 of his closest friends. Former Vice
President Al Gore was the headliner, and in attendance were
Democratic Senators Harry Reid. . .
The Democratic Senate leader and four other Senators were present.
He has pledged to give $50 million to a campaign to defeat, mainly,
Republicans because they don't agree with his global warming agenda.
Mr. Triplett says:
What has everyone's attention is this number: $100 million.
Mr. Steyer has announced that he intends to put $50 million
of his own money into Democrats' races in 2014 and has
challenged his fellow deep-pocket liberals to match it with
an additional $50 million of their own. His issue is
``climate change.''
We have to talk after this conference. We will have a lot of talk
tonight about this question.
With regard to Congress, I will try to be as brief as I can. In 1970
Congress passed the Clean Air Act before global warming had ever been
discussed. In fact, there was some discussion of global cooling in
1970. It passed.
Carbon dioxide is an odorless, tasteless gas that plants take in and
breathe out oxygen; and people breathe in oxygen again and let out
carbon dioxide. It is a naturally forming, odorless, tasteless,
nonharmful gas.
It was contended that this gas was causing global warming. It made
some sense to me. CO2 apparently is some sort of a global
warming gas and creates a blanket effect and could increase the
temperatures. Who knows--that was the argument and it seemed to make
some sense.
However, John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan who was there at the
time of the Clean Air Act and was one of its authors said: ``I think
the Supreme Court came up with a very
much erroneous decision on whether
the Clean Air Act covers greenhouse
gases . . . ''
So what happened was the Supreme Court, in a 5 to 4 vote--after it
was contended through the International Panel on Climate Change that
CO2 could be causing climate change--ruled this was a
pollutant, as are particulates like NOX and SOX--
sulfur dioxide, and, therefore, under the 1970 law, which never
mentioned CO2, the Environmental Protection Agency was
required to regulate it. That gave these unelected bureaucrats--people
in that agency--the power to regulate an individual American's barbecue
grill, their lawnmower, and every major business in America the amount
of CO2 they emit from their businesses and their plants. It
is a remarkable development from a pure constitutional question. If the
issue were brought up today it would not pass. There are not sufficient
votes, apparently, to overturn it, but there would never have been
enough votes to pass legislation to do what the Supreme Court said.
We are not looking at cost and benefits when we deal with this issue.
We are talking about billions of dollars in cost and what kinds of
benefits we get for that. Even if we were to reduce our CO2
emissions in the United States by 80 percent by the year 2050, in line
with what the President says our goal should be, there would be
virtually no reductions in predicted global temperatures if you take
the models the experts utilize, even 90 years from today around the
year 2100.
So it is not improper for us to raise questions about this, and as to
how much power we should be giving to the Environmental Protection
Agency, and how much cost can be pushed down onto the American people
to pay for this agenda when there are some interesting facts that keep
coming out.
In January of 2014, in the Scientific American magazine, which has
been a staunch supporter of global warming legislation, it contained an
article entitled ``The Long Slow Rise of Solar and Wind,'' which
explains some of the reasons for the ``slow pace of energy
transition.'' The article explains, ``each widespread transition from
one dominant fuel to another has taken 50 to 60 years,'' and ``there is
no technical or financial reason to believe [renewables] will rise any
quicker.''
It just takes time to transition. Even if we can make this happen, we
can't make it as fast as a lot of people would like it to see it. The
article says:
From 1990 to 2012 the world's energy from fossil fuels
barely changed, down from 88 percent to 87 percent.
So we remained on the same path, even though we have been working on
this for many years. The article concludes that ``energy transitions
take a long time.'' They just do.
Then we have the problem of exaggeration to the point where
exaggeration is really not a fair word to describe it, in my opinion.
It becomes more than an exaggeration but a deliberate
misrepresentation.
On November 14, 2012, President Obama said, ``The temperature around
the globe is increasing faster than was predicted even 10 years ago.''
Increasing faster than even 10 years ago it was predicted to increase.
So I wrote former EPA director, Administrator Lisa Jackson, in December
of 2012 asking her to provide the best available data that EPA had and
that they would rely upon to support the President's statement. I asked
her to send us the data to support that claim.
A few months later, in February of 2013, Gina McCarthy, then
Assistant Administrator of the EPA, wrote me a response but she did not
provide any of the requested data relating to the average global
temperature and the so-called increases.
Then in April, 3 months later, after she was nominated to be head of
EPA, I asked Ms. McCarthy again and she said she would provide
additional followup information to support the President's statement
that global temperatures are increasing faster than what was predicted.
On April 30 she responded in writing to me--I am on the EPW Committee--
but not with any requested analysis or the chart I asked for that would
show official predictions versus actual global temperatures. She simply
stated:
EPA has not produced its own analysis, but we expect a
definitive comparison in the forthcoming [IPCC] Fifth
Assessment Report.
Then on May 29, 2013, President Obama did it again. He claimed:
[We] also know that the climate is warming faster than
anybody anticipated 5 or 10 years ago . . .
This is the President. I challenged the statement at the committee
before his top environmental official, Administrator McCarthy. She
could not produce any information to back this up. And he repeats it
again. This is very disturbing to me.
So on June 24, 2013, I was joined by all EPW Republicans in a letter
to Ms. McCarthy to ask that she provide data supporting the President's
claims, but she didn't provide any data.
Why? There is no such data. The climate is not warming faster than
was predicted by the experts several or even 5 to 10 years ago. Nothing
close. Let us look at this chart. On this chart the red line is a
projection compiled of 102 predictive computer models. These models are
used by experts at various universities and think tanks around the
globe in trying predict what is going to happen. They believe with
CO2 and other global warming gases the temperatures will
increase and we have to take extraordinary steps, they say, to avoid
this because it can be damaging to us.
This is what the average of those models predicted, going up
substantially from almost a degree by 2020. That is 1 degree, in 20-
some-odd years. That is noticeable. That is an impact, if it were to
happen.
However, these two lines are actual temperature measurements starting
in 1980 and through the current date, right here. And the temperatures
haven't gone up. It has been an extraordinary thing. The computer
models have been wrong virtually every year and experts are admitting,
even the IPCC admits this is a problem for them. They do not know why
the temperature hasn't been increasing. CO2 has been going
up. Why isn't the temperature increasing, such as they predicted?
Yet the President continues to say the temperature around the globe
is increasing faster than was predicted even 10 years ago. It is hardly
increasing at all in the last 17 years.
So we have to have some truth, and I hope, if our colleagues talk
about this issue, they will ask EPA Administrator McCarthy what
information she has that would justify such a statement. And I hope
they do not make that same statement. Actually, I said to her it would
be nice if she would tell the President to quit saying it. I will say
he hasn't said it since last year.
[[Page S1373]]
Again, the facts, as I show them here, show a flat temperature. And
those facts are pretty much undisputed.
Now we have all these allegations that say: Well, extreme weather.
The problems from CO2 and greenhouse gases are causing
extreme weather. We all heard that when Hurricane Sandy hit the
northeast. We don't normally have one in the northeast, but it hit the
northeast, and it was fairly strong. It was not an exceedingly powerful
hurricane, but it did a lot of damage for people who have been living
on the water and weren't prepared for it. It did a lot of damage.
Al Gore, former Vice President, recently asserted ``all weather
events are now affected by global warming pollution.'' Senator Barbara
Boxer, chairman of our committee--the EPW Committee--said Superstorm
Sandy is ``evidence of climate change mounting around us.''
In January of this year, before the Senate EPW Committee, the
administration's top wildlife official Dan Ashe declared there were
``more frequent and severe storms, flooding, droughts and wildfires.''
This is the top person in the wildlife department. He said we have
``more frequent and severe storms, flooding, droughts and wildfires.''
And he, therefore, supported President Obama's climate action plan. So
I wrote him and asked him to provide any data he had personally
evaluated that would support his claim. He testified before a U.S.
Senate committee. I asked him if he had any data to back it up. And, of
course, he didn't.
Dr. Holdren, the top science adviser in the country, also declared
the President will talk about ``the connection between the increasing
frequency and intensity of droughts and climate change when he speaks
tomorrow. He has actually repeatedly talked about the connection
between climate change and extreme weather.''
Well, what do we know about that? We have had experts before our
committee to discuss that very subject. Dr. Roger Pielke, who is a
climate impacts expert, agrees with the view that global warming is
partly caused by human emissions. He testified in the EPW Committee
last year. He talked to us. He talked about this very issue--extreme
weather--and here is what he said:
It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that
disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or
droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the
United States or globally.
He said it is not true. It is misleading. It is false. Dr. Roy
Spencer of the University of Alabama at Huntsville also testified
before our committee last year saying:
There is little or no observational evidence that severe
weather of any type has worsened over the last 30, 50 or 100
years.
The American Enterprise Institute looked at the data on this question
and this is what they found:
In brief, tornado, hurricane and cyclone activity are at
historically low levels, wildfires are in a long-term decline
except in government forests, there is no trend in sea-levels
related to increases in greenhouse gas concentrations, the
record of the Arctic ice cover is ambiguous, there is no
drought trend since 1895, and the same is true for flooding
over the past 85 to 127 years.
When I asked Dr. Holdren--the President's science adviser--about
this, he responded: ``The first few people you quoted are not
representative of the mainstream scientific opinion on this point.''
That was a baseless accusation, as he had no data to dispute their
information. Hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, and floods are measured
every year. We have objective data.
Dr. Pielke went back and examined the hurricanes--with category 5
being the strongest, down to 1 being the least--and categorized them
50-plus years, and we are not having more or bigger hurricanes, we are
not having more floods, we are not having more tornadoes. We had an
outbreak of very severe tornadoes a few years ago in Alabama, but the
data would indicate clearly that nationwide we are not having more. We
have always had tornadoes, and this one did a lot of damage and got a
lot of coverage, but it was not a trend. I was sort of surprised to see
this idea.
There are a lot of things I think we can do which would move us in
the right direction where we could have compromise, and maybe nuclear
energy would be one which we have support on both sides of the aisle
for and would be good for the environment and good for energy and keep
costs at a reasonable level without any pollution. So there are a lot
of things we can do.
As we discuss the hundreds of billions of dollars in costs which are
being imposed on our economy as a result of some of the ideas to deal
with climate change and extreme weather, I asked my colleagues: Would
you please check the data; is it truly so that we are having more
hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, or floods? Dr. Pielke says no. Let's
see somebody dispute those numbers. They haven't been disputed.
Is it true the temperature is increasing faster than was predicted
even 5 years or 10 years ago? The IPCC data doesn't show it and neither
does any other objective data. So I asked the EPA Administrator to
submit some data to show me if that is true: Do you have any? If so,
won't you ask the President to quit saying that? Shouldn't the
President lead us and tell the truth about the situation?
I don't suppose we know enough now to answer this question
conclusively either way, but I would say there has been a lot of
exaggeration and a lot of hype. The American people are feeling the
crunch already in their electric and gasoline bills, and manufacturing
costs are going up as a result of these efforts to stop storms, which
seem to be down, to stop a rise in temperature which doesn't seem to be
rising right now. We will have to evaluate overall what the right thing
to do is as a nation, but I think it is time for us to be a bit more
cautious, to be less alarmist, and to focus more on the science of the
situation.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Michigan.
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