[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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