[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 183 (Wednesday, December 16, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8715-S8716]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     PARIS CLIMATE CHANGE AGREEMENT

  Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, this past weekend, the officials from the 
administration traveled 3,800 miles to Paris to attend the 
international climate negotiations in Paris. As a reminder, this is a 
program that has been going on now for 21 years. The ones who started 
this whole idea that the world is coming to an end because of global 
warming came from the United Nations.
  I have gone to several of these meetings. I didn't go to this one 
because even John Kerry, our Secretary of State, said publicly that 
there is not going to be anything binding. If there is nothing binding, 
then why are they even there? In fact, it was interesting because when 
he made that statement, President Hollande of France was outraged. He 
said: He must have been confused when he said that. But that changed 
the whole thing. It was on November 11 that he made that statement.
  Anyway, they went ahead and they had their 21st annual conference. I 
remember one of them I went to. I ran into a friend of mine from a West 
African country.
  I said: Luke, what are you doing here? Why are you over here? You 
don't believe all this stuff, do you, on global warming?
  He said: No, but we stand to be able to bring back literally billions 
of dollars to Benin, West Africa. Besides that, this is the biggest 
party of the year.
  The worst thing they said happened at the South America meeting 3 
years ago was they ran out of caviar. Anyway, we are paying for all 
that stuff. When they went over and said that wonderful things were 
going to happen in Paris, we knew it wasn't going to happen.
  The COP21 conference has nothing do with saving the environment. With 
no means of enforcement and no guarantee of funding as developed 
countries had hoped, the deal will not reduce emissions and it will 
have no impact on global temperatures.
  When they say they had this historic meeting, everyone was scratching 
their heads wondering: What happened? Did they win anything at all?
  James Hansen is the scientist who is credited with being the father 
of global warming. I can remember when I got involved with the issue 
when they came back from Kyoto and wanted to ratify a treaty, and that 
was at the turn of the century, 1998. James Hansen has been working on 
global warming--he is a NASA scientist--for years. It goes all the way 
back to the eighties. He characterized what happened in an interview he 
had with the British newspaper the Guardian. He said the agreement is a 
fraud. Here is the guy who is the father of global warming, and he said 
it is a fraud and it doesn't accomplish anything. This is likely 
because the only guaranteed outcome from the Paris agreement is 
continued growth in emissions.
  According to a study from the MIT Joint Program on the Science and 
Policy of Global Change, global emissions will increase by 63 percent 
through--that is assuming that everyone complies with their 
commitments, which obviously they will not and they can't--global 
emissions will increase by 63 percent through 2050 compared to the year 
2010. By the end of this century, the MIT study projects, 
temperatures--if they were successful--would only be reduced by 0.2 
degrees Celsius.
  Even the 26 to 28 percent greenhouse gas emission reductions which 
President Obama committed to on this agreement is really a fraud. There 
is an environmentalist witness who came before our committee. He was 
the Sierra Club's former general counsel, and his name is David 
Bookbinder. He testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works 
committee--the one that I chair--this year saying that the President's 
power plan does not add up to the 26 to 28 percent target; it is 
totally unattainable.
  When asked to explain the targets in corresponding regulatory actions 
to Congress, the key administration officials refused to do that.
  In fact, something happened. It may be the first time this has 
happened. People wonder how the unelected bureaucracies go off and do 
things that are not in keeping with the majority of the American 
people, and we see this all the time. To preclude that from happening, 
every bureaucracy has a committee in the Senate and in the House that 
is supposed to be watching what they are doing and they are supposed to 
be overseeing. They have jurisdiction, just like my committee has 
jurisdiction over the EPA. I tried to get them to come in and tell us 
when it was announced by President Obama that they were going to 
propose the 26 to 28 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2025, and 
they refused to testify.
  I would ask the Chair, in the years you have been here, have you ever 
seen a bureaucracy refuse to come before the committee that has the 
jurisdiction? They did. We are the authority in Congress to approve 
such--it has not only not pledged the money that has been committed as 
our price to pay, we haven't actually appropriated any money at all.
  So while proclaimed as historic, this agreement did little to 
overcome the longstanding obstacle that has plagued international 
climate agreements from the start where responsibility is unequally 
divided between the developed and the developing world.
  I can remember back in about 1999, I guess it was, around the Kyoto 
time, we had a vote here, and I was involved in that vote. It was 
called the Chuck Hagel and Bob Byrd vote. It said that if you come back 
from any of these places where you are putting this together with a 
treaty--whether it is Kyoto or another treaty--we will not vote to 
ratify a treaty that either is bad for the economy of America or 
doesn't treat China and the developing countries the same as it treats 
us. That passed 95 to 0. So when they go over and come back, it is dead 
on arrival. The thing is, everyone knows it except for the 192 
countries that were over there. So we can't figure out why they would 
call this a historic event.

  While the administration is pushing forward with economically 
disastrous climate regulations before the end of his Presidency, China 
gets to continue business as usual, including emissions growth through 
2030--each year. That is about 15 years of increase. They

[[Page S8716]]

came back saying: Well, we have to increase our CO2 
emissions for 15 more years.
  Yesterday morning, just 3 days after India signed off on the final 
Paris agreement, the Guardian--that is the big newspaper in London--
reported that India is targeting to more than double its output of 1.5 
billion tons through 2020 because ``coal provides the cheapest energy 
for rapid industrialization that would lift millions out of poverty.''
  At the historic meeting they had, the top official from India's Coal 
Ministry said:

       Our dependence on coal will continue. There are no other 
     alternatives available.

  India is not alone; there are numerous other countries that will 
continue to do that.
  Even though the temperature level set is misleading, a 1.5-degree cap 
on global temperature increase is no more realistic or technologically 
feasible than the 2 degrees they used before this.
  The fine print remains the same. For any agreement to have legal 
significance within the United States, it has to be ratified by the 
Senate. People in other countries don't know that. They think someone, 
particularly a very strong President like President Obama--that he can 
just pretty much mandate anything he wants. It doesn't work that way in 
the United States.
  In what was literally the final hour--this is very interesting--they 
had to delay the announcement of their agreement by 2 hours because 
they wanted to make one change in the agreement. They had language that 
said ``developed country''--that is us, the United States--``parties 
shall continue taking the lead by undertaking economy-wide. . . .'' and 
then explained how to do it. They wanted to replace the ``shall'' with 
``should'' because they discovered in their discussions that if they 
left ``shall'' in there, it would have to come to the U.S. Senate for 
ratification, and they would all be embarrassed because we would know 
what the results of that would be.
  Missing from the administration's top 21 celebratory speeches is the 
fact that neither the American people nor the U.S. Senate supports the 
international agreement and that the centerpiece regulatory 
commitment--the so-called Clean Power Plan--faces significant legal 
obstacles in the Congress--in fact, not just obstacles, but it has 
already been voted on. There is a CRA--that is the Congressional Review 
Act--and the Congressional Review Act is saying that we are going to 
reject the Clean Power Plan, and it passed with an overwhelming 
majority of Democrats and Republicans in the House. What they agreed on 
has already been rejected.
  Missing from almost all of the Paris agreement coverage before and 
after is that the basis for this agreement is not scientific but 
political. Ninety percent of the scientists do not believe the world is 
coming to an end because of global warming, as environmental NGOs and 
the U.S. administration officials claim.
  A Wall Street Journal op-ed examined what constituted this 
misrepresentation of 97 percent. We always hear that 97 percent of the 
scientists say that this is true; it must be true. Anytime you have 
something that is unpopular, if you keep saying over and over again 
that the science is settled, a lot of people out there believes it is. 
But when they did the analysis of the 97 percent consensus and 
explained it, it was simply based on fractions of respondents. For 
example, in a commonly cited 2009 survey of over 3,100 respondents, 
only 79 were counted because they claimed their expertise was solely 
climate-related.
  Well, the 97 percent consensus was reviewed just a few weeks ago by 
one of the news stations in their poll----
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
  Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 1 more minute.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. INHOFE. The poll found that 97 percent of Americans don't care 
about global warming when stacked against issues such as terrorism, 
immigration, health care, and the economy. I remember when it used to 
be the No. 1 concern of Americans, and following the same March Gallup 
poll over the years, it has gone from No. 1 or No. 2 over that period 
of time to No. 15--dead last. They have a lot of work to do, and it is 
not going to work.
  Before I yield the floor, let me thank my friend from Connecticut for 
all of his help last night. We worked late, and we did the right thing. 
I appreciate that very much.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
  Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I am pleased and honored to follow my 
colleague from Oklahoma, and I extend my thanks to him for his 
cooperation on the legislation we did last night by unanimous consent, 
which I was pleased to support eventually and work with him to reach a 
resolution on.
  (The further remarks of Mr. Blumenthal are printed in today's Record 
during consideration of S. Res. 310.)
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming.

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