[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 62 (Thursday, April 21, 2016)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2379-S2381]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT SIGNING AND EARTH DAY

  Mr. DURBIN. Some may know that there is a section of the Washington 
Post called the Kids Post--a section of interesting stories written for 
kids in the Washington area. The writers ask area grade schoolers about 
their favorite books, tv shows, hobbies, and sports. Sometimes the kids 
are asked what they think is one of the biggest problems in the world. 
Last week, a fifth-grade class in Virginia was asked this question.
  About half the class mentioned an environmental problem such as 
global warming. In other recent editions when this question was asked, 
climate change is something these young people consistently worry 
about. It only makes sense.
  Failure to do anything about climate change today, when we still have 
a chance, will leave future generations--our grandchildren and their 
children--with a changed world--and not for the better.
  I know every time I look at my beautiful young grandchildren, I feel 
a responsibility--a moral responsibility--

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to address this problem for them and future generations. It makes me 
wonder why there are still so many here in this chamber and among the 
leading Republican Presidential candidates who deny climate change even 
exists, not to mention refuse to even do anything about it. How will 
future generations look back upon such denial and obstinance in the 
face of overwhelming evidence? Not kindly, I expect.
  I know that science tells us that our human brains evolved to address 
more immediate dangers, and slowly evolving dangers, especially ones 
that may take decades or more to materialize, don't trigger the same 
sense of importance. But that is not the only thing at work here.
  For decades, the fossil fuel industry and those in their pocket have 
tried to blur the debate--to blur the science--and create divisions 
among us instead of looking for what we have in common to solve this 
shared problem. Make no mistake. This is a deliberate campaign financed 
by the fossil fuel industry, a campaign that peddles the pseudo-science 
of manufactured doubt.
  As we approach Earth Day, all you need to do is look at the daily 
news to see the destructive impact of climate change. Scientists 
recently gained an improved understanding of the complex climate 
science of Antarctic ice, and they showed that, if carbon emissions 
were to continue unabated over the next few decades, the oceans could 
rise as much as 3 or 4 feet by 2100. The situation would then grow far 
worse in the 22nd century and beyond, likely forcing people to abandon 
many coastal cities. How can any member of the Senate ignore this 
potentially catastrophic and costly disaster?
  Just the other week, scientists announced troubling evidence in the 
South Pacific that we are reaching a point where many coral reef 
ecosystems may not be able to adapt to the relentless progression of 
climate change. Whole ecosystems that affect all of us and our food 
chain are being impacted.
  And just recently, the New York Times reported that forest fires in 
parts of the United States, from Alaska to New Mexico, were no longer 
just happening in a single season, as was the case historically. They 
have become year-around threats. New Mexico has had 140 such fires this 
year alone, double the number over the same period last year. Such 
fires have arrived earlier each year, are happening in winters, and in 
some cases burning all year along. The culprit for the drier conditions 
leading to these fires? Climate change.
  Climate change also has significant national security implications, 
ones we simply cannot ignore because they will impact our shores. The 
crisis in Syria and the flow of refugees from unstable parts of the 
world is an early warning of how humanitarian crises, particularly from 
less stable parts of our shared planet, are likely to get worse if we 
continue to let climate change go unaddressed. Back in 2011, when pro-
democracy protests began in Syria, many of those joining were displaced 
farmers, who had suffered their fourth year of drought made worse by 
the effects of climate change. The National Academy of Sciences 
published findings earlier this year showing that extreme drought in 
Syria between 2006 and 2009 was most likely due to climate change and 
that the drought was a factor in the uprisings in 2011.
  Just last week, Pulitzer Prize Winner New York Times columnist Tom 
Friedman wrote about massive migration out of parts of West Africa, 
through the Sahara Desert, to Libya hoping to eventually cross the 
Mediterranean Sea into Europe. I ask unanimous consent that his April 
13, 2016, column ``Out of Africa'' be printed in the Record following 
my remarks.
  He writes, ``Just as Syria's revolution was set off in part by the 
worst four-year drought in the country's modern history--plus 
overpopulation, climate stresses and the Internet--the same is true of 
this African migration wave.''
  Friedman further explains that a United Nations official in the 
region showed him three maps of Africa with an outline around dots 
clustered in the middle of the continent. The first map showed the most 
vulnerable regions of desertification, made worse by recent droughts, 
in Africa in 2008. The second map showed conflicts and food riots in 
Africa during 2007 and 2008. And the third map showed terrorist attacks 
in Africa in 2012. All three outlines cover the same territory.
  Anyone serving in the U.S. Senate or running for President who claims 
to be serious about national security simply isn't credible without 
addressing the long-term threats posed by weak states and climate 
change in the decades to come.
  And now, insurance companies are tuning in because they understand 
the threat is real and that business assets are at stake. Lloyd's of 
London, the world's oldest and biggest insurance market, has recognized 
the threat climate change represents to business assets, risks ranging 
from property damage to forced displacement to food insecurity. Lloyd's 
has issued a call for the insurance industry to take into account the 
effects of climate change in their insurance modeling.
  The London School of Economics studied the economic impacts of 
climate change and put out a new report earlier this month. What they 
found is that, on a global scale, climate change could cost the world 
as little as $2.5 trillion--or, within the range of possibilities, as 
much as $25 trillion.
  This is not only a problem in the Arctic or Africa or in remote 
corners of the world. This is a problem close to home for us, right 
here and right now. In the past 6 years, Illinois has experienced 
historic storms, floods, and droughts that have caused millions of 
dollars in damage. The city of Chicago has been hit by four historic 
storms in the last 7 years, meaning that the flooding of basements and 
overflowing of wastewater systems has become an annual event.
  Because of climate change, U.S. growing seasons have shifted so 
drastically that crops which previously could survive only in the 
southern half of the country can now be successfully grown in northern 
Illinois. If current global warming trends continue, climate models 
estimate that Illinois will have a climate similar to that of the Texas 
Gulf coast by 2100. For Illinois farmers, these changes to the 
environment have a direct effect on their livelihood.
  The need to act is urgent. We are reaching the tipping point. The 
science is clear; the debate is settled. The destructiveness of climate 
change is clear and growing. Climate change is a dire threat to the 
global economy and global stability. It will cause catastrophic 
consequences for global health, food security, and habitats on land and 
in the ocean. If we don't act in time, there is no backup plan.
  No one nation can do this alone. The good news is that, together, the 
nations of the world can act to avoid irreversible disaster. President 
Obama, Secretary of State Kerry, and climate envoy Todd Stern have 
helped lead the way. The Paris climate agreement is a historic step in 
that direction. Never before have so many nations come together to 
tackle this threat. The draft Paris climate treaty was negotiated and 
adopted by consensus by 195 countries, unprecedented international 
cooperation in the face of the crisis.
  I want to congratulate President Obama for his leadership in this 
complex but crucial task. He and his team lead the way for an 
ambitious, balanced, and fair agreement. And I would like to thank Todd 
Stern for his contributions, steadily working over several years to 
build up to the success of the Paris negotiations. I wish him and his 
family well as he retires from the climate envoy position.
  Getting 195 countries to consent on the treaty is no small feat, and 
he achieved all this in the face of so much opposition at home.
  The agreement opens for signatures on April 22, Earth Day. The United 
States and China made a joint announcement that we will be signing the 
agreement on that day, the earliest possible time. I encourage other 
nations to follow our lead.
  Our generation has a moral obligation to leave the world in at least 
as good a shape as we inherited from our parents and grandparents. We 
cannot run away from our responsibility.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:


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                            [Apr. 13, 2016]

                             Out of Africa

                        (By Thomas L. Friedman)

       Agadez, Niger.--It's Monday and that means it's moving day 
     in Agadez, the northern Niger desert crossroad that is the 
     main launching pad for migrants out of West Africa. Fleeing 
     devastated agriculture, overpopulation and unemployment, 
     migrants from a dozen countries gather here in caravans every 
     Monday night and make a mad dash through the Sahara to Libya, 
     hoping to eventually hop across the Mediterranean to Europe.
       This caravan's assembly is quite a scene to witness. 
     Although it is evening, it's still 105 degrees, and there is 
     little more than a crescent moon to illuminate the night. 
     Then, all of a sudden, the desert comes alive.
       Using the WhatsApp messaging service on their cellphones, 
     the local smugglers, who are tied in with networks of 
     traffickers extending across West Africa, start coordinating 
     the surreptitious loading of migrants from safe houses and 
     basements across the city. They've been gathering all week 
     from Senegal, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Liberia, 
     Chad, Guinea, Cameroon, Mali and other towns in Niger.
       With 15 to 20 men--no women--crammed together into the back 
     of each Toyota pickup, their arms and legs spilling over the 
     sides, the vehicles pop out of alleyways and follow scout 
     cars that have zoomed ahead to make sure there are no pesky 
     police officers or border guards lurking who have not been 
     paid off.
       It's like watching a symphony, but you have no idea where 
     the conductor is. Eventually, they all converge at a 
     gathering point north of the city, forming a giant caravan of 
     100 to 200 vehicles--the strength in numbers needed to ward 
     off deserts bandits.
       Poor Niger. Agadez, with its warrens of ornate mud-walled 
     buildings, is a remarkable Unesco World Heritage site, but 
     the city has been abandoned by tourists after attacks nearby 
     by Boko Haram and other jihadists. So, as one smuggler 
     explains to me, the cars and buses of the tourist industry 
     have now been repurposed into a migration industry. There are 
     now wildcat recruiters, linked to smugglers, all across West 
     Africa who appeal to the mothers of boys to put up the $400 
     to $500 to send them to seek out jobs in Libya or Europe. Few 
     make it, but others keep coming.
       I am standing at the Agadez highway control station 
     watching this parade. As the Toyotas whisk by me, kicking up 
     dust, they paint the desert road with stunning moonlit 
     silhouettes of young men, silently standing in the back of 
     each vehicle. The thought that their Promised Land is war-
     ravaged Libya tells you how desperate are the conditions 
     they're leaving. Between 9,000 and 10,000 men make this 
     journey every month.
       A few agree to talk--nervously. One group of very young men 
     from elsewhere in Niger tell me they're actually joining the 
     rush to pan for gold in Djado in the far north of Niger. More 
     typical are five young men who, in Senegalese-accented 
     French, tell a familiar tale: no work in the village, went to 
     the town, no work in the town, heading north.
       What's crazy is that as you go north of here, closer to the 
     Libya border, to Dirkou, you run into streams of migrants 
     coming back from Libya, which they found ungoverned, abusive 
     and lacking in any kind of decent work. One of them, Mati 
     Almaniq, from Niger, tells me he had left his three wives and 
     17 children back in his village to search for work in Libya 
     or Europe and returned deeply disillusioned. In Libya, say 
     migrants, you can get beaten at any moment--or arbitrarily 
     arrested and have the police use your cellphone to call your 
     family in Niger and demand a ransom for your release.
       Just as Syria's revolution was set off in part by the worst 
     four-year drought in the country's modern history--plus 
     overpopulation, climate stresses and the Internet--the same 
     is true of this African migration wave. That's why I'm here 
     filming an episode for the ``Years of Living Dangerously'' 
     series on climate change across the planet, which will appear 
     on National Geographic Channel next fall. I'm traveling with 
     Monique Barbut, who heads the U.N. Convention to Combat 
     Desertification, and Adamou Chaifou, Niger's minister of 
     environment.
       Chaifou explains that West Africa has experienced two 
     decades of on-again-off-again drought. The dry periods prompt 
     desperate people to deforest hillsides for wood for cooking 
     or to sell, but they are now followed by increasingly violent 
     rains, which then easily wash away the topsoil barren of 
     trees. Meanwhile, the population explodes--mothers in Niger 
     average seven children--as parents continue to have lots of 
     kids for social security, and each year more fertile land 
     gets eaten by desertification. ``We now lose 100,000 hectares 
     of arable land every year to desertification,'' says Chaifou. 
     ``And we lose between 60,000 and 80,000 hectares of forest 
     every year.''
       As long as anyone could remember, he says, the rainy season 
     ``started in June and lasted until October. Now we get more 
     big rains in April, and you need to plant right after it 
     rains.'' But then it becomes dry again for a month or two, 
     and then the rains come back, much more intense than before, 
     and cause floods that wash away the crops, ``and that is a 
     consequence of climate change''--caused, he adds, primarily 
     by emissions from the industrial North, not from Niger or its 
     neighbors.
       Says the U.N.'s Barbut, ``Desertification acts as the 
     trigger, and climate change acts as an amplifier of the 
     political challenges we are witnessing today: economic 
     migrants, interethnic conflicts and extremism.'' She shows me 
     three maps of Africa with an oblong outline around a bunch of 
     dots clustered in the middle of the continent. Map No. 1: the 
     most vulnerable regions of desertification in Africa in 2008. 
     Map No. 2: conflicts and food riots in Africa 2007-2008. Map 
     No. 3: terrorist attacks in Africa in 2012.
       All three outlines cover the same territory.
       The European Union recently struck a deal with Turkey to 
     vastly increase E.U. aid to Ankara for dealing with refugees 
     and migrants who have reached Turkey, in return for Turkey 
     restricting their flow into Europe.
       ``If we would invest a fraction of that amount helping 
     African nations combat deforestation, improve health and 
     education and sustain small-scale farming, which is the 
     livelihood of 80 percent of the people in Africa, so people 
     here could stay on the land,'' says Barbut, ``it would be so 
     much better for them and for the planet.''
       Everyone wants to build walls these days, she notes, but 
     the wall we need most is a ``green wall'' of reforestation 
     that would hold back the desert and stretch from Mali in the 
     west to Ethiopia in the east. ``It's an idea that the 
     Africans themselves have come up with,'' she adds. It makes 
     enormous sense.
       Because, in the end, no wall will hold back this surging 
     migrant tide. Everything you see here screams that unless a 
     way can be found to stabilize Africa's small-scale 
     agriculture, one way or another they will try to get to 
     Europe. Some who can't will surely gravitate toward any 
     extremist group that pays them. Too many are now aware 
     through mass media of the better life in Europe, and too many 
     see their governments as too frail to help them advance 
     themselves.
       I interviewed 20 men from at least 10 African countries at 
     the International Organization for Migration aid center in 
     Agadez--all had gone to Libya, tried and failed to get to 
     Europe, and returned, but were penniless and unable to get 
     back to their home villages. I asked them, ``How many of you 
     and your friends would leave Africa and go to Europe if you 
     could get in legally?''
       ``Tout le monde,'' they practically shouted, while they all 
     raised their hands.
       I don't know much French, but I think that means 
     ``everybody.''

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