[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 151 (Tuesday, September 19, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5849-S5850]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Climate Change
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, each week that you see me standing
here means another week in which the Senate of the United States has
sat out doing anything to address climate change and another week of
carbon pollution streaming into our atmosphere and oceans. Carbon
dioxide from burning fossil fuels is changing our atmosphere and our
oceans. We see it everywhere. We see it in storm-damaged homes and
flooded cities. We see it in drought-stricken farms and raging
wildfires. We see it in fish disappearing from warming, acidifying
waters. We see it in shifting habitats and migrating contagions.
All these harms we see carry costs--real economic costs--to
homeowners, business owners, and taxpayers. That cost to homeowners,
business owners, and taxpayers is known as the social cost of carbon
pollution. It is the damage that people and communities and States
suffer from carbon pollution and climate change. The Office of
Management and Budget last calculated the social cost of carbon to be
around $49 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted. If you just do some
simple math, you can multiply the total measured U.S. emissions coming
from energy production alone in 2016--that is emissions of over 5.7
billion tons of CO2--by the $49 cost per ton. It is pretty
simple math: $49 times 5.7 billion tons gives you about $280 billion.
So $280 billion is the annual cost that the fossil fuel industry
offloads onto the American public in harm from the carbon dioxide
emissions. That is a big number and a big consequence--$280 billion per
year.
There was a more complex analysis than my simple math that was done
by the International Monetary Fund. The International Monetary Fund has
a lot of smart people. They don't have any conflict of interest that I
am aware of in dealing with this issue. Their calculation puts the
annual subsidy just in the United States of America for the fossil fuel
industry at $700 billion per year.
So is it my simple math where the social cost of carbon is $280
billion per year or is it what the International Monetary Fund
calculated at $700 billion per year? Whichever it is, it is a big
enough harm to the American public that you would think we might do
something about it here in the Senate. But of course, we don't because
that huge social cost of carbon, that huge subsidy gives the fossil
fuel industry the biggest incentive in the world to--instead of fixing
up its situation and cleaning up its mess--come over here and instead
mess with our politics so that our ability to deal with this issue is
silenced by their political muscle and manipulations.
One way in which they play this game is to populate the climate
denial machinery with one-eyed accountants--accountants who can only
see the pollutants' side of the ledger. Honestly, we hear their
testimony. The only thing they see is the cost to polluters of reducing
their pollution. They don't see the public harm side of the ledger.
They pretend it is a liberal conspiracy cooked up by the Obama
administration. Or say you are the Republican chairman of the House
Science Committee and you say: The social cost of carbon is a ``flawed
value . . . to justify the [EPA's] alarmist reasoning for support of
the Clean Power Plan and other climate regulations.''
Actually, if you take away the bad words ``flawed'' and ``alarmist''
and all of that stuff, the statement is actually true. There is a value
to avoiding carbon pollution, and defending that public value from the
polluters does justify the Clean Power Plan. This is the social cost of
carbon. Let's go back for a minute to 2006, when the Bush
administration's National Highway Transportation Safety Administration
put out a rule for vehicle fuel economy standards. There was some
dissatisfaction with that rule. States and other stakeholders
complained that this rule failed to take into account the social cost
of carbon emissions from cars--something that should matter for a rule
that is looking to reduce emissions from cars. Well, that went up on
appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and in 2007,
the Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. The court acknowledged that there
is a cost of carbon pollution, and that cost is ``certainly not zero.''
So it told the agency to go back, redo the rule and to come up with a
real social cost of carbon. Thus was born the legal requirement that
agencies consider a social cost of carbon in decisions.
Because of this decision, the Bush administration produced a wide
range of numbers up to $159 per ton of carbon emissions. The Obama
administration continued the effort to calculate a social cost of
carbon. An interagency working group, including scientists and
economists from across the Federal Government, relied on existing
scientific literature and on well vetted scientific models to produce a
first standard in 2010, with additional updates in 2013, 2015, and
2016.
When Federal agencies didn't apply any social cost of carbon, courts
corrected them. In 2014, a Federal judge in Colorado faulted the Bureau
of Land Management for failing to account for greenhouse gas emissions
when it approved an Arch Coal mine expansion in the Gunnison National
Forest. The court suspended the approval until the Bureau of Land
Management either used the social cost of carbon or gave a valid
explanation as to why not. When agencies did use the social cost of
carbon, their decisions were upheld. In 2016 the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the Seventh Circuit upheld the Department of Energy's use of the
social cost of carbon in the agency's standards for commercial
refrigeration equipment. The industry objected, and on appeal, the
Seventh Circuit said: No, they did the right thing putting that in
there.
Just last month, a three-judge panel from another U.S. circuit court
of appeals--in this case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit--ruled that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
has to consider the effects of carbon emissions that would result from
building three pipelines in the Southeast. Specifically, the ruling
directed FERC to either better calculate the project's carbon
emissions, using the social cost of carbon, or explain why it didn't
use it.
Also last month, another U.S. district court blocked another coal
mine expansion in Montana, citing the agency's failure to assess the
environmental effects of coal. Specifically, the judge referenced the
agency's failure to include any social cost of carbon.
Just last week a Federal appeals court in Denver told the Bureau of
Land Management that its lack of analysis on the climate effects of
four coal leases in the Powder River Basin was ``irrational'' and told
them to start over.
It is not just Federal courts. Agencies at the State level are also
using the social cost of carbon pollution in their activities. The New
York Public Service Commission affirmed the importance of the social
cost of carbon in its zero-emissions credit program. The Illinois State
legislature also incorporated a social cost of carbon into its zero-
emissions credit program, and prevailed in a challenge in the courts.
These State zero-emissions programs were the programs that were rolled
out to help existing nuclear energy providers against competition by
natural gas plants. The carbon price allowed carbon-free nuclear
generation to better compete in the wholesale markets.
Up in Minnesota, since 1993, the Minnesota Public Utilities
Commission has required utilities to consider the estimated cost of
carbon emissions in planning for new infrastructure projects. This
year, the commission voted to raise its social cost of carbon to $43
per ton.
The Colorado Public Utilities Commission recently ordered the local
utility Xcel to use the social cost of carbon in its resource planning
documents. Colorado told its utilities to use $43 per ton starting in
2022 and to ramp up to nearly $70 per ton by 2050.
It is not just Federal courts and State agencies. Private companies
in the United States and around the globe are incorporating the social
cost of carbon into their own operations and accounting. Investors are
beginning to demand that corporations perform this kind of analysis in
order to qualify for investment. Big investors like Black Rock have
taken on big companies like Exxon in order to break through the denial.
Just last week, the Washington Post reported that 1,200 global
businesses either have adopted or are adopting a carbon price in some
form. The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions found that companies
like Microsoft,
[[Page S5850]]
Disney, the insurance giant Swiss Re, Unilever, Shell, BP, the mining
corporation Rio Tinto, and General Motors have all taken steps to put a
price on their own use of carbon.
Courts have made it the law for agencies to use the social cost of
carbon. States are deploying the social cost of carbon. The business
community recognizes and is incorporating into its financial planning
the social cost of carbon. Yet here in Congress and down at the Trump
White House, the leaders of the Republican Party continue to ignore
climate change, pretend it doesn't exist, and ignore the very real
costs that society bears from carbon pollution.
It goes without saying that the storm that has just ravaged Florida
was spun up by warmer ocean waters, carried more rain because of warmer
air, dumped more rain, and pushed storm surge further into Florida
because of risen seas and those other characteristics.
Are we seeing any action? No. The President in March issued a
sweeping Executive order rolling back Federal energy and environmental
standards. It disbanded the interagency working group, and it asserted
that the social cost of carbon was ``no longer representative of
governmental policy.'' Nice try with that, given where the courts are.
Of course, the House and the Senate Republicans followed suit by
introducing a pair of bills by Congressman Evan Jenkins on the House
side and our colleague from Oklahoma, Senator Lankford, on our side
that purport to prohibit the Federal Government from using the social
cost of carbon in rulemaking and in regulatory processes. Of course,
you can't do that, and those laws aren't going anywhere. Why? Because
they violate a very basic principle both in courts and in
administrative agencies. That very basic principle is at the heart of
the rule of law, and it is that facts have to be factual and that
conclusions have to be logical. Any decision that fails this standard--
that is, to use the administrative law terms ``arbitrary and
capricious'' or ``not based on substantial evidence''--fails as a
matter of law. Although Congress, of course, is bound and gagged by the
polluters and their front groups, it is going to be hard for those
polluters to try to stop the social cost of carbon in courts and
administrative agencies. Despite the efforts of ExxonMobil and the Koch
brothers to make America their fossil fuel banana republic, we still
are a rule-of-law country and those rule-of-law principles that facts
must be factual and that conclusions must be logical are too basic for
our courts and administrative agencies to ignore.
In our courts and administrative agencies, lying and misleading can
be exposed on cross-examination, for instance, and lying and misleading
gets you punished, unlike in Congress where lying and misleading have
been fossil fuel tactics for decades and sickeningly successful ones
backed up by huge political muscle.
The failure in Congress and the remedy in the courts is one reason
the Founding Fathers designed our government that way so that even
where political branches of government were captured by special
interests, there would still be a path for the truth, and there would
still be a means for justice to have its way.
If the courts and the States and so many major businesses are all
behind recognizing the social cost of carbon, who is behind the
President and our Republican colleagues in denying that it is real? In
my experience, it is powerful trade associations like the American
Petroleum Institute, the American Chemistry Council, the National
Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and others
that have a distaste for any honest assessment of the social cost of
carbon.
Right now, since the costs of those industries' pollution is
offloaded onto the rest of us for free, why not? Why would they want to
start paying for the harm they cause right now?
Think tanks and front groups funded by the Koch brothers and other
polluters have vigorously fought against recognizing the fact of the
social cost of carbon for years. These groups have neutral sounding
names--maybe even friendly sounding names--like the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, the American Energy Alliance, the Heritage
Foundation, FreedomWorks--my personal favorite--the Heartland
Institute, a group so good that it put up billboards comparing climate
scientists to the Unabomber. It is really a classy contribution to the
debate.
One thing this crowd of bad actors does know is how to throw its
weight around, especially since the Citizens United decision threw open
the floodgates of special interest money into our politics. That is
what has put Congress in the thrall of the polluters. It is an indecent
and wrong place for us to be, but with any luck, the adherence of
courts and administrative agencies to the rule of law--the principles
that facts must be factual and conclusions must be logical--will help
us get out of the political trap that the fossil fuel industry has
constructed.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Kennedy). The Senator from Florida.