[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 177 (Wednesday, November 1, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6947-S6948]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Climate Change

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I come to the floor today for the 
184th time to ask us to at least wake up to our duty as a Congress to 
enact prudent policies to address the effects of climate change. The 
Presiding Officer is well aware of what Alaska faces from ocean 
acidification and ocean melting and sea level rise and all of that.
  For the generations who will look back at this, I have tried in these 
speeches to chronicle the political tricks and bullying that have put 
Congress--the Congress of the United States--in tow to a massively 
conflicted special interest, such that we are incapacitated on this 
vital subject. The shamelessness of the fossil fuel industry and the 
spinelessness of Congress under its sway will provide a long lesson in 
modern-day corruption and political failure.
  The Trump administration has been particularly loathsome, threatening 
the emissions standards for cars and trucks, pressing for the Keystone 
XL tar sands pipeline, disbanding science advisory committees, lifting 
the moratorium on Federal coal leasing, trying to expand offshore 
drilling, and open national marine monuments and sanctuaries to energy 
companies. The Environmental Protection Agency is working to eliminate 
rules on the leaking and flaring of methane and has rescinded 
requirements for reporting methane emissions. The President has 
announced his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate 
agreement.
  One particular target of this corrupted administration is the Clean 
Power Plan, the 2015 EPA rule to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from 
American powerplants--a rule that many utilities and States supported. 
But it is the industry's bottom-dwellers who have the President's ear, 
and they want to undo even this flexible framework for meeting 
emissions-reduction targets.
  When EPA balanced the costs and benefits of the Clean Power Plan 
originally, it offset things, like between $14 billion and $34 billion 
in health benefits in the form of preventive illnesses and deaths, 
against the costs of industry compliance.
  The net benefits of the Clean Power Plan came out to between $26 
billion and $45 billion every year.
  So with its official proposal to rescind the Clean Power Plan, EPA 
administrator and fossil fuel operative Scott Pruitt had to cook the 
books to wipe out this public benefit. Here is how he did it. There 
were two tricks. One derives from the fact that harms, injuries, and 
losses caused by carbon pollution can take place many years after the 
pollution is emitted. In financial matters, future costs and benefits 
are balanced against present costs and benefits, using what is called a 
discount rate. It is more valuable to receive $1 million now than $1 
million 20 years from now. That is the theory.
  But even the George W. Bush administration recognized for healthcare 
rulemaking that ``[s]pecial ethical considerations arise when comparing 
benefits and costs across generations,'' and they urged care about 
using a discount rate when a rule is expected to harm future 
generations.
  In 2015, the United States settled on a 3-percent discount rate to 
estimate the out-year costs of carbon pollution to society. Scott 
Pruitt jacked that up to a 7-percent discount rate so out-year harms, 
injuries, and losses would count for less. Mind you, our children and 
grandchildren will still suffer the exact same costs at 3 percent or at 
7 percent. It is just that present-day polluters--Scott Pruitt's 
masters--get a way-big discount.
  Pruitt's second trick is only to count the carbon pollution harm 
within our borders. You might say: That is OK; we are Americans, after 
all. But it is worth taking a look at what this rule does if all 
countries were to use it because there is a trick hidden in the middle 
of it. The fact is that we are harmed by other countries' carbon 
emissions, and they in turn are harmed by our carbon emissions. On the 
flip side, we harm other countries with our emissions, and they harm us 
with theirs.
  There is a total amount of global emissions, and there is a total 
amount of global harm. If you call the total global emissions X and the 
total global harm Y, what happens when every country follows the Pruitt 
method of only pricing local emissions and local harms?
  For purposes of illustration, let's say there are three countries in 
the world, and each emits one-third of the total carbon pollution and 
suffers one-third of the global harm from the collective global 
emissions. If each country only counts its own emissions and the harms 
only to its own country, guess what happens. All that cross-border harm 
never gets counted. It never gets counted. It disappears off the 
balance sheet. It vanishes into this trick of calculation. If you are 
the tool of the fossil fuel industry, how rewarding it must be to 
implement a trick that just vanishes so much of the fossil fuel 
industry's harm to the world.
  In this hypothetical, how much harm simply vanishes? Two-thirds of it 
does. Two thirds of the harm simply vanishes, never to be accounted 
for--not in the real world. Nothing has changed in the real world. In 
this three-country hypothetical, the total emissions is still X and the 
total harm is still Y. None of that has changed. This Pruitt trick of 
accounting just wiped two-thirds of the harm off the books. A happy day 
for polluters, and a happy, happy day for the polluters' tool, for 
there will no doubt be rewards for implementing this trick.
  Those fossil fuel industry bottom-dwellers no doubt think that this 
is pretty cute and that this is pretty clever stuff, indeed. There are 
high-fives in the corporate boardrooms that they have a tool in office 
who will pull such a trick of magical, vanishing carbon pollution 
harms. But the problem with these crooked little schemes is that the 
whole world is actually watching. Anybody can do the analysis that I 
just did and show that this is nothing more

[[Page S6948]]

than a trick, and sooner or later, consequences do come home to roost.
  Out in the real world, the Pacific Island nation of Kiribati is 
buying up land in Fiji so it can evacuate its people there when rising 
seas engulf its islands and eliminate the nation. It is on its way to 
becoming a modern-day Atlantis, lost forever to the waves. You can 
replicate that risk along the shores of Bangladesh, Burma, Malaysia and 
the Maldives.
  You can add in the risk of lost fisheries that left a country's EEZ 
for cooler waters. If you think that is just a hypothetical, ask 
Connecticut and Rhode Island lobstermen about their catch. Add in the 
expansion of the world's desert areas in the Sahel and elsewhere that 
forces farmers' crops and shepherds' flocks away from their historic 
homes.
  Add unprecedented storms powered up over warming seas. As bad as 
things have been in Houston, Florida, and Puerto Rico, we are rich 
enough to rebuild, to throw billions of dollars at the problem, and we 
are. Other places do not have those resources. Without the help, 
imagine that suffering.
  To those who will suffer in the future, what do we say? On that day 
of reckoning, on that judgment day, what do we tell all those people 
who suffered? Ha-ha-ha, do we say? We came up with this little trick 
that wiped most of your suffering off our books. We used a discount 
rate that discounted your suffering to virtually zero. Is that the kind 
of America we want to be? Remember the saying: The power of America's 
example is more important than any example of our power. Some example 
we would be, some city on a hill, if that was the way we behaved.
  The natural world does not care about self-serving or ideological 
arguments. The natural world is governed by immutable laws of physics, 
chemistry, biology, and mathematics. Scott Pruitt's polluter-friendly 
mathematics just doesn't add up. As Michael Greenstone, an economist at 
the University of Chicago who helped develop the social cost of carbon, 
put it, Pruitt's plan was not evidence-based policymaking. This was 
policy-based evidence making.
  There is enormous pressure in the Trump administration to get rid of 
the social cost of carbon. What is bizarre about the Trump 
administration is that they don't try to get rid of the social cost of 
carbon by getting rid of its social costs, by lowering carbon 
emissions, by addressing the harms that it causes. They try to get rid 
of the social cost of carbon by getting rid of the scoring mechanism 
that counts all of that. It is like saying: My team is winning because 
I tore down the scoreboard.
  Well, no, the world is getting clobbered out there by carbon 
pollution and the climate change that causes it, and tearing down the 
scoreboard doesn't help change the game on the field. You cannot just 
cook the books and reduce the social cost of carbon.
  For one thing, the social cost of carbon analysis is too well 
established in the honest world. Courts have instructed Federal 
agencies to factor the social cost of carbon into their regulations. 
States are using the social cost of carbon in their policymaking. Most 
major corporations, even ExxonMobil, factor a social cost of carbon 
into their own planning and accounting.
  The social cost of carbon pollution is at the heart of the 
International Monetary Fund calculation, for which the fossil fuel 
industry gets an annual subsidy in the United States of $700 billion a 
year. Even to protect a multihundred-billion-dollar annual subsidy, 
Scott Pruitt can't just wish the social cost of carbon away and just 
can't stop counting it. Courts will take notice.
  They may take notice that these stunts are arbitrary and capricious 
under the Administrative Procedure Act. They may take note that Pruitt 
has massive conflicts of interest with his fossil fuel funders. They 
will surely note that the Supreme Court has said greenhouse gases are 
pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and that EPA is legally obligated 
to regulate them. They will surely note that the EPA itself has 
determined that greenhouse gas emissions endanger the public health and 
welfare of current and future generations, a determination that the DC 
Circuit resoundingly upheld.
  But we are not in an ordinary situation. Pruitt has a long history of 
doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry. In the recent Frontline 
documentary, ``War on the EPA,'' Bob Murray of Murray Energy, a strong 
Pruitt supporter, bragged about giving this administration a three-page 
action plan on environmental regulations and bragged that the first 
page was already done. That is the world we live in now, where the 
regulated industry brags that it controls its regulator, gives it 
direction, and that its work is already being done.
  Courts that look at any rule proposed by Scott Pruitt must recognize 
that there is a near zero chance that he is operating in good faith. 
Our Nation's environmental regulator went in captured and has stayed 
captured by our Nation's biggest polluters. Scott Pruitt is not their 
regulator; he is their instrument. That is a conflict of interest.
  I recently hosted my eighth annual Rhode Island Energy Environment 
and Oceans Day, bringing together members of our business community 
from the public sector, from government, and academia, to hear directly 
from experts about the latest environmental news and initiatives. I was 
very excited to be joined by excellent keynote speakers, including 
former Secretary of State John Kerry, who has done such magnificent 
work on oceans particularly but on climate change generally, leading us 
into the Paris climate agreement. Also, there was former U.S. Special 
Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern, who has labored in these vineyards 
so many years, and ocean advocate and Oceana board member Sam 
Waterston. They were all great, but one phrase stood out.
  Sam Waterston called on us to tackle today's ocean and environmental 
problems with what he called a ``battle-ready kind of optimism''--a 
``battle-ready kind of optimism.''
  So let us go forward with a ``battle-ready kind of optimism'' to 
clean the polluter swamp at EPA, to clean our Earth's atmosphere and 
oceans of unbridled carbon emissions, and to clear the reputation of 
our beloved country of the obloquy it is rapidly earning at the hands 
of a corrupting industry.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Burr). The Senator from Virginia.