[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 181 (Tuesday, November 7, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7054-S7056]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Climate Change

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, our EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt, 
has a little problem. You see, the Supreme Court has ruled that 
greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act. Therefore, 
under the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, which 
Pruitt leads, is legally obligated to regulate greenhouse gases. They 
must do this as a matter of law.
  Moreover, the EPA has determined that greenhouse gas emissions 
endanger the public health and welfare of current and future 
generations, and Scott Pruitt has said he will not contest that 
endangerment finding. He is stuck with it. Why? Because he knows it is 
a contest he would lose by a landslide. The climate denial nonsense he 
espouses has never passed peer review, it is not real science, and it 
would get buried in any forum where facts and truth matter.
  That is also likely why the White House released the Climate Science 
Special Report, part of the National Climate Assessment we mandated by 
law without significant alteration. Scientists had prudently disclosed 
what they sent to the White House so everyone could compare what went 
into the White House with what came back out of the White House. That 
put the White House in a box, and caught in that box, the White House 
went ahead and released the report without alteration.
  The Climate Science Special Report affirms that climate change is 
driven almost entirely by human action. It warns of a worst-case 
scenario, where seas could rise as high as 8 feet by the year 2100, 
which is the scenario our home State planners are looking at for Rhode 
Island and which I know has occasioned dire forecasts for the Presiding 
Officer's home State of Florida. The report details a wide array of 
climate-related damage already unfolding across the United States. Here 
is what the report says: ``It is extremely likely that human influence 
has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th 
century.'' The document reports: ``For the warming over the last 
century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by 
the extent of the observational evidence.''
  No convincing alternative explanation. Well, we actually knew that 
because climate denial has all along been bogus, phony propaganda 
created by the fossil fuel industry and pushed out through its array of 
phony front groups. Nobody but the ignorant would seriously believe 
their nonsense, least of all in Congress, except for the fact that the 
propaganda is backed up by ferocious political artillery and an 
implacable fossil fuel industry position to deny, deny, deny as the 
ship goes down.
  This will be a disgrace whose odor will last a long time as history 
looks back and recounts a Congress so subservient to the fossil fuel 
industry that it would ignore unanimous real science and go instead 
with the flagrant, self-serving falsehoods of the industry with the 
world's biggest conflict of interest--an obvious plain conflict of 
interest. It is a sickening display of what our Founding Fathers would 
plainly describe as corruption, and we are supposed to act as if things 
are normal around here. Things are not normal around here--not since 
Citizens United, for sure.
  Things are also not normal at EPA. That Agency of the U.S. Government 
has been corrupted. There is no straighter way to say it. The EPA now 
answers not to the public interest but to the special interest of the 
fossil fuel industry through its new Administrator, Scott Pruitt, whose 
entire history is one long exercise in subservience to the fossil fuel 
industry. If he is not bad enough, check out the creepy coterie of 
fossil fuel lackeys he is surrounding himself with. It is another 
disgrace, but given the fossil

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fuel's control over Congress, the legislative branch is compliant and 
complicit in the industry takeover, and this body has yet to utter a 
peep of dissent as our national EPA sinks into banana republic status.
  Last week, I talked about the phony tricks Pruitt is using to undo 
the Clean Power Plan. The Clean Power Plan is an annoyance to certain 
folks in the fossil fuel industry that has long underwritten Pruitt's 
political ambitions. So for their sake, something had to be done. Well, 
given the Climate Science Special Report that the White House just 
released, they couldn't really mess with the science--at least not 
without it blowing up in their faces--so they reverted to some tricks.
  One trick was to recount the cost-benefit calculations of climate 
change and count only domestic effects of an international danger. Now, 
the Climate Science Special Report the White House just released says: 
``The climate of the United States is strongly connected to the 
changing global climate.''
  Nevertheless, Pruitt made the decision to count only the domestic 
effects of domestic emissions. That trick neatly wipes a major fraction 
of the harm the fossil fuel industry is causing right off the books. It 
doesn't affect the actual harm, just the accounting of the harm. In my 
example, it wiped two-thirds of the harm off the books in a neat feat 
of accounting trickery.
  Of course, that still leaves one-third of the harm to account for so 
they took another whack at that, and their trick there was to juice the 
discount rate. In years to come, prompt action now on climate change 
would prevent things like sea level rise washing over our coastal 
infrastructure, unprecedented wildfire seasons burning our forests, and 
disruptions in agricultural yields from drought and flood extremes. The 
Clean Power Plan would achieve between $14 billion and $34 billion in 
future health benefits, also, like prevented illnesses and deaths, but 
all those things happen in the future, which brings in this matter of 
the discount rate.
  The discount rate discounts the present value of things that happen 
in the future based on a percentage. Here is a simple example. If you 
assume a discount rate of 5 percent, that means anything 1 year from 
now is worth 5 percent less than it would be right now. So $10,000 of 
something in 10 years would be worth $6,000 today. If you assume a 
discount rate of 10 percent, that means $10,000 of something in 10 
years is only worth $4,000 today. You can jiggle the discount rate to 
lower the present value. The higher the discount rate, the lower the 
present value of future harms.
  A report this year from the National Academies of Science confirms 
this: ``The rate at which future benefits and costs are discounted can 
significantly alter the estimated present value of the net benefits of 
that rule.''
  Now, the George W. Bush administration recognized that ``[s]pecial 
ethical considerations arise when comparing benefits and costs across 
generations.'' The Bush administration guidance urged lower discount 
rates when a rule is expected to harm future generations. I will quote 
them again. ``If your rule will have important intergenerational 
benefits or costs, you might consider a further sensitivity analysis 
using a lower but positive discount rate,'' wrote the Office of 
Personnel Management at the time.
  That describes exactly what we face with climate change. Our carbon 
pollution today will hurt generations far off in the future as, for 
instance, temperatures and sea levels inexorably rise decade after 
decade and properties and land are lost to the sea.
  In 2015, the Federal Government settled on a 3-percent discount rate 
to estimate the out-year costs of carbon pollution to society. That was 
the recommendation of leading economists, the top researchers from top 
universities putting forward credible analysis from the scientific 
community.
  In our new, industry-friendly Pruitt analysis, they jacked that rate 
from 3 percent up to 7 percent. They more than double it. There is 
little actual analysis. They just picked a higher rate and what a 
payoff for Pruitt's fossil fuel friends. At 7 percent, future harms, 
injuries, and losses count for far less. Indeed, with this trick, 
Pruitt wiped away nearly $18 billion in predicted harm from carbon 
pollution. Remember, again, nothing changes in the real world. The harm 
to future generations is unchanged. That is a given in either scenario, 
but like that domestic-harm-only trick, this is an accounting trick to 
help the fossil fuel industry dodge accountability for its pollution. 
It doesn't change the situation on the field; it just changes the score 
on the scoreboard.
  Contrast the Pruitt fossil fuel-friendly nonsense with real, peer-
reviewed science. In real, peer-reviewed science, we can now calculate 
not only the harm of carbon pollution but how much individual fossil 
fuel companies have contributed to that harm. A peer-reviewed study in 
the scientific journal Climatic Change tells us that a few major fossil 
fuel producers are responsible for as much as half of the recorded 
global surface temperature increase, and the study demonstrates a 
method for attributing their corporate share of the harm to Chevron, 
ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Peabody Energy, Arch Coal, Devon Energy, 
among about 50, investor-owned carbon producers. You can take the 
emissions data from that climatic change study and factor in well-
established social cost of carbon estimates and approximate individual 
corporations' responsibility for climate damages. Those companies ought 
to be taking a hard look at what they are reporting to their 
shareholders about this because they are under strong legal obligations 
to report out-year risks to their shareholders.
  The National Climate Assessment Climate Science Special Report that 
we first talked about was developed by dozens of leading scientists, 
from 13 different Federal agencies, detailing the extent of climate 
change driven by manmade greenhouse gas emissions and the urgent need 
to address it. That report is as solid as it gets. The report is stark. 
Temperatures are climbing. Seas are rising. Ocean waters are becoming 
more acidic. Fires are more frequent and more severe, and fire seasons 
are longer. Storms are stronger and more frequent, as we have seen 
particularly menacing coastal America.
  Downwind States like Rhode Island cope with air that carries more 
particulate matter, nitrogen oxide, and other lung-constricting 
pollution.
  Fishermen haul in foreign catches full of fish their fathers and 
grandfathers would hardly recognize. Woodsmen harvest in distressed and 
changing forests. Farmers till land subject to extremes of both more 
frequent drought and more severe flood.
  The inescapable science is compiled by the top experts from 
throughout the Federal Government and is concurred in, I believe, by 
every single State university in this country, which not only 
understand climate change, but they teach climate change. There is 
every single National Lab in this country--the Labs we fund and trust--
the armed services, and our national intelligence assessments. It is 
virtually impossible to find anyone not on the payroll of the fossil 
fuel industry who disputes this. It shows that climate change touches 
every corner of the country already, not later.
  Up against that study, up against that unanimity of legitimate 
science, Pruitt puts a bunch of accounting tricks cooked up for him, I 
believe, by a conflicted and corrupting industry.
  We cannot let fossil fuel hacks like Pruitt and his merry crew 
prevent America from responding to the reality around us.
  This week it has been reported that Nicaragua and Syria have joined 
the Paris climate agreement. They were the two outliers. That was the 
company the United States was in with President Trump's decision to 
remove us from the Paris climate agreement--Nicaragua, Syria, and the 
United States of America. That is some company. Now, even Nicaragua 
and, just today, Syria have joined. At some point our national 
reputation is put at hazard. Our national reputation is put on the line 
when we can't do what is obviously right because we can't tell one 
greedy industry: You have had enough--no more.
  It is time we treated this issue honestly. When we can't do that, 
don't tell me history will forget. It seriously is time to wake up. 
This is corruption in plain view.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Montana.

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