[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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