[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 136 (Thursday, August 16, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5678-S5679]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      WILDFIRES AND CLIMATE CHANGE

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, it is terrific to be joined here today 
by my colleague from Oregon, Senator Wyden, to address some of the 
devastating effects of a changing global climate from the shores of 
Rhode Island and our beautiful Narragansett Bay to the forests of 
southern Oregon.
  Rhode Island is looking at losing significant territory to storms and 
sea level rise. Oregon is seeing ancient forests go up in smoke. For 
most of the country, this summer has been a scorcher. July was nearly 2 
degrees Fahrenheit above average, and, before that, the contiguous 
United States experienced its hottest May and third hottest June on 
record.
  It is oceans too. Just last week, the Rhode Island organization Save 
the Bay recorded ocean surface temperatures in Little Narragansett Bay, 
off the coast of Westerly, RI, at nearly 80 degrees Fahrenheit--the 
highest in over a decade of data and, perhaps, the highest ever in 
Rhode Island's history.
  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently released 
its report ``State of the Climate in 2017.'' The 500 scientists from 65 
countries who contributed to this peer-reviewed report, which was 
published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 
reported ominous records broken: the concentration of carbon dioxide in 
our atmosphere, a new high; heat in the upper ocean, a new high; sea 
level rise, a new high; sea ice coverage in the Arctic and in 
Antarctica, both new all-time lows and all headed in the wrong 
direction.
  Out West, the NOAA report called out 2017 as an extreme western 
wildfire season that burned over 4 million hectares. The total costs of 
$18 billion tripled the previous U.S. annual wildfire cost record set 
in 1991.
  Right now, in the summer of 2018, blazing temperatures and drought 
conditions have contributed to wildfire outbreaks worldwide in the 
U.S., Canada, Australia, South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. The 
raging Mendocino Complex fire recently became the largest wildfire in 
the history of the State of California, the previous record being last 
year's Thomas fire.
  Mr. President, I again want to thank the distinguished ranking member 
on the Finance Committee, and I salute his years of passion on 
environmental issues and in the defense of his State, which is now 
suffering so many fires.
  We actually have an answer to the question that Senator Wyden 
proposed rather rhetorically--why this is happening out in the 
Mendocino fires, for instance. The assistant deputy director of Cal 
Fire, Daniel Berlant, who is at the state department of forestry and 
fire protection, has said this: ``Let's be clear: It's our changing 
climate that is leading to more severe and destructive fires.''
  Climate change has doubled the area consumed by forest fires since 
1984. According to a report by Climate Central, ``[c]ompared to the 
1970s, the annual average western U.S. wildfire season is now 105 days 
longer, has three times as many large fires (larger than 1,000 acres) 
and sees more than six times as many acres burned.''
  Not only are these fires becoming larger, they are becoming more 
dangerous. They burn hotter and more intensely. They spread more 
rapidly and shift unpredictably, putting firefighters at risk.
  A 2015 study in The Solutions Journal found that, as compared to 
1990, fires are now larger, three times as many homes are burning, and 
around twice as many brave firefighters are losing their lives.
  The Federal Government's ``Climate Science Special Report,'' released 
late last year, warned that years without large fires in the western 
United States will become what they called ``extremely rare.'' Years 
without these large fires will become ``extremely rare.''
  The Environmental Protection Agency warns that unless we curb our 
greenhouse gas emissions, ``climate change is projected to dramatically 
increase the area burned by wildfires across most of the contiguous 
U.S.'' The Agency estimates for the western United States a more than 
40-percent increase in the area burned by wildfires by 2100, and the 
amount of land in the Southwest burned each year by fires, including 
Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, could go up by as much as 140 percent.
  These more frequent and more ferocious wildfires are leaving 
permanent scars on America's landscape. Ordinarily, wildfires are part 
of the natural lifecycle of a healthy forest, but, as Senator Wyden 
said, these are not our grandfather's wildfires. The intensity, 
frequency, and scale of the infernos we are now seeing reflect nature 
out of whack. Instead of clearing dead trees and groundcover to make 
room for healthy trees and rebirth of plant life, these superstrong 
wildfires are simply destroying these ecosystems.
  The National Wildlife Federation's 2017 report, ominously titled 
``Megafires,'' says: ``If hot enough, extreme fires can even sterilize 
the soil by killing subsurface seed banks that normally aid in post-
fire recovery.'' Some native environments are permanently lost to 
charred landscapes and invasive species.
  A 2017 study reported in the journal Science found that ``thanks to 
climate change, areas ravaged by wildfires may never recover, wiping 
out entire ecological communities forever.'' This review of areas 
ravaged by wildfires showed that ``the proportion of sites with no 
regrowth almost doubled after 2000`` as compared to the 1980s or 1990s.
  Of course, the consequences of these fires to human life are dire. 
Fourteen people died in last year's wildfires in California, 
Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Utah.
  The risk doesn't end with the flames. After last year's devastating 
fire in California, when rain finally returned to the area, but without 
trees and other plants to hold the soil in place, the downpours 
unleashed torrents of mud, rocks, and debris, killing more than 20 
people. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 25 to 30 people 
die each year in postfire floods and mudslides.
  As Senator Wyden mentioned, air pollution is another consequence of 
these wildfires, and it can spread far

[[Page S5679]]

beyond the burned-out site of the fire. Hundreds of miles downwind, air 
can become unhealthy and even hazardous.
  I remember visiting Saskatchewan with Senator Graham and seeing skies 
there clouded from Oregon's fires. Last month, air in the northwest 
took the title of ``worst in the nation''--not what they were looking 
for--with officials recommending that residents wear masks when 
venturing outdoors. Children, pregnant women, and people with breathing 
difficulties were told to actually leave town, to leave the area.

  Wildfires unleash an especially harmful air pollutant: tiny particles 
less than 2.5 microns in diameter. For comparison, an average human 
hair is around 70 microns wide. So we are talking about very small 
particles circulating in the air. Because they are so small, they are 
easily inhaled and can lodge deep in the lungs and even enter the human 
bloodstream. Exposure to them has been associated with asthma, heart 
attack, stroke, and some cancers. Emerging research even links this 
nasty pollutant to premature births.
  A researcher at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, 
CO, told Science magazine that wildfire smoke is ``one of the largest 
problems facing air quality and climate issues going forward.'' 
According to a 2016 study in the journal Climatic Change, wildfires 
were to blame for more than two-thirds of the bad-air days in the 
western U.S., with unhealthy levels of particulate matter.
  Smoke and pollution from western wildfires get picked up by the jet 
stream and can be carried 3,000 miles across the United States, all the 
way to our east coast, contaminating air throughout the country with 
noxious particulate matter, methanol, benzene, ozone, and other toxins.
  This image shows the plume of smoke from west coast fires over here 
spilling across the country last September. NASA reports that when 
airborne contaminants are drawn down to ground level, as happened in 
Iowa last summer, wildfires can trigger air quality warnings hundreds, 
even thousands, of miles away.
  The scourge of these wildfires in Senator Wyden's home State and 
throughout the West is one of the most dangerous symptoms of carbon 
pollution and climate change. His Oregon constituents see this 
devastation firsthand. Senator Wyden has helped to rush additional 
resources to Federal firefighting agencies to step up the response to 
these exploding wildfires. I thank him for joining me here today as we 
implore our colleagues to recognize what is going on.
  If you don't believe me, simply go to your own home State 
universities and ask them. Whether it is Alaska's, Texas's, Oklahoma's, 
Rhode Island's, or Oregon's universities, they will tell you. This is 
stuff that is so clear that it is taught in your home State 
universities. Yet here in the Senate, we continue to indulge the 
pretense that we don't know what is going on. Well, it is climate 
change, plain and simple, as we careen toward what could be an 
irreversible shift in our climate, changing our Earth into what one 
recent report called a ``hothouse.'' Yet here we are, the great 
Congress of the United States, stuck in dirty fossil fuel politics, 
fiddling under the Capitol dome while the western United States burns.
  I thank my distinguished friend from the great State of Oregon for 
joining me here today.
  I yield the floor.

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