[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 164 (Wednesday, October 3, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6485-S6488]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Climate Change
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am grateful to be joined by my
wonderful colleague from Oregon, Senator Merkley, for my 222nd ``Time
to Wake Up'' climate speech. Although there are thousands of miles
between us--on the west and east coasts--Oregon and Rhode Island share
a common connection; that is, our oceans. Fisheries and coastal tourism
are major drivers of our economies. Our coastlines are vibrant with
homes, families, and businesses. We are ocean States.
So we are here to talk about the challenges of human-driven climate
change for our oceans and coasts: sea level rise, ocean acidification,
deoxygenation, warming, and increased storm surge. Our local agencies
and officials and our coastal residents understand the changes that are
coming at
[[Page S6486]]
them. Not all States are prepared, however, and in the aftermath of
severe storms like Hurricane Florence and last year's hurricanes,
powered up by higher seas and superheated ocean water, we are seeing
the consequences of this failure.
Last month was the 80th anniversary of the Great Hurricane of 1938.
The storm barreled through southern New England, destroying roads and
ports and businesses and homes. This is a photograph of downtown
Providence. That is the roof of a car, and they built cars pretty tall
back in 1938. Over 560 people lost their lives in this storm. The
National Weather Service now estimates that Providence experienced a
storm surge of around 20 feet, which put it 14 feet under water in the
downtown area and sustained winds above 100 miles per hour--not gusts,
sustained winds. If this storm were to hit Rhode Island now, it would
carry ashore at least an additional 10 inches of ocean, thanks to sea
level rise since the 1930s. It would probably carry ashore a lot more
than that because that 10 inches of water would pile up in the storm
surge as it hit.
If we continue to do nothing to slow climate change, by the end of
the century, sea level rise will be on the scale of additional feet,
not inches.
Hurricane Florence just brought feet of rain, high winds, and massive
storm surge to the Carolinas. At around 500 miles wide, it was bigger
than Hurricane Katrina, and it dumped more rain than Hurricane Harvey.
Sadly, nearly 50 people have lost their lives from the effects of
Hurricane Florence, and flooding recovery is still ongoing. The
condolences of Rhode Islanders go out to the Carolinas and Virginia.
As Hurricane Florence was building strength and making its approach,
researchers were connecting its power to climate change. A team of
researchers estimated climate change made Florence's rainfall 50
percent worse than it would have been without the known effects of
humankind on the climate. Hurricanes are powered by warmer oceans. One
of the study's authors estimated that for every degree Celsius of ocean
temperature increase, ``extreme precipitation events can increase by
over 60 percent.''
The oceans are warmer. Oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of
the excess heat trapped by our greenhouse gas emissions. It is several
nuclear explosions worth of heat per second that the oceans are
absorbing. By doing that, they spare our land from worse climate
catastrophe, but it wreaks havoc in our oceans. Marine heat waves are a
new phenomenon--so new that they were first identified and
characterized in 2011, but they have already left a permanent scar in
our oceans.
Starting in 2014, the northeast Pacific Ocean has experienced
inordinately warm temperatures--``the Blob,'' it was called--a mass of
warm water around the size of Canada. As the Blob spread toward Alaska,
a trail of millions of dead sea birds followed. The warm water drove
their prey to cooler waters; unable to adapt to the sudden shift, the
birds starved. Starving sea lion pups and toxic algae blooms that
poisoned whales were also attributed to the Blob of warm water.
The recent massive coral die-off in the Great Barrier Reef that left
half the reef dead was driven by abnormal water temperatures. Dr. Terry
Hughes, one of the world's leading coral reef researchers, was quoted
in The Atlantic as saying the Great Barrier Reef ecosystem ``has
collapsed . . . transformed into a completely new system that looks
differently, and behaves differently, and functions differently, than
how it was three years ago.''
Marine heat waves are becoming warmer and more frequent, to the point
that there is a movement now within the scientific community to start
naming and categorizing Marine heat waves much as we do hurricanes.
Warming seas rise, and this will hit coastal properties.
The Union of Concerned Scientists recently released a report that
estimated by 2100, ``nearly 2.5 million residential and commercial
properties, collectively valued at [over $1] trillion today, will be at
risk of chronic flooding.'' These numbers are based on sea level rise
alone; storm surge and rain-driven flooding only amplify these risks.
Long before your house is actually flooded, long before you are
walking through your kitchen in rubber boots, the value of your house
can crash if the house becomes uninsurable or unmortgageable for the
next buyer. Freddie Mac has warned of this property value crash in
America's coastal regions. Here is what Freddie Mac said: ``The
economic losses and social disruption may happen gradually, but they
are likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the housing
crisis and Great Recession.''
The insurance industry trade publication Risk & Insurance had this to
say: ``Continually rising seas will damage coastal residential and
commercial property values to the point that property owners will flee
those markets in droves, thus precipitating a mortgage value collapse
that could equal or exceed the mortgage crisis that rocked the global
economy in 2008.''
Despite this warning, the Federal Government has failed to prepare
for these coming changes and build coastal resiliency. Congress is used
to investing in our coasts only after a disaster. We have let our
National Flood Insurance Program fall into billions of dollars of debt.
We have let FEMA provide inaccurate and incomplete flood risk maps. And
the Trump administration is purposefully blind to climate science,
ocean changes, and flood mitigation requirements that would help us get
ahead of the changes coming along our coasts.
We are not out of time yet. We still have a chance to avoid the worst
consequences of climate change and prepare America's coastal
infrastructure for the rising tides. But we have to move past futile
and false denial and into action.
It is time, Republicans and Democrats alike, west coasters and east
coasters together, to wake up.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I am delighted to be here with my
colleague from Rhode Island. This is a coast-to-coast presentation,
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and on around the world, because our
oceans are in deep trouble from climate chaos.
It is indeed time to wake up, and this week is my colleague's 222nd
speech addressing that fact. It is so important not just that we speak
but that the world act.
Driving these factors--whether we are talking about the impacts on
the land or the impacts on the ocean--is carbon dioxide and carbon
dioxide pollution. It is facts on the ground everywhere that people can
pay attention to, but I think every now and then it is good to return
to the basic science. So I am just going to share this chart which
shows, with this red line, rising carbon dioxide levels. This chart
ends a little bit early, but we are now well over 400 parts per
million.
When I was born, we were at about 314 parts per million, and we are
approaching 414. This generation over the last 62 years is the first
generation to experience a 100-point climb in human history on this
planet, the first one to experience this dramatic growth in carbon
dioxide.
If it were just growth in carbon dioxide, if it were just a matter of
changing the air chemistry a little with no impact, we wouldn't be here
talking today, but now we have this set of black dots representing
temperature changes. We can see, essentially, as the carbon dioxide
levels rise, the temperature of the planet is rising as well. The heat
that is being trapped has been well understood for a long time. It goes
back more than a century.
In more recent times, in 1959, there was a scientist, Edward Teller,
who was quite famous for his work on nuclear issues. He gave a speech
to the 100-year anniversary of the petroleum. He said: This energy that
you are pulling out of the ground--oil and coal and gas--is pretty
powerful in helping humans transform the world and it can do a lot of
good, but then he went on to say, it has two problems. The first
problem is, there is a limited supply in the ground. It turns out there
is a lot more carbon stored in the ground than Edward Teller had any
idea about in 1959, but, he said, the second problem you have is that
when you burn this resource, you create carbon dioxide and carbon
dioxide traps heat and you are going to have a dramatic impact on the
planet. He focused specifically on the issue of rising sea levels and
the fact
[[Page S6487]]
that most people around the world live next to the sea.
That is a proper introduction to us recognizing that this issue has
been understood scientifically for a long time, but in terms of our
politics, individuals are reluctant to embrace that challenge because
it requires action, and that action is sometimes hard to come by to
shift the status quo to address this rising threat. In the 10 years I
have been in the Senate, we have seen dramatic, dramatic impacts, and I
will focus on the oceans today.
Oceans absorb 90 percent of the heat. I didn't know this statistic
until my colleague from Rhode Island questioned a scientist who was
being nominated for a key position in the administration and asked her
that question, thinking it was just basic knowledge. I said to myself,
actually, I wasn't sure how much the oceans absorb. I knew the open
blue waters--non-ice-covered waters--absorb a lot of sunlight energy. I
know they cover three-quarters of the Earth, but I didn't know that
statistic that 90 percent of the energy is trapped by the ocean. So we
see impacts around the world. We see coral reefs dying at an
unprecedented rate, both from the warming of the ocean and from the
increasing acidity of the ocean.
You may wonder why I raise the question of acidity. What does that
possibly have to do with that? As that rising carbon dioxide level that
was on the chart I just put up lifts, waves incorporate more of that
carbon dioxide into the ocean, and it becomes carbonic acid.
Essentially, we are pouring incredible amounts of acid into our oceans
via carbon dioxide pollution.
When I stand on the shore on the coastline of Oregon and I look out
to sea and see that ocean, I find it hard to imagine that we as humans
could have changed the basic chemistry, but there was a rude-awakening
fact that occurred when I came to the Senate back in 2008, when I was
elected, and in 2009. That fact was the baby oysters being hatched in
the Oregon State hatchery, the Oregon hatchery on the coast, started
dying. They all started dying. So the hatchery rushed in experts from
Oregon State University. They thought they would find a bacterium, they
thought they would find a virus and they didn't and they were
mystified. What is the answer? Why are they dying? It turned out it was
simply the increasing acidity of the Pacific Ocean, the ocean having
increased 30 percent over the time that humans have been burning fossil
fuels for energy. When those baby oysters try to pull the molecules out
of the ocean to form their shell, it is so much harder when it is a
higher acidity, and they die. So now we have to artificially buffer the
water in which the baby oysters are hatched in order for them to live.
We lost a billion baby oysters.
Then, of course, we have the impact, and we have climate chaos in the
form of hurricanes. Boy, have we received that message through storm
after storm in 2017 and 2018.
Hurricane Harvey came rolling in, September of 2017. The storm formed
and dissipated between August and September. The numbers are ones you
really can't get your hands around: Twenty-seven trillion gallons of
water dumped in Louisiana and Texas; 34,000 people displaced; 13,000
had to be rescued from rising floodwaters. The estimated damage: about
$125 billion from that one storm, second only to Katrina.
Then, a few weeks later, here comes Hurricane Maria, devastating
Puerto Rico, devastating the Virgin Islands. It knocked out the power
grid in Puerto Rico for almost a year. I went there about 8 or 9 months
after the storm to check it out, and I saw an island where thousands of
families still had blue tarps over their roofs--a testament to the
amount of destruction they had experienced, also a testament to how
unprepared FEMA was to respond to that: an estimated $90 billion in
damage; an estimate of roughly 3,000 deaths coming from the storm and
the aftermath, many of them affected by the knocked-out healthcare
services and the heat that followed.
Together, 2017 broke the record for the cost of the hurricane season,
16 major billion-dollar weather events costing over $300 billion. Why
are these hurricanes more devastating because of climate chaos, because
of carbon dioxide pollution? The energy comes from the temperature in
the ocean. The warmer the ocean, the more energy, the more powerful the
storms. A short explanation is that the warmer oceans produce more
evaporation, more water vapor in the atmosphere. It increases
approximately 7 percent for every 1.8 degrees of temperature rise. Then
the storm as a whole moves across the ocean and across the land more
slowly, which means not only do we have a more powerful storm, but it
is more likely to hover over a given area for a longer period of time.
Between 1949 and 2016, it is estimated that hurricanes slowed down at
sea by about 10 percent and by about 20 percent once they make
landfall. The result: a lot more rain and a lot more wind hits any
given area, a recipe for disaster.
If 2017 wasn't enough, we have already experienced Hurricane Florence
this year. Again, unusually warm ocean temperatures. It is estimated
that by previous understanding, this was a once-in-a-thousand-year
event; that is, we go through 1,000 years, we would see something like
this once, but we didn't just see Florence. We saw in the previous year
Maria, Irma, and Harvey. In other words, these 1,000-year-events are
becoming far more common as a result, setting record rainfalls, doing
record damage. It is more deaths, more damage, and now we have
thousands still in shelters as a result of Hurricane Florence and an
estimated some $38 billion in damage.
There are other effects we should realize from these massive storms.
One is that when the rivers flood up over the land, they tend to flood
areas that were never intended to be flooded; things like, for example,
leftover waste dumps from the ash from coal-burning powerplants. That
ash can turn a river into a gray pudding, and you can see it from
space. That ash contains arsenic, boron, copper, lead, and mercury, and
giant ponds of coal ash throughout North Carolina were flooded. It has
happened before.
In 2014, there was a catastrophic event at a Duke Energy plant that
spilled some 39,000 tons into the Dan River. That spill urged more
regulations to strengthen those coal ash deposits to prevent them from
escaping during floods, but what happened last year? Well, President
Trump's EPA and the North Carolina legislature weakened those
regulations. Then, last month, two other Duke Energy ponds flooded in
Hurricane Florence and released tons of coal ash into rivers and onto
private property. Imagine that toxic sludge flooding across your land.
How would you feel about that? Imagine that toxic sludge going into the
river your city takes its water from. How would you like that? I know
you wouldn't.
Another source of pollution: hog waste. North Carolina has roughly
3,000 unlined, open air pits containing millions of gallons of hog
waste. The hurricane's flooding released a lot of that waste into the
rivers. Again, how do you imagine the impact of that hog waste
spreading across your flooded property or through the river you take
your water out of? Not a pretty sight.
We are in the situation where so many legislatures want to put their
hands over their ears and eyes and not acknowledge the basic science
that is resulting in a warmer planet, warmer oceans, and all of the
effects--the coral reefs; the Pacific blob and the impact it had on sea
birds; the dying oysters; the pine beetles that live through the winter
because the winter is warmer and kill the pine trees; the ticks that
live through the winter in New Hampshire, New England, and kill the
moose; the ticks that live through the winter and spread disease that
humans get--devastating disease.
We have to stop and be honest about this impact on our planet. We
used to talk about computer models, and many mocked those models saying
that is just some ivory tower estimate; it is not really going to
happen. Now the facts are on the ground, and what we are seeing is
damage to our forests and to our fishing and to our farming.
This is not an urban issue or a rural issue. It is both an urban
issue and a rural issue: urban cities getting flooded, rural areas
having their farming and fishing and forestry profoundly affected. So
let us come together. Whether we come from an urban area or a rural
area, whether we come from a Republican State or we come from a
[[Page S6488]]
Democratic State, this threat doesn't discriminate, nor should we make
it a partisan issue. We have a responsibility to this generation, yes,
but the impacts are accelerating. We have a responsibility for the next
generation and the generation after that and 70 more generations that
will all ask: When the facts were before you in such an obvious and
dramatic way, why didn't you act?
Acting means we have to drive through massive transition from gaining
energy from fossil fuels to producing energy without fossil fuels--
producing energy with winds and tides and currents, producing energy
with solar power.
We have this massive fusion reactor called the Sun, and it
distributes energy on Earth through the wind and the sunshine. Let's
harvest that for the benefit of human kind. I am pleased to be able to
come to the floor to help celebrate the 222nd speech by my colleague on
the Atlantic coast and to share a little bit on the perspective from
the Pacific coast, but this is an issue that affects all points in
between and around the globe.
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Will the Senator yield for a question?
Mr. MERKLEY. I will be happy to.
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. One of the touching features of the Senator's
presentation was the summary of the effects on God's creatures--the sea
lion pups, the fish, the sea birds, just from this particular episode.
You may not have a big heart for an oyster spat, but these are all
God's creatures. It is frustrating when people who wear their
Christianity on their sleeve show so little interest for the protection
of God's creatures.
The other angle on that is that we are taught in the Bible to look
out for the least among us. One thing I have noticed is that climate
change harms don't fall evenly across the population, that storms and
floods are harder for some than for others, and that wealth and poverty
dramatically affect the experience of climate change by different
people.
I wonder if the Senator would comment on that from his experience.
Mr. MERKLEY. It is a great question or a great point because when you
have resources, you can respond to the impact far more easily. You can
take and say: My house has been devastated, but I have the resources to
go buy another house in a safer area, in a drier area.
Take, for example, the flooding of New Orleans. When New Orleans was
flooded after Katrina, we saw that affluent families moved, and poor
families had two options: One was to leave everything behind, leave the
State, and start over but start over with no assets, which meant they
were in extremely difficult circumstances, or stay and hope to rebuild.
It was extremely difficult for low-income individuals to be able to do
so.
As we look at the disparate impacts around the world, we can look
within the United States and realize, for example, the impact on the
Native American populations of Alaska are being significantly impacted
by the shoreline eroding, by the ice disappearing, and with that, the
traditional way of life is disappearing. Various groups have,
therefore, had to appeal for help to be able to move their villages, as
a result.
There is very little to be done to address the very changing nature
of the commerce they have carried on with the sea. Their fishing or
their hunting, which has gone on for thousands of years, now is being
dramatically impacted. We do see a hugely disparate impact.
If we broaden this discussion to look at countries such as Syria, we
find that when climate change affected the farmers and they had drought
year after year, they had to abandon their farmlands and flee to the
city, and they had no resources. It created competition for resources.
It helped to launch the civil war and Syria has been in deep, massive
conflict ever since, just as an example.
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I believe it was Tom Friedman, the very well-known
author, who first wrote comprehensively about the connection between
the unprecedented drought in Syria driving farmers and herdsmen away
from their former farms and herds--the farms dried up and the herds
died off--and into the city, into that conflict, and into that crucible
that led to the initial conflict and now to the complete collapse of
Syrian society and into an international boxing match of forces.
I yield my time.
I thank Senator Merkley for joining me and for the longstanding
passion that he has exhibited for the oceans, the coasts, the forests,
and the well-being of the people of Oregon. We are very proud of our
State of Rhode Island, but Oregon has a great deal in terms of natural
assets to be proud of, and there is no stronger voice for them than the
Senator from Oregon.
I yield.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lee). The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Perdue). Without objection, it is so
ordered.