[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.