[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 84 (Monday, May 20, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2982-S2984]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ORDER FOR ADJOURNMENT

  Mr. McCONNELL. If there is no further business to come before the 
Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand adjourned under the 
previous order following the remarks of Senator Whitehouse.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                             CLIMATE CHANGE

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here today for the 243rd time to 
call on this Chamber to wake up to the reality of climate change. I 
thank my colleague Senator Cornyn for his recent statement 
acknowledging that the days of ignoring this are over. Now it is time 
to do something with keeping global warming below the 1.5 or 2 degrees 
Centigrade threshold target.
  I speak regularly about the fossil fuel industry's relentless grip on 
Congress and how that grip prevents action on climate. Don't get me 
wrong--they are still at it, but they are not the only thing slowing 
progress. Another impediment is the wide swathes of our news media that 
cover the issue torpidly or not at all or as actual propagators of 
falsehood.
  Look at the big climate stories the media ought to be covering just 
from 2018. The year 2018 brought two landmark climate science reports. 
One was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on what 
warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels will do. The 
other was the Trump administration's own National Climate Assessment. 
These two studies delivered the starkest warnings on climate change 
ever--that the damage from climate change is already occurring, that 
world economies are now at risk, and that we are almost out of time to 
prevent the worst consequences.
  Even the fossil fuel industry and its stooges in the Trump 
administration didn't contest the science behind these reports. They 
know their science-denial campaign is phony. They know the real science 
is irrefutable. So it is better to hide from it than fight it, I guess.
  The year 2018 also brought devastating natural disasters linked to 
climate change. Out West, wildfires in California broke records. 
Hurricanes supercharged by warming oceans slammed the east coast, gulf 
coast, and Caribbean. Floods, droughts, and rising seas were reported 
across the United States and around the globe.

[[Page S2983]]

  Mr. President, 2018 also brought dire warnings of economic dangers 
from climate change. At the U.N. climate summit in December, a group of 
415 global investors--not environmentalists; investors--managing $32 
trillion of investments warned that unless carbon emissions are 
urgently cut, the world faces a financial crash worse than the 2008 
economic meltdown. The group called for the end of fossil fuel 
subsidies and the introduction of substantial prices on carbon to 
rebalance the market failure.
  The Union of Concerned Scientists separately found that over 300,000 
coastal homes, with a collective market value of over $130 billion, are 
at risk of chronic flooding by 2045. UCS showed that by the end of the 
century, 2.4 million homes, worth more than $1 trillion, could be at 
risk. Decisions we make now will determine whether those risks come to 
pass. By the way, First Street Foundation found that coastal property 
values are already beginning to slide.
  Unprecedented catastrophes, forceful warnings from scientists and 
financial experts--surely the viewers of America's top television 
networks should be focused on these things--or not. According to the 
media watchdog Media Matters, our major television networks--ABC, CBS, 
NBC, and FOX--aired 45 percent less climate change coverage on their 
marquee news programs in 2018 than in 2017. Climate coverage on network 
nightly news and Sunday morning political shows fell to just 142 
minutes in all of 2018, down from an already lame 260 minutes in 2017. 
That is less than 1 minute a day of coverage from all four major 
networks combined.
  Kudos to NBC, which actually upped its coverage by about one-quarter 
from the year before. Without NBC, the numbers look even worse. Media 
Matters found CBS's climate coverage down 56 percent from 2017 to 2018. 
``FOX News Sunday'' is down 75 percent, and ABC is down a whopping 81 
percent from a pretty low performance to begin with.
  I have noticed this trend, so I have begun keeping an eye on the 
Sunday shows' coverage this year. Each month, I look at how many 
substantive segments on climate change each show runs. It is not good. 
In April, for instance, there were only two substantive segments on 
climate change across all five shows. They have basically become Sunday 
morning political gossip columns.
  If you move from quantity to quality, well, with TV still the top way 
Americans get their news, the quality of news coverage really matters. 
How are television news shows doing in that department? Too often, also 
badly. Many of these shows still give airtime to clownish climate 
deniers just to create a pro and con.
  The Weather Channel tracked reaction on television shows to the Trump 
administration's National Climate Assessment this past fall and found 
airtime still given to debunked climate nonsense--for instance, the 
American Enterprise Institute's Danielle Pletka's ridiculous falsehoods 
about recent cold weather; conservative political commentators Rick 
Santorum and Stephen Moore's argument that climate scientists cooked up 
the assessment to enrich themselves; and a Member of Congress's 
argument that ``our climate always changes, and we see those ebb and 
flows through time,'' as if million-year climate changes are in any way 
comparable to the rapid punch in the face we are giving to our climate 
with carbon emissions right now, manmade.
  Allowing this falsehood on the air tilts Americans' perception of 
climate change. ``Placing a climate contrarian behind a scientist is 
effectively shrinking the 97 percent consensus on the issue to 50 
percent--two people arguing opposite sides,'' the Weather Channel 
pointed out.
  In the Columbia Journalism Review last month, author and journalist 
Mark Hertsgaard and editor and publisher Kyle Pope describe this 
troubling trend as follows:

       Climate deniers are still given respectful treatment by US 
     news outlets across the ideological spectrum. [They] in fact 
     deserve to have their social licenses revoked, just as 
     tobacco companies did. More than anyone else, it is 
     climate deniers who got us into this mess; they don't get 
     to decide what we do with it now.

  Again, on this front, NBC has been the best. In December, NBC's 
``Meet the Press'' devoted an entire show to climate coverage, delving 
into the science and discussing climate solutions in detail. It began 
with a clear message from host Chuck Todd. He said:

       We're not going to debate climate change, the existence of 
     it. The Earth is getting hotter. And human activity is a 
     major cause, period. We're not going to give time to climate 
     deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is 
     not.

  That is the right place to start the discussion in the media on 
climate change. Facts are facts. Falsehood is falsehood and does not 
deserve equal time. I hope other networks take note.
  If they want to cover climate denial, cover it the way it should be 
covered: investigatively, as a fraudulent enterprise with big secret 
money behind it. Trust me, there is a lot to investigate. Don't 
legitimize lies.
  Newspapers and online news are a mixed bag. As a group, our top 
national papers are improving their coverage of climate change. 
According to the University of Colorado Boulder's International 
Collective on Environment, Culture, & Politics, the five major national 
newspapers--the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street 
Journal, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times--published 282 articles 
about climate change in January 2009. A decade later, January of this 
year, those papers published 469--282, up to 469. That is a good sign. 
So, too, generally is the quality of coverage. Big publications like 
the New York Times and Washington Post and smaller, independent, and 
web-based publications like InsideClimate News, Years of Living 
Dangerously, and Grist have brought us into the midst of climate crisis 
with brilliant reporting and storytelling. The Guardian, from overseas, 
may be the best of all. The Guardian just decided, as editorial policy, 
to use ``climate emergency crisis or breakdown'' instead of ``climate 
change,'' ``global heating'' instead of ``global warming,'' and 
``climate science denier'' instead of ``climate skeptic.'' These 
outlets all offer readers captivating photos, videos, and graphics that 
illustrate exactly how the climate is changing and what that will mean.
  In Rhode Island, our Providence Journal has done exceptional 
reporting on carbon pollution's effects on our climate and oceans. This 
year alone, the Journal has published indepth, front-page articles on 
how Rhode Island's real estate market is already experiencing the 
effects of climate change, on scientists' warnings of massive flooding 
risk to coastal towns, and on the risks facing Providence's hurricane 
barrier as sea levels rise and storm surges loom in the decades to 
come. Here is an example of that, like that from our home State paper.
  Mr. President, other Rhode Island papers, like the Newport Daily 
News, the Westerly Sun, and ecoRI, cover climate change in their 
communities with vigor and skill. They supply the news Rhode Islanders 
need to understand and prepare for the effects of climate change.
  Elsewhere, the record is not so good. Take USA Today, a paper with a 
circulation to 1.8 million Americans and a broad online readership. 
According to the University of Colorado, the paper ran 25 articles on 
climate change in January 2009. It ran only 14 this January.
  On its editorial page, however, USA Today's editorial board wrote one 
of the strongest climate editorials so far this year, making the case 
for meaningful action on climate change. They cited real science and 
dismissed Republican leaders' cynical campaign against the Green New 
Deal. The editorial concluded: ``The critics owe this and future 
generations more than scorn; they have an obligation to put better 
ideas and solutions on the table.
  Bravo and well said to that.
  The reverse is the Wall Street Journal, with pretty good news 
coverage. It is a respectable news-gathering newspaper--in fact, a 
first-order one. But its opinion page emits toxic climate waste. For 
decades, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page has been a haven for 
outlandish science denial, but they truly outdo themselves when it 
comes to climate denial. Take a piece that the Journal published just 
last year titled, ``The Sea Is Rising, but Not Because of Climate 
Change.'' Riddled with scientific errors, it ignores all of the 
legitimate science on

[[Page S2984]]

climate change. The author whom they published, a notorious climate 
denier, has for years been affiliated with or funded by the Heritage 
Foundation, the Heartland Institute, the Cato Institute--a rogues' 
gallery of industry-funded climate denial front groups.
  The sum of this is an American media too often asleep at the switch 
when warnings need to be made.
  The Washington Post media columnist and former public editor of the 
New York Times, Margaret Sullivan, wrote this past fall:

       Just as the world, especially the United States, needs 
     radical change to mitigate the coming crisis, so too for the 
     news media. . . . This subject must be kept front and center, 
     with the pressure on and the stakes made abundantly clear at 
     every turn. . . . Just as the smartest minds in earth science 
     have issued their warning, the best minds in media should be 
     giving sustained attention to how to tell this most important 
     story in a way that will create change.

  There is some exceptional climate change coverage reaching readers 
today. Indeed, American voters increasingly name climate change as a 
big priority for them at the ballot box, but the pace of climate 
disruption demands urgency. Columbia Journalism Review's Hertsgaard and 
Pope write: ``If American journalism doesn't get the climate story 
right--and soon--no other story will matter.''
  I yield the floor.

                          ____________________