[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 144 (Tuesday, September 10, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5382-S5384]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Climate Change

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as the Presiding Officer knows, I have 
often spoken about how climate change is affecting Rhode Island. Rising 
sea levels will remake my State's map. Warming seas are shifting our 
traditional fisheries away from Rhode Island. A hotter climate creates 
public health risks for Rhode Islanders. And the list goes on.
  In the Senate, I have also tried to learn how climate change is 
affecting other States. The Presiding Officer was courteous about 
joining me in Louisiana when I made a trip to his State. I have been 
doing a fair amount of traveling, and last month I visited Wyoming to 
hear about climate change in the Cowboy State. That was the 17th State 
I visited on these climate trips.
  Here is a little background on Wyoming. It is big. It is a lot bigger 
than Rhode Island. It is almost 400 miles wide by almost 300 miles 
north to south. Although it has some lovely lakes, Wyoming ain't 
coastal. Its lowest point is more than 3,000 feet above sea level--
three times higher than Rhode Island's highest point, Jerimoth Hill--
and its highest point, Gannett Peak, is almost 14,000 feet.
  Wyomingites have a reputation for being conservative skeptics about 
climate change, but polling data shows that even in Wyoming, 60 percent 
of people think climate change is happening, 43 percent think humans 
are driving it, 69 percent say they support regulating carbon dioxide 
as a pollutant, and 68 percent think their schools should teach about 
global warming.
  My trip began in Teton County, which I was repeatedly told is the 
liberal part of the State. Teton County is home to Jackson Hole and 
Grand Teton National Park, as well as a large chunk of America's 
legendary Yellowstone National Park. From Jackson, I went up to visit 
Yellowstone and then came back down over Togwotee Pass and down here to 
Dubois and then around on to Lake of the Woods, to the Wind River 
Indian Reservation, to Lander, to Pinedale, and back to Jackson.
  In Teton County, I met with local elected officials from Jackson, 
from the Teton County council, and from the Wyoming Legislature. I 
learned that roughly two-thirds of Wyoming's revenues come from mineral 
extraction--mostly coal, oil, and natural gas. With all this fossil 
fuel money pouring into its coffers, Wyoming has no State income tax, 
sales tax of 4 percent, and one of the lowest effective property tax 
rates in the Nation. Indeed, I was told that Wyomingites get around $9 
in services for every $1 they pay in taxes. It is a sweet deal. And 
fossil fuel picks up the rest of the tab.
  There are problems with this political-economic model, however--
problems that folks in Wyoming repeatedly pointed out to me. First, it 
exposes Wyoming heavily to boom/bust cycles. Three coal companies have 
gone bankrupt just this year. It will also expose Wyoming to the 
devastating bust coming if, as predicted, fossil fuel assets crash. 
Almost all of Wyoming's eggs are in one fossil fuel basket.
  Moreover, a political-economic model based on fossil fuel harms 
Wyoming's other economic driver: outdoor recreation--skiing and 
snowboarding, river rafting, backpacking, hiking, rock climbing, and 
fly fishing. Wyoming has abundant outdoor recreation.
  During my trip, I heard how lucky I was to enjoy clear and smokeless 
skies in August and that this August was like August of times gone by. 
The new normal across the West is hotter, dryer summers driven by 
climate change, and that makes massive forest fires, filling the skies 
with smoke for weeks and months on end. We enjoyed clear skies.
  In addition to the threat to life and property, wildfires harm 
Wyoming's tourism and outdoor recreation economies. Obviously, fewer 
people visit when iconic landscapes are obscured or when places they 
want to explore are at risk of fire. A representative from

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the Fremont County lodging tax board told me that fires can shut down 
roads to the national parks and forests, cutting hotels and motels off 
from the attractions to draw people there.
  At the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, I sat down with over a dozen 
business leaders from the outdoor recreation industry who told me that 
outdoor recreation generates $5.6 billion in Wyoming and supports 
50,000 jobs--actually more jobs than the fossil fuel industry. For the 
winter sports business, climate change is an existential threat, 
shortening ski seasons, worsening snow cover, and affecting these 
beautiful landscapes. For this industry, this problem is deadly 
serious, and the industry is struggling to learn how to get the 
political attention that the fossil fuel industry enjoys.
  In Lander, I met with leaders from the renowned National Outdoor 
Leadership School, NOLS. NOLS draws people from around the world to 
learn about the outdoors, develop leadership skills, and study 
mountaineering and outdoor survival. It is the largest nongovernment 
employer in Fremont County. The president of NOLS told me: ``Without 
question, the number one risk the school faces is climate change.'' For 
instance, the risk of wildfire is up dramatically and along with it, 
property insurance rates. Climate change has disrupted NOLS's schedule 
at its outdoor campuses around the world, as wildfires, melting 
glaciers and permafrost, and upended stream flows make it difficult, 
impossible, or dangerous to access these course sites. For people who 
love these places, this hurts the heart as much as it hurts the 
pocketbook.
  In Jackson, I met winter sports athletes from the group Protect Our 
Winters. These are amazing athletes who spoke about their passion for 
snow sports and magnificent mountain landscapes. They also spoke of 
climate change threatening the future of the sports they love. I 
listened to Lynsey Dyer deliver a wonderful presentation to a packed 
house in Jackson about how climate change is altering alpine 
environments. She is summoning the same inner strength that allows her 
to ski death-defying drops. I will tell you, look at the film of some 
of what she skis off of, and it will stun you. She is using that inner 
strength to build national support for climate action.

  In Pinedale I heard how climate change threatens Wyoming's cold water 
fisheries. The Upper Green River and its tributaries are some of the 
most storied trout streams in the world, drawing in a big fishing 
business. I spent an afternoon with a fly fishing guy and a 
representative from Wyoming Trout Unlimited. They told me how higher 
temperatures and lower water flows, both caused by climate change, harm 
Wyoming's iconic trout, which need cold water with plenty of oxygen.
  I also visited local scientists who study climate change. Dr. Michael 
Tercek and Dr. Andy Ray gave me a tour of Yellowstone National Park to 
show me how climate change is already changing the park's ecosystem, 
with vaster changes expected ahead. Dr. Tercek is an ecologist who has 
worked in Yellowstone for over two decades. Dr. Ray's specialty is 
amphibians, which may not be as iconic as Yellowstone's bison but are 
on the frontlines of climate change.
  The scientists told me that just over the last 70 years, the average 
annual temperature in the greater Yellowstone area has risen by 2 
degrees Fahrenheit. In parts of the region, there are now 60 fewer days 
a year with below-freezing temperatures than there were just 30 years 
ago. Summers are drier, and in winter there is less snowpack, meaning 
less snowmelt and less water in the spring and early summer.
  You can already see changes in the park. Take cheatgrass. Cheatgrass 
is an invasive species whose roots don't hold the soil as well as the 
native sage brush. As temperatures warm, cheatgrass spreads to higher 
and higher elevations, supplanting the sage brush. The result is this: 
large gullies carved in hillsides as rain and snowmelt wash away the 
soil.
  Consider Dr. Ray's amphibians. We visited several small ponds and 
tarns that dot the Yellowstone landscape. As temperatures warm and 
precipitation declines, water levels in many ponds fall, reducing 
habitat for these amphibians and making them more vulnerable to 
predators.
  In this photo, you can see a line here along the edge of this pond. 
Most of the rocks here are gray. They are gray because they are covered 
by lichen that turns them that color. But if you look just above these 
grasses here, you will see rocks that are nearly pink in color. These 
are rocks that were submerged until recently, and the lichen hasn't yet 
had time to colonize--clear evidence that the water level at this pond 
has fallen rapidly.
  We climbed up into some dead forests to look at what bark beetles are 
doing to the Rocky Mountains' conifers. Here is a photo I took of a 
branch from a tree killed by bark beetles. The beetles bore through the 
bark, and then their larvae eat the thin cambium layer between the bark 
and the wood of the tree trunk. This ultimately girdles and kills the 
tree. You can see in this photo the marks left by the bark beetles. 
This J-shaped mark you see here is particularly characteristic of bark 
beetles.
  This chart shows how beetle kill spreads through forests once winter 
temperatures began warming. You see these temperature climbs here from 
1980 forward, and you see a matching climb in beetle-killed trees in 
Colorado and Wyoming. Hotter, drier summers also stress the trees, 
making them more vulnerable to infestation. Once they are dead, they 
become wildfire tinder.
  Bark beetles might seem like esoteric little creatures until you see 
the damage they have done throughout the Mountain West. Everywhere 
there is red on this map there is kill by bark beetles. Bark beetles 
have killed enough acres of western forest to cover the entire State of 
Wyoming and then some. You can see a lot of this kill is in Wyoming.
  On the road from Yellowstone to Dubois, you cross Togwatee Pass, 
between the Absaroka and Wind River mountain ranges. You traverse miles 
and miles that look like this--dead trees as far as the eye can see, 
killed by beetle infestation.
  In the Wind River Indian Reservation, I met a man named Jim Pogue. He 
said they call these gray, dead forests ``doghair forests.''
  Here is a landscape dramatically altered by climate change. This 
forest died in less than a decade.
  Before I met Dr. Tercek, I read an article in which he was quoted as 
saying: ``By the time my daughter is an old woman, the climate will be 
as different for her as the last ice age seems to us.'' I didn't fully 
grasp what he meant until I met another scientist studying climate 
change in Wyoming, the University of Wyoming's Bryan Shuman.
  Dr. Shuman took me up to one of his research sites--the Lake of the 
Woods--high in the foothills of the Wind River Range. At this lake and 
others, Dr. Shuman extracts sediment cores and conducts radar scans of 
the lake bottom and then reconstructs the climate of the region 10,000 
years back to the last ice age. During the last ice age, global average 
temperatures were 3.5 degrees colder than our preindustrial average.
  The 3.5 degrees colder temperatures resulted in a radically different 
landscape in Wyoming. Massive glaciers spread across the Wind River 
Range. On this map, you can see just how much territory these vast 
glaciers covered. That legend shows 10 kilometers. So that is 
essentially the whole Wind River Range.
  The 3.5 degrees change in temperature created a huge effect. I say 
that because the Earth is predicted to warm at least 3.5 degrees by the 
end of the century if we don't cut carbon emissions. So think about it 
for a minute. In a little bit more than 100 years, the temperature on 
Earth will have changed as much as it did in the 10,000 years from the 
end of the last ice age. From 10,000 years ago to the beginning of the 
Industrial Age, there was a change of 3.5 degrees, and in the following 
100 years, we are expecting another 3.5 degrees. Instead of climate 
change driving forward at 1 mile an hour, it started driving forward, 
thanks to fossil fuel emissions, at 100 miles an hour.
  This shows how dishonest the smug statement is that the climate is 
always changing. Not like this, it is not. When you know that 3.5 
degrees Celsius is the difference between being covered in ice and 
having the forest and sage brush steppe ecosystems there now,

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you can see that another 3.5 degrees of warming will cause massive 
changes.
  Dr. Tercek was not exaggerating. When his daughter is an old woman at 
the end of the century, the climate will have changed as much as it 
changed since the last ice age, and our climate then will seem as 
foreign to her as the ice age seems to us.
  There are still glaciers--some--in the Wind River Range. They were 
tiny compared to the ice age glaciers that once dominated northwestern 
Wyoming, but they are the largest glaciers in the Rocky Mountains. For 
the last several summers, a team of professors and students from 
Central Wyoming College have studied these glaciers. Their work is 
featured in an Emmy-winning documentary produced by PBS Wyoming called 
``Glaciers of the Winds.'' It is actually available on YouTube, and I 
highly recommend it. Again, it is called ``Glaciers of the Winds.''

  I visited around their campfire the night before the Central Wyoming 
College team set off on a 20-plus mile expedition up to the base of 
Dinwoody Glacier. The students are measuring the size of the glaciers 
to determine how quickly they are melting. They will analyze water 
quality, and they will search for archeological artifacts to better 
understand how Native peoples lived up in this alpine environment.
  The archeology team told me that based on artifacts they have 
unearthed, they believe that early Native peoples worshipped the 
glaciers. A spiritual reverence for glaciers began to make a little 
more sense to me when I visited the Wind River Indian Reservation. The 
land to the east of the reservation is deathly arid. Agriculture 
depends on irrigation, and irrigation depends on glaciers. Leaders of 
the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribal councils said that 
after the winter snow melts away, their irrigation depends entirely on 
the glaciers, which hold water back as ice and release it through the 
long summer as meltwater--key after annual snows have melted away. They 
told me that ``once the glaciers are gone, our main resource for life 
will be gone.''
  I won't pretend I met no climate skeptics in Wyoming. An innkeeper at 
a motel told me that climate change was a ``goddamned hoax'' and for 
sure wasn't happening in Wyoming. Many of the student scientists at 
Central Wyoming College recounted difficulty explaining their interest 
in climate change to family and friends. They called it having ``the 
conversation.''
  I also met with an employee at the Jim Bridger coal-fired powerplant. 
She made a strong case that climate solutions must protect workers. I 
couldn't agree more. Wyoming has lost three coal companies to 
bankruptcy just this year.
  One of the great lies of the rotten, crooked climate denial operation 
is that reducing carbon emissions is bad for the economy and bad for 
jobs, when, in fact, the opposite is true. Another great lie is that 
the industry cares much about its workers. Carbon pricing would give an 
economic reason for carbon removal, which in turn could help keep some 
plants operating a little longer and ease the workers' transition. But, 
no, like we saw when coal companies looted miners' pensions, took care 
of the CEOs, and ducked into bankruptcy, the climate denial path is a 
dead-end for workers.
  In spite of some Wyomingites' skepticism, my trip underscored how 
attitudes are changing even in the reddest parts of the country. Over 
and over again, Wyomingites told me that they cherish the stunning 
landscapes around them. They live in Wyoming to be able to hunt and 
fish and explore these amazing places. As climate change bears down on 
Wyoming's wild places, even current skeptics will come to accept that 
we must fight climate change to protect things they love.
  The younger generation already gets it. I won't forget the fire-lit, 
passionate faces of the Central Wyoming College students, nor the 
determination and drive of Lynsey Dyer and the winter sports athletes, 
nor a young instructor at NOLS who gave an impassioned argument for 
climate action. With powerful and knowledgeable voices like these 
speaking, with an economy so vulnerable and no plan B, and with such 
risk to Wyoming's natural wonders, I am hopeful that voters in Wyoming 
and across the country will start to send a clear message that we must 
take action to reduce carbon emissions and soon--it is the smart, 
prudent, and economically best course--and to ask the people whom they 
elect: Listen, let's do this. If you won't lead, at least get out of 
the way. Help us protect what we love while there is still time.
  I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CASSIDY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. McSally). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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