[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 185 (Tuesday, November 19, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6648-S6649]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Climate Change
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, for this 259th climate speech, I am
going to return to the theme of corruption. Before diving into the how,
let's start with the why because the scale and the remorselessness of
the scheme of corruption the fossil fuel industry has run is hard to
comprehend without understanding why.
Here is the why. The fossil fuel industry reaps the biggest subsidy
in the history of the planet. I will say that again. The fossil fuel
industry reaps the biggest subsidy in the history of the planet. The
IMF--International Monetary Fund--estimates that the global subsidy for
fossil fuel is in the trillions of dollars every year. That is
globally. In the United States alone, the fossil fuel industry got a
$650 billion--that is with a ``b''--subsidy in 2015, according to the
most recent report from the IMF. That is about $2,000 out of the pocket
of every man, woman, and child in the United States. Here is that IMF
report. Look it up. Read it and weep.
Stop for a minute and understand this subsidy. Some of it is
favorable tax deals and other direct subsidies that pour public
taxpayer money into the pockets of this polluting industry. In recent
years, that has been estimated at around $20 billion annually.
The vast bulk of this $650 billion is something else. It is people
getting hurt. It is the cost of people suffering economic harms. It is
the cost of your home burned in a wildfire or swept away in a storm by
rising seas. It is the cost of farms withered from unprecedented
droughts or crops drowned in unprecedented flooding. It is the cost of
fisheries that are lost or moved away as oceans warm and acidify. It is
the lost day of work with your kid in the emergency room waiting out a
climate-related asthma attack on the ER's nebulizer. It is the cost of
tick-borne and mosquito-borne illnesses that didn't used to be where
you live. It is the cost to dive tours of tourists seeing dead, white,
bleached coral reefs instead of vibrant undersea gardens and the cost
to snowmobile moose tours of going through mud instead of snow and when
you see moose, seeing emaciated moose calves with thousands of ticks
slowly killing them. It is the cost of American military deployments to
conflicts caused by resource scarcity or climate migration. It is the
cost of relocating Naval Station Norfolk when the community around it
floods out. It is the cost of Glacier Park with no glacier. It is the
cost of trout streams with no trout. It is the cost of millions of
acres of healthy forests killed off by pine beetle infestation. It is
the cost to Phoenix of staffing up emergency services when it is not
safe to work outside because it is too hot and lost airline flights out
of the airport when the tarmac melts. It is the myriad costs of basic
operating systems of the natural world gone haywire because of climate
change.
All this pain, all this loss, all this suffering has a bloodless
economic name: externalities. Externalities are the social costs that
are imposed on others by the use of a product. Pollution, of course, is
the obvious example. In economic theory, those social costs should be
baked into the price of a product. That is why courts and companies and
countries around the world apply a social cost of carbon calculation.
But destroying the basic operating systems of the planet is a high-
priced externality--by the IMF report, $650 billion in 2015 just in the
United States. And because it is hard to calculate a price for so much
of this harm, that is a lowball estimate. For instance, we can estimate
the loss to the dive shop of the coral reef off the coast dying, but is
that really the full cost of the dead reef? There is a lot more. So the
externality is probably well over $650 billion.
By comparison, let's look at the five major oil companies' earnings.
The five major oil companies earned somewhat more than $80 billion in
profits last year all around the world, all right?
[[Page S6649]]
Global profits are $80 billion versus $650 billion in destruction and
harm they caused just in the United States. So make those oil companies
follow the rules of market economics. Make them put the cost of the
harm of their product into the price of their product--$80 billion
versus $650 billion--and guess what: Their business is in a $570-plus
billion hole. That is why the fossil fuel industry is so corrupt. It
knows it needs to break the laws of market economics in order to
survive, and it knows it needs political help to do that.
Fortunately for the fossil fuel industry, up against that $650
billion subsidy, politicians come cheap. They could put $650 million
into politics every single year, and it would earn them a 1,000-to-1
return on that expenditure protecting the $650 billion subsidy.
So that is the why of fossil fuel corruption: It pays. It pays
hugely. It is as simple as that. They are corrupt because it pays.
Now let's look at the how.
By the way, they have some expertise in this area. These companies
operate in the most crooked countries in the world, so they know how to
work crooked deals and politics. But what happened here in the United
States? Well, I saw it happen. The big change came when five Republican
Supreme Court Justices gave this industry and other mega industries big
new political artillery. It came in the disgraceful Citizens United
decision that let unlimited special interest money into our elections.
I will tell you, there is no special interest more unlimited than
fossil fuel. Fossil fuel front groups were all over that Supreme Court
case, by the way, signaling to the five Republicans on the Court what
they wanted them to do, and sure enough, they did it.
Of course, it does take some fun out of spending unlimited money in
politics if people can tell who you are. In theory, we were supposed to
know. To get to the outcome the fossil fuel industry wanted, the five
Republican Justices had to pretend, as a legal matter, that all this
political spending--all this unlimited political spending they were
authorizing--was going to be transparent, that we would know who was
behind it.
Well, that transparency was not going to work very well for Exxon or
Koch Industries or Marathon Petroleum, so they cooked up all sorts of
schemes to hide behind. Tax-deductible 501(c)(4)s appeared that can
hide their donors. Trade groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce got
taken over and co-opted. Disposable shell corporations turned up behind
political donations. An enterprise called Donors Trust was established,
whose sole purpose is to launder the identity of big donors.
By the way--back to Citizens United--those five Republican Justices
would have to be idiots not to see this apparatus of phony front groups
out there mocking their assurances of transparency--assurances that
were at the heart of the Citizens United decision--but those Justices
have studiously ignored this flagrantly obvious flaw and have made zero
effort to clean up their unlimited-spending, dark-money mess. I was
taught as a kid that you are supposed to clean up the messes you made.
That is not a message that got through to the ``Roberts Five.''
We have addressed this flotilla of propped-up, dark-money front
groups in the Senate before. We call it the web of denial. Academics
who study these groups have documented well over 100 of them in the
last decade. That sounds like a lot--100 front groups--but remember,
there is $650 billion a year riding on this. And it is a really big
help if you can pretend you are, say, Americans for Peace and Puppies
and Prosperity instead of ExxonMobil or the Kochs or Marathon
Petroleum. People tend to get the joke when the ad says: Brought to you
by ExxonMobil.
So they have the motive and the means to spend millions of political
dollars and to do so from hiding. How much do they spend? Well, that is
hard to tell because the whole purpose is to hide. Responsible
watchdogs won't even venture a guess as to how much dark money is
sloshing through the political system, but total dark money spending on
Federal elections has been at least $700 million since the Citizens
United decision, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The
lion's share of that dark money is probably from fossil fuels because,
first, nobody else has the same corrupt motive on the scale of fossil
fuel. Plus, when you look at the spending, it is usually groups who can
be connected to fossil fuel. And for most, the activity is climate
denial and obstruction, so it is fossil fuel work being done. So it is
pretty easy to conclude who is likely behind all this.
For colleagues who weren't here before 2010, let me tell you, things
were different then. In 2007, 2008, and 2009--those were my first 3
years here--there were lots of bipartisan climate bills kicking around
the Senate, real ones that would have headed off the crisis into which
we are rocketing right now. Heck, in 2008, the Republican nominee for
President ran on a strong climate platform.
After the Citizens United decision in January of 2010, all of that
was snuffed out. An oily curtain of denial fell around the Republican
Party as the fossil fuel industry brought its new political weapons to
bear. The before and after comparison is as plain as day, and it cost
us a decade of inaction when time was of the essence. It has been a
high cost except, of course, for the fossil fuel industry, whose lying
and denying, whose front groups and dark money, whose political
obstruction and threats still remain fully dedicated to protecting that
$650 billion subsidy.
Do the math just for a second. At $650 billion a year, from January
2010 until now, Citizens United let the fossil fuel industry protect
nearly $6 trillion in subsidy--$6 trillion in losses to our
constituents, $6 trillion that this industry dodged in the laws of
market economics to foist on everyone else--and you wonder why they
worked so hard to take over the courts.
The fossil fuels' denial operation and obstruction operation is
likely the biggest and most corrupt scheme in human history. I can't
think of one that is worse, and it is still operating today--right
now--as I stand here and speak. Its oily tides pollute our public
debate with deliberate falsehoods and nonsense, grease our press to
steer away from this subject, slosh slimily through the hallways of
this very building, and grip the Supreme Court in a web of oily, dark
money influence. We have become like the people who have lived in the
shadows for so long and have forgotten what sunlight, what free debate,
what laws based on facts can look like.
The fossil fuel industry has polluted our American democracy on as
massive a scale as it has polluted our atmosphere and oceans. For those
in our history who gave up their lives--who died in the service of our
democracy--who are looking down on us now, that pollution of the
democracy they died defending must be a bitter spectacle.
As a boy, there was an ominous hymn that we often sang in chapel
about how ``once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, in
the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side.''
``Truth,'' the hymn went on, is ``forever on the scaffold, wrong
forever on the throne,'' but ``though the cause of Evil prosper, yet
`tis Truth alone is strong.''
Now is our moment to decide: Do we finally bring down fossil fuels'
false Babylon of corruption or, in the strife of truth with falsehood,
do we keep protecting the evil side?
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.