[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 212 (Tuesday, December 15, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7490-S7491]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Climate Change

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, while Senator Grassley is on the 
floor, I would thank him for his remarks about the First Step Act and 
let him know that on the Judiciary Committee, I look forward to working 
with him to continue to advance that.
  As the Senate knows, the Grassley-Durbin segment and the Cornyn-
Whitehouse segment were the two key pieces of that bill, and it is 
terrific to hear the Senator and our chairman at the time chose support 
to continue that work. So I am grateful.
  What I would like to do now is to follow the conversation we had 
about oceans a minute ago in the context of my ``Time to Wake Up'' 
speeches.
  Obviously, the oceans are taking a colossal beating from climate 
change, from the warming, from the chemical acidification that it 
causes. It is warming at a rate of multiple detonations of Hiroshima-
level nuclear weapons per second in the ocean. That is the amount of 
heat that is added, if you want to put an image to it.
  So we have done some good things on oceans in this Congress, and I 
would like to summarize some of those.
  One, obviously, is Save Our Seas 2.0 that Senator Sullivan, Senator 
Menendez, and I just discussed, but we also have a little package of 
enforcement provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act that 
focus on what is commonly called illegal, unreported, and unregulated 
fishing--IUU fishing--which is a really boring and bureaucratic name 
for extremely bad behavior.
  Essentially, it is modern slavery at sea for the crew, who are 
miserably trapped on these illegal, pirate fishing vessels. They are 
also an avenue for trafficking of humans, of narcotics, of arms, or 
whatever. Once you are out in a boat outside, beyond the realm of the 
law, operating illegally and doing whatever you can for money, you will 
do pretty much anything there is. So in addition to ransacking our 
common seas, these pirate fishing fleets are really dangerous vectors 
for really dangerous criminal conduct.
  I am glad that we have put a little more heat on the Navy to up its 
game and report on its implementation of previously passed measures. I 
am glad that we have directed the Navy to work with the Coast Guard, 
which has the substantive jurisdiction over all of this, and to work 
with the private sector involved in solutions to this. There are such 
things as private sector satellites that track the wake and the signal 
of these illegal fishing vessels, and coordinating that with our 
intelligence and our research I think will really help in fighting that 
battle, so that we are sharing the information that we can and 
gathering the information that we can to be more effective.
  Finally, as I recall from my travels with the late Senator McCain, 
when you went to coastal countries near China, you always heard the 
same complaint. We went to the Philippines and heard it. We went to 
Vietnam and heard it. We went to Indonesia and heard it. There are 
probably others if I could remember more clearly that I could add to 
that list. But the complaint was that the Chinese fishing fleet is 
incredibly aggressive, it is trespassing into foreign sovereign waters, 
it is fishing illegally and outside of any respect for the domestic 
protections of these nations, and it is often violently protected by 
Chinese vessels, by navy or other vessels of the Chinese Government. So 
focusing on that as a place to push back and protect our oceans while 
at the same time diminishing this bad behavior by China is also a good 
thing.
  So that was our suite of progress on pirate fishing in the NDAA.
  In the omnibus, we expect at least $75 million to go, for the first 
time, into a new fund to tackle ocean plastics and for ocean plastic 
work in the administration.
  So those are bits of good news, and I am delighted that those things 
have happened. The less good news from this past year is that coasts 
remain sadly underfunded, and we have missed some real opportunities.
  Two of the accounts that demonstrate how badly funded coasts are 
facing these threats from the changing oceans are the Land and Water 
Conservation Fund, which should properly be called the inland and 
freshwater conservation fund, and the Army Corps Flood and Coastal 
Storm Damage Reduction Fund.
  If you go back and look at how this money actually gets spent, for 
every dollar that the Land and Water Conservation Fund spends in an 
inland State, in a landlocked State, per capita, it spends only 40 
cents in a coastal State--a dollar per capita inland, 40 cents per 
capita coastal. And that actually understates the coastal discrepancy 
because it doesn't count the spending in coastal States that isn't on 
coasts. You have coastal States like New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas 
that have big, big upland inland areas in which most of the Land and 
Water Conservation Fund money goes.
  So what we really ought to do is call this what it is, which is an 
inland and freshwater conservation fund, and have a parallel coastal 
and saltwater preservation fund to make sure that coasts are treated 
fairly.

  I did not even get the chance to ask for some adjustments to treat 
coasts more fairly as an amendment when we reconsidered the Land and 
Water Conservation in the so-called Great American Outdoors Act, which 
was frustrating because everybody--at least on my side of the aisle--
talks a good game about how we need to have more amendments, we need to 
have more amendments. That deal got locked down before it got to the 
Senate floor. Nobody was allowed an amendment. So that was frustrating, 
but we will fight on because coasts need to be treated fairly, and with 
sea level rise and warming and fisheries moving about and storm surge 
worsening and more hurricanes, the dangers to coasts are greater than 
before, not less.
  On the Army Corps account, that is even more extreme. If you go back 
through the last 10 years, the best year the coasts had in the flood 
and coastal storm damage account was 1 coastal dollar for every 19 
inland dollars--1 coastal dollar for every 19 inland dollars. Tell me 
how that is fair to coasts facing those same risks. And that is the 
best year. The worst year was 120 times more for inland projects than 
for coastal projects--less than a penny on the dollar. Less than a 
penny on the dollar for America's coasts.
  So we have a lot of work to do to make sure that we are doing what we 
need to do for our coasts. I am hoping that we can move the OFFSHORE 
Act--that there is even a faint chance of getting it done in the last 
few days. It had a successful hearing in Energy and Natural Resources. 
It has 19 bipartisan cosponsors, including Commerce Chairman Wicker, 
and it would treat wind energy offshore the same way for revenues that 
we treat oil drilling offshore--i.e., 37.5 percent to the nearby State, 
12.5 percent to a dedicated fund. In this case, it would be the Oceans 
and Coastal Fund because it is oceans and coastal. It is one of the 
ironies that most of the money that comes off of coastal oil drilling--
offshore oil drilling--gets moved into the Land and Water Conservation 
Fund, where it goes out West and is spent on inland, not coastal, 
projects.
  So we continue to have real work to do. There is the BLUE GLOBE Act, 
which I have with Senator Murkowski, on data monitoring in the oceans 
and Great Lakes--we are going to continue to push forward--and our Blue 
Carbon bill, which will help us address the changes in the oceans that 
climate change is wreaking. With Blue Carbon, things like growing 
mangroves are incredibly powerful as a carbon sink, kelp and sea 
grass--to get that research done and do the work we need to to 
deacidify our oceans while we still have reefs that are alive.
  My ideal would be a ``big blue bill''--a big blue bill that combines 
BLUE GLOBE, Blue Carbon, and others and,

[[Page S7491]]

for once, finally, finally, finally, finally, finally takes our oceans 
and coasts seriously.
  I get that we are terrestrial mammals, but a lot of us care for our 
coasts, a lot of us care for our seas, a lot of our economies are 
dependent on our oceans, and the health of the planet is dependent on 
the cooling and on the oxygen that oceans provide. So we mess around 
with our oceans at our peril.
  I hope that the Biden administration will take climate change as 
deadly serious as it needs to be taken and that it will step up a 
significant step from the degree of attention climate change got in the 
Obama administration.
  We have to recognize the danger to our future if we remain 
negligent--it is that simple. And we have to make sure we free 
ourselves from the thrall of the fossil fuel industry's climate denial 
machine because the fossil fuel industry does not want what is best for 
America, does not want what is best for people, does not want what is 
best for oceans and the environment; it wants what is best for its 
profits, period, and end of story.
  So we really, really, really, under the Biden administration, need a 
serious climate bill to safeguard the oceans on the only planet that we 
call home.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Pennsylvania.
  Mr. CASEY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as if in 
morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.