[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 163 (Wednesday, October 4, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4935-S4937]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Climate Change
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am back for now the 290th time to
urge this Chamber to act on climate change. I have my trusty graphic
here, which after nearly 300 of these is getting a little battered.
This evening, I would like to talk about two things: First is the
grim parade of climate-driven disasters the United States and the world
has experienced over the last several months. Then, our hearings in the
Budget Committee on the enormous budgetary and economic dangers caused
by fossil fuel emissions.
Let's start with the unprecedented warming the world is experiencing.
This June was the hottest June on record. Then July became the hottest
month on record. Then August became the hottest August and the second
hottest month on record, and September was just declared the hottest
September on record and by the largest margin.
Here is what that looks like when you compare it to previous years.
We have popped out of the zone of previous experience.
So 2023 will almost certainly become the hottest year on record, with
the first significant chance that global average temperature will hit
1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the preindustrial average. Exceeding
that 1.5 degree-Celsius point will expose us to dangerous tipping
points, things like ice sheet collapses that could cause dozens of feet
of sea level rise.
More than 6,500 daily heat records were broken in cities and towns
across the United States this summer. Phoenix experienced a record 55
days this year with temperatures above 110 degrees, with a 31-day
streak. People who fell on Phoenix pavement required medical attention
for burns. The Midwest experienced its worst drought in over a decade,
with huge swaths of the Midwest, Southwest, and the South still under
the most severe drought designation.
Extreme drought in Hawaii set the conditions for its lethal wildfire.
In Vermont, New York, and Pennsylvania, storms triggered deadly floods.
Florida's gulf coast was hit by Hurricane Idalia, which intensified
rapidly over warmed-up waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Wind speeds
increased almost 55 miles per hour in just a 14-hour window.
Around the world, Europe baked; China hit record high temperatures;
Italy suffered its worst flooding in a century; and more than 21,000
Libyans are dead or missing after massive flooding. Recordbreaking
fires ravaged Greece and Canada.
Canada's fires burned an area roughly the size of Oklahoma.
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The smoke. Here is the annual acreage of Canadian wildfires, and here
is this year. Top year before, down here. This is what we got last
year. The smoke from these fires blanketed the eastern seaboard for
weeks. Here in Washington, doctors said that breathing the smoke-choked
air was worse than smoking a half pack of cigarettes. New York looked
like this.
The list of unprecedented, record-breaking, and worst in history
climate events goes on and on. These disasters seen separately fail to
capture the full scale of the problem. When you look at them together,
you see that we are creating a climate for our own habitation unlike
any in the history of humankind.
We are increasingly testing the limits of human habitability on this
planet, and it will worsen if we don't act--which brings us to the
Budget Committee. Set aside the destruction of lives and livelihoods,
the 250,000 deaths around the world each year caused by fossil fuel
emissions. Look just at the financial havoc.
Last year, weather-related damage in the United States topped $165
billion, the third costliest year on record. This year, we have had 23
separate billion-dollar climate disasters already, and that is just
counting direct, physical damage. Just now, in the CR, we had to add
$16 billion in disaster relief funds, and that is only a stopgap.
Failing at our climate responsibilities is immoral, but it is also
irresponsible, fiscally irresponsible.
So the Budget Committee did a deep dive into the fiscal costs and
risks of climate change. Across 10 Budget Committee hearings already
this year, central bankers, financial experts, economists, insurance
executives, political leaders, and other responsible experts described
increased budget costs and systemic risks looming over the U.S.
economy.
What is ``systemic''? Systemic means that the damage spreads beyond
the immediately affected sector and cascades throughout the economy.
Remember 2008 when a meltdown in the mortgage market cascaded through
the economy and brought the Great Recession? Between October 2008 and
April 2009, 700,000 Americans lost their jobs every month. American
households lost $17 trillion in wealth. The Federal Government's debt
grew by $5 trillion from lost revenues. Our economy still carries the
scars.
And in one of our Budget hearings, a former chief economist from
Freddie Mac said that climate change could cause a crash in coastal
property values that would be just as bad. Just as bad.
Sea level rise and worse coastal storms are on their way to making
more than a trillion dollars in coastal real estate uninsurable and,
therefore, unmortgageable, and that is when you get that crash--not
when the water pours in across your doorstep, but when 30-year
mortgages won't cover your property because that risk of the water
coming over the doorstep is so foreseeable.
And it is not just coastal property either, we heard. There is a
whole separate risk from wildfires that a similar death spiral occurs
for Western property values, and we had a hearing on that.
The other systemic threat we had a hearing about is that the fossil
fuel industry is artificially propped up, both by massive political
subsidies and crooked international cartel pricing and that, as
inevitably declining demand for its products occurs, that, in turn,
will cause a dash for the exits--when other countries that pump
enormous amounts of oil and gas abandon the cartel pricing, sell it for
what they can get, the dash for the exits. When that happens, it will
strand hundreds of billions of dollars in fossil fuel assets in what is
called a carbon-bubble collapse.
Each of these three systemic risks is well documented. Each could
create a massive economic crash. And added to that is the steady,
relentless cost increases, the climate inflation from insurance prices,
from lost and damaged infrastructure, from increased healthcare needs,
and from climbing food prices as increased temperatures, higher sea
levels, and precipitation anomalies break up world food supply
patterns. We have had hearings on those, too.
At our very first hearing, a former governor of the banks of England
and Canada and a former Director of the nonpartisan Congressional
Budget Office and Goldman Sachs former head of risk management all
underscored the economic urgency of solving climate change and the
foreseeable hit of climate change on public budgets. They all suggested
that a price on carbon so polluters pay for harms they cause would be
fiscally and economically responsible.
One Republican member of the committee embraced a domestic price on
carbon and noted that a carbon border adjustment--a tariff on imports
from carbon-intensive economies such as China's--would use market
forces to decarbonize the global economy. I couldn't agree more. I have
had that bill in the Senate for years, a carbon price with a border
tariff.
A later hearing brought conservative support for that kind of climate
action from former Australian Conservative Prime Minister Malcolm
Turnbull and former Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist. Up against
our serious, nonpartisan, and knowledgeable witnesses--among them
witnesses with real fiduciary obligations and real economic stakes with
every motive to get it right--the Republican witnesses often spouted
fossil fuel disinformation, often funded by dark money industry front
groups.
We heard some beauties--one witness, a former mouthpiece of the
tobacco industry, stated that secondhand smoke was not a public health
issue because lung cancer and emphysema are not contagious, like that
is the problem. One witness produced cherry-picked and misleading
testimony so easily refuted that even the fossil fuel friendly Montana
Attorney General dropped her off his witness list in the youth climate
case he was defending, a trial that the young plaintiffs won against
the State of Montana, by the way.
Another witness informed us that sea level rise was nothing to worry
about because New York, Miami, and Boston will all just move.
Republican witnesses spouted the usual debunked falsehoods, that
renewable energy is expensive, that the fossil fuel industry isn't
subsidized, that the science around climate change is uncertain, that
transitioning to clean energy will be bad for the economy. It is all
nonsense, and they say it anyway.
One witness even tried to accuse the financial services sector of
having a conflict of interest behind what she called its climate
alarmism. But then she had to admit, under examination, that the fossil
fuel industry was the one with the economic incentive to minimize
climate dangers and shouldn't be trusted as a reliable source.
Many of the Republican witnesses have made careers out of being
industry shills, sheltered in a fossil fuel funded array of front
groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American
Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation just to be trotted
out for hearings like these.
Well, our hearings began in February, and they got very often this
response from the other side. But let us take a look at what we warned
about and what happened since.
Well, first of all, there is that accelerating cascade of climate
disasters that I discussed at the beginning of the speech, so I won't
relitigate that.
Let us go on to insurance. Our hearings in February and March warned
of turbulence ahead in the insurance industry. These predictions are
already coming true--hearings in February and March. By July, insurers
were exiting or reducing exposure in California, Florida, Texas, and
Louisiana markets, and reinsurers exited Iowa--all citing exposure to
climate-related losses. In Florida, homeowners' premiums have spiked to
nearly four times the national average with a 40-percent increase this
year predicted.
There are already signs that insurance affordability and availability
are beginning to disrupt Florida's real estate market, exactly as
foretold in our hearings, and I doubt Florida's State insurance fund is
solvent.
And don't think it is just Florida. Here is where climate risks are
hitting home insurance markets. A lot of it is along the coast here,
where hurricanes and sea level rise and increased storm and tide damage
is putting homeownership at risk. You will notice that the
[[Page S4937]]
entire State of Florida is covered. But then out here, you get into
wildfire-adjacent areas where the wildfire risk is already causing
problems in the home insurance markets.
In the face of these risks, all across the country, up against truly
distinguished witnesses, real grownups who know what they are talking
about, whose warnings are already coming true, Republicans frequently
put up fossil fuel front group mouthpieces, paid not to understand the
facts. Sadly, it is a sign that fossil fuel mischief persists. So in
our 11th hearing, we showed how the fossil fuel industry has known for
almost seven decades about these dangers they deny.
As early as the 1950s, industry scientists left records of their
warnings about climate change. They were measuring and predicting it.
Industry scientists were measuring and predicting it, and they knew
their fossil fuel products were causing it.
In 1977, Exxon Senior Scientist James Black told Exxon's management
committee--I am quoting him here.
There is general scientific agreement that the most likely
manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is
through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil
fuels.
Nineteen seventy-seven, that is what Exxon's scientists told Exxon's
management. Well, other scientists noticed it, too. And Congress began
pursuing legislation that would have addressed climate dangers. Big Oil
responded with billions of dollars in fossil fuel funded
disinformation, lobbying, and dark money election spending. They are
still at it, as the more preposterous witnesses attested by their
presence. It wasn't always so. During my first years here in the
Senate, climate legislation was bipartisan. John McCain ran for
President on a serious climate platform.
But in January 2010, the Citizens United decision set loose a barrage
of political spending by the fossil fuel industry. Worse, the Court
allowed that spending to be secret, to hide the identity of the
spender. The fossil fuel industry was ready with unlimited dark money
and--and--with the secret threats and promises that the ability to
spend unlimited dark money allows you to make.
And between the spending and the threats and the promises, the fossil
fuel industry snuffed out bipartisanship on climate like that. From
January of 2010, the date of Citizens United forward, no Republican has
gotten on a serious climate bill in the Senate.
Collectively, fossil fuel interest through trade organizations and
through their dark money front groups have spent billions of dollars
that we know of so far on ads, on lobbying, on campaign contributions,
and on super PACs.
Super PACs, by the way, didn't exist before Citizens United. That
monstrosity is a creation of Citizens United and dark money. The delay
in climate action that those billions of dollars bought has directly
caused the economic perils that our hearings have spotlighted.
Organizations like the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the
American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, by
2021 had received over half a billion dollars from fossil fuel and
other dark money interests.
This is the web of various fossil fuel-funded front groups, with the
bulk of the funding unidentified. That is the dark money blob in the
middle of this web.
Here are some of the key groups into which political money flowed to
support climate denial and climate skepticism. Political money flowed
through anonymizing intermediaries into Republican super PACs.
Lobbyists from industries and trade associations crawled around this
building. They spent a fortune.
But for all the billions that they spent, this political and
propaganda effort was a bargain--a corrupting bargain but a bargain.
The International Monetary Fund calculates, using a peer-reviewed
procedure, that we subsidize fossil fuels by $760 billion--billion--
annually in the United States alone. Seven hundred and sixty billion
dollars is the subsidy the IMF points out that the fossil fuel industry
floats on in this country.
So let's say the fossil fuel industry spent $7.6 billion on political
influence and secret corruption schemes every year. They would be
pocketing a subsidy dollar for every political-influence penny that
they spent if they protected their $760 billion subsidy. It is the best
money they could possibly spend. It is more rewarding than drilling for
oil.
But while corrupting Congress may have been a bargain for them, the
price of a corrupted Congress was very high for everyone else. We lost
an essential decade from the Citizens United decision in January of
2010 and our passage of the IRA--the first serious piece of climate
legislation passed by Congress.
More than $10 trillion of our national debt stems from the 2008
financial crisis--a warned-of economic shock--and the COVID pandemic--
another warned-of shock. Those trillions of ``shock debt'' amount to 40
percent of our total national debt. Climate disruption shocks are
looming, predicted, clearly predicted, just like climate change and its
consequences were predicted, clearly predicted. Now, as we have seen,
the climate change consequences are here. The shocks are still looming.
I will close by saying that the threat from climate change to the
Federal budget is probably the least of our climate worries as we think
about the damage we are doing to the natural systems that have made
Earth habitable for humankind; as we think about new diseases and
dangers and destruction; as we think about wars and suffering as
resources shift and global scarcity replaces global abundance; as we
think about the lost species, the lost places of beauty, the lost
natural harmonies, the lost human traditions, the trout stream you
can't teach your granddaughter to fish at because the trout aren't
there. By some measures, the money is the least of it.
But here in Mammon Hall, we seem to care most about the money. So our
Budget Committee hearings have made clear that warnings abound of what
droughts, floods, wildfires, and heated, rising seas will do
economically to American families and businesses and to our Federal
budget.
The long-predicted damage has already begun. It has gone beyond
science predictions. It is now within the fiduciary horizons of
businesses that are having to report to shareholders on climate risks
because it has become so real and so immediate that their fiduciary
obligations demand that reporting. That is why the fossil fuel industry
cooked up this whole phony anti-ESG show that they have put on to try
to push back against the fiduciary obligations that so many
corporations are feeling obliged to meet.
These looming, systemic, economy-wide threats are real. Nothing says
that it is going to be either the coastal crash or the wildfire crash
or the carbon bubble crash. Nothing says that all three can't happen.
If we are to be serious about debt and about deficits and about
federal spending, we better damn well be serious about climate change.
It is, as my trusty old graphic says, time to wake up.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. REED. Mr. President, first, I want to commend my colleague from
Rhode Island. No one has been more accurate and more farseeing about
climate change than Sheldon Whitehouse.
When he first came to the Senate, it was a technical issue that
scientists debated. Now it is an issue we are confronting because of
his efforts, and it is also an issue we are confronting because we see
it.
We are in the midst of a crisis. He foresaw it. He has dedicated
himself to addressing it. I am just very proud to be his colleague in
this Senate.