[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 24 (Tuesday, February 3, 2026)]
[Senate]
[Pages S457-S458]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Climate Change
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Here in this Temple of Mammon, we only seem to care
about what we can monetize. So as Budget chair, I drilled hard into how
climate change is coming at American family finances.
Some of it comes at families through grocery costs as climate
disruptions disrupt agriculture. Some of it comes through construction
costs as climate disruptions disrupt lumber markets and supply chains.
Some of it comes through outdoor sports industries--hunting, fishing
and scuba and skiing--as climate disruptions disrupt the natural
environments that they need.
The first biggest shock will come through insurance markets as
climate risks make real estate uninsurable. This disruption kicks off a
cascade: Climate risk collapses insurance markets; insurance collapse
cascades into mortgage markets; mortgage collapse cascades into
property value losses; and the combination of insurance cost, mortgage
collapse, and home value losses thrashes the entire economy.
Don't believe me. Believe the chief economist of the mortgage giant
Freddie Mac who said exactly this. He said it would be as bad as the
2008 recession based only on coastal flood risk. And, of course, now we
have wildfire risk as well. And by the way, investor David Burt, who
predicted that 2008 recession, is now making bets predicting this one.
In a joint editorial, Senator Sheehy and I warned of a ``torpedo to the
hull'' of our economy from extreme weather, whether floods or
wildfires, triggering exactly this cascade.
As the climate danger looms closer, more and more studies are
monetizing that danger. Mammon Hall may have to wake up. Let's go
through some of the recent reporting.
First off, this isn't later. This is now. On home insurance, look no
further than Florida's teetering home insurance market where average
premiums now have soared to over $14,000 or look westward from there
where 92 percent of Texans now are worried about homeowners insurance
costs. The insurance peril comes as no surprise because insurance, to
quote First Street, ``directly prices expected loss.''
First Street describes how insurance is often the first transmission
channel for climate risk into markets through premium increases,
tighter terms, higher deductibles, nonrenewals, and I would add
mandates like homeowners having to build a new roof on their home to
get insurance coverage.
It matters what insurance companies think about this because those
insurance companies have both a fiduciary duty and a financial
incentive to predict well to make that an accurate transmission channel
of climate risk into markets. And they are predicting storm clouds
ahead, and they are battening down.
Other reports show climate change is already reducing Americans'
wealth and income. One study estimated that incomes in the United
States are already lower by around 12 percent since 2000 from where
they would have been if fossil fuel emissions were not causing climate
disruptions. That 12-percent estimated income reduction was a midpoint
in an estimated range between 2-percent income reduction and 22-percent
income reduction.
That study, by the way, looked at general temperature effects, not at
the costs of specific extreme weather effects like hurricanes, sea
level rise, or wildfires. So the actual number is obviously worse.
As to those uncounted extreme weather effects, First Street reports
that natural disaster damages have risen more than tenfold since the
1980s and now cost the global economy over $200 billion per year.
NOAA's 5-year average of billion-dollar disasters in the period from
1980 to 2024 averaged nine of them per year; 1980 to 2024 averaged 9
billion-dollar disasters per year. From 2020 to 2024, that segment, the
average has soared to 23 per year.
Another report notes that the greatest impact of climate change is
from ``the frequency, magnitude, and duration of extreme events.'' So
if you start with 12-percent income reduction and then you add in the
greatest impact of climate change on top of that from extreme events,
well, it is not just obviously worse; it is obviously a lot worse
counting those extreme weather effects.
The study notes that climate change has altered weather in all recent
years and all places. It is everywhere, not just where storms hit or
wildfires burn. So that is now. That is what is already here. What are
we in for? A 2024 study published by the National Bureau of Economic
Research found that each added degree centigrade of warming results in
a 12-percent reduction of GDP. Extrapolate that out, and the numbers
get huge. The World Meteorological Organization estimates that the
global cost of failing on climate, of letting the polluters continue to
run roughshod over policy, is as much as $1,200 trillion by the end of
the century--$1,200 trillion.
Another study has monetized ocean damages. Rhode Island is The Ocean
State. My wife is a marine scientist. I tend to pay attention to ocean
things. But we do tend to overlook ocean damage. It is worth looking
out for the oceans, though, because 90 percent of the excess heat
caused by fossil fuel emissions and 30 percent of the excess carbon
dioxide from those fossil fuel emissions have all been absorbed by the
oceans--90 percent of the excess heat, 30 percent of the carbon
dioxide, all absorbed by the oceans. Without that ocean effect, fossil
fuel emissions would likely have already made planet Earth unlivable
for humankind.
When you account for ocean impacts, when you monetize those ocean
impacts, it nearly doubles the social cost of carbon to humankind. The
effects come through higher ocean temperatures, reduced ability of the
ocean to hold oxygen, acidification of the ocean, increased severity of
extreme weather events, and accelerated sea level rise. Specific
dangers to God's creation include mass mortalities of organisms, large-
scale bleaching of coral reefs, and the loss of sea grass beds and kelp
forests.
Putting numbers to all of that gave this:
Market use damages are the largest in absolute terms,
totaling global annual losses of . . . $1.66 trillion in
2100, followed by damages in non-use values amounting to . .
. $224 billion, and non-market use values adding up to $182
billion in annual losses. That sums to over $2 trillion a
year, and it is for sure an undercount.
Again, there is a lot here that is not yet included in ocean social
cost of carbon calculations, damages that the EPA acknowledges as
important but has not yet included in social cost of carbon
calculations. It includes some pretty prominent impacts like on
fisheries and mariculture and tourism and recreation and, of course,
aesthetic values. That is a pretty big suite of harms.
At the end of the day, the oceans damage report prices 2020's ``blue
social cost of carbon'' at $48 in harm per ton of CO2
emissions. By 2030, 4 years from now, it is up from $48 per ton to $72
per ton. The trajectory is not good.
Remember that these numbers are an attempt to monetize a looming
natural systems disaster. As another report pointed out, some of the
benefits that our natural systems provide to humankind ``are not
substitutable, meaning they must be protected as they cannot be
replaced by technology when they are gone.'' Irreplaceability is one
danger; irreversible acceleration is another.
Some of the harms fossil fuel emissions cause hit tipping points that
kick
[[Page S458]]
off ``a cascade of accelerating and unmanageable damage''--``a cascade
of accelerating and unmanageable damage'' leading to dramatic worsening
for humankind in a worsening trajectory of damage.
Tipping points can have a profound effect on markets. Markets are
built around expectations, and one of the main expectations around
which they are built is the expected lifetime of assets. Well, as of
today, the central case estimate for sea level rise is around 3 feet by
2100--not good for homes or businesses that lie around or below 3 feet
above sea level, not great for homes or businesses that are within
range of ocean storms swamping ashore above the 3 feet of sea level
rise, but manageable with respect to considerable amounts of real
estate.
Now, imagine that tomorrow we learn that we have permanently
destabilized the Greenland ice sheet or the aptly named ``doomsday
glaciers'' in West Antarctica. Suddenly, the expected sea level rise by
the end of the century doubles or more, and we know that we are
eventually in for between 12 and 36 feet of sea level rise. Market
expectations around the valuations of trillions of dollars of real
estate will suddenly change, provoking massive value destruction that
will cascade through markets. It will make 2008 look like child's play.
On a more immediate scale, that is what is happening in insurance
markets right now, as homeowners along the gulf coast in Florida and in
wildfire country out West are finding out that the property that they
thought had a certain value is not worth so much any longer. If they
can afford insurance, but it has doubled or tripled, then the present
value of that heightened insurance cost over the time that they hold
the property suppresses the property's value. Their property values go
down. Florida led the country in property value reduction last year--I
think as a result of this.
If you can't get insurance at all, then you have trouble getting a
mortgage on your property, which means, if you are not selling to a
hedge fund or a billionaire, you have to mark your property down; you
have to sell it for cheap because there simply isn't a mortgage
available for it.
Jay Powell, who is useless on climate but knows a little bit about
mortgages and markets and the economy, has predicted that whole regions
of the United States will shortly be unmortgageable. And, of course,
when insurance gets out of control and mortgages become unavailable and
property values crash, that cascades into very a significant and
painful recession.
What else do we know? We know that our estimates of the worst kinds
of damage that fossil fuel emissions are causing humankind have been
wrong. They have been too low. I quote:
The severity and frequency of extreme events are
unprecedented and beyond model projections.
It is worse than we thought, and it is going to get worse faster than
we thought. Remember that, just by its nature, monetizing the human
harm caused by fossil fuel emissions disrupting our climate and natural
systems is an almost disgraceful undercount of the actual damage to
what one writer called our ``planetary solvency.'' As another author
wrote:
While the social costs--understood as costs to people--of
untrammeled pollution are colossal, the ecological costs,
those borne by nonhuman entities, are almost too vast to
grasp.
When you monetize things, you blind yourself to those costs that are
almost too vast to grasp because looking at them through the lens of
money blinds you to them. There are losses, massive losses--and I quote
again here--that ``appear only in [nature], almost never in a form that
capital can see.''
That is the defect of trying to monetize the harm we are causing to
the natural systems that sustain us. Monetization, by definition, fails
to acknowledge most of the harm and the danger. It fails to acknowledge
most of the harm and danger to our species, and it fails by a mile to
acknowledge the harm and danger to the rest of God's creation.
Even so blinkered, the numbers are colossal, and the threat looms.
All this has caused the World Economic Forum to elevate ``ecosystem
collapse as a mid- to high-level global risk.'' Other studies advance
the concept of planetary insolvency. Others warn about our continued
fossil fuel pollution: If left unchecked, ``then mass mortality,
involuntary mass migration, severe economic contraction, and conflict
become more likely.'' Heading into a world of more mass mortality, more
involuntary mass migration, more severe economic contraction, and more
conflict, it is worth paying a little more attention.
Existing modeling practices understate economic impacts, and further,
as one study pointed out, at the extreme, they ``do not recognize the
risk of ruin.'' They presume that this damage will fall into a
predictable center-case scenario. But there are outer-case scenarios--
nontrivial ones, real ones--that create the risk of human ruin.
Researchers have not only looked at the costs of climate change; they
have also studied the economic benefits of eliminating carbon
pollution. An OECD--Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development--study suggests that the most advanced economies on our
planet would enjoy an increase of 60 percent in GDP by 2050--those
societies, 60 percent richer by 2050--from getting climate right. And
they suggest that lower-income countries would enjoy an increase of 124
percent in GDP--more than doubling their wealth--from getting climate
right. So this is a two-sided equation: Continue to fail and ignore it
and these warnings of economic calamity become our future. Be
responsible and get it right and greater wealth and prosperity become
our future.
A third of global GDP lost in this century if the climate crisis and
the polluters causing it are allowed to run unchecked is a pretty dire
scenario to subject the people we represent to.
Anyway, back to Mammon Hall. Here we are, where none of this
discussion is taking place, where these risks and dangers are simply
treated as if they don't exist because of a different monetization--the
monetization of our politics defending a $700 billion annual subsidy,
powered by unlimited dark money spending. The fossil fuel industry and
its vast array of front groups have used the power of money in politics
to strangle this discussion.
In our new American petrostate, the power of petromoney and our
corrupted petropolitics have turned this supposedly greatest
deliberative body into a tomb of silence about this danger, a mortuary
of democracy.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Curtis). The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
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