[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 8]
[Senate]
[Pages 10417-10420]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                             GLOBAL WARMING

  Mr. KERRY. Madam President, yesterday President Bush, in the Rose 
Garden, conducted a ceremony in which he addressed the question of 
global warming and our environment. There are many issues on the table, 
obviously, as the President meets in Europe. I don't want to discuss 
those issues now because the President is abroad, and I think that 
would not be appropriate.
  However, it is appropriate, because the President spoke yesterday 
about the subject of global warming, and I think it is important to 
respond to his comments.
  Regrettably--I say this with an enormous sense of lost opportunity--
the President did not offer our Nation any specific policy as to how he 
now plans to address some of the basic fundamental, easily acceptable 
concepts with respect to global warming. The President did accept 
science at the beginning of his comments, but at the end of his 
comments again he raised questions about the science, which seems to be 
the good cop/bad cop aspect of the comments the administration is 
making with respect to this issue.
  The President essentially called for more study and said his 
administration is currently engaged in a review. Most who have been 
involved in this issue for 10 years or more and who have accepted the 
science understand there are a clear set of priorities that do not 
require a study that effective leadership could immediately move to put 
into place without an economic downside but with an enormous positive 
upside for our country and for the globe. More study is good. I am not 
suggesting there are not elements of this issue where we don't have an 
enormous amount of science to still develop. I will talk about that in 
a moment.
  In any system as complex as global climate change, there are 
uncertainties. Obviously, we have to continue research. However, we 
will find, I am confident, as the National Academy of Sciences warned 
last week, that the longer we go without taking the simple, clearly 
definable steps that there is consensus on among most people who have 
seriously studied this issue, the more we procrastinate, then the 
danger is even greater in the long term than we currently understand it 
to be.
  I think it is important to note, there is no way to study yourself 
out of this problem. Second, even as the President claims what they are 
doing is simply reviewing the bidding and making sort of a further 
analysis of what the options are, even as they claim that, the fact is 
the President is taking precipitous and potentially dangerous and 
clearly counterproductive steps that will have enormous long-term 
implications for America's ability to resolve the challenge of climate 
change.
  To underscore this point, the National Academy of Sciences, at the 
request of the White House, issued a report last week assessing our 
understanding of climate change. In addition to reaffirming the 
scientific consensus that climate change is underway and getting worse, 
the National Academy of Sciences made an extraordinarily relevant 
observation:

       National policy decisions made now and in the long-term 
     future will influence the extent of any damage suffered by 
     vulnerable human populations and ecosystems later in this 
     century.

  Indeed, since the earliest days of the administration, the President 
has made a series of policy decisions that will profoundly impact our 
ability to protect the global environment, all the while purporting to 
be simply studying the issue.
  So it is really clear that while the President says they are going to 
study it, that he has asked for his Cabinet review, and while the 
President says there are certain unknowns that impact the choices we 
will make, the President is not neutral in the choices he is making 
which will have a long-term impact on the choices with which we are 
left with respect to this issue.
  Specifically, while the administration claims to be studying the 
issue, the President has repeatedly questioned the underlying science 
of climate change and attempted to reignite the debate over whether the 
threat is real. This was done despite the fact of the Intergovernmental 
Panel on Climate Change, a scientific panel founded at the behest of 
his own father; despite earlier assessments by the National Academy of 
Sciences; and despite some top government and university researchers in 
this Nation; and despite personal statements of concern from 
researchers around the country.
  Let me just refer to today's New York Times where there is an article 
that says, ``Warming Threat Requires Action Now, Scientists Say.'' I 
will just read very quickly:

       Indeed, to many experts embroiled in the climate debate, 
     the question of how much warming is too much--which has been 
     at the center of international climate negotiations for a 
     decade--now constitutes a red herring. They say it is more 
     important to start from the point of widest agreement--that 
     rising concentrations of heat-trapping gases are warming the 
     atmosphere, and that adding a lot more is probably a bad 
     idea. The next step, they say, is to adopt policies that will 
     soon flatten the rising arc on graphs of global emissions 
     while also pursuing more research to clarify the risks.
       Many note that recent studies suggest a fairly high risk of 
     significant ecological harm from a global temperature rise of 
     less than 1 degree Fahrenheit and of substantial coastal 
     flooding and agricultural disruption if temperatures rise 
     more than 4 or 5 degrees in the new century.
       Global temperatures have risen 1 degree Fahrenheit in the 
     last 50 years; since the last Ice Age, they have risen about 
     9 degrees.
       The risks are clear enough to justify some investments now 
     in emissions controls, they say.
       They say that the general quandary is no different from the 
     kind faced by town officials who must judge how much road 
     salt to buy based on uncertain long-term winter weather 
     forecasts, or by countries deciding whether to invest in a 
     missile defense system that might not ever have to shoot down 
     a missile.
       ``It's silly to expect that we can resolve what the future 
     is going to be,'' said Dr. Roger A. Pielke Jr., a 
     mathematician and political scientist at the National Center 
     for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. ``That's like 
     trying to do economic policy by asking competing economists 
     what level the stock market is going to be at 20 years from 
     now.''

  Yesterday, I was in Boston with a number of extraordinary scientists, 
among them the Nobel laureate who helped discover the ozone hole, Dr. 
Jim McCarthy, a professor of biology at Harvard University, and a 
member of the IPCC working group. He said, imagine yourself as a parent 
and somebody

[[Page 10418]]

says to you as a parent: Look, there is a 50-percent chance that your 
child is going to get cancer from the water he or she has been 
drinking. But if your child takes this medicine, we know we can reduce 
the risk. If you don't take the medicine, perhaps your child is going 
to get the cancer.
  Most parents in this country will make the judgment immediately: I 
want the medicine for my child.
  That is exactly the kind of analogy we face today with respect to 
global warming. We are being told what the probabilities are, about 
what the consequences will be. We are being told if we take certain 
actions, we can mitigate it. And we know to a certainty if we do not 
take those actions, we run the risk that we could wind up with a 
completely irreversible equation.
  We are not talking about something you can suddenly jump in on at 
some stage later and necessarily remediate--unless, of course, there 
may be some extraordinary discovery about how you take out of the 
atmosphere what we are putting into it. But as of this moment, that 
remains the most perplexing and complex of solutions at which 
scientists are looking.
  It is far easier and far more attainable to take measures now to try 
to reduce the level of emissions that we put into the atmosphere and to 
premitigate, to take the opportunity to reduce and not even do the 
damage we will do in the first place.
  The reason this is particularly compelling is very simple. We know 
the progressive possibilities, and we recognize there is sort of a law 
of safety, if you will; sort of a prudent person principle that you 
would put in place in order to try to avoid a disaster that you may not 
have any capacity to undo at some point in the future.
  We may never know the exact rate of change or the specific impacts 
and precise human contribution until it is too late to do anything 
about it. The changes we are causing in the atmosphere, raising 
atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations to levels unseen in over 
400,000 years, is simply unprecedented. Those who demand that we wait 
for absolute certainty, starting with the President, should explain how 
they will reverse the damage that we have caused, how our environment 
can be made whole again once we have polluted the atmosphere in such a 
substantial and fundamental way.
  Rather than asking us the question, how do you know what the damage 
will be, when you know that you will create damage, we should be asking 
them the question, how can you guarantee us that it will not cause the 
worst scenario that is being predicted. It seems to me the 
precautionary principle demands we take some kind of actions.
  Furthermore, while the administration claims to be only studying the 
issue, the President has actually reversed the campaign pledge and 
announced a newfound opposition to capping carbon pollution from power 
plants, which is the source of one-third of our greenhouse gas 
emissions.
  The idea of a four-pollutant power plant bill has been a bipartisan 
effort in the Congress. It has industry support. It remains one of our 
most promising proposals to move ahead in climate change. But it was 
rejected out of hand by the President only weeks after entering office.
  That is not a neutral position. That is not merely studying. That is 
taking a proactive negative position that has an impact on global 
climate change.
  Further, while the administration claims to be only studying the 
issue, the President declared the Kyoto Protocol on climate change to 
be dead, and still calls the agreement fatally flawed. That is not only 
studying the issue; that is not a neutral action.
  That has a profoundly negative impact on global efforts to try to 
deal with climate change. Whatever one thinks of the substance of the 
Kyoto Protocol, it is self-evident that the President's outright 
rejection of the protocol so quickly with little explanation and with 
little international consultation, and apparently little considered 
analysis, was a mistake.
  Is the protocol flawed? Yes. Is it fatally flawed? That depends 
entirely on the willingness of an administration to lead and to fix it.
  The President in his Rose Garden statement yesterday referred to the 
95-0 vote of the Senate on the Byrd-Hagel amendment as a rationale to 
say the Senate, as a whole, doesn't believe in this treaty. I was the 
floor manager on our side for that amendment. I know precisely what the 
intent was, at least on our side of the aisle, in adopting that 
amendment. It wasn't that the treaty was so flawed that it couldn't 
ultimately be made whole and become the instrument which we could 
ratify with amendment, with further nurturing and with future 
leadership. We were suggesting that, indeed, it would be wrong to do it 
without the less developed nations also participating.
  The Clinton administration set out over the course of the last 2 
years to work with these less developed nations to bring them into the 
process. That is the unfinished task of the Kyoto Protocol. But it 
should not allow somebody to define the protocol as automatically dead 
as a consequence of that kind of deficiency.
  In the 17 years I have been in the Congress, and the many years many 
others have been here longer, there have been countless numbers of 
treaties that have come to us that we have remedied, that we have put 
amendments to, and that we have gone back and renegotiated on in order 
to guarantee they meet our concerns.
  This protocol is the product of the work of 160 nations. It is a 
decade of work. It deserves better than to simply be cast aside by a 
unilateral action of the United States, particularly in view of the 
fact that it represents, ultimately, the format on which we are going 
to have to agree, which is an international agreement to have a 
mandatory goal which we are going to try to reach together in order to 
deal with this issue.
  While the administration claims to be only studying the issue, the 
President has proposed a budget to us that slashes Federal support for 
clean energy technologies, which are a vital component of any plan to 
mitigate climate change.
  The President's budget cuts funding in almost every efficiency 
program at the Department of Energy, including cuts to appliances, 
buildings, instruments, and transportation. It cuts support for 
renewable energy from wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass by about 50 
percent--a 50-percent cut. That is not a mere study.
  That is a negative action that will have a profound negative impact 
on the ability of our country to be a willing global leader in 
developing the technologies and in showing the world our seriousness of 
purpose in this endeavor.
  While the administration claims to be only studying the issue, the 
President issued an energy plan that by his own acknowledgment does not 
consider the threat of global climate change. It resurrects an energy 
policy better suited for the 1970s than the year 2000 and the new 
millennium. It does more to set limits on America's ability to innovate 
than it does to inspire the technological advances that can help our 
economy and our environment.
  By one estimate, the President's budget and efforts will increase our 
greenhouse gas pollution by as much as 35 percent. That is not a 
neutral, mere study. That is a negative action that will have profound 
long-term consequences.
  Let me read again the crucial observation by the National Academy of 
Sciences. They said:

       National policy decisions made now and in the longer term 
     future will influence the extent of any damage suffered by 
     vulnerable human populations and ecosystems later in the 
     century.

  With all due respect, I think the President has acted and is acting 
on the issue of climate change in a counterproductive way. I urge him 
to take the time to reevaluate that budget and to assist us in setting 
this country on a course of leadership that will help us to prove our 
bona fides with respect to this issue.
  None of us who argue for action are going to suggest that we have all 
the answers to what is going to happen in the long run. We recognize 
there are complex environmental, economic, scientific, and diplomatic 
challenges. But I do know that we need American leadership in order to 
convince the people

[[Page 10419]]

we have been working with for the last 10 years that we are, indeed, 
serious about this issue.
  One of the principal reasons we have been unable to bring the less 
developed countries into this process is because they do not trust us. 
They do not believe we are serious about this. In the meetings in 
Buenos Aires, and in the meetings in The Hague most recently, one could 
not just hear but you could feel the growing anger at the United States 
for the level of our emissions; and, then, of course, the lack of 
action that we have taken to try to deal with this challenge.
  I simply remind my colleagues that all of the prophecies of a 
damaging impact on our economy need to be measured against what a lot 
of big businesses in our country are already doing. British Petroleum 
will reduce voluntarily its emissions to 10 percent below the 1990 
levels by the year 2010. Polaroid will cut its emissions to 20 percent 
below the 1994 levels by 2005. Johnson & Johnson will reduce its 
emissions to 7 percent below the 1990 levels by 2010. IBM will cut 
emissions by 4 percent each year until 2004 based on 1994 emissions. 
Shell International, DuPont, and others, have made similar commitments. 
But the predictions of economic calamity from entrenched polluters are 
simply not credible when you measure them against the accomplishment of 
these particular companies.
  The problem is that only a small universe of these companies have 
been willing to adopt any kind of voluntary effort. We applaud their 
leadership. That is the kind of good corporate citizenship that makes 
an enormous difference.
  The lesson of the last 10 years is you have to have a mandatory 
structure and a mandatory goal. You can have all kinds of flexible 
mechanisms. You can use the marketplace in countless numbers of ways to 
encourage different kinds of behavior. Indeed, we should ask the 
corporate community to come to the table in ways that they haven't been 
invited previously and ask them to be part of helping us define the 
least cost, least intrusive, most efficient ways of dealing with this 
issue. But unless we set that kind of goal, we are not going to have 
the credibility to create the framework within which you bring the less 
developed nations into our fold.
  Our country has proven its remarkable capacity when challenged to be 
able to apply the entrepreneurial skill and the remarkable 
entrepreneurial spirit of our Nation to accomplishing almost any task. 
We did that in the measure of World War II when we needed to pursue the 
Manhattan project and developed the atom bomb itself. We have done it 
in countless other ways. It is when we unleash our technological 
capacity that we are at our best. But many times we have to excite the 
private capital movement to some of those areas by creating the 
incentives or by encouraging that capital to move those ways. When you 
slash your budget significantly in ways that reduces that technological 
organization, you send a counterproductive message to the capital 
markets which diminish the ability of that spirit to take hold.
  I believe we should summon our energy to the effort of challenging 
our country to, in a sense, view this as sort of a new mission to the 
Moon, that this should be our effort, that we are going to do the 
following in the following period of time. We can achieve that by 
cutting emissions at home. We can commit to drafting an international 
agreement that is based on these mandatory caps. We can find all kinds 
of ways to excite achievement to create hybrid cars, alternative fuels, 
renewable energy, and I think in the end that would be beneficial for 
all of us.
  While the protocol that was created in Kyoto is incomplete, it also 
represents a remarkable process because it created this mandatory 
structure. I think most of us would be willing to acknowledge that 
there is still room for compromise; that we could find the ways through 
the emissions trading and through the definition of the carbon sinks 
and other things to be able to come to a final solution with respect to 
it.
  But we have wasted the past decade in a political impasse, and we 
have failed to do what I think we know how to do best. If we do pursue 
what I just talked about--providing the economic incentives for the 
development and proliferation of solar, wind, biomass, hydrogen, and 
other clean technologies--then we can carry a new message to the rest 
of the world that takes away the regressive record of the last years 
and reasserts a kind of credibility that is important to the 
negotiating process.
  I might add, everyone should understand this is not just about global 
warming. People are always talking about the confrontation between the 
environment and the economy. But the fact is, we can create tens of 
thousands of jobs pursuing these alternatives. In addition to that, we 
would have wide-ranging domestic benefits, including reduced local air 
and water pollution, preventing respiratory and other illnesses. All 
you have to do is look at the incidence of child respiratory disease in 
our country, the increase in the incidence of asthma, including in 
adults, the remarkable increase in our hospital costs as a consequence 
of air pollution- and water pollution-carried diseases and illnesses.
  We would lessen our dependence on imported oil. We would lessen the 
pressure to exploit our own natural lands. We would create markets for 
farmers. We would grow jobs and exports in the energy sector. We would 
enhance our overall economic strength by strengthening our 
technological sector. And we would ultimately strengthen our national 
security as a consequence of these measures.
  Those are not small accomplishments, let alone what we would 
accomplish with respect to global warming. So we have a challenge in 
front of us. We need to recognize we have been going backwards. We are 
at 1980 levels in automobiles because of the loophole on SUVs. There 
are countless numbers of things we could do on building efficiencies in 
America, countless numbers of things we could do for various engines 
and air-conditioners, and other emitters of greenhouse gases, if we 
were to try to apply the technological capacity of our country to that 
endeavor.
  So my hope is this administration will recognize the energy study 
done 2 years ago which said that if we were to try to implement what we 
know we can do today--what IBM, Polaroid, and these other companies are 
doing today--we could, in fact, do so in a way that is completely 
neutral to our economy. We could have the upside of gains on addressing 
global warming while having the upside on our economy.
  We should begin with steps that benefit the environment and the 
economy and are technologically achievable today. We can and should 
increase the efficiency of automobiles, homes, buildings, appliances 
and manufacturing.
  The efficiency of the average American passenger vehicle has been 
declining since 1987 and is now at its lowest since 1980. That is 
unacceptable. Our cars and trucks could and should be increasingly more 
efficient not less efficient. Despite doubling auto efficiency since 
1975, we are actually now backsliding. It is time to update national 
standards for vehicle efficiency. It is time to get more efficient 
gasoline, diesel, natural gas, hybrid and fuel cell vehicles off the 
drawing board and onto America's highways. We can do it. We are doing 
it. Hybrids, once considered exotic, are on the market today getting 50 
miles to a gallon.
  We can improve the efficiency of resident and commercial buildings. I 
am a cosponsor of the Energy Efficient Buildings Incentives Act. It is 
a bipartisan proposal to provide tax incentives for efficiency 
improvements in new and existing buildings. Once implemented it would 
cut carbon emissions by over 50 million metric tons per year by 2010 
and provide a direct economic savings that will exceed $40 billion.
  We can strengthen efficiency standards for clothes washers, 
refrigerators, heat pumps, air conditioners and other appliances. 
Standards issued in 1997 and earlier this year by the Department of 
Energy must be fully and effectively implemented. The net energy

[[Page 10420]]

savings to the nation will be $27 billion by 2030. The environmental 
benefits include a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions equal to 
taking more than 14 million cars off the road.
  We must push the deployment of domestic, reliable and renewable 
energy from wind, solar, biomass and geothermal by creating markets and 
providing financial incentives. Today, California gets 12 percent of 
its energy from renewable energy while the rest of the country gets 
less than 2 percent of its electricity from renewable energy. We need 
to do a better job. Our nation has great potential for wind power--not 
only in states like North Dakota, South Dakota or Iowa but also in 
coastal states like Massachusetts. Planning is underway for an offshore 
wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts that will be generating as 
much as 400 megawatts of power--enough to power 400,000 homes.
  We have only begun to tap the potential of geothermal in Western 
states and biomass, which can produce energy from farm crops, forest 
products and waste. But to seize this potential we must create the 
markets and financial incentives that will draw investment, invention 
and entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, America is falling behind. One of 
the challenges in wind development is long delays in purchasing 
equipment from European suppliers who have the best technologies but 
also long delays because of rapidly growing demand. I believe American 
companies should be the technological leaders supplying American 
projects--instead it's European firms. We must create the market and 
the incentives for these technologies and let America's entrepreneurs 
meet the demand.
  Finally, we must look to the long term. If we are ever to convince 
the developing world that there is a better way, we must create that 
better way. To do so, we must invest in solving this problem with the 
same urgency that we have invested in space exploration, military 
technology and other national priorities. For too long our investments 
have been scatter shot and poorly coordinated--and lacked the intensity 
we need. We need a single effort, with strong leadership, that 
investigates how we meet this challenge and sets a path for a 
sustainable future.
  If we do this, if we act early and invest in the future, I am 
confident our investment will be rewarded. It will bolster our economy, 
make us more energy independent, protect the public health and 
strengthen our national security. Unlike today, America will be the 
leader in clean energy technologies and we will export them to the 
world. As America has throughout our history, we will lead in finding a 
global solution--and we will protect the global environment for 
generations to come.
  That is the challenge. I hope the Senate and House will show 
leadership in engaging in that effort.
  I thank the Chair and I thank everybody else in delaying a little 
bit. I yield the floor.

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