[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Pages 18021-18022]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             CLIMATE CHANGE

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, it is my habit to give my ``Time to 
Wake Up'' speeches once a week when the Senate is in session. It is 
also a practice of mine to go to other States--particularly States that 
have Republican Senators--to look at what is happening in the States 
and get a sense of where the local universities and the local experts 
are with respect to climate change. My last visit was to Ohio. I have 
also been to New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, 
Florida, Tennessee, and Iowa. The thing that is common across all of 
those trips is that there is no denying climate change in those States. 
The denial is the function of this building, and it is the function of 
the wall of money the fossil fuel industry has erected around this 
building. But pick a State university in the country and go there, and 
we find there is simply not climate denial.
  I am joined today by my friend Sherrod Brown, Ohio's senior Senator, 
who was kind enough to accompany me on the trip--on several parts of 
it, anyway. We went to Cleveland. We had a couple of meetings there 
together. Another one of my visits was to Lake Erie, which got 
clobbered by the cyanobacteria that shut down Toledo's water system, 
which is also climate change-related.
  Let me yield to the Senator from Ohio for a few moments, and then we 
can talk about Cleveland and the lake.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I thank Senator Whitehouse.
  When I introduced Senator Whitehouse to the mayor of Cleveland and to 
a number of experts in Cleveland, from public health officials, to wind 
energy entrepreneurs, to community groups to whom climate change 
matters so much, I introduced him as probably--not just probably--there 
is no person in the Senate who has done a better job of focusing public 
attention on the threats of climate change and what it means to our way 
of life and what it means to our country. I thank Senator Whitehouse 
for that.
  I want to point to what happened in Toledo, OH, in 2011. This green 
color in this picture is algae bloom. This is a small boat that is 
making its way through the algae bloom.
  This wasn't even the year Toledo residents lost their water supply. 
In 2014--last August, 15 months ago--algae blooms were so serious in 
Lake Erie and in the western basin--Toledo is in the western basin of 
Lake Erie, Cleveland is sort of central, and then Ashtabula and Erie, 
PA, are in the eastern basin of Lake Erie. Again, this is not the most 
serious situation, although the algae bloom is so overwhelming here. 
This green is all algae bloom. The lake actually should be the color--
where you can see dark blue here, that is normally the color of the 
lake. We can see the wake of the boat, and that is the normal color of 
the lake, as the boat plowed through the algae bloom.
  The problem with Lake Erie is that it is the most vulnerable lake 
because it is the shallowest lake in the western basin of Lake Erie. In 
this part of Lake Erie, it is only 30 feet deep. It is fed by the 
Maumee River, which is the largest tributary of any river into any of 
the five Great Lakes. Keep in mind that it is 30 feet deep here, fed by 
farmland and commercial activity and industry and homeowners--greater 
Toledo in northwest Ohio. Contrast that with Lake Superior. It is 30 
feet deep here, and Lake Superior is 600 feet deep on average. And Lake 
Superior mostly drains forests, so we can see why Cleveland and Toledo 
are so vulnerable to climate change and so vulnerable to pollution and 
all that has happened with the algae blooms.
  People in Toledo--500,000 people lost their drinking water for 2\1/2\ 
days. People were great, stepping up from all over southern Michigan, 
eastern Indiana, and northwest Ohio to ship in water for people. But it 
made such a--it says to us that climate change isn't the only reason 
this happened, but it is clearly happening. We are seeing this algae 
bloom worse and worse and worse in hot weather.
  One other thing about this Great Lake. Lake Erie is only 2 percent of 
all of the Great Lakes' water--five Great Lakes. Lake Erie is only 2 
percent of all the Great Lakes' water because it is shallow and its 
surface areas are not as big as the others. Fifty percent of the fish 
of all of the Great Lakes are in Lake Erie because fish will produce 
and will prosper in shallower, warmer water, but the water was too warm 
because of climate change and all of the things that came out of that.
  In this meeting we had with Dr. Aparna Bole--a pediatric specialist 
at Cleveland's University Hospital--she talked about asthma rates. We 
heard from others too.
  I will turn it back to Senator Whitehouse and ask him what he learned 
from these meetings. He was not just in meetings with people in 
Cleveland learning about what climate change means there, he also went 
to the Stone Lab and he can tell us about that. Then he had an amazing 
meeting at Ohio State University with some of America's amazing climate 
scientists. I will kick it back to Senator Whitehouse and again thank 
him for traveling the country every single week and looking for places 
where climate change has done the most damage in terms that people can 
understand. His leadership is so important.
  I thank Senator Whitehouse for the work he has done, and I am so 
grateful he came to the city of Cleveland and joined us.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Well, I was very happy to join the Senator. I thought 
Frank Jackson was extremely impressive on this subject. He pointed out 
that there are times in life when we simply have to go to the future, 
and if you decide to hang on to the past, you will fail as a result of 
missing that curve. He said that the business community in Cleveland 
was really beginning to get that, beginning to take it on. So he has 
led with a Cleveland Climate Action Plan, which is one of the best ones 
in the country.
  We went to a great place where they are growing lettuce 
hydroponically, 3, 4 acres in an old building, under an open glass 
ceiling. They are using captured rain water; they are recycling it. The 
people there have jobs that pay well. They were the owners of the 
project and they were really vested in it. Wasn't the morale of the 
people working there phenomenal? It was terrific.
  Dr. Aparna Bole, whom Senator Brown mentioned, was very in tune to 
what was happening in minority communities as a result of climate 
change from asthma, from heat. She is seeing it with her young 
patients. She was wonderful, talking about that. At this point, because 
of toxic ground level ozone and ragweed being triggers for asthma 
attacks--she has seen so much of that. She said that more than one in

[[Page 18022]]

five African-American kids in Cleveland has asthma, and she connects it 
to what is happening in climate change.
  Of course, we understand that in Rhode Island because we have the 
same bad air days where we have to have kids stay indoors and elderly 
people stay indoors, all because of the air coming from the Midwest 
that has been fouled by these coal-burning powerplants.
  Out on Lake Erie I met with some of the scientists from Stone Labs 
and a couple of the lifelong fishing captains who had been out there on 
the lake. Here are some of the water samples we took while we were out. 
It is clean now--this is what the water should look like--but back 
before, when the climate change-driven rain bursts were flooding Lake 
Erie with phosphorus from the farms in the watershed, there was an 
explosion of cyanobacteria to the point where these guys said driving 
their boats wasn't like driving through water, it was like driving 
through pudding, and the wake would slurp over instead of turning the 
way a regular boat's wake would. One of them had been doing this for 35 
years and he said: I don't know this lake any longer. I don't know 
where the fish are going to be. For 35 years I have fished this lake, 
and now it is like a stranger to me because of all these changes that 
are happening.
  That is exactly what my Rhode Island fishermen are telling me, too, 
about Narragansett Bay and Rhode Island Sound. We are here with the 
Senator from Massachusetts. ``Sheldon, it is getting weird out there. 
Sheldon, this is not my grandfather's ocean.'' We have some 
responsibilities to pay attention to these people and to listen to 
them.
  One of the most impressive parts of the trip was this at Ohio State. 
Ohio State is host to the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center named 
after the famous polar explorer Admiral Byrd. These two scientists, 
Ellen Mosley-Thompson and Lonnie Thompson, have spent their lives 
traveling all over the planet going to these incredible, faraway 
places--the North Pole, the South Pole, to the Greenland icecap, going 
to glaciers high in Peru, going to glaciers in the faraway mountains of 
China. They drill down and take a core sample out of the glacier and 
get hundreds of thousands of years of data in that core sample.
  Then there you are on the top of a glacier in Peru or China, and you 
have to figure out how to get this core sample back to Ohio--and it has 
to stay frozen the whole time. So they had this huge logistical 
challenge. They conquered all of that. They are two amazing people.
  These are all the core samples from glaciers all around the globe. 
Some of them, because of the way climate has dissipated the glaciers, 
where they drilled the core sample the glacier doesn't exist anymore. 
It is the last record of gone glaciers.
  Here is a picture they had. This is the same site. On this side is a 
picture of the glacier. You can see striations from the seasons and 
years going by, and they took this picture from the same place. You can 
see how the glacier used to be right in front of them and now this 
glacier is off in the distance. It has moved back as the climate has 
warmed.
  They gave me this. This is a piece of plant matter. You can hardly 
see it. It is plants that were unearthed as the glacier moved back, and 
they can date them. Those plants were last out 6,626 years ago, when a 
snow covered those plants. Snow piled on to snow and it was buried 
under the glacier. It stayed and it stayed, and thousands of years went 
by. Then, after thousands of years had gone by, Jesus came and walked 
the Earth, and then thousands more years came by, and now the glaciers 
are melting so fast that here it is. You can look, and you can still 
see the leaves. It is squashed and old, but it hasn't decomposed 
because of the way it was preserved under the glacier that is going 
away now. In this laboratory they have this incredible treasure. You 
can go in and you can find air that was on this planet when Jesus 
walked the Earth, and it is still preserved just the way it was in the 
ice. You can find dust from dust storms that were written about in 
Egyptian hieroglyphics, and there is the actual dust held in the ice. 
This is the record that the climate science is based on, and it truly 
is a marvel.
  The last thing I will mention is that we also stopped by the Ohio 
State Center for Automotive Research. Here is a brandnew Camaro in the 
background. They work with GM to get cars brand-spanking-new, a high-
performance American Camaro. These students are going to take it apart 
and put it back together so it runs cheaper, faster, and with less 
fuel. They are going to make a hybrid Camaro with the same level of 
performance, and it is really very impressive what they are doing. They 
know climate change is here. That is why they are doing this stuff.
  I will close out because I have other Senators waiting, but I thank 
Senator Brown for taking me around Cleveland, meeting all the people we 
did, and taking me on those visits. I thank the folks at Ohio State. 
Stone Labs out on Lake Erie is an Ohio State facility. The Byrd Polar 
and Climate Research Center is an Ohio State facility. I met with the 
John Glenn Institute folks at Ohio State University.
  Look, if you are a Buckeye fan and you are listening, pay attention 
to what Ohio University says about climate change. Don't listen to the 
fossil fuel phonies. Listen to what your home State university says. 
These guys are deadly serious. They know it is real. I don't think 
there is a home State university in this country that is denying 
climate change, and yet this body is stuck in denial. It has nothing to 
do with the facts; otherwise the home State universities would say 
something different. You can't go home and root for the Buckeyes on the 
weekend and then come here and deny climate change and pretend you are 
being true to your home State university. I don't care what your home 
State is--Iowa, Oklahoma, Florida, Georgia--you name it. Go to the big 
State universities. They understand that climate change is real.
  What prevents us from acting isn't information, it is the wall of 
special influence money that the fossil fuel industry has built around 
this place, and it is time we woke up and got on with our business. So 
I will close with that.
  I am grateful for the people in Ohio who showed me around, 
particularly to Dave Spangler and Paul Pacholski, lifelong charter boat 
captains. They make their living out on Lake Erie. They know what it is 
like out there, and they know what climate change is doing to their 
beloved lake and their beloved way of life.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.

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