[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Pages 19848-19850]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             CLIMATE CHANGE

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here for my 189th ``Time to Wake 
Up'' speech to discuss the Republican tax bill. Who knew? Folks 
watching today's debate from home are probably wondering what the tax 
bill has to do with climate change. That is a good question. They might 
also ask, as I do, why the tax bill includes massive giveaways to 
fossil fuel producers or what opening up precious wilderness to oil 
drilling has to do with tax reform.
  The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee said: ``We need a 
simpler tax code that puts more money back into the pockets of workers 
and families.'' Republicans, he said, want to create ``a fairer, more 
predictable system for taxpayers across the country.''
  Their tax plan is none of those things. Its benefits are weighted 
heavily to big corporations, not workers and families. The corporate 
tax cuts are permanent, while the modest breaks for some workers 
disappear after a few years. What is fair or predictable about that?
  The chairman also said:

       I want a bipartisan process that renders a bipartisan 
     result. . . . I think we need a vigorous and open debate in 
     the Senate, which, in my view, should include a full process 
     in committee and regular order on the Senate floor.

  We got none of that. Republicans have rammed this bill through, using 
every procedural and parliamentary trick at their disposal, as a purely 
partisan measure, in the dead of night, producing amendments in 
handwritten chicken scratch in the margins of the bill at the last 
minute.
  If we were to ask middle-class families their top priorities for 
fixing our tax system, I don't think very many would say: You know, we 
really need to let oil companies pump crude in an Alaskan wildlife 
refuge. But that is what they do.
  The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1960 to 
preserve ``unique wildlife, wilderness, and recreational values.'' It 
now encompasses almost 20 million acres, with around 8-million acres 
designated as wilderness. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages 
the refuge, which is roadless, trailless, and represents the best of 
wild Alaska in a world where wilderness is increasingly scarce and 
vanishing far too fast.
  The Republican tax bill opens the refuge's 1.5 million-acre coastal 
plain to the oil drillers. Opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge 
to oil and gas development does little to provide energy security. The 
oil-producing potential of the area is estimated by the U.S. Geological 
Survey to be, at a maximum, around 12 billion barrels total of 
recoverable oil. In 2016, the United States consumed 7.2 billion 
barrels of petroleum products just in that year. So all of the oil we 
get from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which will take decades, 
represents fewer than 2 years of current consumption, and that is 
according to the most optimistic estimate.
  The budget resolution required that this venture raise $1 billion 
over 10 years. Republicans need that $1 billion to fund the big tax 
cuts they are giving out to the wealthy and to big corporations. When 
the numbers were finally

[[Page 19849]]

crunched, though, drilling in that Arctic coastal plain couldn't 
produce those numbers. Did this reality dissuade my Republican 
colleagues? No. Instead, they have proposed to make up the difference 
by selling off 7 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve--
the United States' emergency supply of crude oil, which actually does 
help guarantee our energy security. They want to sell reserve oil to 
fund those cuts for the wealthy and the big corporations.
  An auction last week of oil and gas leases in another part of 
Northern Alaska bodes ill for Republican hopes about drilling in the 
wilderness preserve. On 900 tracts of land offered up to oil and gas 
companies, the Bureau of Land Management fielded just seven bids--900 
tracts of land, 7 bids.
  Why is that?
  For one thing, low prices for crude oil make the prospect of 
exploring undeveloped Alaskan wilderness less appealing. In general, 
current industry appetite for high-risk ``frontier'' exploration is 
very low, observed an energy analysis at Raymond James & Associates. 
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ``would suffer from much the same 
thing.''
  A second problem is that oil companies are likely overstating their 
achievable existing reserves already. They will have to leave a lot in 
the ground of what they are now claiming as reserves. Buying more when 
you cannot sell what you already have is not a great strategy. Low-cost 
renewables and excess supply will further drive oil prices down and 
down if the laws of supply and demand hold true.
  This may be one reason the World Bank just announced in this new 
story, dated 2 days ago, that it will end its financial support for oil 
and gas exploration within the next 2 years. It is in response to the 
growing threat that is posed by climate change. That is where they are 
going. We are going the wrong way.
  The sad irony of Arctic drilling is that the American Arctic will 
feel the effects of burning fossil fuels most severely. The U.S. Global 
Change Research Program's ``Climate Science Special Report,'' authored 
by scientists and experts from top universities and across the Federal 
Government, found that while all regions of the United States will see 
significant warming by the end of the century, Alaska is expected to 
take the hardest hit--potentially over 12 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by 
2100, which is under the high-emission scenario shown down here at the 
bottom right.
  The northern edge of Alaska, including the historic whale-hunting 
village of Utqiagvik--and please forgive me, the people of Utqiagvik, 
for mangling the village's pronunciation--could see temperature 
increases of 18 degrees Fahrenheit. This village, which is only about 
300 miles west of the area in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge 
targeted for oil and gas development, is already seeing its coastlines 
overrun by rising seas, its permafrost melting beneath its buildings, 
and its beaches washing out to sea in strong winter storms as the 
protective shoreline sea ice forms later and later each year.
  Here is another news flash from Utqiagvik: 320 miles north of the 
Arctic Circle, a weather station in America's northernmost city of 
Utqiagvik has been collecting temperature data since the 1920s. Just 
recently, the average temperature went so off the chart at the weather 
station there that the instrumentation shut down the recording because 
the algorithm that monitored this figured that something must have gone 
wrong with the instrumentation because the numbers were so out of 
whack.
  The numbers were not out of whack. It was actually very real climate 
change that changed the environment and sent that signal that blew 
through the algorithm that the scientists had set up.
  But, in this building, in this room, the warnings from our best 
scientists about the consequences of our carbon emissions just don't 
count. The hyped economics about oil drilling don't count here. The 
weird budgetary jujitsu required to shoehorn this environmental hit 
into a tax bill doesn't matter here. What matters here is that the oil 
companies want to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and so 
Republicans are making it happen.
  Republicans claim to be cleaning up the Tax Code, but their so-called 
tax reform leaves in place most of the oil and tax giveaways that have 
benefited that industry for decades. The Big Oil giants, like BP, 
Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips, have enjoyed nearly $1 
trillion in profits over the past 10 years. Yes, let's rush to their 
assistance. Never mind the beleaguered American families, many of whom 
will see taxes go up from this bill. Let's rush to the defense of those 
companies with $1 trillion in profits over the past 10 years. They 
continue to benefit from multibillion-dollar tax subsidies.
  I am proud to have repeatedly cosponsored Senator Menendez's bill 
that would close the loopholes for the Big Oil giants, saving $22 
billion for taxpayers and debt holders over the next decade. The 
Republican bill not only leaves most of the old loopholes in place, but 
it offers new giveaways to the oil and gas industries. A last-minute 
change scribbled in during the Senate vote-arama will allow traded oil 
and gas partnerships to use the so-called passthrough loophole that the 
Republicans claim is designed to help small businesses.
  While the Republican tax plan boosts the fossil fuel polluters with 
this new tax gift, it singles out renewable energy to undermine those 
jobs. The way this works is that, under the historic bipartisan 
agreement that many of us worked on in 2015, developers of new wind 
energy were given a period in which tax credits for projects for which 
construction begins by the end of 2019 would be protected. There was a 
bargain struck in this body. We came together, and we agreed on a 
bipartisan result. This tax bill breaks that deal and breaks that 
result for wind and for solar. For wind, it was until the end of 2019. 
For solar, it was through 2021.
  These tax credits have been vital to the growth of the renewable 
industry across the country. It has grown in red States and in blue 
States. In fact, the five States that get the largest percentage of 
their electricity from wind and that have all of those wind energy jobs 
are Iowa, Kansas, South Dakota, Oklahoma, and North Dakota. Texas 
produces the most wind power of any State. The Republican tax bill is 
likely to upend the progress that we have made on renewables, disrupt 
ongoing projects, and ruin those jobs--all with clever provisions, the 
trick being to render those renewable tax credits that we bargained for 
practically valueless.
  Renewable developers don't usually turn a profit in the early years. 
So they don't have taxes against which to apply the tax credits. They 
sell the tax credits to others, and they use the revenue from selling 
the tax credits to support those wind and solar investments. The clever 
fossil fuel trick in the Senate bill--specifically, the corporate AMT 
and base erosion so-called provisions--would make these credits 
worthless to the businesses that have been buying them. With no buyers 
for the tax credits, funds for new wind and solar projects will dry up.
  There is even more nonsense in the House bill that takes direct aim 
at the wind and solar credits, including changing the rules on how 
projects would qualify for the credits, not just in the future but also 
retroactively. They go back to undo deals that have already been done. 
So $20 billion in projects have frozen up, developers say, just from 
the threat of these changes.
  Renewable energy industry organizations, including the American Wind 
Energy Association, the American Council on Renewable Energy, the 
American Conservation Coalition, Citizens for Responsible Energy 
Solutions, the Conservative Energy Network, and Conservatives for Clean 
Energy, all warn that the tax bill will jeopardize growth and jobs in 
wind and solar projects.
  ``If these provisions are retained,'' the groups wrote to Senators, 
``they will result in broad instability and uncertainty for businesses 
and investors across many sectors, including the clean energy sector.''

[[Page 19850]]

  Gosh, I hope my Republican friends will listen to our wind and solar 
producers, particularly the ones in their home States. I hope they will 
listen to the people who are counting on the jobs of those $20 billion 
in projects that have now been put on the shelf. I hope they will 
listen to American taxpayers, who are sick of midnight-deal corporate 
welfare like this.
  If they do listen, they can scrap this terrible bill. They can sit 
down and work with Democrats. It would be a novelty, but we would 
welcome it. We could have a bipartisan tax bill that works for the 
middle class, for the economy, and for the environment, but with the 
oil and gas industry calling the shots around here, fat chance of that.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.
  Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, first of all, I thank my friend, the 
Senator from Rhode Island, for two things--one, for being a constant 
voice on the need for us to diversify our energy sources and supplies 
and for recognizing the enormous challenge around climate change.
  I come from a State that is not too dissimilar from his in terms of 
its having a great deal of shoreline. We see the effects of the 
changing climate each and every day. At high tide, we have parts of the 
city of Norfolk that have never before flooded that flood on a regular 
basis.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. On a sunny day.
  Mr. WARNER. On a sunny day.
  We have a church that has to regularly change its schedule of 
worship, not because the Lord has asked them to change the schedule of 
worship but because it floods on a regular basis.
  Let me also thank him for his comments about the tax legislation. I 
share his concern as somebody who feels very strongly that there is a 
right way and a wrong way to do tax reform. Unfortunately, the product 
I believe we will be voting on next week, not only the provisions the 
Senator from Rhode Island talked about, will also add close to $2 
trillion to our debt.
  In many ways, it does not even take care of the problems we are 
supposed to solve, in terms of the ability of companies to bring back 
profits from overseas in a way to reinvest in this country. Frankly, it 
exacerbates the problem where companies can further hide their profits 
abroad.
  I share his doubt about whether our colleagues will join us in 
starting anew, but if they would, I would join with them and others in 
trying to make sure we do tax reform in a fair, balanced way that is 
fiscally responsible. I thank Senator Whitehouse for his comments.

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