Uninterrupted Scholars Act (USA)

Mr. President, the president and CEO of Smithfield Foods, Larry Pope, took to the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal again to blame all that ails him on the renewable fuels standard for ethanol.

Some may recall he did the same thing back in April 2010 when commodity prices were rising. At that time, he perpetuated a smear campaign and blamed ethanol in an attempt to deflect blame for rising food prices while boosting Smithfield's profits. With this newspaper article, he is back at it again.

I start by referring to Mr. Pope as Henny Penny from the children's folktale ``Chicken Little.'' Every time Smithfield has to pay a little more to America's corn farmers to feed his hogs, Mr. Pope starts with the same argument that the sky is falling, and it is all ethanol's fault.

Mr. Pope's opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal might lead some to believe he is very knowledgeable about the ethanol industry. But there are many areas of ethanol he doesn't know much about.

He continues to perpetuate the myth that ethanol production consumes 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop. Mr. Pope states: ``Ethanol now consumes more corn than animal agriculture does.''

Everyone with a basic understanding of a livestock farm--even a kernel of corn--or of an ethanol plant knows that is not a true statement. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 37 percent of the corn crop is used in producing ethanol. But--and a very important but--the value of corn does not simply vanish when ethanol is produced.

One-third of the corn--that is, 18 pounds out of every 56-pound bushel--reenters the market as a high-value animal feed called dried distillers grain. I would imagine millions of hogs raised by our farms every year are fed a diet containing this ethanol coproduct. For sure it is a very big feed product for cattle. Of course, Mr. Pope appears to be unaware of its existence.

When the distillers grains are factored in; that is, 18 pounds out of the 56 pounds that is left over after you make ethanol, 43 percent of the corn supply is available for animal feed. Only 28 percent is used for ethanol--unlike the 40 percent Mr. Pope says. This is the inconvenient truth of ethanol detractors. They prefer to live in a bubble where they believe ethanol is diverting corn from livestock use. That is just not the case.

Mr. Pope also proclaims that ``ironically, if the ethanol mandate did not exist, even this year's drought-depleted corn crop would have been more than enough to meet the requirements for livestock feed and food production at decent prices.''

I would like to ask Mr. Pope why he thinks that is the case. Why did farmers plant 96 million acres of corn this year when normally they would plant between 86 and 88 million acres of corn? Why have seed producers spent millions to develop better yielding and drought- resistant traits so we can produce more corn on less acres? The answer is simple: Because this gigantic industry of ethanol is there to consume more corn and more production on each acre.

If not for ethanol, it is very clear farmers wouldn't have planted 96 million acres of corn this year because those are more acres of corn than farmers have planted in this country since 1938. Without ethanol, I doubt we would have seen investment in higher yielding and more drought-tolerant corn plants by our seed corn companies.

I happen to think Mr. Pope is an intelligent man, but he is woefully uninformed on the issue of what the ethanol industry and the demand for corn has done for the size and genetic improvement of the corn crop. It is easy to understand Smithfield's motives. They benefit from an abundant supply of corn, just not the competing demand for it.

What is Smithfield's primary problem? Again, the answer is simple: cost and profit. They still want to pay $2 for a bushel for corn. This is an important point that I hope people understand. For nearly 30 years, until about 2005, companies such as Smithfield had the luxury of buying corn below the cost of production. Corn prices remained for about 30 years between $1.50 a bushel and $3 a bushel. Farmers routinely lost money. The Federal Government then provided economic support for the farmers. Producers such as Smithfield had the best of both worlds. They were able to buy corn below the cost of production, and they were able to let the Federal Government subsidize their business by guaranteeing a cheap supply of corn.

In the view of corporate livestock producers, subsidies are fine--if they allow them to buy corn below the cost of production. Anybody could look like a genius with that sort of a business model.

Mr. Pope also continues to overstate the impact of corn prices on the consumer. Agriculture Secretary Vilsack recently stated that farmers receive about 14 cents of every dollar spent on food at the grocery store. Farmers get 14 percent and everybody else gets 86 percent, yet the farmers of America are the problem? It happens that that 14 cents works out to be about 3 cents of that 14 cents is because of corn.

A research economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently stated that a 50-percent increase in the price of corn will raise the total grocery shopping bill by about 1 percent. To put it in perspective, the value of corn in a $4 box of corn flakes is about 10 cents.

Mr. Pope also exaggerated the impact of ethanol on food prices in 2010, and he is doing it again. He is using the devastating drought that we now have--over 62 percent of the country and worse in the Midwest, of Iowa where I live--to once again undermine our Nation's food, feed, and fuel producers,

and he is doing it--why? To make more money.

Repealing the renewable fuel standard will not bolster Smithfield's profits. Because of the flexibility built into the renewable fuels mandate, a waiver will not significantly reduce corn prices. A recent study by Professor Bruce Babcock, Iowa State University, found that a complete waiver of the renewable fuel standard--that is what the mandate is called--might reduce the corn prices by only 4.6 percent. That report goes on to state:

The desire by livestock groups to see the additional

flexibility in ethanol mandates may not result in as large a

drop in feed costs as hoped.

They continue:

. . . the flexibility built into the Renewable Fuels Standard

allowing obligated parties to carry over blending credits

from previous years, significantly lowers the economic impact

of a short crop, because it introduces flexibility into that

mandate.

The drought is enormous in both scale and severity. But we will not know the true impact until September when harvest begins. The latest estimates from the U.S. Department of Agriculture indicate an average yield of 146 bushels per acre. That would result in a harvest of 13 billion bushels. This would still be one of the largest corn harvests.

I suggest those claiming that the sky is falling withhold their call for waiving or repealing the renewable fuel standard. It is a premature action that will not produce desired results and it would increase our dependence upon foreign oil and it would drive up prices at the pump for consumers.

On another point with regard to taxes and the proposals around the Hill to increase taxes, I want to say that over the past few years my colleagues on the other side have come to the floor repeatedly to present a revisionist story regarding the fiscal history of the last two decades. On several occasions I have come to the floor to refute this history. Yet, again and again, the other side continues to present the same distorted facts, including lots of speeches last week.

The general misguided argument is that all of the economic and fiscal success of the 1990s is thanks to big tax increases by the Clinton administration and the 2001 and 2003 bipartisan tax relief is responsible for all of our economic ills and fiscal problems.

Neither of these claims is supported by facts or a basic understanding of economics. I will begin with the Clinton tax increase to which people are giving so much credit. Many on the other side of the aisle argue that the Clinton tax increases are proof that tax increases will not harm our economy today--when they have even heard their own President say otherwise several times, until recently, that you should not increase taxes when you have a depression. These people frequently ask, ``If our economy grew in the 1990s with higher marginal tax rates, how can it be bad to raise marginal taxes to these former levels?'' Engrained in this argument is the assertion that tax hikes can actually be good for our economy.

This assertion fails to take into account numerous economic factors that occurred alongside the Clinton tax increases. The fact is that the economy grew not because of the 1993 tax increases but despite them.

The economy of the mid-1990s is a result of economic conditions that we may never see again. It was a time of great economic expansion due in large part to the advent of the Internet economy. The Internet spawned new technologies and created efficiencies in our economy that have never been matched. In turn, these new technologies and efficiencies spurred startup businesses and new industries. Many seem to forget the huge Y2K fear that gripped the Nation, causing billions and billions in spending that helped prop up what became the infamous Internet bubble that blew up on all of us. Nevertheless, before the bubble burst these factors led to historically low unemployment and high workforce participation. Claiming that this was due to Clinton tax increases is equal to Vice President Gore claiming that he invented the Internet.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle would be hard-pressed to find many economic studies indicating tax increases are stimulative. The focus of economic research in this area is not about whether tax increases are harmful or beneficial to the economy. Rather, the focus seems to be on the degree to which tax increases are very harmful to the economy. Admittedly, there are wide variations in views of economists on the responsiveness of individuals and businesses to taxes. However, even studies by economists who can hardly be labeled as conservative have concluded that tax increases have a significant negative effect on the economy.

For instance, a 2007 study by Christina Romer, President Obama's former chief economist, found ``tax increases are highly contractionary,'' and ``have very large effects on output.''

In fact, this study found that a tax increase of 1 percent of gross domestic product could lower real GDP by at least 3 percent.

Another likely contributor to the growth of the 1990s was a peace dividend we reaped from the end of the Cold War. We have Ronald Reagan's staredown of the Soviet Union to thank for that phenomenon. The end of the Cold War allowed for a reduction of government spending as a percent of GDP. Coupled with priorities pushed by the Republican- led Congress to reach a balanced budget and to reform welfare, spending as a percentage of GDP dropped to its lowest point in 30 years. With the Government spending less of the people's money, more was left in the hands of the private sector. This allowed the private sector to innovate, to invest, and eventually create jobs. The peace dividend is also the largest contributor to reining in deficits in the 1990s.

The biggest source of deficit reduction, 35 percent, came from the reduction of defense spending. The next biggest source of deficit reduction, 32 percent, came from other revenue because of a growing economy. Another 15 percent came from interest savings.

Let's get to the Clinton tax increase in reducing deficits. The Clinton tax increase, on the other hand, only accounted for 13 percent of the deficit reduction--only 13 percent.

There are further factors that contributed to the economic growth of the 1990s, including the expansion of free trade in the 1997 reduction in the capital gains tax rate. However, in the interest of time I am going to go on to other issues. One thing is clear, though, from this period of the 1990s. The economic growth of that time was not thanks to the Clinton tax increase nor was it a major player in bringing our deficit into balance.

Today we cannot rely on the unique economic conditions we experienced during that decade of the 1990s, some of which were artificial, to buttress the negative effects of the tax increase. In fact, we are in the middle of one of the worst economic eras since the Great Depression. Unemployment has remained above 8 percent now for over 41 straight months, almost 3\1/2\ years, in other words. Economic growth has been anemic.

Each passing day economic indicators are pointing more and more to the chance of a double-dip worldwide recession. Last Wednesday it was reported that Great Britain's economy contracted at the rate of .7 percent. Then on Friday it was reported that our own economy is stalling. Real GDP grew at an annual rate of just 1.5 percent, continuing its downward trend for three straight quarters. In a recent blog post, Nobel Laureate economist Gary Becker addressed the question of whether raising taxes on high-income earners is a very good idea. In his post, Professor Becker entertained arguments--these were arguments by the supporters of the tax increases--by hypothesizing that there is a 50-50 chance that higher taxes on the so-called rich would damage the economy.

Of course I believe, as does Professor Becker, that in reality this chance is much higher than 50-50. However, even granting the other side this generous assumption he concluded the benefit of raising taxes was outweighed by the potential damage they would cause. According to Professor Becker, even if richer individuals only slightly reduce their work hours and reduce their effort at work, the gain in tax revenue from these individuals would not be great. In contrast, ``the costs to the economy in the chance that higher taxes greatly discourage their efforts is likely to be substantial in terms of fewer hours worked and less work effort by high-income individuals, reduced incentives to start businesses,

less investment in their human capital, investing abroad rather than in [this country] . . . and even migration abroad.''

Yet my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are pushing billions of dollars in tax increases. Last week they voted to increase taxes on nearly 1 million flowthrough businesses. Their vote to increase taxes on job creators came on the heels of an Ernst and Young study detailing its ramifications. This study concluded that these proposed tax hikes-- on top of the 3.8-percent tax increase on dividends, interest, and capital gains that was added to pay for the health care reform bill-- would reduce our economic output by 1.3 percent. The Ernst and Young study also found that real aftertax wages would fall by 1.8 percent as a result of President Obama's policies.

Even in the face of this information, my colleagues on the other side seem all too willing to gamble with the chance that our stalling economy can withstand such a hit. By doing this, they are playing Russian roulette with our economy.

To my colleagues I ask: How certain are you that tax increases on job creators will not be damaging the economy? If you have any doubt, I suggest don't pull the trigger.

I wish to shift gears a little bit to address the record of the 2001 and 2003 tax relief. Just as a perfect storm of good economic conditions blew at the back of the Clinton administration, a perfect storm of bad economic conditions and unpredictable events blew in the face of the Bush administration.

It is undisputed that at the end of the Clinton administration, the Congressional Budget Office was projecting a 10-year budget surplus of $5.6 billion. Keep in mind, though, that CBO's projection was based on assumptions that did not pan out.

The CBO failed to predict the bursting of the tech bubble that was so beneficial in the previous years. CBO also did not predict the September 11, 2001 tragedy that wreaked havoc on our economy.

In reaction to the economic recession from these events, Congress enacted the bipartisan 2001 tax relief that cut tax rates across the board, providing tax relief to virtually all taxpayers. Then in 2003, Congress expedited this relief so the benefit of lower rates would take effect more quickly. This resulted in one of the shortest and shallowest economic recessions yet on record. The economy grew for 25 straight quarters, making it the fourth longest period of economic expansion since 1930. Additionally, we had 47 straight months of private sector job gain.

Moreover, the expanding economy led to higher than expected revenues. That is a fact. Revenue actually rose in the years following the tax relief bill, peaking at 18.5 percent of GDP in 2007, well above the historical average of around 18 percent.

In fact, the Congressional Budget Office projects that if we extended all the 2001 and 2003 tax relief today, revenues would once again exceed the historical average. Under this scenario, the CBO projects that by 2022 revenues will reach 18.5 percent of GDP.

From 2004 to 2007, the deficit also shrank from a high of $412 billion to a low of $160 billion. That means the budget deficit was cut by more than half in 3 years. Given the trillion dollar deficits we are experiencing under President Obama, a deficit below $200 billion would be very welcome news. Yet CBO projects that even if all the tax increases in President Obama's budget were enacted, deficits would never drop below $500 billion in the 10-year period from 2013 to 2022.

I will give President Obama credit when he says he took office in very tough economic times. The bursting of the housing bubble and the resulting financial crisis gave him a very high hill to climb, but any assertion the 2001 and 2003 tax relief is related to these events is without merit. There is plenty of blame to go around for the housing bubble. It was the culmination of housing policies spanning administrations of both parties. It was further fueled by the Federal Reserve providing historically low interest rates and cheap credit.

However, the President's policies have failed at getting us out of this mess. The President's party passed the President's nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill. He claimed this would keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent. However, the unemployment climbed to a high of 10.1 percent and has never dropped below 8 percent during his almost 4 years in office.

The President's party also passed the health care bill, which the President sold as a job creator, and the financial reform bill that was supposed to fix our financial system. However, both of these bills, which the President signed, have actually turned out to be costly to our economy and a hindrance to job creation.

Now President Obama appears ready to gamble with the economy. He appears to go all in on raising taxes on our Nation's job creators. In doing so, he is betting that raising taxes on the so-called wealthy will result in a political payoff exceeding the chance his actions will throw us back into recession. It is not so long ago that I remember the President saying what I have already referred to in this speech: ``You don't raise taxes in a recession.'' The President's statement is as true now it was then.

Let's end the political theater of holding votes for the purpose of campaign ads. Let's instead actually do what the people sent us here to do. Let us not drive the American economy head long off the fiscal cliff.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, rather than doing the usual thing and reserving the right to object, I will object, and then I would appreciate the courtesy, before I offer a parallel UC, to make my remarks.

Madam President, I am going to make a unanimous consent request dealing with the same subject.

Before I do that, I am astounded that it took 100 days for the majority to decide that the bill they wanted to send to the House would be blue-slipped because they kept saying it really wasn't subject to a blue slip. Obviously, the Constitution gives the House of Representatives the power to make that decision, and they made the decision that the fee in this bill would keep it from being accepted by the House of Representatives.

They have obviously overcome that problem. But they have not overcome some other problems with the legislation. My reason for objecting for people on my side who voted against this bill is because of some unconstitutional provisions that it contains, and issues that don't have to be brought up to guarantee there is adequate legislation for fighting violence against women.

By the way, I believe this act, which has been on the books for more than a decade and a half, is going to be carried on. So there is not going to be a situation where, whether or not we go through this process, there is not going to be legislation protecting women on the books. It is just a question whether it will be expanded in a way that was intended to make the bill controversial so, presumably, it could be made a political issue in an election year.

What bothers me about this whole process--besides the fact it has taken 100 days to get to the point of offering it for conference--is it fits into a pattern of doing things at the last minute. We are 2 days away from a recess, and this is brought up at this particular time. I have to ask why. Why not sometime during the last 100 days?

I also see a pattern of this maneuver fitting into the maneuvers that have been going on ever since, I believe, the spring break we had in the Senate. Ever since then--as reported in an article published in the newspaper we know as Politico a couple of months ago about a strategy between the White House reelection effort and things that go on in the Senate--we seem to have a crisis every week.

We came back from the spring break, and we had the Buffett tax rule. That was carried on for a week. Everybody knew that wasn't going to pass, but we wasted a whole week on the Buffett tax rule.

Then this issue was brought up before and passed about that time as part of a strategy of having a war on women come up as an issue. That ended in this legislation being passed through the Senate but in a way where everybody knew it wasn't going to get through the House of Representatives. But it was a very convenient political issue.

Later on, we had the equal wages for women legislation that came up for about a week. Once again, everybody knew that wasn't going to go anyplace, but it was debated in this assembly, taking up time from a lot of important issues that ought to be dealt with--the economy and creating jobs. We spent a week on that.

Then we spent a week on taxing the rich, and everybody knew that wasn't going to go anywhere.

I think we spent a month on interest rates on student loans. Everybody knew there was a bipartisan solution to that, but nobody wanted to go there until the President had a whole month of going to university campuses to blame Republicans for not passing a bill that would keep interest rates low on student loans.

Then we spent last week on the DISCLOSE Act. Everybody knew that wasn't going to go anyplace.

So we have had a whole spring and summer in this body of accomplishing nothing because there is a strategy between the White House and the leadership of the Senate to help this President get reelected. And to keep away from issues the people of this country are concerned about, which are the economy and creating jobs and the fact that this White House and this Senate aren't going to do anything to work through those issues.

Here in the Senate it is an issue of politics and not an issue of process. I think the American people know the games being played, and they are sick and tired of it.

So I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 406, H.R. 4970, the House-passed Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act; provided further that all after the enacting clause be stricken, the text of the Senate-passed violence against women bill, S. 1925, with a modification that strikes sections 805 and 810 related to the immigration provisions; that the bill be read three times and passed, the Senate insist on its amendment, request a conference with the House, and the Chair be authorized to appoint conferees on the part of the Senate with a ratio agreed to by both leaders.

Mr. President, over the last few days we have been lectured numerous times that we must protect cyber critical infrastructure; otherwise, our country is in jeopardy. Everybody agrees with that statement. Enhancing cyber security is important to our national security. I support efforts to strengthen our Nation against critical cyber attacks.

However, I take issue with those who have come to the floor and argued that those who don't support this bill are against strengthening our Nation's cyber security. Disagreements over how to address policy matters shouldn't evolve into accusations about a Member's willingness to tackle tough issues. The debate over cyber security legislation has turned from a substantive analysis of the merits into a political blame game as to which side supports defending our Nation more. If we want to tackle big issues such as cyber security, we need to rise above disagreements and work in a constructive manner. Disagreements over policy should be openly and freely debated.

Unfortunately, this isn't how the debate on cyber security proceeded. Instead, before a real debate began, the majority leader cut that debate off. As the discussion of cyber security began on the floor this week, Senators stated that a failure to grant broad new powers to the Federal Government will lead to a cyber 9/11. I agree that if we fail to take action on cyber security, there could be a national security consequence. However, I don't believe giving the Federal Government more regulatory authority over business and industry, as supporters of this bill propose, is the answer to strengthening cyber security.

Chief among my concerns with the pending bill is the role played by the Department of Homeland Security. These concerns stem from oversight that I have conducted on the implementation of a law called the Chemical Facility Antiterrorism Standards Program. That acronym would be CFATS. CFATS was the Department's first major foray into regulation of the chemical sector.

The Department of Homeland Security spent nearly $\1/2\ billion on that program. Now, 5 years later, they have just begun to approve site security plans for the more than 4,000 facilities designated under the rule.

I have continued to conduct oversight on this matter. Despite assurances from the Department of Homeland Security that they fixed all the problems with CFATS, I keep discovering more problems. So now I am baffled why we would take an agency that has proven problems with overseeing a critical infrastructure and give them chief responsibility for our country's cyber security.

Additionally, I am concerned with provisions that restrict the way information is shared. The restrictions imposed under title VII of the bill are a step backward from other information-sharing proposals. This includes the bill I have cosponsored, the SECURE IT bill. The bill before us places the Department of Homeland Security in the role of gatekeeper of cyber threat information. The bill calls for the Department of Homeland Security to share the information in ``as close to real time as possible'' with other agencies. However, this surely will create a bottleneck for information coming into the government.

Further, title VII includes restrictions on what types of information can be shared, limiting the use of it for criminal prosecution, except those that cause imminent harm.

This is exactly the type of restriction on information sharing that the 9/11 Commission warned us about. In fact, the 9/11 Commission said, ``the [wall] resulted in far less information sharing and coordination.'' The 9/11 Commission further added, ``the removal of the wall that existed before 9/11 between intelligence and law enforcement has opened up new opportunities for cooperative action.''

Why would we even consider legislation that could rebuild these walls that threaten our national security? How much of a real debate have we had on those issues I have raised? The lack of a real process in the Senate on this very bill amplifies my substantive concerns.

In fact, this is eerily reminiscent of the debate surrounding the health care reform bill. During that time, then-Speaker of the House Pelosi declared, ``We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.'' Well, we all know how well that worked out. Years of litigation later, the public is still learning what surprises the majority and President Obama had in store for the Nation's health care system.

Now here we are, once again, in the last week before our August summer break, tackling a serious problem that hasn't been given full process.

I do not want cyber security legislation to become another health care reform bill. If we are serious about our

Nation's security, then shouldn't we treat it as serious as it really is? We all agree how serious it is.

We are told that the Senate has been working on cyber security for 3 to 5 years. However, we have not been working on this bill before us for that long. The bill before us was introduced 13 days ago, and it was only pending on the floor for 4 days before the motion for cloture was filed. It did not go through the normal committee process. It was not debated or amended. Instead, it was brought straight to the floor, and we are being forced to consider it under a very rushed schedule.

Talking about the danger of cyber attacks for years is not the same as discussing the impact of the actual text of the bill which could become law. The words on the 212 pages of the bill are what must be analyzed, and analyzed in detail.

In fact, no one, except a handful of Senators, actually knows what the bill says or might say. And, of course, that is a process that debate in the U.S. Senate accomplishes or at least tries to accomplish.

We need full process and, unfortunately, that has not happened, and it does not look as if it will happen. Why won't it happen? Because the majority leader has limited debate. This week we were told that a group of Senators and their staff were working on a compromise.

Again, that is something all of us as a body do not know much about. We need an open debate in order to process this, as opposed to huddled, backroom meetings.

I do not think this is the way we are supposed to legislate. The people who elected us expect more. They expect transparency because they know when you get transparency, you have accountability.

How many Senators are prepared to vote on something this important without knowing its impact because we have not followed regular order? Are we to once again pass a bill so that the American public can then, at that time, find out what is in it a la Speaker Pelosi's statement on health care reform?

These are questions that all Senators should consider. And our citizens should know in advance what we are actually considering.

Yesterday, we heard claims that the amendments offered by Republicans were part of some obstructionist tactic. Why isn't the same statement made about the 77 or so amendments filed by Democrats? Somehow, are they acceptable and not obstructionist?

I had three amendments that addressed specific provisions in the bill, and I wanted to have a debate on them.

For example, I have an amendment to strike the provision in the bill that creates a cause of action against the Federal Government. What does that cause of action do? That provision waives sovereign immunity, provides for automatic damages, and provides for an award of attorney's fees.

This provision is, obviously, a gift to the trial lawyers lobby, which American taxpayers should not have to pay for. And I do not think class action lawsuits against the government will help with cyber security.

Another amendment of mine would have removed industry-specific carve- outs from the bill. This is another example of how backroom deal making takes place so as to get support and build support for a bill. We saw this happen with the health care reform bill. You know the famous ``Cornhusker Kickback'' that was agreed to in order to pass ObamaCare, and this process reminds me of that.

Here, to get support from companies in the information technology industry, the bill clearly states those companies cannot be identified as critical cyber infrastructure. So to build support for this bill-- but without people knowing what is in the bill--the authors carved out these companies from having to comply with the bill.

For example, under this carve-out, say an information technology company builds a router that has a flaw that is exploited by hackers. That router is purchased by every sector of the critical infrastructure, including power, water, and probably a lot of others that I ought to be able to name.

If that router flaw is exploited, and if that is attacked, the companies that bought the router are held responsible. However, the company that made the faulty router is not.

It is obvious how absurd this is. It is obvious how much of a major giveaway to a key industry it is, just to give the appearance of private sector support. This is not how we should handle cyber security, and I have an amendment to strike this provision. We should openly debate this issue and discuss whether this is the right course of action to give a carve-out to a specific segment of industry.

Again, the carve-out was a deal cut with one purpose: to limit opposition to the bill. Well, that was not good policy in 2009 on the ``Cornhusker Kickback'' in the health care reform debate, and we should learn from that lesson that it is, obviously, not good policy in 2012.

I also know that Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin had an amendment that the Congressional Budget Office issued a score on the cost of the bill before it could take effect.

Why were the supporters of the bill opposed to doing that? Do they believe they have a right to spend millions or billions of taxpayers' dollars at will without making the amount public? Are the supporters of the bill really prepared to vote for this bill without revealing how much it will cost?

But I will not get a chance to debate my amendments or Senator Johnson's amendment before the cloture vote because that is how the majority leader runs the U.S. Senate.

There are serious questions about this bill. It needs to be amended. We need to discuss changes. Unfortunately, it does not look as though that is going to happen.

I know some will, again, say that this has been a long process. The only thing true about that statement is that the issue and problem has been discussed for a long time--but not discussed for a long time on this bill.

If we are serious about addressing this problem, then let's deal with it appropriately. Rushing something through that will impact the country in such a massive way is not the way the most deliberative body in the world, the U.S. Senate, should do its business. It is not good for the country, and it is, obviously, not good for the reputation of the U.S. Senate.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

I thank the Chair.

(The remarks of Senator Inhofe pertaining to the introduction of S. 3473 are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

Madam President, I have a little bit of a problem in that I do not want to take time from the Senator who is in line to speak after me. But I would like to serve notice that there have been several things that were said on the floor today concerning this whole idea of global warming. We had a hearing this morning. It was kind of revealing because they have done everything they can to pass cap and trade, and it has not happened.

I wish to correct some statements that were made by Members. When the time comes that I have about 20 minutes to do this, I will do that. It will probably have to be later today because of the clock that is running now.

I yield the floor for my friend to take his turn.

Madam President, I understand the floor time is pretty much used up between now and 6:30. I have made inquiries. I understand I will have time at 6:30 for 25 minutes. I ask unanimous consent that I be recognized at 6:30 for 25 minutes.

I understand the next speakers are in the cloakroom at this time. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

That is perfectly all right. And I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of the remarks of my friend from New Jersey I be recognized for 30 minutes.

Mr. President, when we came back to session this week, I was pleased to see a very good friend of mine on the floor, of a completely different philosophy from mine and a different background and a different State, talking about--being somewhat critical of my position on global warming, which everybody knows I have been involved in for some 12 years since the Koyoto treaty, which was never before us.

Nonetheless, I appreciated the fact that we had a chance to resurrect that issue because, to my knowledge, nobody has uttered the term ``global warming'' since 2009. It has been completely refuted in most areas. But I was pleased to hear my good friend from Vermont talking about it because he and I have a very honest relationship with each other but a total disagreement. We are able to go over those things.

Then again today two things happened. First of all, we had the senior Senator from Massachusetts come down to the floor and was somewhat quite critical of me and anyone who is a skeptic. I think it is important to realize that to understand--so you understand, when we are talking, what we are referring to.

Those people who believe the world is coming to an end because of global warming and that is all due to manmade anthropogenic gases, we call those people alarmists. Those people such as myself who have looked at it very carefully and have come to the conclusion that is not happening and the fact or the assertion that global warming is occurring today and it is occurring because of the release of CO2 and anthropogenic gases, methane, and such as that, it is a hoax, which I said way back in 2003. This became quite a charge to a lot of people, a hoax that--the fact that all of this is happening is due to manmade gases. I believe it is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.

As a result of that, a lot of people are trying to do things to this country that are detrimental. By the way, we also had this morning--it was enjoyable. This is the first time since 2009 that the Environment and Public Works Committee has had a hearing on global warming, on the science or lack of science behind global warming.

I was delighted to see all these things resurrected. I know it is not proper to talk about your own books on the floor, and I do not do it, except I have to do it because it was mentioned by some of my adversaries, my book which was called ``The Greatest Hoax.'' Things were taken out of this book so I had to defend them. Let me just mention, if I can in this fairly short period of time that I have, I think it is only 30 minutes, some of the things that were stated, first of all, on the floor by the senior Senator from Massachusetts and then make some comments about the hearing this morning.

In fact, I am glad it is coming to the surface again. First of all, I was referred to as a ``skeptic.'' I mentioned just now that skeptics are those who do not believe what I referred to as the hoax. He referred to us as ``flat earthers.'' I learned a long time ago that if they do not have logic on their side, they do not have the science on their side, they respond with name calling. I have been called a lot of names. Let me just name a few. This comes right out of the book and some of the things that were said this morning. The ``noisiest climate skeptic,'' ``the Senate's resident denier bunny,'' ``traitor,'' ``dumb,'' ``crazy man,'' ``science abuser,'' ``Holocaust denier,'' ``villain of the month,'' ``hate filled,'' ``war mongering,'' ``Neanderthal,'' ``Genghis Khan''. It goes on and on. I will submit this for the Record.

But quite often we hear these things, it is only because there is not logic or science on their side. So they do name calling, which is fine. To me, that gets attention, and it needs to have the attention. The second thing, one of the other things that came out this morning, the statement was made by the senior Senator from Massachusetts, and I am quoting now, I believe: There are 6,000 peer-reviewed studies that say that no one peer-reviewed study that proves it is not happening.

There is not one, not one peer-reviewed study. A peer-reviewed study is a study that is published and then the peers review it. I think that is a process that is necessary. Consequently, that statement was made. That statement just flat is not right. In fact, let me go ahead and talk about some of these studies. If we look at the Harvard-Smithsonian study, that was a study which examined the results of more than 240 peer-reviewed papers published by thousands of researchers over the past four decades.

The study covers a multitude of geophysical and biological climate indicators. They came to the conclusion--this is a Harvard-Smithsonian peer-reviewed study. They came to the conclusion that climate change is not real, that the science is not accurate.

Dr. Fred Seitz. Dr. Fred Seitz is a former president of the National Academy of Science. He said: ``There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will in the foreseeable future

cause catastrophic heating of the earth's atmosphere and disruption of the earth's climate.''

I would like to pause at this moment, because I see the majority leader on the floor of the Senate, and inquire if they care to have some leadership time. I would be very glad to yield to them that time. Apparently, that is not the case.

Thirdly, this is something that happened very recently. One of the universities, George Mason University, surveyed 430 weathercasters and found that only 19 percent of the weathercasters felt catastrophic global warming is taking place and is a result of human activity.

That is quite a change from what it used to be. That means 81 percent of those weathercasters that we all see every night are saying that is not true.

Dr. Robert Laughlin, a Nobel Prize-winning Stanford University physicist, said:

Please remain calm. The earth will heal itself. Climate is

beyond our power to control. The earth doesn't care about

government and legislation. Climate change is a matter of

geologic time, something the earth does on its own without

asking anyone's permission or explaining itself.

I think the statement is certainly not an accurate statement that was made this morning. By the way, in terms of the climate change, I would like to suggest there is a Web site called Climate Depot by Marc Morano. In this, we can find multitudes of peer-reviewed studies. There is not time to go over them all, but we certainly can find them on that particular Web site.

Another statement made by the senior Senator from Massachusetts this morning was when they were talking about a former climate skeptic, Richard Muller, M-u-l-l-e-r. He changed his mind through extensive research, implying he at one time was a skeptic and he is now an alarmist. Let me tell you about Richard Muller. In 2008 Richard Muller said that the bottom line is that there is a consensus. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--we will talk about that later. The President needs to know what the IPCC says. Second, they say that most of the warming of the last 50 years is probably due to humans. You need to know that this is from carbon dioxide and that you need to know the understanding of the technology.

Mr. President, I was talking about and responding to the speech made on the floor this morning by the senior Senator from Massachusetts.

I think the main thing I got across at that time was the assertion that was made that there are 6,000 peer-reviewed studies that say not one peer-reviewed study proves that global warming is not happening and that anthropogenic gases would be the cause of it. I know it wasn't the intention of the senior Senator from Massachusetts to say something that was factually wrong, but I did read several peer-reviewed studies and referred to the Web site climatedepot.com, if anyone is interested in that.

Second is the fact that the Senator from Massachusetts--and then again in the hearing this morning, Richard Muller was referred to several times as being a former skeptic who converted over to an alarmist. I suggested--and I read something to show that, in my opinion, he never was a skeptic. I would like to make some comments about Richard Muller.

If you go to my Web site, you will find about 1,000 scientists who have come around and said: No, this assertion that we are having catastrophic global warming due to anthropogenic, manmade gases is not correct. Muller is not on that list. However, when they say that he is the one and made such a big issue, I will quote a couple people about their expressing themselves on the credibility of Richard Muller.

Professor Judith Curry, a climatologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, stated ``way over-simplistic and not at all convincing, in my opinion.'' She was talking about the comments by Muller. She also said, ``I don't see that their paper adds anything to our understanding of the causes of the recent warming.'' That is on the paper submitted by Richard Muller.

Roger Peilke, Jr., said that the ``bigger issue is how the New York Times let itself be conned into running [Muller's] op-ed.''

Michael Mann is the guy who started this whole thing at the U.N., putting it together. He had the hockey stick thing that has been totally discredited. He said:

It seems, in the end--quite sadly--that this is all really

about Richard Muller's self-aggrandizement.

So much for the statements that were made to give credibility to their side by Richard Muller.

I think another thing that was stated this morning was we have evidence of climate change all around--wildfires, drought and vegetation, and all that type. Then they talked about glaciers. Well, let me just share the facts about that, which I think are very significant, as far as the droughts and all that are concerned. Again, this is a statement made by the senior Senator from Massachusetts this morning, talking about all these things that are happening as a result of global warming.

Well, hurricanes, according to NOAA, have been on the decline in the United States since the beginning of records in the 19th century. The worst decade for major--category 3, 4, and 5--hurricanes was in the 1940s.

To quote the Geophysical Research Letters:

Since 2006, global tropical cyclone energy has decreased

dramatically . . . to the lowest levels since the late 1970s.

Global frequency of tropical cyclones has reached a historic

low.

So just the opposite.

On tornadoes, NOAA scientists reject a global warming link to tornadoes. To quote them:

No scientific consensus or connection between global

warming or tornado activity.

Droughts. The Senator talked about droughts this morning. Reading from this article, the headline is ``Scientist disagrees with Obama on cause of Texas drought:'' and to quote Dr. Robert Hoerling, a NOAA research meteorologist, ``This is not a climate change drought.''

They further said severe drought in 1934 covered 80 percent of the country compared to only 25 percent in 2011.

The statements that were made about the Arctic and about Greenland this morning, if you look at a November 2007 peer-reviewed--and I stress peer-reviewed--study, conducted by a team of NASA and university experts, it found cyclical changes in ocean currents impacting the Arctic. The excerpt from this peer-reviewed study by NASA says:

Our study confirms that many changes seen in upper Arctic

Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature,

rather than trends caused by global warming.

And 2011 sees 9,000 Manhattans of Arctic ice recovery since the low point in 2007.

Let me explain what that means. When we talk about the Manhattan Arctic recovery, they use Manhattan because that is something people can identify with, and then they relate that to the recovery of ice. In this case--this is, again, from NASA. In 2011, there were 9,000 Manhattans of Arctic ice recovery since the low point in 2007. Now, this study was 2011. So that means the low point was actually below that, and it has been decreasing since that time.

Now, that was the Arctic. In the Antarctic there is a 2008 peer- reviewed paper in the American Geophysical Union, and it found a doubling in snow accumulation in the western Antarctic Peninsula since 1850. In a paper published in the October Journal of Climate Examples, the trend of sea ice extends along the east Antarctic coast from 2000 to 2008 and finds a significant increase of 1.43 percent per year.

Let's talk about Greenland. And I will always remember when I had occasion--well, one of the things I have been interested in is aviation. I have been an active pilot for, I guess, 60 years now. The occupier of the chair is fully aware of this because he and I together were able to pass the pilots' bill of rights, so for the first time an accused pilot has access to the judicial system. But as the occupier of the chair is fully aware, I had occasion to fly an airplane around the world one time, emulating the flight of Wiley Post when he went around the world. It is an exciting thing, but it is one of those things where you feel you are glad you did it, but you never want to do it again. It was kind of miserable at times.

Anyway, I remember coming across Greenland, following Wiley Post, and starting in the United States, going up to Canada, then Greenland, to Iceland,

back to western Europe, and then across Siberia. But in Greenland they are still talking up there about what it used to be like in Greenland. They had gone through this melting period where everyone up there was growing things. They were ecstatic up there, talking about the great old times. Then, of course, the cold spell came along, and it got much colder and it was much worse.

Now, the IPCC, in 2001, covered this. They said that to melt the Greenland ice sheet would require temperatures to rise by 5\1/2\ degrees Celsius and remain for 1,000 years. The ice sheet is growing 2 inches a year. So that is Greenland, and they were just talking about Greenland this morning. In fact, they talked about it during this hearing too.

Let me mention this IPCC and remind everyone of something that people tend to forget. The IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was put together by the United Nations a long time ago. It all started in 1992 down in Rio de Janeiro. They had their big gathering down there to try to encourage everyone to pass the Kyoto Treaty. The treaty was never even submitted by the Clinton-Gore administration, although Gore went to this big meeting in Rio de Janeiro. They had a wonderful time down there. At that time they were all saying the world is coming to an end so we have to pass the Kyoto Treaty to stop all that. Well, that is the IPCC that I have been very critical of because that is the science on which all of these things are based that we are dealing with today.

So much for these things that were stated in terms of the disasters and the droughts and all of these problems. The next thing he talked about--and I have already talked about Greenland--is he talked about it is going to be necessary to have carbon caps. I think we talked about that this morning. Right now, there are those people who are advocating cap and trade--a very complex, difficult thing to explain--which is essentially requiring a cap on carbon emissions and then trading these emissions back and forth. That is something they do not talk about anymore because that has been completely discredited. Now they are talking about a carbon tax, and I think that was mentioned this morning.

Quoting the Senator from Massachusetts this morning once again:

The avoidance of responsibility has to stop. We have been

waiting for 20 years now while other countries, including

China, are stealing our opportunities.

Let's put up that chart. Let's talk a little about China. You know China is the great beneficiary of anything we do here to put caps on carbon because they are the ones that are doing it. So they say China is making great strides in reducing their carbon emissions. Well, look at this. The green line there is China. This is in emissions--billions of tons of emissions. It starts down at 2, a little over 2, which was in 1990, and it was fairly low until 2002.

Look at what has happened. It has doubled in tons of emissions. China has actually doubled in that period of time, from 2002 to 2012--a 10- year period.

At the same time, we have actually reduced our emissions--both the United States and the European Union. To suggest that China is sitting back there waiting for us to provide the leadership for them to destroy their economy is pretty outrageous.

By the way, the other statement that has been made in the past, not just by the Senator to whom I have referred but several others, is that we are not going to be able to solve the problem and to do something about our reliance upon the Middle East just by developing our own resources. That is wrong.

There is a guy named Harold Hamm, who is now the authority, and he has actually had more successful production in tight formations. He happens to be from my State of Oklahoma. I called him up before a speech or a debate I was involved in probably 6 months ago, and I said to Harold Hamm: You know, if we were to open up the United States--now, granted, there has been a surge in the production in this country, in the recovery, but that is all in private lands; none in public lands because we have had a reduction in public lands.

The Obama administration has said over and over and over--and I guess if you say something wrong enough times people will believe it--that even if we open these public lands it would take 10 years before that would arrive at the pumps.

So I asked Harold Hamm, and I said: You are going to have to give me something you can document, but if we were to set up in New Mexico, for example, where you are precluded on public lands from drilling, and you put up your operation, how long would it take you to bring up the oil and actually go through the whole refinery process and get it to the pump to get the supply there so we can bring down the price of oil, of gas, at the pumps? He said: Seventy days. He didn't hesitate.

I said: Seventy days? They said it would take 10 years.

He said: No. He said: It would take 30 days to go down and lift it up--60 days before you hit the surface, and in preparation of sending it to a refinery, then in 10 days you get it to the refinery and to the pumps.

Well, I am just saying there is this whole idea we have to rely on some kind of green energy that has not even been developed yet in terms of technology and ration what we have in this country. I mean, this Obama administration has had a war on fossil fuels since before he was elected President of the United States. He wants to kill fossil fuels. We all know that. And I am not going to quote all the people in his administration who say we are going to have to raise the price at the pumps to be comparable to Central Europe before people will be weaned off of fossil fuel because I think people know that now.

This morning was kind of interesting. We had a hearing this morning, and one of the witnesses was a Dr. Christopher Field. He was a witness for the other side, and he made a lot of statements. It was kind of interesting because there is an article that was sent out, written by Roger Pielke, Jr., who is from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and he was actually on the IPCC at one time. But he is one of the authorities who disagrees with me, and he talked about how wrong Dr. Field was.

Now, this is what Field said, first of all:

As the U.S. copes with the aftermath of last year's record-

breaking series of $14 billion climate-related disasters and

this year's massive wildfires and storms, it is critical to

understand that the link between climate change and the kinds

of extremes that lead to disasters is clear.

Well, what did Roger Pielke say this morning? He said:

Field's assertion that the link between climate change and

disaster ``is clear,'' which he supported with reference to

U.S. ``billion dollar'' economic losses, is in reality

scientifically unsupported by the IPCC. Period.

That was the response to the assertion made this morning.

Another assertion made this morning by Field was:

The report identified some areas where droughts have become

longer and more intense (including southern Europe and west

Africa), but others where droughts have become less frequent,

less intent or shorter.

This is what was said in response to that. Again, this is Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., just today. This is in today's paper he published.

Field conveniently neglected in his testimony to mention

that one place where droughts have gotten less frequent, less

intense or shorter is . . . the United States. Why did he

fail to mention this region, surely of interest to U.S.

Senators. . . .

Myself included--that were on the panel?

The third thing he mentioned on NOAA's billion-dollar disasters; Field said:

The U.S. experienced 14 billion-dollar disasters in 2011, a

record that far surpasses the previous maximum of 9.

Field says nothing about the serious issues with NOAA's tabulation. The billion-dollar disaster memo is a PR train wreck, not peer- reviewed, and is counter to the actual science summarized in the IPCC. Again, this is Dr. Pielke, Jr., who disagrees with me on this, but he said he is tired of people saying things that are not true.

I ask unanimous consent to include his entire statement in the Record because he goes over point after point and discredits everything that was said by this witness--whose name is Christopher Field--this morning.

It is important to talk about the IPCC because if we stop and think about it, everything that has been happening comes from the science that was investigated and formulated by the IPCC-- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--that is, the United Nations. In my book I talk a little bit about that, but I don't believe it would be appropriate to mention it at this time. But at today's hearing, we talked about the IPCC.

When they were unable, through about five or six different bills, to get cap and trade through--keep in mind, cap and trade through legislation would cost the American people between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. But when that failed, we had something happen in December 2009.

The United Nations has this big party every year, and they invite countries from around the world to testify that global warming is happening and they are going to do something about it. One time in Milan, Italy, I saw one of my friends from West Africa. I said, What in the world are you doing here? You know better than this--in terms of global warming. He said, This is the biggest party of the year. Besides that, if we agree to go along with this, we in West Africa are going to get billions of dollars from the United Nations, from those countries in the developed nations.

Another big party was coming up in Copenhagen in 2009. I think Senator Kerry had gone over; Hillary Clinton had gone over. I don't believe Barack Obama was there. Nancy Pelosi was there and several others were there. They were telling all these countries: Don't you worry about it because we in the United States of America are going to pass cap-and-trade legislation this year. So I said I was going to go over as a one-man truth squad to let them know the truth, and I did. I went over and told the 191 other countries there: We are not going to pass cap and trade. It is dead. It is gone. They can't get one-third of the Senate to support it.

Before I left, one of my favorite liberals, Lisa Jackson--I really like her. She is Obama's appointee and is now the Director of the Environmental Protection Agency. Right before I went to Copenhagen, we had a hearing and she was a witness.

I said: Madam Administrator, I have a feeling that once I leave and go to Copenhagen, you are going to come out with an endangerment finding that will give you justification to start doing what they couldn't do by legislation through regulations. And I could see a smile on her face.

I said: When you do this, it has to be based on science. What science are you going to base this on?

She said: Well, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would be the major thing. And, sure enough, that is exactly what happened.

I could not have planned it, but she made this declaration that we now are going to be able to do through regulation what we couldn't do through legislation because the people of America had spoken through their elected representatives in the House and the Senate and had denied the opportunity to do cap and trade, so they decided to do it on an endangerment finding.

What happened after that is what I call poetic justice. Climategate occurred. I had nothing to do with it when it happened, but all the speeches I had made in the previous 10 years on the floor of this Senate were speeches saying exactly the same thing: that they were cooking the science and what they were saying was not real.

I read several of the editorials that came out after climategate. The New York Times has always been on the other side of this issue. They said:

Given the stakes, the IPCC cannot allow more missteps and,

at the very least, must

tighten procedures and make its deliberation more

transparent. The panel's chairman . . . is under fire for

taking consulting fees from business interests. . . .

The Washington Post, which has also been on the other side of this issue, said:

Recent revelations about flaws in that seminal IPCC report,

ranging from typos in key dates to sloppy sourcing, are

undermining confidence not only in the panel's work but also

in projections about climate change.

Newsweek:

Some of the IPCC's most-quoted data and recommendations

were taken straight out of unchecked activist brochures,

newspaper articles. . . .

Christopher Booker of the UK Telegraph said of climategate, `` . . . the worst scientific scandal of our generation.''

Clive Crook of the Financial Times said: ``The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.''

A prominent physicist from the IPCC said: ``Climategate was a fraud on the scale I have never seen.''

Another UN Scientist, bails:

UN IPCC Coordinating author Dr. Philip Lloyd calls out IPCC

`fraud'--the result is not scientific.

Newsweek:

Once celebrated climate researchers feeling like used car

salesmen. Some of IPCC's most-quoted data and recommendations

were taken straight out of unchecked activist brochures.

Clive Cook of the Atlantic Magazine, speaking of the IPCC, responds:

I had hoped, not very confidently, that the various

Climategate inquiries would be severe. This would have been a

first step towards restoring confidence in the scientific

consensus.

So everyone is in agreement that this is what climategate was all about. And why I am spending so much time on this is because this is the science of all of these things that started since Kyoto.

By the way, the Senator, this morning on the floor, commented about the Kyoto Treaty. Let's keep in mind, the Kyoto Treaty was back during the Clinton-Gore administration. They were strongly in support of it. Vice President Gore went down to the summit they were having in Rio de Janeiro and signed the treaty, but they never submitted it to the Senate.

To become a part of a treaty, it has to be ratified by the United States. It never was, and people need to understand that there is a reason it never was submitted.

I would suggest a couple of other things in the remainder of the time that I have that I think are significant and worthy of bringing up. One would be the one-weather event. The thing that we are hearing more about than anything else is that it has been a very hot summer. On Monday, my wife called me up and said: In Tulsa it is 109 degrees today.

I was joking around with my good friend from Vermont--we disagree with each other, but he is a good friend. Sure, it is hot. But it is so important that people understand, weather is not climate.

Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at University of Colorado, said:

Over the long term, there is no evidence that disasters are

getting worse because of climate change.

Judith Curry, chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, has said:

I have been completely unconvinced by any of the arguments

. . . that attribute a single extreme weather event, a

cluster of extreme weather events, or statistics of extreme

weather events to anthropogenic forcing.

Myles Allen at the University of Oxford's Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Planetary Physics Department:

When Al Gore said . . . that scientists now have clear

proof that climate change is directly responsible for the

extreme and devastating floods, storms and droughts . . . my

heart sank.

I consider Rachel Maddow of MSNBC to be one of the outstanding liberals, and she is one of my four favorite liberals. I have been on her program, and I have enjoyed it. Bill Nye, the Science Guy, agrees that some of these weather events have nothing to do with global warming.

The other thing I made a note of that came up this morning was that they said there is no evidence on cooling. I think it is important to talk about that a little bit because a prominent Russian scientist said:

We should fear a deep temperature drop--not catastrophic

global. . . . Warming had a natural origin . . .

CO2 is not guilty.

U.N. Fears (More) Global Cooling Cometh! An IPCC scientist warns the

I do think it is important to bring this up because this is happening right now, after 3 years, and not one mention of global warming, and all of a sudden it is global warming.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to extend my time by 5 minutes.

This morning I showed a picture of an igloo. I have 20 kids and grandkids. My daughter Molly and her husband have four children. One of those is adopted from Africa, a little girl. She was brought over here when she was a little baby. She is now 12 years old, reading at a college level. She is an outstanding little girl. I sponsor the African dinner every February, and she, for the last 3 years, has been kind of a keynote speaker, and everybody loves her.

They were up here 2 years ago, and they couldn't leave because all the airports were closed because of the ice storm. What do you do with a family of six when they are stuck someplace? They built an igloo. That was fun--a real igloo that will sleep four people. This became quite an issue, and we had articles from France and Great Britain and all criticizing my family. In fact, my cute little family was declared by Keith Olbermann of MSNBC to be the worst family in America because of this.

The point they were trying to make is, no one ever asserted that because it was the coldest winter in several decades up here that somehow that refuted global warming. I said: No, that isn't true. Now those same people are saying that it is.

So you can fool the American people part of the time and you can talk about all the hysteria and all the things that are taking place, but the people of America have caught on.

In March 2010, in a Gallup poll, Americans ranked global warming dead last, No. 8 out of eight environmental issues. They had a vote, and this was dead last.

A March Rasmussen poll: 72 percent of American voters don't believe global warming is a serious problem.

An alarmist, Robert Socolow, laments:

We are losing the argument with the general public big time

. . . I think the climate change activists--myself included--

have lost the American middle.

So as much money as they have spent and the efforts they have made, and moveon.org and George Soros and Michael Moore and the United Nations and the Gore people and the elitists out in California in Hollywood, they have lost this battle. Now they are trying to resurrect it. They would love nothing more than to pass this $300 billion tax increase. It is not going to happen.

But I am glad that we are talking about it again, and I applaud my friend. Senator Sanders from Vermont is a real sincere activist on the other side. We agree on hardly anything--except infrastructure, I would have to

say--and yet we respect each other. That is what this body is all about. We should have people who are on both sides of all these controversial issues talking about it. There has been a silence for 3 years. Now we are talking about it again.

So welcome back to the discussion of global warming. I look forward to future discussions about this.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Unanimous Consent Agreement S. 3326

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. President, it is pretty unusual for me to come to the floor to say I want to spend money. But I have had a longstanding problem as I sign the letters of condolences to hundreds of families in Oklahoma who have lost their loved one by serving this country.

I come to the floor to offer a critique on one of the most important things to the people who truly put their lives on the line for this country. It is a national security issue, but it is truly about our men and women in uniform and the most important deployed weapon system over the last 10 years of war; that is, the Army service rifle and their other small arms.

There is nothing more important to a soldier than his rifle or her rifle. There is simply no excuse for not providing our soldiers with the best weapon, not just a weapon that is ``good enough.''

As I go through this, I am going to give a history of what the military has done--or, rather, basically what they have not done--in terms of having available for our soldiers a weapon that is capable of giving them the best possible chance when they serve our country.

Over the last few years, we have spent $8,000 per soldier on new radios, but we still are using a weapon that is 25 years old when it comes to their M4.

I first got involved in this when I got e-mails. I gave many in the Oklahoma National Guard--who served multiple tours, with lots of life lost in Iraq and Afghanistan--I gave those soldiers my personal e-mail, and I said: If you are having a problem over there, e-mail me.

I started hearing about the malfunction, the lack of effectiveness of the M4 for the Oklahomans who were over there. It is the same weapon the career Army has. It is the same weapon everybody who is issued a standard rifle is given, except for our special forces and others in the world who have a better rifle than the U.S. soldier on the ground fighting on our behalf.

I have noted before in the Congressional Record that I have lifted my objection to the nomination of Ms. Heidi Shyu to be the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisitions. It is an important position. She is in charge of $28 billion worth of expenditures. My objection was due to the Army's continued lack of urgency in modernizing and fielding new rifles, carbines, pistols, light machine guns, and ammunition for our troops in combat. Ms. Shyu has been very responsive to me and has provided some information regarding the Army's future plans for small arms and ammunition.

So when I started getting the questions from our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, I started looking into what was happening. Most of our soldiers know exactly what to do and how to care for their rifle. They know how to take care of it. So we looked into the issue. What we found was that there were several studies that raised questions about the reliability of the M4 rifle and whether there was a better weapon out there for our troops.

For example, a special operations forces report in February 2001 said the M4's short barrel and gas tube increased the risk that a round might not eject from the rifle properly after it is fired. In other words, they fire it and the round does not come out. That is called a jam--when you are having bullets coming at you and your rifle is jamming.

What we did was we set up a test, and the Army would not do it. So I put a hold on the Secretary of the Army Pete Geren's nomination. We talked, and he assured me we would have a new competition for a new rifle for our troops. That was in 2007.

Here we are, 5 years later, and the Army is now telling us we are going to complete a new competition in 2014. But in the meantime, we had a test done against our soldiers' rifle and others available in the world, in terms of a dust test, and we came in last.

So we are sending our troops to defend us and fight for a cause that we have put blood, sweat, tears, and $1 trillion into, and we are sending them with one that does not work the best.

My question to the Army is, Why? I can tell you why. Because the guys who are responsible for making the decision on purchasing the rifles are not the guys who are out there on the line. Because if they were, we would have already had this competition and our service men and women would be getting new rifles.

It is not that we cannot do it because what we learned--as we went back in

and reupped in Afghanistan--we determined that the MRAP was not suitable for the rocky terrain as compared to what we used it for in Iraq.

In less than 16 months and after rapid testing and fielding, new MRAP All-Terrain Vehicles--that was designed specifically for Afghanistan; a complicated piece of vital equipment, costing $\1/2\ million each-- started arriving in Afghanistan.

So it is not that we cannot supply our soldiers with a new rifle. It is not that it cannot be done. It is that we refuse to do it.

For $1,500, we can give every person on the line something equivalent to what our special forces have today.

Let me show some history.

The average age of our troops rifle is 26 years. The average age of the German military rifle, small arms, is 12 years. For the U.S. special operations forces, theirs is 8 years. Guess what. They have new technology. Our regular frontline guys, they do not get it. They cannot have it. It costs the same, but they cannot have it because it is not a priority for the leadership in the Army to give the most deployed piece of equipment our troops need--that defends them, protects them, and gives them the ability to come home alive--we will not give it to them. It is shameful. It is shameful.

Let me give a history of what happened just once in Afghanistan.

It was called the battle of Wanat. On July 13, 2008, in the battle of Wanat, in Afghanistan, 200 Taliban troops attacked U.S. troops at a remote outpost in eastern Afghanistan. The Taliban were able to break through our lines and entered the main base before eventually being repelled by artillery and aircraft.

What is notable about the battle was the perceived performance of the soldiers' small arms weapons in the initial part of the battle.

Here are some quotes:

My M4 quit firing and would no longer charge when I tried

to correct the malfunction.

I couldn't charge my weapon and put another round in

because it was too hot, so I got mad I threw my weapon down.

It would be bad enough if this was the first time it happened. But it is not the first time it has happened. It has happened multiple times to our troops in our present conflicts.

All we have to do is go back to what happened with the M16 when they were first used in Vietnam. There were instant reports of jamming and malfunctions. One tragic but indicative marine action report read:

We left with 72 men in our platoon and came back with 19.

Believe it or not, you know what killed most of us? Our own

rifle. Practically every one of our dead was found with his

M16 torn down next to him where he had been trying to fix it.

That is occurring now, except it is not getting any press. Again, I would ask my colleagues in the Senate: Why would we not give our soldiers the capability that almost every other soldier has except ours?

There is another aspect of this that I think needs to be shared; that is, the fact that it is all about acquisitions and culture rather than about doing the right thing. I do not like giving this talk critical of the leadership of the Army. But when it is going to take 7 years to field a new rifle and in 18 months we can build and design a completely new $500,000 piece of equipment, an MRAP, for Afghanistan or when we can spend $8,000 per troop to give them a new radio--which are all going to be replaced in the next 2 years with another $8,000--and we cannot give them a $1,500 H&K or something equivalent, there is something wrong with our system. Our priorities are out of whack.

If the Department of Defense had spent just 15 percent less on radios, they could give every soldier in the military a new, capable, modern weapon, and it does not just apply to their rifle.

One of the biggest complaints, after the M4, is the fact that the regular Army gets a 9-millimeter pistol that weighs over 2 pounds, but our special operations forces get a .45-caliber pistol that weighs less than 1\1/2\ pounds. That is a big difference when you are out there all day. But the most important thing is, a .45-caliber round is twice the size of a 9-millimeter round, so when you are shooting it and you hit somebody, it is going to take them down. A 9-millimeter does not. So we are giving them an inferior pistol throughout the military.

Then, finally, here is what an M4 carbine looks like compared to an HK416, as shown on this chart. One other point I would make. This piece of equipment fires on automatic. This other piece of equipment--because the military wants to save some bullets--will not fire on automatic. So our soldiers are facing people who have automatic fire and they can fire in bursts of three and at half the rate of what they are facing.

Why would we do that? The real question is, we are asking people to defend this country. For essentially the same amount of money, we can buy an old-style, 26-year-old M4 or we can buy a brandnew one that gives them everything they need and gives them the best weapon. Do they not deserve that?

A lot of people do a lot of things for our country. But nobody does for our country what the soldier on the frontline does--nobody. This is a moral question, Mr. Secretary of the Army. This is a moral question. Get the rifle competition going.

Members of Congress, members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, do not allow this to continue to happen. Do not allow this to continue to happen. There is no excuse for it. We should be embarrassed. We should be ashamed. Because what we are doing is sending our troops into harm's way with less than the best that we can provide for them.

As I have noted, I have lifted my objection to the nomination of Ms. Heidi Shyu to be the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisitions. This is an extremely important position for an organization as large as the U.S. Army which spends $28 billion per year on acquisition of goods and services. My objection was due to the Army's continued lack of urgency in modernizing and fielding new rifles, carbines, pistols, light machine guns, and ammunition to our troops in combat. Ms. Shyu has been responsive to me and provided some information regarding the Army's future plans for small arms and ammunition.

I first got involved in the Army small arms issue 6 years ago when Oklahoma National Guard soldiers told me that their issued weapon, the M4 carbine, was jamming in Iraq. These soldiers were told by their superiors that jamming resulted from poor weapons maintenance on their part and not from any fault of the rifle. While cleaning and proper maintenance of a weapon are extremely important, sand and dust in Iraq are a daily occurrence and any small arms weapon our troops use there should be able to fire reliably in spite of some sand and dust.

Also, the National Guard soldiers from my State--as is the case for Guard soldiers from many if not all of our States--are somewhat more likely to hunt or serve as police officers or security guards in their civilian lives. In other words, National Guard soldiers in the infantry generally know better than most how to care for rifles. So my staff looked into this issue and found that there were studies that raise questions on the reliability of the M4 and whether there was a better weapon out there for our troops. For example, a special operations forces report in February 2001 said that the M4's short barrel and gas tube increased risk that round might not eject from the rifle properly after firing.

I also learned that in the early 1990s Colt received funding from the Army to produce the M4 carbine, which would be a shorter variant on the M16 rifle. This was not done through a competition and was considered merely an extension of Colt's original M16 contract.

This lack of competition would later greatly benefit Colt. In 1999 Colt charged the military less than $600 per M4 carbine. This would rise to more than $900 in 2002 and more than $1,200 for a fully equipped carbine in 2010 when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan resulted in more M4s being bought.

So in 2007 I raised these questions and even put a hold on the nomination of Secretary of the Army Pete Geren. To his credit, he ordered a full and open competition for a new carbine rifle no later than the end of 2009.

It is now 2012 and the Army still has not completed a competition for a new carbine rifle, now scheduled for 2014. The window for the regular Army soldiers to battlefield test an improved rifle in a war we have been in for 12 years is rapidly closing. This extended and lengthy process is for a weapon

system that--while vital--costs less than $2,000 each.

This 7-year effort differs greatly from their effort to field new armored combat vehicles in Afghanistan. According to the Government Accountability Office, in 2008 Army leaders determined that the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected, MRAP, vehicle was not suitable for the rocky terrain of Afghanistan. In less than 16 months and after rapid testing and fielding, new MRAP all-terrain vehicles, M-ATV, a complicated piece of vital equipment costing $500,000 each--started arriving in Afghanistan.

In contrast, according to the Government Accountability Office, the Department of Defense spent more than $11 billion buying newer models of existing legacy radios from 2003 to 2011 and is currently planning on spending billions more on even newer radios to replace the ones just purchased for Iraq and Afghanistan. There are only 1.4 million troops on active duty so the Department of Defense has spent nearly $8,000 per troop on new radios. A brand new rifle--that soldiers don't have--costs around $1,000 to $1,500.

If the Department of Defense had just spent 15 percent less on the billions and billions they spent on newer models of legacy radios in the last 10 years, every soldier in the Army could have had a brandnew carbine rifle going to war.

In addition to the rifle, there remains a great need for improvement of the Army's service pistol. This pistol, usually given to officers but also as an additional weapon to some infantry soldiers, is the M9 Beretta. This pistol entered the Army in 1985, 27 years ago, and fires a 9mm round. The M9 pistol had the lowest satisfaction rate of any weapon surveyed by the military in 2006 on troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with half feeling that the 9mm ammunition is insufficient.

Is the Army's failure to modernize its rifles, pistols and machine guns a recent occurrence? Sadly no, the Army's reluctance to field new weapons runs throughout its history. In far too many instances U.S. Army troops have entered battle with an inferior weapon to their adversaries and either during or after the war ended the Army was reluctant to change and adapt to the superior weapons.

In 1776 colonial forces faced the British at the Battle of Brandywine where the British used a new breech loading weapon that loaded at the rear of the weapon rather than the muzzle or front of the weapon. As a result trained British soldiers could fire more than twice as fast as trained colonial American soldiers. The breech loading weapon was not used much in the Revolutionary War but where it was used, such as at the Battle of Brandywine, it was described as acting magnificently: 93 British killed and 400 wounded compared to over 300 Americans that died, 600 wounded, and 400 prisoners captured.

However when Americans again fought the British in the War of 1812-- 36 years later--the Americans were still using the same muzzle loading weapon they fought with during the Battle of Brandywine.

U.S. Army troops at war against Mexico in 1845 did not have breech loading rifles, but rather continued to carry muzzle-loading rifles when fighting against Mexico--nearly 80 years after the breech-loading rifle was invented.

During the Civil War one Union officer in particular was unsatisfied with the Army's standard muzzle-loaded rifle and decided to do something about it. Colonel Wilder, commander of the Union's ``Lightning Brigade'' decided to go around the Army bureaucracy. His men spent $35 out of their paychecks to buy Spencer Repeating Rifles direct from the factory for his mounted cavalry. In one of the first battles using this new rifle Wilder's ``Lightning Brigade'' of 1,000 soldiers defended the Union flank against over 8,000 Confederate troops that could not pass. At one point one company of Colonel Wilder's men held off ten times as many Confederate troops using their repeating rifles for 5 hours.

However, the Army did not widely adopt the repeating rifle after the Civil War. More than 30 years later in the Spanish-American War, 5,000 American soldiers armed with single shot rifles attacked fewer than 1,000 Spanish soldiers armed with a German `Mauser' repeating rifle. While Americans won the battle by attrition (there were 10,000 U.S. troops in reserve), the U.S. Army suffered over 1,400 casualties, with 205 killed, while the Spanish lost fewer than 250, with 58 killed, before surrendering.

A telling American newspaper column title from 1898 aptly summarizes the problems: ``The [U.S. Army] Gun: It is Inferior in Many Respects to the Mauser [rifle] used by the Spaniards.'' The article states unequivocally that the ``enemy's [Spain's] weapon is easier to load [and] can be fired more rapidly''.

The 20th Century would see a great deal of further modernization, improvement, and innovation in the area of small arms to include lighter fully automatic assault rifles capable of firing at a rate of more than 10 rounds per second rather than per minute.

The United States entered World War I with a Springfield 1903 rifle, named for the Armory and the year it was produced, which was possibly the third best rifle in the world at that time. The British Enfield-Lee rifle held ten rounds instead of 5 and could fire upwards of 20 rounds per minute. The American rifle held only 5 rounds and fired 10 rounds per minute which was similar, but still inferior to the German rifle that was capable of firing more rounds per minute.

The U.S. Army did enter World War II with one of the last great battle rifles, the M1 Garand, but its success during that conflict may have blinded the Army to a revolutionary development in small arms: the invention of the modern lightweight fully-automatic assault rifle. From 1942 to 1944 Germany invented the world's first assault rifles--rifles that could fire 550 to 600 rounds per minute and held detachable 30 round magazines. However, it would be over two decades later before U.S. Army soldiers were permitted to have lightweight assault rifles.

Shortly after World War II ended the Soviet Union invented the AK-47 fully automatic assault rifle. This rifle's success is easily stated: over 90 million AK-47s or derivatives have been built. It is very likely a weapon that has inflicted more casualties than any other weapon on earth. Soviet troops had this rifle nearly 20 years before the United States Army would issue assault rifles to its soldiers.

In 1958, an American inventor named Eugene Stoner developed the AR-15 rifle in less than 9 months, which would eventually become the M16. This revolutionary rifle weighed six pounds and fired at a rate between 700 and 900 shots per minute with little recoil and the lightweight but still deadly 5.56mm ammunition meant soldiers could carry more firepower than before.

However, it took the then-Chief of Staff of the Air Force General Curtis LeMay to purchase 85,000 of them for use by Air Force base defense airmen before they got into the military at all. The U.S. Army was strongly opposed to the M16. Some of these weapons were used by Special Forces troops serving as advisers in Vietnam, increasing the pressure for the Army to adopt it. The Army initially refused the AR- 15s stating the ``lack of any military requirement.''

At this point, it should be clarified that the Army has used the phrase ``lack of a requirement'' for more than 50 years to justify slowing down and not innovating in the area of small arms. I first encountered the phrase ``lack of a requirement'' in 2006 when asking why the Army couldn't field a better carbine rifle that didn't jam in the desert. I am hearing the same phrase today when I ask why soldiers can't have a better light machine gun or pistol. Soldiers have complained about these weapons but they can't have a new one because there is no ``military requirement.'' Congress is often frustrated by the term ``military requirement'' because it can be used to deflect responsibility from the person using it. It says the Army is fearful of offering its judgment on whether or not someone made a weapon that is better than what the Army has, so it instead says that the weapon is not needed.

It took intervention by President Kennedy and Secretary of Defense McNamara to order the Army to adopt the M16 rifle--the military version of the AR-15. Then what happened in Vietnam was a tragic occurrence that took the direct involvement and investigation of Congress and deaths of thousands of soldiers to remedy.

When the M16s were first used in Vietnam there were nearly instant reports of jamming and malfunctions. One tragic but indicative Marine after-action report read:

We left with 72 men in our platoon and came back with 19.

Believe it or not, you know what killed most of us? Our own

rifle. Practically every one of our dead was found with his

M16 torn down next to him where he had been trying to fix it.

Before the necessary fixes could be made to the weapon which included switching back to the original type of ammunition propellant and issuing cleaning supplies in early 1967, nearly ten thousand American soldiers had been killed. Before the Army made the changes these soldiers were told--much as soldiers are told today--that problems with their weapons are their fault: a lack of care and cleaning or operator error. There is no formal process where soldiers are required to provide feedback to Army leadership on a jammed weapon in order to accurately note issues with reliability.

There were six warnings from various arsenals and offices within the Department of Defense as to the problems with the M16. However, the Army Materiel Command and Army senior leaders would not listen. It took public pressure and a massive congressional investigation by the House Armed Services Committee to get to the bottom of the problems with the Army's small arms in Vietnam. It was discovered that the Army was using a different ammunition propellant--procured from a sole-source contract--that caused the M16 to jam. After Congressional intervention, the original propellant was used and the problems with the M16 nearly disappeared. After Vietnam, the Army formally adopted the M16 as its service rifle and by 1968 nearly all troops surveyed said they preferred the M16 to any other rifle.

The post-Vietnam era saw changes for the M16 weapon, few of them positive. In 1980 the Army adopted a different, heavier 5.56mm round that required different rifling for the caliber which marginally improved penetration of armor and helmets but at the cost of greatly reducing.

U.S. troops would find out in Iraq and Afghanistan that the enemy did not wear helmets or armor. As a result the rounds would penetrate through the enemy and exit the other side without causing enough damage to incapacitate him and he kept fighting. Soldiers have regularly reported having to fire multiple rounds into enemy combatants in Iraq and Afghanistan as a result.

In 1982 the Army also altered the M16 to prohibit soldiers from firing on full automatic. The current M16A2 rifle has a choice between semiautomatic and three-round burst. The M16A2 is now the only major assault rifle in the world fielded for military use that does have a full automatic capability.

As I said the problems we see with small arms procurement may not be sinister, but they are serious and they are current.

On July 13, 2008 in the Battle of Wanat in Afghanistan around 200 Taliban attacked U.S. troops at a remote outpost in eastern Afghanistan. The Taliban were able to break through U.S. lines and enter the main base before eventually being repelled by artillery and aircraft. What is notable about the battle was the perceived poor performance of the soldiers' small arms weapons in the initial part of the battle. Some selected quotes from the report:

My M4 quit firing and would no longer charge when I tried

to correct the malfunction,

I couldn't charge my weapon and put another round in

because it was too hot, so I got mad and threw my weapon

down.

Nine soldiers died and twenty-seven were wounded at the Battle of Wanat in Afghanistan.

For too much of its history from the Revolutionary War to today the Army has shown a slowness and reluctance to adopt improved small arms weapons and ammunition developed by others. It has also been slow to recognize and fix problems with its small arms. The Army has repeatedly engaged in poor negotiating and contracting on behalf of the American people. Senior Army leaders continue to go work for incumbent small arms manufacturers after they retire.

However, a major problem is also Congress. There have been far too few hearings and oversight on the topic of small arms. The House Armed Services Committee report in 1967 stands out as an exception that proves this point. Senior military leaders in uniform and civilians are regularly challenged and questioned--and in some cases chewed out--on all manner of programs and weapon systems here by Members of Congress including medical benefits, stealth fighter jets, missile defense, the size of the Army and Navy, and armored vehicles.

However, for some reason Congress, for the most part, has seen fit to give the Army a pass on small arms. For some reason the oversight committees responsible do not aggressively and regularly question whether the Army's rifle--the most deployed weapon system for the last ten years--is the best that American industry can offer our troops. There are many small arms experts that are independent of the industry that can inform Congress on this issue. I call on my colleagues to hold long overdue hearings on this topic with independent witnesses as soon as possible and will continue my efforts on this issue to raise awareness and push the Army to procure the best weapons and ammunition for our troops.

I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, what is the parliamentary situation?

Mr. President, a number of us have spoken with increasing concern--I think probably most Senators have come to the floor in the course of the last months to express their alarm about the politics that surround big issues in our country that demand action and not partisanship, not acrimony, but which we continue to simply find a way to avoid. We have been artists in the politics of avoidance here in Washington over the course of too long a period now.

The debt and the fiscal cliff are obviously perfect examples of where, despite all of the warnings and all of the expert advice we get, Congress is fundamentally stuck in political cement of our own mixing. No one will credibly deny here the existence of the fiscal cliff, the crisis of our budget, the tax system, and so forth. So that, at least as an issue that is avoided, gets a credible amount of words being thrown at it.

But there is another issue that, in many ways, is just as serious because of its implications for all that we do on this planet, but which doesn't any longer elicit that kind of concern or expressions of alarm on both sides of the aisle, or from that many Senators. The two words that have described this particular issue over a long period of time now have actually become somewhat words of almost skepticism in many quarters in America, or a kind of shrug, where people say: I don't know what I can do about it. It is not something I ought to worry about. Somebody else will take care of it, or maybe it is not real. Those words are ``climate change.''

Climate change, over the last few years, has regrettably lost credibility in the eyes and ears of the American people because of a concerted campaign of disinformation, a concerted campaign to brand the concept as somehow slightly outside of the mainstream of American political thinking. I have to say it has been a remarkably effective campaign. You can't sit here and say it hasn't worked. Every opportunity to cast a pall on facts with some kind of cockamamie theory has been taken advantage of, and a lot of money has been spent in this process of disinformation and discrediting.

People used to joke years and years ago about those who argued that the Earth was flat. For a long period of time, people argued that the Earth was flat, even though the evidence of astronomers and explorers evidenced that it was in fact quite the opposite. So we have, in effect, with respect to climate change in America today what is fundamentally a ``flat Earth caucus''--a bunch of people, some in the U.S. Congress itself, who still argue against all of the science, all of the evidence, that somehow we don't know enough about climate change or that the evidence isn't sufficient or that it is a hoax. We have Members of the Senate who argue it is a hoax. But that is all they do. They make the argument it is a hoax, but they don't present--and they can't--any real, hard, scientific, peer-reviewed evidence to the effect that it is in fact a hoax. The reason they can't is there are 6,000- plus peer-reviewed studies, which is the way science has always been done in America. If you are a scientist and you are a researcher, you do your science and research, and then your analysis is put to the test by your peers in those particular disciplines. They pass on the methodology, the pedagogy by which you arrived at your conclusions.

We have more than 6,000 of those kinds of properly peer-reviewed analyses of the science of climate change, and the other side of the ledger has not one--not one, zero--peer-reviewed analysis that says human beings aren't doing this to the atmosphere and that humans are not contributing or the main cause of what is happening in terms of the warming of the surface of the Earth.

What has happened is that in America we all know it. We are seeing it in campaigns because of Citizens United. You have these unfathomable amounts of money being thrown into the political system--millionaires and billionaires who plunk down millions of dollars--a $10 million or $20 million check at a whack--and then what is happening is people buy their facts. They create their facts out of whole cloth.

As we all have been reminded so many times in the last year, certainly, because of this new debate we are having in America--as our colleague, with whom I was privileged to serve here, Pat Moynihan, reminded us again and again, everyone is entitled to their own opinion in America, but you are not entitled to your own facts. But in fact, in

American politics today, that is not true. Apparently, you are, because you can go out and buy them. You can buy some scientist to whom you give some appropriate amount of funds, and he does a study with a particular conclusion that has to be found, and they produce a whole bunch of hurly-burly to surround it and suggest that those are, in fact, facts.

The result of this is that over the last year and a half or 2 years, we have had this concerted assault on reason, an assault on science. This isn't the first time in the history of humankind we have been through these things. Galileo was put on trial for his findings and, as we all know, there have been countless periods of time--that is why we went through an Age of Enlightenment, Age of Reason, as people challenged these old precepts that weren't based on fact but were sort of raw belief and/or political interests in some cases, or religious interests in some cases. A handful of Senators here, including Senator Boxer, Senator Whitehouse, Senator Sanders, Senator Lautenberg, the occupant of the chair, and Senator Franken have recently spoken out about this very process by which an incredibly important, legitimate issue of concern to all Americans--to everybody in the world--is being completely sidelined because of the status quo interests of powerful corporations and other interests in America that don't want to change, or some of whom find political advantage in somehow buying into the theory discrediting it.

This has not been an issue on which there is a profile of courage by some in the U.S. Congress who are prepared to stand up and say what they know is true, but what has become far more convenient to avoid. I believe the situation we face is as dangerous as any of the sort of real crises that we talk about.

Today we had a hearing in the Foreign Relations Committee on the subject of Syria. We all know what is happening with respect to Iran and nuclear weapons, and even the possibility of a war. This issue actually is of as significant a level of importance because it affects life itself on the planet, because it affects ecosystems on which the oceans and land depend for the relationship of the warmth of our Earth and the amount of moisture there is and all of the interactions that occur as a consequence of our climate. It involves our health because of policies that we do or don't choose to pursue with respect to pollution in the air.

Pollution didn't used to be a question mark in American politics. We fought that fight in the 1960s and 1970s. Rachel Carson started this enormous movement for reasonableness when she warned Americans they were living next to toxic wells and water that had been polluted by companies that put mercury or other poisons into the Earth, which went down into the water supply, and people got cancer and died. America decided in the early 1970s--with the first Earth Day in 1970 itself, and the actions that Congress took after that in response to the American people--everybody decided we didn't want that pollution in the air. We actually passed legislation in 1972, 1973, and 1974 that created the EPA.

America didn't even have an Environmental Protection Agency until Americans said we want to be protected, and the people in Congress responded to that. We passed the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Marine Mammal Protection, Coastal Zone Management, and all of these came about because of an awareness among the American people because they wanted to make a different set of choices or have their politicians do so on their behalf. Now, suddenly, there is an assault on the EPA, the Clean Air Act and, all of a sudden, pollution doesn't matter. That is what we are talking about.

Greenhouse gases are, in fact, a pollutant. The particulates that come with that have the same effect on human beings in terms of their breathing, their lungs, the input in some of their food and water, which ultimately impacts cancer, emphysema, and other diseases that come as a consequence of the quality of air we breathe. Yet we have this whole notion now that somehow we have gone too far, that we have done enough, or that the job has been done and we can go home, when, in fact, it is exactly the opposite. With respect to pollution, there are choices, and with respect to health, the single greatest cause of young Americans going to the hospital in the summertime and costing billions of dollars to the American people is environmentally induced asthma. That environmentally induced asthma comes about as a consequence of the ingredients that go into the air. All of this is related.

In addition, there is not one person in the Senate who doesn't know that we are still more dependent than we want to be on foreign oil. We are better than we were, and we have made improvements, but we are still more dependent than we want to be on foreign oil. We could be doing better with respect to that if we pursued an intelligent energy policy. We still don't have an energy policy after the years we have been talking about doing it in the Senate and elsewhere.

Why is that important to climate change? Because energy policy is the solution to the problem of climate change. If you have an effective energy policy, then you are dealing not only with your independence issues, but with the sources of carbon and other greenhouse gases that are causing the problem today. Twenty years ago this year, I was privileged to go with the Senator from New Jersey, Senator Lautenberg, Senator John Chafee, Senator Al Gore, Senator Wirth, and others, down to Rio, where we took part in the first Earth Summit, which President George Herbert Walker Bush took seriously. To the great credit of George H. W. Bush, he not only sent a delegation, he personally went down there and spoke about the issue. He helped to embrace a forward- leaning idea. I think 160-some nations signed onto an agreement to try to restrain greenhouse gases. That was back in 1992. It was incredible.

Here we are, 20 years later, and we could not even get the time for the Senate to send a delegation down there, let alone enough people who thought it was important and of interest. The Earth summit, 20 years later, came and went without any major step forward or progress, and the procrastination continues.

Mr. President, today I remember the debate when we came back from Kyoto, in 1998 or so, and we had a debate in the Senate about whether the United States should take part in the Kyoto Treaty. We all know now, as a matter of long history, that we didn't because it was viewed as being too unilateral. In fact, everybody had the question of, what about China? We can't possibly sign up for this because China will not do it, and they will go racing ahead of us and continue to grow their economy at the expense of the United States.

Well, Mr. President, guess what. Today China is the leading clean energy producer in the world. China. The United States of America invented the technologies 50 years ago--of solar and wind, renewable energy technologies such as turbines, the transmission, and so forth, and photovoltaics. About 4 years ago, China had about 9 percent of the market. That was 4 years ago. Two years ago, China had 40 percent of the market. Today China has over 70 percent of the global solar market, and the United States, which invented the technology, doesn't have one company in the top 10 solar panel producers, solar energy producers in the world.

You know what is happening. Ninety-five percent of what China produces it exports to other countries, including the United States. So here we are, we give up our lead, and we don't get the jobs. Everybody is screaming about jobs. The energy market is a $6 trillion market with about 6 billion users. Just to put that in perspective, the market that created the great wealth of the 1990s in the United States was in fact a $1 trillion market with about 1 billion users. That was the technology market. We saw it with personal computers and with the rest of the telephone communications technology of the 1990s. We didn't even have an Internet in the United States until about 1995 or 1996 when that began to be commercialized. Yet in that short span of time we created more wealth in America than we had ever created at any time in America's history. We created 23 million new jobs because we led in that new industry.

Here we are today staring at the potential of this extraordinary industry--the energy market--and we are just

sitting on our hands while other countries take it and run with it and grow their economies. We are sitting around saying: Where are the jobs?

It is an insult. It is an insult to our intelligence. It is an insult to every American's aspirations about where they would like to see our country go. And the fact is it is not just China, but India, Mexico, Brazil, South Korea, and countless other countries have taken greater advantage of this than the United States.

One of the principal reasons we have trouble getting that market moving is we refuse to put a real price on the price of carbon. Carbon has a price. Everything we are doing to our country and to our communities today as a result of pollution is a price we are going to pay. But that price is not subsumed into the price of products, the price of doing business or anything else because we just avoid it altogether.

A lot of people here continue, unfortunately, to avoid the science and just not deal with the reality of what is happening. But 2 days ago, Mr. President, in the New York Times, there was a very important op-ed that appeared, written by a well-known climate skeptic Dr. Richard Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley. He has written many times about how he did not believe the science was adequate or had produced it. Let me read his words. This is Dr. Muller:

Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified

problems in the previous climate studies that, in my mind,

threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last

year, following an intensive research effort involving a

dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real

and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were

correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost

entirely the cause.

That is what this former climate skeptic has said. Bottom line: We need to be armed with the facts, not with empty rhetoric. That is exactly what Dr. Muller set out to do. Let me quote him again:

We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from

urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data

alone), from data collection selection (prior groups selected

fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations;

we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we

separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from

human intervention and data adjustment (our work is

completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we

demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome

effects unduly biased our conclusions.

Now, obviously, we all know the future has a hard way of humbling people who try to predict it too precisely, but I have to say, when the science is screaming pretty consistently over a period of 20 years--and not just screaming at us to say it is coming back correctly but that it is coming back with faster results in greater amounts than the scientists predicted--as a matter of human precaution that ought to be an alarm bell and people ought to take note.

Here again is what Dr. Muller says:

What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions

increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect

the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one

and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if

the oceans are included.

And then he says ominously:

But if China continues its rapid economic growth--

And I say, as a matter of parentheses, who doesn't believe China isn't going to do everything in its power to continue its growth path and do what it is doing? So he says:

But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has

averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its

vast use of coal (it typically adds 1 new gigawatt per

month), then that same warming could take place in less than

20 years.

Less than 20 years, folks. In North Carolina recently State Senators actually voted not to do any planning for the potential of sea level rise, even though scientists today tell us the sea level is rising. Ask insurance companies about what they are thinking in terms of their potential exposure and liability as we look down the road with respect to the disasters that could come as a consequence of these changes.

So the plain fact is we have all of the evidence--and I am not going to go through all of it right now, but it is there for colleagues to analyze--countless studies of what is happening in terms of the movement of forests--literally, movement--as it migrates, and species that have left Yellowstone National Park and migrated north. Talk to the park rangers. Talk to the folks in Canada and in Colorado and Montana and other places about the millions of acres of pine trees that have been destroyed by the pine bark beetle that now doesn't die off because it doesn't get as cold as it used to. Talk to people in Canada and in the Northern United States who used to skate on ponds that used to freeze over but that don't freeze over anymore.

There are hundreds of examples. Talk to the Audubon Society. Ask them about the reports from their members about certain plants and shrubs and trees that don't grow in the same places they used to. There is a 100-mile swath in the United States now where there has been a migration of things that grow and don't grow. This is going to have a profound impact on agriculture in our country as we go forward if it continues. And I would just share with my colleagues why that is true beyond any scientific doubt.

The first scientist who actually wrote something about global climate change was a Swedish scientist by the name of Arrhenius, and he wrote around the turn of the 19th century--1890 or something, I don't remember the year. But he is the guy who first said there was this relationship to the gases trapped in the atmosphere and this thing called the greenhouse effect. In fact, science has now determined to a certainty the reason we can breathe on Earth today, the reason it is warm enough for us to live, the reason life itself exists on Earth is because there is a greenhouse effect. And it is called a greenhouse effect because it behaves just like a greenhouse.

The light comes down from the Sun at a very direct angle on many things on Earth and is reflected back from things such as the ice and snow and off roofs and parking lots and other things. But in the ocean and in certain other dark spots it is subsumed into that mass, and it goes back much more opaque than it comes down in its directness. The reason, therefore, for the greenhouse gas is that it doesn't escape. It doesn't break out of the thin veneer of the atmosphere that contains the gases that create the greenhouse effect, which actually creates an average temperature globally of about 57 degrees Fahrenheit.

That is why life can exist; we have a greenhouse effect. And it stands to absolute high school, if not elementary-middle school logic, if a certain amount of gases are contained, and there has always been balance to some degree, and you add to that massively and thicken the amount that is there, less heat is going to escape and we wind up augmenting that effect of the greenhouse.

Scientists tell us now--and I am not a scientist, but I learned how to listen to them and at least read the science and try to think about it--that in order to keep the temperature of the Earth somewhere near where it is today or within the permissible range of change, we have to keep our greenhouse gases at--originally, they said--450 parts per million. As they then noticed the damage and did more calculation, they came and said: No, 350 parts per million.

Why is this important? Because today, as we are here assembled in the Senate, we are now at 397 parts per million. We are above where they say you have to hold it. And worse, without doing anything--and we are not doing anything--we are only adding amounts; we are moving at a rate that will take it up to 500 or 600 parts per million. If that happens, we will be at a tipping point with respect to the amount of temperature change--5 to 7 degrees--and nobody can predict with certainty what happens, except that we know the ice already melting in Greenland and in the Arctic will melt faster and disappear. As more water is exposed, that dark water subsumes more of the heat, and the heat creates greater, more rapid melting. And that is exactly what scientists are seeing in the Arctic and Antarctic today, where whole blocks of ice the size of the State of Rhode Island have broken off and dropped into the sea and floated south to melt.

There are dozens of other examples of what is happening. I said I wouldn't go into all of them today. I would just say

to my colleagues, please read and challenge the science and talk to the people who are the peer reviewers of these analyses because we have a responsibility here, to future generations and to all of us, to try to get this right. And in the balance of right and wrong, I don't understand the judgment some people are making.

We know this is a $6 trillion market. We know that if we were to price carbon, the marketplace would move rapidly toward the kinds of technologies and new job creation that would respond to that pricing and the United States could become a seller of these technologies and a builder of these new energy capacities in various parts of the world.

Astonishingly, the United States of America doesn't even have an energy grid. The east coast has an energy grid, the west coast has an energy grid, Texas has its own energy grid, and from Chicago out to the Dakotas, there is sort of an energy grid. But the entire center of the United States is just a great big gaping hole where we don't have any connected energy transmission capacity, and the result is that we can't produce renewable energy down in the four corners of the Southwest--in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and so forth--and sell it to Minnesota in the wintertime or to New England, where we pay a very high price for energy. We can't send energy from one part to the other in the United States of America. It is an insult.

We need to build a national energy grid, and in the building of that grid, there are countless jobs to be created for Americans and countless technologies to be developed. For every $1 billion we spend on infrastructure, we put 27,000 to 35,000 people to work. If we passed our infrastructure bank effort here in the Senate, for $10 billion of American taxpayer leverage, we could have $650 billion to $700 billion of infrastructure investment paid for by Chinese investment, by Arab Emirates investment. It wouldn't cost the American taxpayers a dime to be building America and putting people to work. We are not doing it, and we are not even building the energy grid of our Nation.

I must say to my colleagues, the avoidance here of responsibility for a whole host of choices we ought to be making--and obviously, yes, it begins with the deficit and the debt, and we can deal with those issues. There isn't a person in the Senate who doesn't understand what the magic formula is going to be to do that. But everybody wants to wait until the end of the election. I got it. But this issue has been waiting and waiting for 20 years now while other countries are stealing our opportunities to be able to be in the marketplace and winning.

Nothing screams at us more than the need to have an energy policy for our country that begins to address the realities of climate change, and nothing screams at us more than to tell the truth to the American people about climate change, to stop having it be an unusable word in American politics and not to allow it to become a source of attack and ridicule with nonfacts and a bunch of cockamamie theories that have no foundation in science or in the kind of analysis that does this institution justice.

I hope over the course of the next months we can have this fight because nothing less than our economic future--which is, in the end, our greatest strength for our military, for our security, for all of our objectives--that is what is at stake in this effort. I hope we will finally wind up doing what is right.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the proceedings under the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I am delighted to have a fine group of young Alaskans with me--not only here on the floor, but in my office for four weeks, and I thank them for their help in Washington and really for all of Alaska. They have been back here for a month and have done a great job. It is always a true delight to have good, high energy young people from back home to help me in the work we do here. I am so pleased they are with me.

Tsunami Debris

Mr. President, I rise today to discuss an issue that people back home are talking about a lot. We are discussing the Federal Government's need to plan for the increasing level of marine debris that is hitting the Pacific coastline, whether it is out in Hawaii or all the way up north in Alaska. This debris is coming from the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan last March. This is a subject of great discussion and debate for folks who are out fishing or walking our beaches.

We all know that tragic event claimed nearly 16,000 lives and destroyed community infrastructure, homes, and livelihoods. Our prayers continue for the ones we have lost and those who have lost their loved ones.

As horrifying as these natural disasters were, the Earth only shook anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes, and the tsunami rushed to the shore and then receded. But the devastation to property and coastlines continues as debris has moved from the shores of Japan over a year and a half later and we begin to see the debris pile up on our shores over here.

The Japanese Government has estimated that about 5 million tons of debris were carried into the ocean. We have assumed that the majority of that either sank or will sink. There is no concrete idea of how much is still floating or when the bulk of it will reach our beaches, but in Alaska we know it has been arriving.

We saw the first evidence of it last winter, and it arrived ahead of the projected timelines. It is understandable that we were not able to anticipate exactly when the tsunami debris would start arriving, but now that we are starting to see it along the shoreline there is no doubt we need to respond.

Last January, in trying to get ahead of the curve, if you will, I held a roundtable in Anchorage to find out what our State and Federal agencies were doing to prepare for the debris we knew would be coming to our shores, how the interagency work was being coordinated, and how individuals could report sightings and navigational issues.

I think I have mentioned on this floor that I have two sons out on a fishing vessel in the Gulf of Alaska. As they cross the gulf, I wonder if they will encounter debris from the tsunami?

We saw at one point in time a Japanese vessel that was literally a ghost ship, a relic from that tsunami. The Coast Guard took that vessel out of the navigation channels. Alaskans and people who live on the coast are very aware when there is stuff out in the water unchartered and unknown, and we want to understand and know a little bit more.

This past June, I joined the U.S. Coast Guard to see for myself what was washing up on some of Alaska's remote shorelines and our beaches. We flew out of Cordova, AK. We went to Kayak Island. Kayak sticks out from the coastline at an angle that allows it to collect an incredible amount of marine debris on just an average year. So the reason to go to Kayak was to see what might be there other than the typical marine debris, unusual things like nets, ropes, and buoys. We saw real evidence of what is coming our way from the tsunami. We saw colored buoys. We saw large Styrofoam blocks. There was a large container that had washed up very recently.

We have a picture from NOAA that shows some of what we saw washed up there on Kayak Island. These are all the plastic buoys. The black ones, we were told, are what we see more of coming out of Japan.

Now, you may wonder, have we been clearly able to identify whether these items came from Japan or if this was the usual marine debris? NOAA is working to sort all of that out, but there are signs that give us somewhat of an idea of whether what we saw out there on Kayak Island was typical marine debris or not.

Many saw pictures of this huge dock that recently arrived on the coastline in Oregon. Just look at the size here and think: this concrete dock had flotations on either end and traveled all the way across the Pacific literally in one huge slab up onto the Oregon beach. I think when folks looked at that picture, their word was, Wow.

Again, for those who are navigators and fishermen, if they run across something like this in the water it is real evidence of why we need to be concerned.

This next photo is from somewhere in the Pacific. This shows the objects that are creating, again, a hazard to navigation. These same materials are going to end up somewhere on a shoreline, whether it is on our beaches or in our ports. Think about the impact this may have on sensitive habitats, making them unusable, possibly deadly for certain marine animals, such as shore birds and other species that may rely on them.

I think what is important to recognize from these three pictures I have just shown is that we are seeing now the debris that is floating on top or at least partly on top of the water. We are seeing it coming to U.S. shorelines earlier than anticipated because in addition to being carried by the currents from the ocean, this debris is being moved along by the wind.

What we are seeing in Alaska primarily are those buoys that sit up clear out of the water. You can also see fishing boats, building materials, and roofs in this photograph. Again, this is what we can see because it is above the water.

So one of the real questions we need to ask is, What is below the water? What is just below the surface that we can't see?

A couple of weeks ago, I met with some representatives from the Yakutat Tlingit Tribe from Yakutat, AK. Yakutat is in the northern part of the Alaska panhandle, on the eastern side of the Gulf of Alaska. It is a very remote community. It is only accessible by air or by boat. The closest community is hundreds of miles away and, Yakutat is surrounded by National Park Service and Forest Service lands.

So this community--the tribe, city, borough--is meeting weekly to assess the debris that is coming up on their beaches, and they are trying to put together a response. They have done some cleanup along 15 miles of area beaches.

One beautiful beach is called Cannon Beach. It has black sand. It is absolutely gorgeous. I visited it in March, and now we are seeing the Styrofoam, housing foam, and buoys coming up on it and the other beaches near Yakutat. The community estimates that they have about 600 pounds of marine debris per mile. The borough has 1,074 miles of coastline, so this small village community is looking at the possibility of 3,000 tons of debris.

This next picture is actually from Yakutat. This details another problem that our coastal communities are facing. What do we do with this marine debris? Our landfills, particularly in southeastern Alaska, are maxed out or close to being maxed out. This landfill space that is already filling up could very quickly be overwhelmed by tsunami debris. And not only are my residents working to clean up beaches with limited landfills, often they are in very rugged and very remote locations, many with no road to access. Sometimes they can't land a vessel or a boat on the shoreline because it is just too dangerous. So how do we access this debris? That is a challenge.

It is also costly, and we are faced with the question of what do we do with the debris we have collected?

Yakutat is exploring some pretty creative solutions and alternative disposal solutions. Yakutat is one of those communities that has extremely high energy costs. If my memory serves me, I believe they pay in excess of 50 cents a kilowatt hour for their energy. So when they are dealing with challenges and problems, they try to find solutions that help with their high cost of energy.

What Yakutat is looking at now is whether there is the potential for any waste-to-energy technologies that could deal with two problems: clean up debris and support long-term efforts to deal with the high cost of energy. It is kind of a two-for-one. They are trying to figure out how they can turn this problem into an energy source, and in this way they can support long-term community marine debris cleanup efforts. This would be a creative solution for this small remote community, largely on their own and facing truckloads of debris.

Now the State of Alaska has engaged in tsunami debris coordination, and I am told the Alaskan region representatives of various Federal agencies are as well, but headquarters of agencies across the Federal Government really need to be part of the plan and engage creatively to address this accumulating debris.

I don't have my typical Alaska map here that I usually use when I speak, but my State has an incredible coastline--more coastline than the rest of the country put together--and we depend on our marine sources for livelihood and recreation. We value a healthy coastline to support a resilient marine environment. Our fisheries, our tourism, and our coastal communities are so dependent on a strong and sustainable region.

So, think about this from the tourism perspective. When somebody is paying thousands of dollars to come up to Alaska to visit remote, wild areas, they are certainly going to be disappointed if they are greeted by a beach full of Styrofoam or pass by the many debris fields that are accumulating.

Communities up and down the coastline need assurance that the headquarters of various agencies are going to be part of the cleanup plan. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, FEMA compiled a document denoting the debris removal authorities of Federal agencies. That document outlined that the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Homeland Security, and Transportation all had a role to play in debris removal.

So for this reason--and using this federal memorandum as an example-- I have asked the White House to establish and lead an interagency task force to plan for tsunami debris. We also need to engage the relevant States, tribes, local governments, and international partners by inviting them to participate in this task force. We all need to work together. We cannot leave a little community like Yakutat and say: Clean up your section of the coastline.

I know private and government Japanese representatives have expressed interest in helping with the debris problem. The ability for Japan to offer experience and technology with waste-to-energy devices could provide a great opportunity for the U.S., Japan and public partnerships to come together and address the debris.

There are many reasons we need to act now. It is a difficult time of year for many of us here in Washington, DC, to think about winter storms. We are enjoying some pretty warm weather here. But we need to recognize and think about what winter weather in Alaska will mean for accumulating debris. We have a lot of areas being impacted by tsunami debris that have already had huge tide swings. If we add that to a winter storm in areas with beaches, some of the debris we see will be buried deep by the sand, and will only be uncovered when snow melts. However even during the spring, accessing the coastline can be challenging due to breakup conditions. We have extreme tides and, of course, the weather will also move the debris up into the tree line, making access and removal even more difficult.

This last picture will give my colleagues some indication of what I am talking about when we think about the Alaska coastline. This is in a part of the State called Montague Island. With good high tides and the weather we get, downed trees are part of the ocean accumulation on the shore. You can see tucked among the trees, kind of sprinkled like confetti, some of the Styrofoam that has washed up. Again, this is marine debris we are seeing. Think about how difficult it will be to access some of this after winter storms.

Where debris lands on rough and rocky shorelines, wave action is expected to break it up. We know that happens, and I am concerned about our marine life, birds and animals consuming smaller plastic particles that have been broken down by this wave action. A piece of Styrofoam that is easy to pick up today because it is reasonably good-sized is going to be much

more difficult to clean up when it has been broken down by wave action. So, again, all of this argues for prompt action.

Maybe the best we can do for now is pick up the debris and store it somewhere. But as we saw looking at the Yakutat picture, storing it in a landfill in most of these communities is probably not going to be feasible. Bailing technology could be available to Alaska communities for about $10,000, and these machines would at least support the voluntary cleanup efforts and provide a means to store the debris rather than force strained landfills to absorb the incoming debris. I throw this out because I think it is important that we get creative about this. We need to be exploring all available technologies to support the most efficient means to handle this tsunami debris and other marine debris for the long run.

Every year I attend an annual alternative energy fair. It is held in the interior part of the State at Chena Hot Springs. We always learn something good and new at this energy fair. Last year, when I was there, I saw a device that is actually in production. It is on-the- shelf technology. It may help turn much of the debris that is hitting our coastline into fuel. The device--I called it a gizmo but I know there is a much more technical term for it--processes plastics into fuel with the capacity to produce as much as 2,400 gallons per day. With fuel at over $6 a gallon in Yakutat, people are looking at this and saying, We can actually take some of the waste, the garbage, the debris, the plastic, and turn that into fuel so we don't have to pay 6 bucks a gallon to fill up a four-wheeler, truck, or boat.

Given the tight budgets across the country, again, I think we need to be creative. We need to identify and deploy all available resources and share information. We need to leverage local knowledge and our coastal residents' proximity to the debris, as well as their vested interest in the cleanup efforts.

Our Federal agencies have regional staff and they have facility resources. Many run programs that are consistent with the objectives of tsunami debris response and mitigation. For those who would suggest, Well, if it has come up on your shore, it is your responsibility; there is no Federal role here; it is up to the States to figure this out, I would remind them that in my State, much of our land is owned by the Federal Government. This picture here is of Montague Island. Montague Island is entirely within the Chugach National Forest. And, in fact, over 60 percent of my State is owned by the Federal Government, so clearly the Federal Government has a role to play in cleaning up the debris.

We also can't forget about the private interests in cleanup. Many industries and private citizens are dependent on our navigable waterways and healthy ecosystems. We need good communication, leadership, and a plan to guide an interagency and public-private approach to solve this challenge during what we all acknowledge are difficult fiscal times. I commend the NOAA marine debris program for their coordination and response to this work, but the fact is they are a small and an overtasked program. They need the help of their Federal partners to address this as a national priority.

I encourage my colleagues to join me in recognizing that marine debris is a national problem as well as a priority, and a comprehensive response to tsunami debris that we are seeing on our shoreline in Alaska and other Pacific States, in addition to Hawaii, is past due.

With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.