Madam President, I rise today in one sense as a former Governor. In looking at nominations of Cabinet members by the Executive, I start with a position of deference to the Executive because I think he or she should be able to choose the…
Madam President, I rise today in one sense as a former Governor. In looking at nominations of Cabinet members by the Executive, I start with a position of deference to the Executive because I think he or she should be able to choose the people who surround them and give them advice. I understand that. I did that as a Governor, and I understand that principle. Indeed, in the proceedings before this body thus far, I think I voted for 7 or 8 or perhaps 10 of the nominees for Cabinet members who advise the President.
But today we are considering a nominee who is hostile to the fundamental purpose of the Agency to which he is being appointed. We are appointing a person to be the head of an Agency that is called the Environmental Protection Agency. All you need to know about the mission of that Agency is contained in the name, the Environmental Protection Agency, and we are considering a nominee who has no record that I have been able to discover of protection of the environment. None. Zero. No history of actions on behalf of the environment, on behalf of the health and welfare and well-being of the citizens of his State or of the United States.
It is bizarre, to me, to be appointing people to an office where they are hostile to the mission of the office to which they are being appointed. In fact, not only has he no record of positive environment activity, his record is completely to the contrary where he has opposed activities of the Environmental Protection Agency.
As everybody knows, as attorney general of Oklahoma and leading other attorneys general around the country, he sued the Environmental Protection Agency numerous times; I think something like 20 times. And some of those rules--all of those rules were put into place to protect the health and well-being of the American people. There are several of them that I am particularly sensitive to.
When I was the Governor of Maine, we had an issue of air quality. We still do. The reason we have an air quality issue in Maine is because of the air that is coming in on the prevailing westerly winds from the rest of the country. At one point, we had a time where we did the calculations, and we could have taken every car off our highways, closed every one of our factories, and we still would have had air quality violations on the coast of Maine. Pollution doesn't respect borders. It doesn't respect State borders, and it doesn't respect international borders. That is why it has to be a national responsibility.
Of course, each State can also have, as we do in Maine, its own department of environmental quality, its own department of environmental protection. Each State could and should and will do that and has done that, but we also need to have national standards because otherwise the States will race to the bottom: How friendly are you to business? Come on in; we have no rules. This was realized almost 50 years ago by a Senator from Maine, a Senator whose seat I occupy, a Senator whose desk I have in my office, Edmund Muskie. Edmund Muskie was the father of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and he came from a State where this was not politically easy. The rivers in Maine had been grossly polluted by industrial waste. Yet he took the lead on this important issue.
Here is something extraordinary: The Clean Air Act, one of the most important environmental laws of the 20th century and very controversial, widespread impact around the country, passed this body unanimously. It is unbelievable looking back to that day. We couldn't pass the time of day unanimously in this body today, but there was bipartisan consensus that protecting the environment for ourselves and for the future of our citizens was not a political issue. It was an issue of responsibility. It was an ethical issue. And Ed Muskie, a giant in this body, created the groundwork and the legislative basis for the work we are still doing today.
In Muskie's time, the pollution was obvious. You could see it, and you could breathe it. I live on the Androscoggin River in Brunswick, and when I first went there 35 years ago,
you could smell the river in the spring. You could smell it. You knew it was spring; you could smell the foam and waste that was coming down the river. That is gone today because of the work of people like Ed Muskie.
By the way, people like Howard Baker, Republicans--and in our State of Maine, the environmental movement was led by Republicans in those days. Hoddy Hildreth, David Huber, Ken McCloud, Harry Richardson--those are all prominent Republican leaders in our State who also led the environmental protection movement in our State.
As I said, it was easy. You could smell it; you could see it. The smog in Los Angeles was so bad that it was ridiculous, and it was unhealthful, so we took some steps that dealt with that.
We are facing an environmental threat today that is somewhat less visible--although I will argue that it is actually quite visible--but it is no less profound. In fact, I believe it is more dangerous, more threatening, more important to the future of this planet and our country and our people than those obvious threats that were faced back in 1970 and beyond.
Environmental protection, in my view, is a moral and an ethical issue; it is an intergenerational ethical issue; and it can all be summarized by what I call the main rototiller rule. The main rototiller rule goes like this: If you borrow your neighbor's rototiller in the spring in order to plow up your garden and get ready to plant, you have an obligation to return it to him in as good of shape as you got it and with a good tank of gas. That is all you need to know about environmental stewardship, because we have the planet on loan. We don't own it. We own it temporarily. We own plots of land temporarily, but we don't own the planet. We have it on loan from future generations--from our children and our grandchildren and seven generations hence. Yet our age, our generation, is acting like it is all ours, like everything is ours.
It took millions of years, for example, to create the fossil fuels that are underneath the Earth. The word ``fossil'' has a meaning. They are there because they are from fossils. It goes back literally millions of years for the Earth to distill the plant and animal matter into this miraculous substance called oil--millions of years. Yet we are using it up. Forget about the pollution for a moment; just think about the idea that we are using an asset that the Earth produced over millions of years, and in a matter of--I don't know--200 to 300 years, we are going to use it all. It is as if on Thanksgiving the turkey comes to the table, all of the family is sitting around, and Dad says: OK, I am going to eat this whole turkey. You don't get any.
What do we tell people when they look back on us in 20, 50, 100, 200 years? What are they going to think of our generation? What is our defense going to be?
We know it is not infinite. There is argument about how much is there, but it is not infinite. There is no machine in the center of the Earth that is creating these substances; therefore, we have a responsibility to future generations, as my friends in Maine would say, not to pig out on what we have and just forget about who comes next. Of course, as it becomes more rare, it will become more expensive, so we are passing those costs off as well. Beyond that is the environmental cost.
I mentioned the obvious environmental problems back in the seventies and eighties of when you could see the air, when you could smell the rivers, but today the problem is what we are doing to the planet, which is climate.
What bothers me about this nominee is he basically says: Well, it is a controversial issue. The sciences differ.
No. The science is clear.
Before I get to that, I have one more point about the ethical and moral responsibility.
Last year, we had Pope Francis here. Pope Francis has talked a great deal about this issue and the ethical and moral and, indeed, religious obligation we have to be good stewards of our environment and of our planet. People criticized the Pope. They said: Let the Pope stick to religion and stay away from science.
It turns out that the Pope is a chemist. That is an unfortunate fact.
When the Pope was here, I did a little act of Jesus in the Good Book and found a number of references to the responsibility we have to protect the environment and the land. Indeed, in the Old Testament--and we all know about the Sabbath, that on the seventh day, He rested. There is a provision in the Old Testament whereby every 7 years the people were instructed to let the land lie fallow for a year--a Sabbath for the land in order to preserve its productivity.
I believe this is fundamentally an ethical issue. What do we owe our children--to just forge ahead in the face of overwhelming science and all of the predictions? What is happening in the world around us is selfishness. It is unethical. It is wrong. It is unfair.
As I said, we are talking about a nominee for this body who says the debate about climate change is just that--it is a debate.
There are scientists that agree, and there are scientists
that don't agree to the extent of man's contribution and
whether it is even harmful at this point.
Give me a break. The scientific community is virtually unanimous, and, indeed, the data is unanimous.
I carry a little card around with me. This is a blowup of it. I am a visual person--I like to see things, and I understand them better. To me, this is what you need to know about what is going on.
By the way, what this is, is CO2 in the atmosphere, parts per million, for 800,000 years. People say: Well, it has varied over time. It goes up and down. It is just a natural cycle.
It does vary over time. Here is 850,000 years, and you can see that it varies from a low of about 180 parts per million up close to 300 parts per million, and that is the variation. Absolutely true. That is the variation until you get to about 1860, and that is when it starts to go up. Now we are at 400 parts per million, which is 25 percent higher than it has been in 5 million years. Was it a coincidence that it started to happen when we started to burn fossil fuels in such vast quantities? Of course not. Was there a big outburst of volcanos in the mid-1800s? Of course not.
This is not debatable. These are measurements. These are scientific measurements. Debating this is like debating that water boils at 212 degrees: Oh, no. I think it boils at 214 degrees.
No. It is 210.
It is 212.
Light travels at 186,000 miles a second. That is not debatable. Neither is this.
We are in a very dangerous place. Scott Pruitt calls it an argument and doesn't want to do anything about it. Not only does he not want to do anything about it, he wants to undo the things that have been done to try to protect us.
You can look at this chart and say CO2 is going up. It is invisible gas. You cannot taste it. You cannot smell it. It does not poison us. It is in the atmosphere anyway. Who cares? What difference does it make?
Here is what difference it makes. This is the other side of my little card. This is the correlation of over 800,000 years between temperature and CO2. Of what you can see, the blue is the CO2, and the temperature is red, and what you see is an almost exact correlation. It is beyond coincidence. When CO2 goes up, the temperature goes up. When CO2 goes down, the temperature goes down. You can see it over the time. Do you know where we are now in CO2? Here. The correlation is unmistakable, it is powerful, and it is dangerous.
The nominee for the Environmental Protection Agency denies this. He says it is a debate. Just for a moment, let's take him at his word. Let's say it is a debate. Let's say it is not entirely settled. If the risk is so catastrophic, wouldn't it be prudent to try to take some measures to prevent it even if you are not sure? By the time we are sure--by the way, we are sure now. By the time Scott Pruitt is sure, it will be too late. It may already be too late. We may be beyond the tipping point, and all we can do is mitigate the danger, not stop it altogether, because we have been heedless of the consequences of the results that will impact the next generation of Americans and of people around the world.
What are the consequences going to be? What if it gets a little bit warmer? We will be able to play golf longer in Maine--hey, not bad--but the consequences in many cases are going to
be catastrophic. There are many already affecting Maine in terms of where our lobster population is moving.
I had a sea farmer in my office 2 days ago, a fellow who has a great business. He has grown it for years. It is really a serious business of growing oysters, and he has always grown them in the Damariscotta River. In fact, if you go to a fancy restaurant and ask for Damariscotta River oysters there, they are the top-level oysters in the world. He has always grown them in the river. He puts in the little seed. They start in little, tiny shells, and then they grow out. He can no longer grow them initially in the river because the water is so acidic from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is absorbed by the ocean, that the shells don't grow. He had to move the incubation part of his business onshore and treat the water to lower the acidity so that the shells will grow, and then when they get a certain size, he puts them back in the river.
This is a real, direct, obvious, observable effect of global climate change and of too much CO2 in the atmosphere. It is not theoretical. It is not debatable. It is not that scientists differ. This guy is trying to make a living, and he can only do it by treating the water because the acid that has been created by the ocean in its absorbing the CO2 is making it impossible for the oysters to develop. That is a direct impact. Probably the most direct impact we are going to be able to see and identify and not avoid is sea level rise.
Last summer--as a matter of fact, in August--I went to Greenland. Let me just put that in context. It is the continent of Greenland. The ice on Greenland, if and when it melts--and I think it is when, not if-- will add 61 feet to the ocean depth. The ice in Antarctica has 212 feet of sea level rise contained in it. Just think about that for a minute. Greenland is melting at a rate no one has seen before. I saw it with my own eyes. I saw these big things in the ice. We helicoptered out over the ice sheet, and you could see these big holes in the ice called moulins. Into those moulins are flowing, rushing rivers of meltwater. You can see them. They are blue, and they run across the ice and down into the hole, and they go all the way down to the bottom, 2 miles thick, where they lubricate the space between the ice and the land and accelerate the ice in its moving toward the ocean. ``Accelerate.'' That is an important term. That is a term I heard at the University of Maine from their climate scientists. That is a term I have heard from scientists in other parts of the country. ``Accelerate.'' ``Abrupt.''
We all think of things changing very slowly; as a matter of fact, the very term glacial means ``moving slowly.'' Not anymore. We went to the Jakobshavn Glacier, the largest glacier that is draining the ice sheet of Greenland, and it has retreated as much in the past 10 years as in the prior 100 years. It has retreated as much in the past 10 years as in the prior 100 years. Do the math, and that is 10 times the rate that the ice is flowing off the Greenland ice sheet into the ocean and raising sea levels.
One of the problems with what is going on now is the process of acceleration. For example, everybody knows that the ice in the Arctic Ocean is disappearing at an unprecedented rate. A cruise ship went through the Arctic Ocean last summer. The Arctic Ocean has been closed throughout human history. It has been unavailable for commerce. You couldn't get through. It was always covered with ice. In the summer it would clear a little bit. Now we are talking about international trade through the Arctic Ocean.
What happens, though, scientifically, when the sun's rays hit the ice and the snow, 85 percent of the energy of the sun is bounced back. That is science. When the ice is gone and the dark ocean is available, 85 percent of the sun's energy is absorbed into the ocean. That is called a feedback loop. That accelerates. The more it melts, the more it gets melted, and that is the kind of thing that is happening in Greenland, in Antarctica, and, indeed, all over the world.
Here is something I learned on my trip to Greenland that I really hadn't absorbed. If there is anything we think of as a constant, it is the ocean. You walk down to the beach in Maine or on to the dock in Portland, you look out, and you see it. There it is. It is the way it has always been. It turns out it has always been that way for only 8,000 years. It happens to have always been that way when people have been around and keeping records and taking pictures, but it hasn't always been that way.
Here is an amazing bit of science that, frankly, I wasn't aware of. This is the ocean depth 24,000 years ago. This is the ocean depth today. So 24,000 years ago, it was 390 feet shallower than it is today. It was 390 feet shallower 24,000 years ago. Why 24,000 years ago? Because all the water was locked up in the glaciers. In one sense, Greenland and Antarctica are the last remnants of the glaciers, and they are now melting.
This period, 24,000 years up to today, is how the oceans have risen. You can see coincidentally, it has been pretty fixed for 8,000 years, and that is why we think it is going to always be that way. I used to teach about the recency effect. All human beings tend to think that what happened last week is going to happen next week. But this tells us that the ocean level is variable.
Here is the amazing spot, right here. It is called the meltwater pulse 1A; all geologists know about this. And if you do the calculation on this period, the ocean gained about a foot a decade. It got deeper. The sea level rose about a foot a decade during this period, and this is what we are facing right now.
The best estimates I have been able to obtain are that we are facing about a foot to a foot and a half of sea level rise in the next 15 years, and a foot a decade thereafter for the rest of the century. If you do the math, that is an additional 6 to 8 feet.
In fact, there was an estimate just released last week that says it is more like 9 feet, 3 meters. Nine feet? Miami is gone; New Orleans, gone; New York, under deep threat; Bangladesh--we are talking about national security here because the people who are going to be pressed into migration because of this are going to create a national security and a migration crisis, the likes of which this country and the world has never seen. We are talking about 1 million or 2 million people out of Syria, and it has caused great uproar here and in Europe. The estimates are for the migration from climate change in the reasonably foreseeable future to be 200 million to 500 million people. Think of the national security implications of that.
And here we are debating a nominee for the Environmental Protection Agency who says: Well, it is debatable; maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
It is not debatable. This is happening. And for us to ignore it and to approve this nominee who is hostile, who has sued the Agency, and who has never done a thing in his life to protect the environment, is just outrageous. It is a dereliction of our responsibility, and we are going to look back on this moment and say: What were we thinking?
I understand that the President won. Elections have results. He can move in the direction he wants to on policy, but this is beyond policy. This is just fundamentally irresponsible to our children, to their children, and the future of this country.
So I hope, after this debate and after this discussion, the people of this body will come together--just as they did with the Secretary of Labor nominee, who really wasn't appropriate--and say the same thing.
Plus, finally--I will just note this as a parenthetical--there is the issue of the emails in and out of this fellow's office when he was attorney general that they have been hiding for 2\1/2\ years or 3 years that may well become available in a week. If I were someone contemplating voting for this fellow, I sure as heck would want to wait until I saw these emails because there may be things there that are going to be profoundly embarrassing, if not worse.
So there is no reason to move this nomination today, and there is no reason, in my view, to move this nomination at all.
I understand that the EPA can overreach--any agency can overreach-- and there should be control on regulations. I have worked on regulatory reform since I have been here, but there is a difference between regulatory reform and a wrecking ball to the fundamental protections that have made so much difference to the people of this country.
So I hope we will consider the future in our vote today--not just ourselves,
not just the regulations, not just a few people who may be profiting by the exploitation of these resources, but think about our kids, our grandchildren, and our ultimate responsibility to this country.
Thank you, Madam President.
I yield the floor.