Floor Statements

Mr. President, I am here today to join the chorus of opposition to Todd Blanche's nomination as Attorney General of the United States.

Things that Republicans have purported to care about are disastrous with this guy. Pam Bondi put the blame directly on Todd Blanche for the Department of Justice's foulup with the Epstein files.

That foulup was pretty deadly serious for the women who were victims, who had managed to keep that fact private until Todd Blanche and the DOJ fouled that up and put out their names, put out their addresses, put out their photographs, and in some cases put out photographs with very little clothing on--complete disruption of the lives of the victims of Epstein's depravity, complete incompetence from a document- production point of view.

And on the other side, this guy actually participated in the Epstein coverup. Remember that there was a witness who spoke to FBI agents about having been assaulted by Donald Trump when she was about 14 years old, physically assaulted and sexually assaulted.

She spoke to the FBI at least four times. Those four times were recorded in FBI 302s. A 302 is the FBI name for the witness statement that the agents write up after an interview.

So four times this woman has been interviewed about what had happened to her as a girl. Three of those 302s specifically mentioned Donald Trump. In the disclosure that Todd Blanche made under the Epstein files law, the only one of the four that got disclosed was the one that didn't mention Donald Trump.

That ought to be disqualifying right there. Luckily, some very sharp investigators realized through, like, gaps in Bates stamp numbers that documents were missing and that the three 302s had not been disclosed. And so Blanche was forced to cough those up.

But behind a 302 come the agent notes. And there are still 37 pages of documents relating to that that are still suppressed, that are still covered up, that look to be the agents' notes, which should have been disclosed. So the coverup continued with respect to allegations against Donald Trump. Where else did the coverup continue?

Well, the Treasury Department sent to the Department of Justice what are called suspicious activity reports. A suspicious activity report is what you get when international banking transactions look like something funny is afoot, look like there is, for instance, money laundering going on. In this case, it was money laundering and human- trafficking concerns that provoked the suspicious activity reports.

You don't have to be a genius investigator to look at a suspicious activity report and deduce it might have something to do with some suspicious activity. It is the title of the report, for Pete's sake.

Billions of dollars of transactions were behind those suspicious activity reports. How many were investigated by the Blanche Department of Justice? Zero. Turned a complete blind eye to that whole aspect of the Epstein files, even though the suspicious activity reports were right in front of them.

And then he goes running down to Tallahassee to interview Epstein's comrade-in-crime Ghislaine Maxwell. Did he use that interview to develop any new information, to go after people who were culpable in the Epstein files? No.

He used that interview to extract exculpatory comments from her about Donald Trump. Oh, that he was a perfect gentleman. And the next thing you know, she is rewarded with a transfer to a Club Fed-type prison.

What is the excuse for that? Oh, she was at risk. We felt she was in danger. Well, look, I have been around law enforcement for a long time, and this is the first time I have ever seen a prisoner allegedly in danger be transferred to a less secure setting to solve the problem of danger. Right? You move the prisoner to a more secure setting, not a less secure setting. It makes no sense. So in the Epstein files, Todd Blanche's fingerprints are all over the screwup and the coverup. Then we move on to the slush fund and the Trump family tax fraud amnesty, which was cooked up in a deal surrounding a Federal court proceeding, which was such a mess that the judge in that Federal court proceeding has gone back to look at what the heck happened.

She was looking at whether something happened called fraud upon the court. You probably haven't heard of fraud upon the court. It is unusually rare. It is a thermonuclear ethics accusation. We have looked. In the history of the Department of Justice, fraud on the court has not even been alleged against any senior DOJ official--ever. Ever.

And here you have a court that opened a proceeding, an inquiry, into whether or not there was fraud on the court, and that is still pending.

There is still every reason to believe that Blanche may be found culpable for putting a fraud on the court together to cook up the slush fund tax amnesty scheme. That is pretty unheard of.

Unfortunately, it is not uncommon in this Blanche Department of Justice. There is a cascade of criticism from Federal courts about misconduct by this Department of Justice--misconduct that is unprecedented.

I will tell you that I was the U.S. attorney for the District of Rhode Island. If judges had used words like this about my attorneys' conduct in their courtrooms, there would have been consequences. At a minimum, there would have been staff meetings. There could have been referrals to the Office of Professional Responsibility. There could have been apologies required to the court. There could have been a reboot, internal office discipline of what is going on with this case. But when a judge says that the government's argument is disingenuous, when the judge says that the government's argument is a pretext for something else, when the judge says that the government has engaged in bad faith, each one of those is a four-alarm fire word.

In medicine, there are things that they call never events, things that should never happen in a hospital that you protect against, these are never event words coming from Federal judges. And yet they are commonplace in the corrupted Department of Justice run by Todd Blanche.

As to his complicity in the Epstein files coverup, I ask unanimous consent that a letter from Epstein survivors to Senators Tillis and Cornyn be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks.

With respect to the destruction of the Department of Justice that he has wrought, I would also ask that we add George Will's column called ``Against Todd Blanche.''

I ask unanimous consent that the article entitled ``Against Todd Blanche'' be printed in the Record.

And with respect to this litany of criticism of the honesty of the Blanche Department of Justice, I would like to add a ProPublica article entitled ``Federal Judges Chastise Trump's Justice Department for `Unlawful,' `Unethical' and `Unseemly' Conduct,'' whose first sentence begins:

Across the country, federal judges are calling out

Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented

ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold

centuries-old legal norms.

I ask unanimous consent that the article entitled ``Federal Judges Chastise Trump's Justice Department for `Unlawful,' `Unethical' and `Unseemly' Conduct'' be printed in the Record.

And then this isn't just a problem in American legal communities. There is a global magazine called The Economist magazine, which, by the way, does not run liberal. It is a fairly conservative publication.

The cover story in the July 18 The Economist is a picture of the Department of Justice logo and the title ``Degradation in progress.''

I ask that The Economist magazine article--there are actually two. One is the opening article that they lead with before they get to the main article; and the second is the main article--the two articles about the degradation of the Department of Justice under Todd Blanche be added to the Record as well.

I ask unanimous consent that the articles entitled ``Degradation in progress'' and ``The rule of one'' be printed in the Record.

Last, there is a group called Just Security, which keeps track of what goes on in Federal courts. This is a binder of the cases that they have put together in which a Federal judge is harshly criticizing the integrity or the competence of the Department of Justice.

This binder, frankly, should not exist. This is two-sided, by the way. These many cases--it is just astounding. I am not going to ask that this all be put into the Record. But I will note that if you look at justsecurity.org, you can look at their report published on March 19, 2026. It gets regularly updated.

And if you want to go through it, you can see truly appalling criticisms by Federal judges of every appointment background against incompetence and dishonesty by the Blanche Department of Justice.

Where that really hits the road is with something called the presumption of regularity. You might not know what the presumption of regularity is, but it is a benefit that the government enjoys--that as a matter of policy, the Federal judiciary has determined that the Federal Government is generally so honest and competent that its proceedings will be given the presumption of regularity that the benefit of the doubt will go to the Department of Justice lawyers and to the government Agencies involved.

Unless the adversary can prove otherwise, courts will presume that the government has done the right thing. And over and over again, we have seen judges say that presumption of regularity is now shot because there is so much dishonesty and incompetence coming out of the Department of Justice. That is unprecedented.

There are hundreds of other reasons to vote against this most reprehensible Attorney General nominee in American history, but the very specific ones about his complicity in the Epstein files screwup and coverup, his being the first senior Department of Justice official in the history of the United States to face a fraud on the courts inquiry, where the judge already decided that the proceeding was a sham and that the parties were in collusion with each other and that the whole thing was done in bad faith, and that that is not an isolated incident--that is part of a pattern of incompetence and dishonesty out of the Department of Justice that has never before happened in the United States of America.

If my Republican colleagues want to get behind that--if they are cool with an Attorney General who has that record--that is on you.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am here to take us into the upcoming vote, the Congressional Review Act vote, with respect to an EPA rule related to PFAS.

For those of you who aren't following this, PFAS is a dangerous and toxic substance that, I think, Republicans and Democrats alike see as a dangerous and inadequately regulated substance. Unfortunately, it is particularly prevalent in military installations, and particular exposure has been faced by veterans and also by folks who are in our emergency response community--firefighters. Airports get a lot of it because of the firefighting drills that they have to have. It is a very significant problem.

There was a rule that required the reporting about PFAS use. Manufacturers and importers just have to say: Here is what we are doing. But it is important to get that information out so that people can understand where the exposure is to these toxic PFAS chemicals. Well, just before--like 4 days before--that reporting window was supposed to open and require the reporting of PFAS exposure, Trump's EPA announced a new interim rule with a delay of the reporting requirement until next year. They delayed it once. That delay ran out. This is the second delay.

First of all, I don't think there is any need for a delay. Second of all, there is every reason to believe that the chemical industry is behind weakening PFAS protections during the delay period. That would be consistent with the Trump EPA's favoritism toward any pollutant and any polluter all the time.

So here we are with a deadline for reporting. This isn't regulation; this is reporting public information that is being scrapped and extended. I would hope because of the fact that the PFAS contamination danger falls across red and blue States alike that we could send a bipartisan message today, through this Congressional Review Act, back to the EPA, saying: No, you don't get a second delay. Start the reporting right now. If you want to come back and weaken the standard, we will fight you on that, but that is a separate fight. At least let's get the reporting on PFAS contamination out there.

So I urge my colleagues to support this Congressional Review Act.

I understand that the distinguished chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee would like to respond. So I ask unanimous consent that Senator Capito be recognized and that, at the conclusion of her remarks, I be recognized to go through the parliamentary steps necessary for the vote.

Well, I am sorry that we can't agree on this particular provision because we are working together on so many things so well. But I will have to confess I have real doubts about whether EPA is really trying to put this together, as deadline after deadline slips and slips and slips.

So perhaps we will see what happens. But if, for some reason, this CRA should fail, perhaps we can come back again after EPA slips the deadline again and perhaps has baked in some goodies for the PFAS industry along the way. And if we can't do it today, then soon send a bipartisan message to the EPA to knock it off and get about their business with PFAS.

Mr. President, with that, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate resume legislative session.

Mr. President, I move to proceed to Calendar No. 532, S.J. Res. 187.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, simple fact: Climate change is real. It is actually pretty widely known. I think it is a true statement that every person knowledgeable about climate science who is not on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry or its denial operation agrees with that. Actually, a lot of people knowledgeable about climate science who are on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry agree with that. In fact, scientists from Exxon, from Chevron, in a report for API 30, 40 years ago, acknowledged climate science, predicted the harms, and indeed quite accurately predicted the harms we are seeing now.

Given that, I came to the floor to ask my colleagues if they could simply agree on that simple scientific fact--climate change is actually real. Well, unfortunately, to no one's surprise, Republican colleagues could not. So I came back to the floor and broke down the big question--the scientific fact that climate change is real--into some of its component truths, the smaller truths that make up the big truth that climate change is real. Each time faced with simple, well- documented truths, such as sea level rise and economic fallout from climate change, Republicans objected.

Objectors have protested that they are not climate change deniers. Well, you would never know that from their willingness to consider solutions. Indeed, the objectors are stridently opposed to any--any-- climate solutions, and they have made their opposition clear. The problem is that that comes with consequences.

So I will try another simple truth today. It is actually a pair. One, climate change-driven extreme weather events are increasing, and at the same time, the government is dismantling weather monitoring and alert systems. I will ask you to accept those two truths together. I don't think either one is subject to much debate, so I hope we can all agree on that.

As I have explained repeatedly and as anybody knowledgeable in this space pretty well knows, climate change exacerbates extreme weather and disaster events. You can see on this chart the billion-dollar disasters from 1980 to today. It gets worse and worse. It includes winter storms, wildfires, hurricanes, and other severe storms; freezes, flooding, and drought. But to make the chart, it has got to be a billion-dollar disaster. Climate change increases both the frequency and the intensity of these events. Scientists have known this to be true for decades now. It has actually developed to the point where the National Academies could release a report just this month making clear that the attribution science--linking extreme weather to climate change to emissions--is advancing. It is now quite well established.

So what do we know?

We know that the fossil fuel industry is making extreme weather worse. Now we have an even better sense of how much worse; how it is attributable to those companies.

I mentioned flooding. Climate change drives flooding in several ways: wetter hurricanes, for one; sea-level rise for another. And I say this as a Rhode Islander: It is not just our coastal communities that are at risk; climate change increases rainfall intensity--powerful rain bursts--that deliver unprecedented upland flooding. That happens because a warmer atmosphere, just as a matter of simple physics, holds more water.

This chart shows that, from 1970 to 2025, average rainfall intensity increased by 28 percent. That is a lot more water, and it results in more frequent and intense extreme rainfall, which can occur far away from coasts. Ask Asheville, NC.

So how can communities like Asheville know when floods like that are coming?

Well, the answer is, government warning systems from our National Weather Service, which is part of the NOAA.

Most of us use National Weather Service data every day because smartphones rely on Weather Service data to power the weather apps that we look at. If you have gotten a thunderstorm warning, a tornado warning, or a flood alert on your smartphone, that is the Weather Service and its hundreds of civil servants diligently doing the science, tracking the data, and putting out the warnings.

Well, since President Trump took office and unleashed Elon Musk and his team of little DOGE boys, the Weather Service has lost about 600 employees--600. Half of those employees were meteorologists and hydrologists--the people who work on doing the forecasting and the warnings.

As climate change-driven extreme weather continues to worsen these dangers, well, that spells trouble, and people need warnings. We can trace the impact of those DOGE losses to the Weather Service already.

For instance, at the time of the deadly flooding in Kerr County, TX, last year, the Weather Service's San Angelo office was missing a senior hydrologist, a staff forecaster, and a chief meteorologist. They are just not there anymore. The San Antonio office was missing a science officer and a warning coordination meteorologist. What could possibly go wrong? Well, they found out in Kerr County, TX.

In April of this year, East-Central Kansas got a Weather Service tornado warning out with just minutes to spare. Weather forecasters can usually issue tornado warnings hours in advance and then update. They can do those early warnings because, when the government is properly staffed and hasn't had Elon Musk's little minions wrecking it, it can release daily weather balloons in the predawn hours to build the dataset of what is going on. Well, due to staffing cuts, several Weather Service offices now don't have the people to do the predawn launches, so the balloons don't go up until regular office hours. By then, when those balloons went up on April 13, the storms were already on the move. This time, Kansans were warned to seek shelter just in the nick of time, but that is not an acceptable gamble for the U.S. Government.

You know, it is pretty basic government stuff to fund and maintain weather monitoring and alert systems, including adequate staff at the weather Agencies. If we can't do that, well, we will see more lives lost as ever more frequent and dangerous climate-driven weather events catch people by surprise because our Weather Service is understaffed and underfunded. We should certainly be able to agree on that. Climate- driven extreme weather is worsening, and the administration is taking down the capabilities for weather forecasting and warnings. Both are true. I hope that we can agree to this one.

So, notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be discharged from further consideration and that the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 558. I further ask consent that the resolution be agreed to; that the preamble be agreed to; and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, just a few quick things. First of all, Medicaid, from the budget discussion this morning, is facing a trillion dollars in cuts. Second of all, that is being done by a redtape bomb being dropped on Medicaid recipients that will fall the hardest on the people least capable of the additional redtape and paperwork who have-- you know, are in addiction recovery, have severe mental health issues, have such disabling physical health issues that it is hard for them to take on the new project of keeping up with the Republican redtape and bureaucracy.

And the question of whether it is real or not, you don't have to go any further than looking at the organizations, hospitals, doctors groups, nursing homes, that are having to prepare their finances for that cut. They are not preparing their finances for level Medicaid funding; they are preparing their finances for massive cuts. So that is just the truth of the matter.

With respect to the Weather Service, 600 employees are gone. They were driven out by Elon Musk and his little

minions, and there are vacancies in meteorological, hydrological, and weather forecasting positions as a result. That is just another fact.

And, last of all, my colleague from Wisconsin's view of what is happening with climate change is certainly entertaining in certain circles. But if you want to take a look at what is real, you might want to consider going to the universities in Wisconsin--like the quite renown University of Wisconsin--to see that legitimate climate science is what is taught in Wisconsin's own universities, not the entertaining version that we just heard here on the Senate floor, but the real stuff, taught by the people who really know to students who want to know what the truth is. That is the choice Wisconsin made in its universities. They teach the real stuff, and there is no way you can reconcile the real stuff with the entertaining version of climate that we just heard from the distinguished Senator from Wisconsin.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I won't speak long. David Rosner has died. You have probably never heard of him, but I knew him. His research, along with his colleague Gerry Markowitz, helped expose the role of the lead paint industry in poisoning millions of children.

He was a great public health researcher. Here is his book with Gerry Markowitz, which I just took down from my Senate bookshelf, where I keep it: ``Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution.''

David had smarts, and he had discipline, and he had guts. The smarts made him and Gerry path-breaking researchers. The discipline made their research incontrovertible, and the guts helped him weather the response, all too common, from American industry when faced with inconvenient truths: to lie, to bully, to disparage.

Well, that behavior did not defeat David. His work stands.

As I said, I won't speak long. I will instead ask unanimous consent that three obituaries be printed in the Congressional Record appended to these remarks. One is his obituary in The Lancet, the distinguished medical publication. The second is a reminiscence by his professional peer Bruce Lanphear. And the last is a Substack reminiscence by his daughter Molly.

David was a special man. He did special work. I was proud to have worked with him.

I thank the Chair. I yield the floor.

Mr. President, before I start, let me offer the Presiding Officer my best wishes for a very, very happy birthday. I might regale you with singing ``Happy Birthday.''

But I have a terrible singing voice, and so I will spare the Senate the embarrassment of that particular performance.

Madam President, as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I therefore ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be discharged and the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 557; further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I am not going to go through a rebuttal of the factual misstatements to which we have just been treated, but I will add that I have objections to the IRA bill as well. We can all have objections to parts of the IRA.

But the fact is that fossil fuel emissions continue to cause harm; they continue to cause danger. And the warnings that I have described are now very real.

We can do nothing about it, and that has been the plan in the Senate ever since Citizens United dialed up the fossil fuel industry to influence us with dark money.

But if we are going to do something about it, we must start somewhere, and I would recommend that we start with some really simple facts, like the ones that I brought to the Senate floor just now.

These are serious warnings. Senators who wish to change the subject or distract us or prevent us from responding in any way to these serious warnings--well, that is everybody's choice. But I do think these warnings are serious enough that they merit attention.

So if you don't like my suggestion, let's do something different. But let's just not sit here and do nothing.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, climate change is real. Simple proposition. Earlier this year, I came to the floor and asked my colleagues if they could all agree on that simple factual proposition. Well, they could not, so I return to the floor in hopes that our Republican colleagues could at least agree to some of the simple truths that make up the larger truth of climate change.

I asked if we could agree, for instance, that sea levels are rising as a consequence. There is really no dispute about that, but Republicans objected.

I asked if we could agree that the oceans are warming as a consequence. There is really no dispute about that either. In fact, they are warming by about 20 zettajoules a year. Nevertheless, Republicans still objected.

So I shifted my focus to economic threats. I asked if we could agree that climate change is driving up the cost of homeowners insurance or that it threatens home values. Very clear propositions demonstrated in real life. But, again, Republicans objected.

Well, the closer these threats are to your home, the harder they become to deny. So let me try a narrower simple truth today: Florida's insurance market is gravely stressed by climate risks. That is it. Can we all agree on that?

I have explained many times that climate change is driving an increase in severe storms, including hurricanes. This chart tracks billion-dollar climate disasters in the United States between 1980 and today. The pattern is crystal clear. As you can see, these events and their costs are increasing.

According to NOAA, of all the climate-driven disasters since 1980, hurricanes have caused the most damage--over $1.5 trillion total adding all that up--with an average cost of $23 billion per event.

And hurricanes hit southeastern States--particularly Florida--the hardest. Between 2020 and 2024, nine hurricanes hit Florida causing $244 billion in damages in Florida alone. They went on often to create more damage in other States--but $244 billion in Florida.

So what does the data show is happening in Florida insurance markets as a result? First, data I collected as chair of the Senate Budget Committee shows that Florida has, by far, the highest insurance nonrenewal rate in the country--that is the rate at which insurers say to their customer: I am sorry. I know you have been a good customer. We have been insuring you for years, but your property is now so endangered that we can no longer insure you. We are done. You have got to go find new insurance.

Florida: Highest nonrenewal rate in the country.

Second, Florida has, by far, the highest average premiums in the country--by some estimates, approaching $14,000 per year. Economists expect these costs to continue to rise.

This chart predicts future insurance rate increases as high as 300 percent in coastal Florida in the next 30 years--the period of a mortgage entered into today. Just do some quick math. If it is $14,000 now, a 300 percent increase, four times as much, you add--call it a $56,000 annual expense to own a home, and you run a present value of that simple math, that all comes off the value of the home.

Even at these high premium rates, many home insurers in Florida are at risk of insolvency. After catastrophic hurricane losses in recent years, many of the major insurers--including Farmers, Progressive, and AAA--all left the Florida market entirely leaving behind small, local, and less stable insurers. Many of those small, local, and less stable insurers have gone bust when claims come in. This insurance problem creates a mortgage problem in Florida. Banks won't finance a home mortgage unless the home is protected by insurance.

When banks originate mortgages, they often flip them to government-

sponsored entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So, a new problem: Fannie and Freddie will only purchase mortgages which are protected by an insurer and only if that insurer has a requisite financial stability rating. Well, to obtain a financial stability rating, insurers pay a rating agency.

Given the insolvency risk in the Florida insurance market, how do insurance companies there obtain the stability rating required by Fannie and Freddie? Most go to an operation called Demotech. Mark my words, you will hear a lot more about Demotech as this situation worsens. Demotech has rated nearly all of these small, local companies that it covers ``A'' or above. Well, it turns out these ratings are too good to be true.

A recent investigation by the Wall Street Journal found that insurers rated by Demotech are 30 times more likely--30 times more likely--to become insolvent than those graded by other rating companies. So if Fannie and Freddie were to stop accepting mortgages with a high-risk Demotech-rated insurer, the Florida real estate market would come to a shuddering halt.

This is the share of the insurance market in Florida rated by Demotech. This is what is left of the traditional ratings, and this is Citizens Property Insurance, which, because it is State-backed, doesn't require ratings. It has its own separate problems.

But this Demotech problem is real. Almost 20 percent of Demotech- rated insurers in Florida have gone insolvent in the last decade--20 percent; 1 in 5, gone. An insolvent insurer is, of course, a disaster for homeowners who have to wait, eventually, to be paid by a State-run organization--the guaranty fund--that takes over for the failed, insolvent insurance.

Well, two problems result from that. One, the delay in paying claims destroys neighborhoods. It is great to get paid by your insurance company when you have a major claim and your house is wrecked, but if the money doesn't come soon, you can't rebuild and the neighborhood doesn't come back. And we see that in Florida now. Two, other Floridians are on the hook for all those claims. The guaranty fund transmits that cost to other Florida policyholders.

Now, Citizens Property Insurance--this one--the State-backed insurer of last resort, has a similar backstop when it can't pay claims, but in real life, those levees to prop up Citizens are often going to be uncollectible. There are credible scenarios in which the losses of Citizens Property Insurance exceed its ability to pay claims, and the assessment scheme fails. Those are plausible scenarios.

Well, to defend, Citizens engages in periodic depopulation efforts where it hands off to those same popup, politically connected, Demotech-rated local insurers tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of homeowners. Boom--the homeowner is dumped into an insurance company she has never heard of.

It is a cascade happening. The climate crisis clobbers home values, drives up insurance prices, and causes insurance insolvency in climate- risky areas across the country but nowhere so more than Florida.

This is a crisis for families in Florida. The human stories behind this are heartbreaking, and it is growing into a crisis for all of us. Florida's insurance market is the canary in the American climate risk coal mine. As climate change gets worse and risks spread, other States will find themselves in a similar position--my own, being a coastal State, amongst them.

So can we all agree on this simple truth: that Florida's insurance market is gravely stressed by climate risks?

Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be discharged and the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of that proposition, S. Res. 556; further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I appreciate my fine colleague from Indiana State whose Indiana University teaches the science of climate change. But I would like to say that this is not an attack on Florida; this is a warning to Florida of what is happening, what is already demonstrably beginning to happen as a result of sea level rise, worse hurricanes, and heavier storm bursts. I just want to make sure that characterization is clear. Florida is entitled to be warned about this risk. It is a risk we all share.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the vote scheduled for 5:30 be allowed to begin immediately.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, climate change is real. Earlier this year, I came to the floor and asked my colleagues if they could all agree to that simple scientific fact. Unsurprisingly, given the clout of fossil fuel in this arena, they could not.

So I return to the floor in hopes that my Republican colleagues could at least agree to some of the simple truths that make up the bigger picture of climate change.

I asked if we could agree that sea levels are rising due to fossil fuel emissions. Republicans objected.

I asked that we could agree that oceans are warming due to fossil fuel emissions. Republicans objected. They are actually warming by the zettajoule, if you want to look up a really big number.

So I changed tactics. I wanted to see if my Republican colleagues could at least acknowledge some of the realities. I asked if we could agree that climate change is driving up the cost of homeowners insurance, which is something that even homeowners insurers will tell you. But, again, Republicans objected.

Well, I am not giving up. Here is today's simple truth: Climate change poses a threat to home values and the mortgage market. Can we all agree on that?

Let me break this down. Republicans may object, but facts remain. And the fact is that sea levels are rising.

Sea level rise and the flooding that comes along with it causes catastrophic damage to coastal infrastructure, businesses, and homes. This drives enormous financial loss.

Between 2005 and 2017, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia together lost $7.4 billion in home value due to sea level rise-related flooding. Absent climate action, flooding like this will get worse in the years to come.

Researchers find that 300,000 U.S. homes and commercial properties collectively valued at $136 billion, in today's dollars, are at risk of chronic disruptive flooding in the next 30 years, the duration of a mortgage; and by the end of the 21st century, nearly 2.5 million U.S. homes and commercial properties, collectively valued at over $1 trillion, will be at risk of chronic flooding. Indeed, the chief economist of Freddie Mac has predicted what he called a ``coastal property values crash.''

Sea level rise is not the only climate impact threatening homes across the country. We see it in all kinds of natural calamities. I have shown this chart on the floor before. It tracks billion-dollar climate disasters in the United States between 1980 and now. These include floods, wildfires, cyclones, and drought. As you can see, the events and the costs are increasing.

And it is not just homes directly impacted by climate disaster that face declines in property values. Following a weather disaster, housing values decline substantially across entire impacted ZIP Codes, in part because of the market's expectation of future disasters in that area.

Last week, I explained that the same forces driving home insurance costs up are driving down home values. That is because climate losses hit insurers first, and insurers then raise their costs; and those costs ultimately affect the home's value.

This chart shows that insurance costs are increasing the most in areas facing the highest climate risk, which is only logical.

Unfortunately, for the parts of the country most exposed to climate change, insurance premiums are going to continue to climb. This chart shows the county-level forecast for homeowners insurance premiums over the next 30 years. As you can see, all along the gulf coast, through Florida and out through the Intermountain West, where fires are such an issue, premiums are expected to double or triple or even quadruple. The darkest areas here are the highest increase, but everywhere is heading up.

And it gets worse. Rising premiums depress home values, as the carrying cost of owning that home increases. If you have to pay, as in Florida, on average, $14,000 every year for home insurance and that doubles or triples, and now you have a $30,000 or $40,000 annual burden--a check you have to pay to keep that home--that is going to drive down the cost of the home because the next buyer is going to be looking at that cost burden.

So rising premiums are one key risk to home property values, but insurance unavailability is just as big. More and more often, in the areas of highest climate risk, insurance companies are refusing to insure homes at all.

This chart tracks home insurance nonrenewal rates. That is when your insurance company--that you have been a good customer of for years and years and years--suddenly sends a notice into your mail slot saying: Sorry, you are all done. Your property is too dangerous. We are not going to insure it any longer. You will have to look elsewhere.

This was based on work we did last Congress in the Budget Committee, and the nonrenewal rates are the highest in areas with high climate risk. Again, it seems obvious, but the data tracks that the greater the climate risk, the more the insurance industry is backing away from uninsurable risks. Obviously, coastal Florida and wildfire-prone western areas are in greatest danger.

This problem is a disaster for homeowners because lenders won't approve a mortgage unless the borrower also purchases insurance. An uninsurable home is an unmortgageable home, and an unmortgageable home is, in most places, an unsellable home. At the individual level, homeowner by homeowner, this can wipe out a family's primary source of wealth. One day your home had one value. The notice of nonrenewal comes, you can't get insurance, and your own home's value drops precipitously, wiping out your primary source of wealth, endangering retirements, endangering your children's future.

And as climate disasters keep getting worse, so will this. Researchers predict that U.S. residential property will lose nearly $1.5 trillion in value over the next 30 years due to increasingly expensive and unavailable insurance. Just recently, Moody's Analytics came to a similar conclusion. And, sure enough, the places that will see the biggest declines in value are the places most exposed to climate risk: the Southeast and gulf coast, and the West and Plains, which are exposed to wildfire and hail risks.

Indeed, in Florida, property values have already started to decline. It has been reported that Florida is the No. 1 State in the country for lost property value, which is the natural endpoint of the cascade from climate risk to insurance collapse, to mortgage market collapse, to property values collapse. And there in Florida, you see it beginning to happen.

Here is the bad news. At the end of the day, the pressure from the insurance market on home values--this is the place where home values are likely to decline because of climate change.

There has always been a basic truth in America that, with time, over the course of the mortgage, your property is going to go up in value. But in a world burdened by this level of climate risk, that is no longer the case. Now, we are looking at areas where it is predicted that home values may decline. In some cases, the decline is targeted at 100 percent.

What is 100 percent decline in home value? That means it ain't worth nothing anymore; you have lost all the value in your home. And, obviously, it is concentrated in the highest risk areas, but the risk is continuing to grow.

We know what happened the last time, when there was a widespread decline in property values: The economy spiraled into the great recession. It cost millions of people in the United States their jobs, their homes, their savings. It would be folly to repeat 2008 all over again. The warnings are many, and they are real, and they come from leading voices in the financial sector--not environmentalists--people who track financial markets.

So let's agree on the simple truth that climate change portends significant declines in American home values in climate-exposed regions of the United States.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent, therefore, that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be discharged and the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 555; further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, may I just say that some of the projections that my colleague objects to go back to the Chafee hearings of 40 years ago. These are predictions that are the product of NASA scientists.

NASA is pretty good at stuff. We have vehicles rolling around on Mars thanks to NASA science. Their predictions are pretty good about where things are going to go.

When the 2008 mortgage meltdown happened, there were two guys--one named Burry and one named Burt--who predicted. They got it right. Had we listened to those predictions, we could have saved ourselves a lot of pain.

By the way, both of them are predicting a climate-related insurance collapse affecting property values, as we

have said. And, indeed, if you look at some of the companies most responsible for this mess, their own scientists predicted exactly what we have seen.

We can test those predictions from 30, 40 years ago by measuring what has happened since, and what happened since confirms the predictions that Exxon scientists knew about, American Petroleum Institute scientists knew about, Chevron scientists knew about.

Their problem was that when they told their senior management, the senior management said: No. No. No. Let's not talk about that. Let's cover that up, and let's start actually misleading the public about it.

The folks who came into the Budget Committee to testify about this are people like the former risk management chief for Goldman Sachs, the chief economist--former chief economist for Freddie Mac, the mortgage giant.

We had reports from the international Financial Stability Board about the danger to global banking markets. The Mortgage Bankers Association expressed their concern about this problem. An Allianz board member has written a very compelling article about what the collapse of the insurance market looks like as it continues. The American president of Aon, a huge insurance giant testified about this risk. Mark Carney, who was the president of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada before that and is now Prime Minister of Canada, testified about this.

So some predictions are worth paying attention to, either because they have a track record over decades of proving themselves out or because the people really seem to know what they are talking about. And I would urge that we pay more attention to these predictions.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I think it is virtually undisputed, among people who are not on fossil fuel's payroll, that climate change is real. Earlier this year, I came to the floor, and I asked my colleagues if they could all agree on that simple, scientific fact. Well, unfortunately, they could not.

So I came back. I returned to the floor in hopes that my Republican colleagues could, at least, agree to some of the simple truths that make up the bigger picture of climate change. I asked if we could agree, for instance, that sea levels are rising due to carbon emissions--again, essentially zero dispute on that fact in the scientific community--but Republicans objected.

I asked if we could agree that oceans are warming. Oceans are warming by multiple zettajoules. That is a number with 21 zeros behind it. It is a massive, massive measured scientific fact. And yet Republicans sent someone to the floor to object.

Again, there is essentially no nonfossil fuel-funded science disputing any of this. And I have to put the fossil fuel-funded science in air quotes because it is not real science. It is just designed to look like science and tell a lie in scientific vocabulary.

So if the environmental realities are too much for the Senate to acknowledge, perhaps my colleagues will at least recognize the economic threats that are emerging.

So here is today's simple truth: Climate change is driving up the cost of homeowners insurance. Can we agree on that?

Well, let me break down why we should agree on that. Climate change drives extreme weather disasters, including hurricanes and floods and wildfires. Disasters like those destroy homes and destroy infrastructure, and all that destruction carries a heavy cost.

Before the Trump administration stopped the practice in 2025, NOAA-- the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration--actually used to track the costs of this destruction every year. Thanks to NOAA, we have all this data going back that shows that climate disasters and climate costs have been increasing--quite dramatically, actually.

This chart draws on NOAA data from before 2025 and other aggregated data since that, and it shows that the increase in climate change- driven weather has been very notable between 1980 and today--from here up to here.

Costs of the disasters spike in particular years, depending on the type of disasters and where the impacts occurred. Hurricanes Harvey, Maria, and Irma made 2017--here, that--the costliest year on record. But setting aside the spikes, the average cost is steadily increasing, along with the frequency of disasters.

And these costs fall first where? On the insurance companies.

In 2023, insurers lost money in 18 of 50 States. That is an increase from 12 States 5 years previously and 8 States in 2013--8 to 12 to 18. The losses to insurers are also increasing.

To offset these climate-driven losses, insurance companies raised their premiums. And, sure enough, from 2013 to 2022, home insurance premiums more than doubled, rising to be over 20 percent of mortgage payments, on average.

When a family starts with a pretty big payment like their home insurance payment and it then doubles, that is a big hit to the family's finances.

We know this increase isn't just inflation because insurance premiums are increasing 40 percent faster than inflation. We know that this cost increase is driven by climate change, and we know it because the numbers don't lie. You can look at the areas with the highest climate risk, and you see that the cost increases most in those counties, the ones at most risk from climate change. The largest increases in insurance rates between 2014 and 2023 happened in the highest climate risk areas--obvious and true.

In high-risk States like Florida and Louisiana, premiums are estimated to average more than $14,000 and $11,000 respectively. That is not by accident. That is because those low-lying States are being hammered by increasingly violent and wet storms and hurricanes, combined with rising sea levels. Both phenomena are driven by climate change.

Higher home insurance means less money to spend on household essentials like groceries and gas, which are already more expensive than ever.

But higher insurance rates are not actually a family's worst-case scenario. The worst-case home insurance scenario for a family is nonrenewal. More and more, in high climate risk counties across the country, insurance companies, unwilling to take on this additional risk, are refusing to insure homes at all. This is a nightmare for homeowners.

First of all, you have the enormous hassle of having to go out and find new insurance, which probably costs more and is worse. But also, most lenders won't approve a mortgage unless the borrower also purchases insurance. And if the home is uninsurable, guess what. The home is unmortgageable, and an unmortgageable home is almost inevitably an unsellable home.

When you lose your insurance, lenders may also force place a new home insurance policy on you to replace the policy that was canceled. Force- placed insurance obviously protects first the lender's interest, not the homeowner's property, and it almost always costs much, much more, and it covers less. And it is added to the mortgage payment, and that can be a huge financial blow to a family.

All of this added cost and risk means that climate change is dragging down home equity value, undermining the primary driver of wealth appreciation for America's middle class, and, by the way, reducing property tax revenue for things like schools and public safety and basic services provided by local government.

The bottom line here is that climate risk has moved from the science department to the economics department, and it has landed hard in home insurance, and Americans are paying the price.

So as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be discharged, and the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 554; further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I would just point out briefly in response to my distinguished colleague that an entire industry understands that climate risk is driving homeowners insurance.

The home insurance industry is actually under both a business model requirement and a fiduciary legal obligation to do its very, very best to predict risk, figure out what is driving that risk, and act accordingly.

For that reason, we had the president of Aon testify in the Budget Committee about how climate risk is damaging insurance markets. We have an editorial by a board member of the biggest insurance company in the world, Allianz. We have warnings from the risk manager--former risk manager--of Goldman Sachs. We have warnings from the former head of the Bank of England, now the Prime Minister of Canada. We have warnings from the Home Mortgage Association. We have warnings from the international Financial Stability Board.

There is an enormous amount of very solid and responsible data that comes not out of the environmental community but out of the financial community warning about the looming great climate insurance collapse. And if we refuse to pay attention to it, we will fail in our duties.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, today marks the 308th time that I have stood on the Senate floor and asked my colleagues to wake up to the realities of climate change.

This also marks 308 times that my Republican colleagues have ignored my call to wake up. They even refuse to acknowledge the simple truths that the climate is changing, oceans are warming, sea levels are rising, and our fossil fuel emissions are the principal cause.

In the last several weeks, Republicans have sent someone to the floor to object each time I sought unanimous consent to pass a resolution affirming these very simple truths.

The Senate's record of failure profoundly disappoints me. In fact, it angers me. I am angry on behalf of the homeowners in Florida, Louisiana, back home in Rhode Island, and across the country who are paying double or triple what they used to for property insurance because climate risk is making floods, storms, and wildfires more frequent and severe.

I am angry that these same families are paying more than ever for groceries due to increasingly frequent and severe droughts, heat waves, floods, and storms.

This is a tragedy. But, worse, it is a preventable tragedy. Ignoring it will not make climate change go away; it will leave Americans poorer and American communities more vulnerable and less prepared.

America can do big things. Our history shows that. And I believe a challenge of the magnitude of climate change justifies congressional action.

So here I still am, speaking because I still believe in the power of this body to take action, to serve the people whom we took an oath to serve, and to use the awesome power that our constituents have granted us to solve the greatest problems facing our country today.

This is a significant anniversary. Republican Senator John Chafee, whose distinguished career in the Senate spanned from 1976 to 1999, and who also served as Governor of my State and Secretary of the Navy, shared my belief.

On a note of personal disclosure, when he and my father both came back from World War II as marines from the Pacific theater, they ended up as roommates in college. So there is some personal family affection there, as well as professional appreciation.

Well, exactly 40 years ago this week, while serving as chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Environmental Pollution, Senator Chafee convened a 2-day, 5-panel hearing on the greenhouse effect, climate change, and ozone depletion. Senator Chafee believed Congress had a role in addressing both the hole in the ozone layer and the rising temperatures and global disruptions caused by climate change.

The 1986 Chafee hearing witnesses included scientists and policymakers--among them, Dr. James Hansen, who went on to become a leading advocate for decisive climate action and served NASA with great distinction; Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, later an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change participant and Nobel prize recipient; and even then- Senator Al Gore of Tennessee. Also testifying were President Reagan's EPA Administrator, Lee Thomas, and his Commerce Deputy Secretary, Clarence Brown.

In Senator Chafee's opening remarks, he warned of what he called two ``critical problems facing the world.'' First was ``the growing use of manmade chemicals'' that were significantly depleting the ozone layer, and second was the ``buildup of greenhouse gases, which threaten to warm the Earth to unprecedented levels.''

Those problems had to be addressed, Senator Chafee warned 40 years ago, because--and I will continue with his words here--``there is a very real possibility that man--through ignorance or indifference, or both--is irreversibly altering the ability of our atmosphere to perform basic life support functions for the planet.''

He asked the scientists to educate the public on the scientific consensus on ozone depletion and climate change, and he urged the government officials to take immediate action to, as he said, ``put the brakes on'' these looming crises and ensure a livable planet for future generations. Notably, Ronald Reagan's appointees acknowledged the climate crisis and agreed to take action.

This is not the first time I have brought this graph to the Senate floor. This is the so-called Keeling Curve, well known in science circles. This chart shows the change in carbon dioxide concentration in the Earth's atmosphere. As you can see, it has accelerated rapidly since 1950.

Last month, the Member whom the Republicans sent to the floor to object to my statement of the science made the point that CO2 levels have naturally fluctuated over many, many years of geologic time. Well, yeah, that is true.

Here is what that looks like. This is 800,000 years ago--800,000 years ago. For the last 800,000 years, the carbon concentration in the atmosphere has never gone above 300 parts per million. It has varied up and down. But something very, very different happened when our Industrial Revolution began and we started emitting massive amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, like methane, into the atmosphere. There it is--up like a rocket. The notion that this can be explained by that is just plain preposterous.

This is also not the first time I have come to the floor to speak about the 1986 Chafee hearings. I did so 10 years ago, in 2016, to mark those hearings' 30th anniversary. Then, as now, I reflected not only on the reality of climate science, which is virtually undisputed except among those on fossil fuel's payroll, and the climate costs that have accrued since 1986. But I also spoke about the shocking transformation of the Republican Party from the 1980s to today.

In June of 1986, a Republican Senator, concerned by the same data that I am sharing with you now, committed to immediate and urgent action. He directed a panel of Ronald Reagan-appointed officials to outline their plans to address the crisis, and they did so. At that time, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was approximately 348 parts per million.

In June of 2016, when I recognized the 30th anniversary of this hearing, the fossil fuel billionaire-backed Supreme Court had just stayed the Clean Power Plan, EPA's first-ever attempt to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from powerplants. Then-Candidate Donald Trump promised to rescind the Clean Power Plan when he got into office, and the U.S. House of Representatives voted to officially denounce a carbon price. They went to bat to protect the freedom to pollute for their fossil fuel donors.

In 2016, the concentration of CO2 had climbed from 348 parts per million to 404 parts per million. These are measurements, by the way, not opinions.

Today, President Trump, approaching the halfway point of his second term, calls climate change a ``hoax.'' Hoax. His EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin rescinded EPA's greenhouse gas endangerment finding--an action flatly at odds with known science and with the law--and then celebrated what he called ``driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.'' Really.

And to bring things full circle, earlier this spring, 40 years after a senior Reagan administration Commerce official acknowledged the reality of climate change, today's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a strident opponent of affordable renewable energy, denies the science. The Republican Party steps backward.

Today, as I speak, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is north of 430 parts per million--348, up to 404, and

now up to 430. In just four decades, atmospheric CO2 concentration has increased by nearly 25 percent due to fossil fuel combustion.

As climate deniers are fond of pointing out, CO2 doesn't harm or kill people. What it does is trap heat in the atmosphere-- enormous amounts of heat--and it is that heated atmosphere that harms and kills people through more violent extreme weather events, wildfires, and rising seas.

Here you see global average temperatures. Back in 1986, they were 0.46 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial norm. Now, they are 1.4 degrees above that preindustrial norm. That difference, nearly a full degree, has already had profound consequences for our planet. For one, our oceans are heating every year by the zettajoule.

If you don't know what a zettajoule is, let me tell you. It has 21 zeroes after it. You can either call it a billion trillions or a trillion billions. It is an enormous number.

The entire production and consumption of energy by the human species on planet Earth is half a zettajoule. And because of the heating generated by the greenhouse gases, more than 24 zettajoules of excess heat go into the ocean every year. A multiple of our total energy consumption as a species is absorbed by the oceans.

If you want to know why they are warming, if you want to know why reefs are dying, if you want to know why fisheries are moving around, if you want to know why seas are rising, if you want to know why storms are worsening, there is your answer: zettajoules of excess heat into the oceans caused by fossil fuel.

And all of that has economic cost. In this building, I have grown, I suppose, accustomed to the fact that nobody cares about anything that can't be monetized, and they only care about it to the extent that it is monetized. So here is some monetization of what all that means. In 1986--here--there were three--one, two, three--three billion-dollar disasters in the United States. Last year, there were 23 billion-dollar disasters. The recent L.A. wildfires alone destroyed thousands of homes and did tens of billions of dollars in damage.

And guess what happens when that kind of damage soars? Insurance moves with it. You actually don't have to be directly affected by a climate change-driven extreme weather event, a hurricane, or a wildfire to be paying the price for climate change. Back in 1986, when Senator Chafee held his hearings, homeowners insurance premiums averaged about $150 annually. In today's money, they averaged $470, roughly. Today-- today--premiums average almost $2,500, and--no surprise--the largest increases are in the highest climate risk areas. In Florida and Louisiana, homeowners insurance premiums average more than $10,000, and they are predicted to increase--doubling, even tripling--off the proverbial charts.

Climate change is no longer tomorrow's problem, and it has moved from the science department into the economics department. It is here today. And whether my colleagues care to admit it or not, we are all already paying for it. Economists estimate that it costs every household an average of around $500 per year in heightened climate cost, and that is a conservative estimate. In many coastal and wildfire-exposed parts of the country, that average annual cost is already north of $1,000 per household cost. And that hidden climate tax, brought to you by the fossil fuel industry, is steadily rising year after year.

This is what 40 years of inaction and obstruction following the Chafee hearings has wrought: huge costs and increasing economic dislocation. What was once a scientific issue, a prediction, is now knocking at our door and causing immediate economic harm.

And then there is the politics. In 1986, the hope and determination to tackle climate change was a bipartisan thing. Today, climate change has been replaced in the Republican Party by climate denial. When I got here in 2007, climate change was still a bipartisan concern. We had major climate legislation in this body--four different measures that I recall, each significant, each that would have changed the trajectory that these pages will face in their lifetime.

But then--then--the 2010 Citizens United decision came down. That decision unleashed a vast fossil fuel-funded armada of front groups that spread around climate disinformation, perhaps the biggest fraudulent operation in the country's history, and unlimited dark money into our politics--perhaps the largest corruption enterprise in American history.

Back in 1986, Senator Chafee did not face a politics awash in fossil fuel dark money, and the armada of climate denial front groups did not exist; and so the Senate was able to focus more on the public interest and less on fossil fuel's special interests. Today, objecting to my calls to this body to recognize the reality of climate change, the objector sent here accused me of ``subscribing to Chicken Little scare tactics.'' That is the 2026 Republican position.

Back in 1986, Republican John Chafee, before this became the ``House of Mammon,'' opened his climate change hearing by saying something very different. He said:

This is not a matter of Chicken Little telling us the sky

is falling.

Forty years of fossil fuel influence has made a sickening difference.

The 1986 Chafee hearing is also illustrative of the power of Congress when, uncorrupted by a powerful special interest, it acts decisively in favor of the public.

At the time of the Chafee hearing, depletion of the Earth's protective ozone layer was allowing dangerous levels of solar radiation to penetrate the atmosphere. Twin holes in the ozone layer had formed around the North and South Poles, and the ozone holes were growing.

Scientists worried that, absent immediate action, the holes would grow big enough to threaten the survival of life on Earth. That fear is ancient history now. Why? Not because we mocked the scientists for fearmongering, but because we did as the science advised and phased out the use of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons.

In 1990, just 4 years after the Chafee hearings, Congress passed the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, which required this phaseout. No surprise, the scientists were right, and the phaseout worked.

Chlorofluorocarbons stay in the atmosphere for decades. So it took years to see the effects of the ban. But beginning in the 2000s, the ozone holes stabilized and then began to shrink. And if current policies remain in place, scientists expect a return to pre-1980s levels, a healing of the ozone holes, within the next four decades.

We could still do the same for climate change: Follow the science, pass a law to implement policies that would reduce and eventually eliminate carbon pollution, remove the already emitted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and restore our climate's natural health, halt and eventually reverse dangerous sea level rise and the dangerous cycle of ever-worsening storms and wildfires, and fend off the insurance collapse that this trajectory portends.

Many of us watched the recent Artemis II mission with awe--with awe of the astronauts who traveled farther than any human has gone before and with awe of NASA's ingenuity to be able to send them there.

Astronaut Christina Koch, speaking from over 200,000 miles away from Earth, spoke to future generations. She said:

We will explore. We will build. . . . We will visit again.

We will construct science outposts. . . . We will found

companies. We will bolster industry. We will inspire. But,

ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always

choose each other.

Her closing words would resonate, I think, with Senator John Chafee. Forty years ago, he said:

It seems that the problems man creates for our planet are

never ending. But we have found solutions for prior

difficulties, and we will for these as well.

With those words of his, I salute the memory of Senator John Chafee, whose seat I now hold. He was an inspiring and farsighted public servant. We need more of them.

I should add that the NASA scientists who made that remarkable Artemis voyage possible have no doubts about the climate science.

Those climate doubts, that fake climate denial, are precisely coextensive with the reach of the fossil fuel industry's corrupt political influence.

There are two paths that emerged from Senator Chafee's hearing. One was the path of science to success against ozone depletion. The other-- the one we have unfortunately chosen--is the path of climate denial fraud and dark-money political corruption that leads to failure.

We can do better, but only if we wake up.

I yield the floor.

To the Senator, through the Chair, I, too, was at that memorial service. It probably was the first time we saw one another.

Thank you.

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

Mr. President, I come to the Senate floor every year around this time to remark upon an event in our pathway toward revolution.

As we close in on the semiquincentennial celebration of our day of independence--July 4, 1776--I want to take this Chamber back 4 more years than that to June 9, 1772, when the first blow was struck of armed conflict between the American Colonies and Great Britain's fleet.

The story begins with the arrival on Narragansett Bay of His Majesty's officer Lieutenant William Duddingston, the captain of a revenue cutter named the Gaspee. Lieutenant Duddingston's task was to police the commerce going in and out of Narragansett Bay, and he went about his task with bumptious, arrogant zeal, which included arrogant exchanges of correspondence with the Colonial Governor and Chief Justice and unnecessary harassment and interference with colonial shipping on Narragansett Bay.

Before we get to June and the events that I am going to describe, I will take a quick sidebar to one of his first exploits in February. He had only gotten there in January. By February, Captain Duddingston of the Gaspee seized a ship called the Fortune, and he seized its cargo. He had the ship and the cargo transferred up to Boston, where His Majesty's government sold the cargo and sold the ship and transferred the funds to the exchequer of Great Britain.

What they had not appreciated was that one of the owners of the Fortune was a Rhode Islander named Nathanael Greene, who had not beforehand been much involved in the Committees of Correspondence and the spirit of rebellion. But the seizure of his vessel put him into what he called a spirit of resentment that changed the course of his life. As students of history will know, he went on to become the chief operating officer of the Revolutionary War, the top lieutenant to George Washington, the guy who made the supplies and the work-- everything--happen.

He was important in that role, but he constantly begged General Washington for a real command. Ultimately, General Washington relented, though it wounded him to lose the administrative capability of General Nathanael Greene. General Greene went down to run the southern campaign of the Revolutionary War, whose motto, according to General Greene, was: We fight, we get beat, we rise up, and we fight again.

Sure enough, he did. He fought over and over and over again, never winning a battle but definitively winning the war in one of the first real examples of guerrilla-type conflict the world had seen. They were used to staged, matched armies in colorful regalia, standing at a reasonable distance from each other and firing at each other with muskets and with cannons. The entire campaign in the South was a guerrilla campaign in which they fought, they got beat, they got away, they rose up, and they fought again.

The result was that General Cornwallis, commanding the British Army, wrote to his wife:

That damn Greene is more dangerous than Washington.

He was a very significant participant in the victory that America achieved and the independence that we asserted on the Fourth of July, 1776. He doesn't get the credit he deserves because he spent so much of the war facilitating the work of General Washington, but historians know what a remarkable job he did running that southern campaign. You can trace that all the way back to Lieutenant William Duddingston and the Gaspee seizing his ship the Fortune and lighting up that spirit of resentment.

So scroll forward to June 9, 1772. Lieutenant Duddingston is still helming the Gaspee, and the Gaspee is still harassing Rhode Islanders. A June day on Narragansett Bay is a beautiful thing to behold, and in the sparkling light of that wonderful day, a little ship called the Hannah, bearing cargo, was sailing on its way up to Providence, which was one of the maritime centers of the Colonies, and the Gaspee gave chase, seeking to arrest the Hannah and seize its cargo and send it off to Boston the way the Fortune's had been sent. Only Captain Lindsey of the Hannah decided: To hell with that. I am not going to surrender. I am going to run for it.

He sailed away up Narragansett Bay with the Gaspee in chase.

Along the Warwick shore, about halfway up Narragansett Bay, the Pawtuxet River comes into the bay, and, as rivers do, it carries silt and dirt from the river washing through into the bay. When the river slows down and the water goes out into the larger bay, the silt and the sand fall to the bottom, and there is a little barrier along the bottom of the bay left by the river.

Well, Captain Lindsey had sailed there quite a lot, and like any good captain, he had a pretty good idea of how deeply his vessel drew. He sailed over the sandbar off of Namquid Point

and continued on his merry way in the sparkling midday of June 9, 1772. Behind him came the bigger, heavier, lumbering Gaspee, and it floundered and stuck on that sandbar. The tide was falling, so the Gaspee was going no place until the tide fell all the way to low tide and came all the way back up to the tide level at which it foundered and then raised farther enough to lift the vessel off where it was stuck.

When the Hannah got to Providence, her captain told the story of what had taken place. He described to the worthies on the Providence shore that the Gaspee--this dread vessel that had caused so much nuisance and cost to Rhode Islanders--was stuck.

That night, Rhode Islanders rode down from Providence to the Gaspee at night in longboats with muffled oars. As they approached the stuck Gaspee, Abraham Whipple, who was the local sheriff and was in the party, yelled out that he was there to arrest the captain of the vessel and arrest the vessel. Duddingston was not about to put up with that, so he called his crew up to the deck, called them to arms, and a battle ensued between the longboats surrounding the Gaspee and the Gaspee itself.

As the Rhode Islanders swarmed onto the Gaspee, among the gunshots was one that struck Captain Duddingston, so, injured, he surrendered his crew, and the Rhode Islanders captured--his rank was lieutenant; his position was captain. Captain Duddingston. Lieutenant Duddingston. They took him ashore with the crew and turned them all over to be held prisoner and detained. Then they went back out onto the bay, out to the stricken and stranded Gaspee, and they set her alight. When a ship burns, particularly a ship of that era, whose rope is covered with tar, whose rigging is canvas, whose structure is wood, with so many parts that are varnished and oiled, the combustion is rapid. And, as the Gaspee burned, the fire reached the Gaspee's powder magazine. And, when the fire reached the powder magazine, the gunpowder did what gunpowder does, and it blew the Gaspee to smithereens.

It is now about 4 in the morning on June 10, 1772. More than 4 years would go by before the Fourth of July Declaration of Independence; and, interestingly, more than a year and a half would go by until another event--that is much more prominent even though much less brave and significant--took place, and that is the so-called Boston Tea Party.

Now, I have nothing against my friends from Massachusetts, but they got drunk; they went onboard a civilian ship. They seized bales of tea, and they pushed the tea bales into Boston Harbor. Well, bully for them, but well more than a year earlier, Rhode Islanders had seized a vessel of Her Majesty's Navy; had captured the crew; and had blown the damned boat up, and I think that deserves a little credit. So I come here every year. When I go home this weekend, we will be marching in the Gaspee Days Parade that goes by Namquid Point--now called Gaspee Point--where an annual celebration takes place.

And I want to make sure that all of the pages who are here know that, when they hear about the Boston Tea Party, they should know to scroll back 18 months to a bolder, more violent, and more remarkable engagement by Rhode Island.

The aftermath was immediate. King George was furious. He demanded that everyone involved be hanged, and he sent commissioners to come and root out who the miscreants were who had participated in the raid on the Gaspee. And here is what is interesting. There are probably five long boatloads of Rhode Islanders--enough to overwhelm the crew of the Gaspee--and enormous rewards were offered for people to cooperate and testify against their comrades--against all that pressure from the King, against all that inducement of reward. In Rhode Island, no one squealed. The commissioners went home emptyhanded. The nooses hung empty. That was the second conclusion. The blowing up of the vessel was one thing. The solidarity of not yielding to testify against their fellow colonists was the other.

So I will read my poem about this event with apologies to the ride of Paul Revere.

Listen, my colleagues, and you shall see

How Rhode Islanders blew up the dread Gaspee.

Great Britain was fearsome, she ruled the sea,

But Rhode Islanders burned with the fire to be free.

So when George sent his frigate to tax our coast,

And its arrogant captain was heard to boast

That he'd soon have Rhode Island under his sway,

[Well] a course was set for a fateful day.

Narragansett Bay sparkled bright and blue

June 9 of 1772,

The trading ship Hannah was making her way

With cargo for Providence that fine day.

King George's Gaspee pursued in chase,

But the Hannah decided to give her a race.

Away fled the Hannah with wind in her sails,

As the Gaspee's cannon fired from its rails.

Evading the Gaspee's cannon balls,

The Hannah sailed for the Namquid shoals.

Fast and light, Hannah crossed the shallow,

But when the Gaspee attempted to follow,

She ran aground on the Warwick shore,

In a falling tide, and could move no more.

That night dark longboats with muffled oars,

Came slipping quietly down the shore,

To rid our Bay of the dread Gaspee,

And show old King George that Rhode Island [would be] free.

The battle was fierce off Warwick Neck.

When the gunsmoke cleared from the Gaspee's deck,

The Rhode Islanders had her as their prize,

And her crew bound up in chains and ties.

When the crew was ashore, Pawtuxet's Rangers

Assured they'd present us no further danger.

Back to the Bay, in the dark of the night,

Went the Gaspee Raiders to set her alight.

The fire spread through the Raiders' prize,

'Til a blast filled the Narragansett Bay skies.

The fire had reached the Gaspee's magazines,

And her gunpowder blew her to smithereens.

Away sped the Raiders into the dark,

Leaving in the embers freedom's spark.

``I want their names!'' King George demanded,

And ordered the Raiders be apprehended.

But his call for hangings came to naught:

His nooses hung empty; no charge was brought;

Because never a traitorous tale was told.

Rhode Island stood steady and silent and bold.

The spark that was struck in the Gaspee Raid

Lit a flame that still burns in our hearts today.

And the lesson from then is a lesson now,

That every American still will avow.

``However majestic your powers be,

You should heed our warning: don't tread on me.''

I yield the floor.