Floor Statements

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.

Mr. President, we are here on my Congressional Review Act motion, and I understand that the Chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee has already spoken in opposition, so I want to make the case for why we should vote yes on this.

Months before the 2024 election, President Trump offered his Big Oil and Coal cronies a deal: If they gave him a billion dollars to take the White House, he would pay them back one hundredfold. Well, he doesn't keep a lot of promises, but he seems to have kept this one. Since taking office in January, Trump has bent over backward to make big polluters happy, and Americans pay the price.

This sweetheart billion-dollar deal for polluters has meant a number of things: one, basically a driveby window handing out regulatory exemptions to individual coal plants and other toxic sources to pollute with impunity. Quite the driveby window. That sweetheart deal meant ordering coal plants to stay online so that the coal dealers can continue to fuel them even against the wishes of the local communities and even the utilities themselves.

This sweetheart billion-dollar deal meant--and this is relevant to this particular motion--rolling back toxic pollution standards for every coal- and oil-fired powerplant across the country. EPA's Mercury and Air Toxics rule established lifesaving standards, restricting emissions of the most dangerous air pollutants from coal- and oil-fired powerplants. And, naturally, the Trump EPA rolled these health standards back.

As dirty power sources go, coal is the dirtiest. Coal plants are the largest source of mercury emissions in the United States. Mercury pollution is bad stuff, and coal and oil plants also emit massive volumes of other toxic pollutants, including arsenic, lead, and cadmium--more bad stuff.

Approximately 80 million Americans, including about 17 million children, live within 3 miles of one of those toxin-spewing, fossil fuel-fired powerplants. Without strong rules limiting their toxic pollution, all those millions of Americans are exposed to unacceptable risk to their health and well-being.

But in the Trump ``put polluters first'' world, that doesn't matter. We can do something about it, however, because the Congressional Review Act gives Congress the opportunity to vote on such evil regulations.

With the Trump administration engaged in an effort, at breakneck speed, to tear down protections of Americans' health and safety and our environment, Congressional Review Act resolutions like this one can help hold the administration to account and protect Americans' health and safety while doing so. For those reasons, I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of this measure, in favor of the protection of those 17 million children in the harm zone of these toxins.

Mr. President, I now move to proceed to Calendar No. 409, S.J. Res. 188.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Vote on Motion

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

Mr. President, I come to the Senate this afternoon with a simple proposition and a resolution that recognizes that simple truth, and that is that: Climate change is real.

Earlier this year, I came to the floor, and I asked my colleagues if they could all agree on this simple scientific fact.

On this occasion, I also asked my colleagues to acknowledge what the fossil fuel industry has known for nearly 60 years, which is not only that climate change is real but also that they are the primary cause of climate change--their emissions. Unfortunately, Republicans refused to acknowledge those facts.

So I came back and asked for a simple recognition that sea levels were rising as a result of climate change, and Republicans refused to acknowledge that.

I came back and asked that we recognize, very simply, that oceans are warming because of climate change, and Republicans refused to acknowledge that fact.

So let's try this. It is super simple.

Resolved, That the Senate recognizes that climate change is

real.

That is the text of this resolution. It is a simple, four-word proposition that I hope we can agree on.

But just to show the fact base that this simple fact stands on, we can start with NASA. NASA has pretty good scientists. They are actually driving rovers around on Mars. They are pretty good at what they do. And here is what NASA maintains:

There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an

unprecedented rate. [And that] human activity is the

principal cause.

And if you don't trust NASA, if you don't want to take their word for it, you can just take a look at the data. It is pretty straightforward.

This graph reflects the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is a known thing. It is done by measurement. I hope we still believe, in the Senate, in measurement. This chart shows what is called the Keeling curve--daily atmospheric CO2 concentrations measured at scientific observatories. The historic data going back is actually collected from testing air bubbles frozen in ice sheets. And I have been to the Ohio State lab where some of those ice cores from old glaciers are maintained, from where they take those measurements. The Ohio State scientists know what they are doing. The measurement is not that complicated. So that is the track of CO2 in the atmosphere according to the Keeling curve.

Here is the next fact: Global average temperature is increasing at an accompanying rate as the CO2 emissions climb. You can see how well it tracks. Global temperature is not that hard to measure. Again, we are dealing with measurement--in effect, thermometers. It is not that hard.

And if you look, as I said before, at what is going on with the heat in the oceans, here is how that tracks. And the reason that the ocean heat tracks the CO2 concentration and the land heat measures is because most of the excess heat that fossil fuel emission causes gets absorbed by the oceans. We would already be on an unlivable planet if it weren't for the oceans absorbing 90 percent of that excess heat.

And the amount of heat that the oceans absorb is pretty astounding. You have to measure it in zettajoules.

Last week, I explained that we are now warming the oceans by 23 zettajoules a year, breaking the ocean heat content record for the ninth consecutive year.

As I said before, what is a zettajoule? A zettajoule is the unit of heat measure--the joule--with 21 zeroes behind it. That makes it a very big number. That is actually a billion trillions or, to put it the other way, a trillion billions. It is an enormous amount of heat. It is more than 40 times the total amount of energy that human beings generate on all of planet Earth to warm ourselves, cool ourselves, drive our cars, run our motors, push refrigerators--whatever it is we are trying to do. The whole energy footprint of humankind on planet Earth is half a zettajoule. And the oceans, because of that excess fossil fuel emission, are absorbing more than 40 times that much. It has a huge magnifier effect.

And that does things like drop the Antarctic ice shelf. And when the Antarctic ice mass shrinks, the ice that is on the land that goes into the water does what? Raises the sea level.

You can test that proposition for yourself by putting ice in a cup and letting it pour into another cup as it melts, and you will see the level of the cup rise.

So here is where global sea level has been going. Again, we are not dealing with complicated stuff here. We measure heat with thermometers. We measure sea level rise with tide monitors. It is basically a yardstick, and you go and look at the time of day when the tide is the same, and you measure where on the yardstick the sea level is. This is not something that is complex or amenable to much legitimate confusion or dissent.

Here we can look at the areas burned by wildfires. It is not just coasts and oceans that are getting clobbered by our emissions, but the area in the United States burned by wildfires keeps climbing and climbing. And the harm that this causes goes on and on. Hurricanes driven by warmer seas are becoming stronger and wetter. Wildfires driven by drought and wind are burning far more land.

And it is not just scientists who are reporting what they measure. You can actually go back to a very interesting and somewhat unique dataset. In Japan, in Kyoto, believe it or not, the Japanese people have been measuring the peak bloom of their cherry trees for 1,200 years. It is one of the longest datasets on the planet: 1,200 years of when Kyoto's cherry trees hit peak bloom.

And you can see, going back to the year 800, it moves fairly steadily along

until you get to the Industrial Revolution, until you get to the fossil fuel emissions barrage that drove the CO2 concentrations so high. As CO2 went up and as the planet heated, spring came sooner. And so you see here, earlier and earlier and earlier and earlier comes the day of peak bloom. I thought that was interesting because I thought a 1,200-year dataset kept by the Japanese people was interesting.

So that is where we are. We have more violent storms. We have more ferocious and damaging wildfires. We have hotter temperatures. We have a dramatically warming ocean.

And as I have said, climate change has moved from the science department to the economics department because all of those science measures bring costs onto the American public. Droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes disrupt agriculture and the transit of groceries, and they make food more expensive for Americans.

These climate impacts drive up homeowners insurance in regions where the climate risk becomes unmanageable. And they drive down property values, because when your homeowners insurance cost doubles or triples and threatens to double or triple again, that cost knocks down the value of your home. And we are seeing that right now in Florida.

And then, of course, all of this drives up energy bills at a time when oil prices are already extremely high because of Trump's mad war in Iran.

All of this is real in family budgets today, and it is a big deal. It is a big cost when homeowners insurance, which starts as a big number, doubles, as it has in Iowa in recent years. It is a big deal when you get told by your insurance company that you are fired, they are not going to insure your property any longer, and now you have to scramble to find insurance. And when you do, it is worse. It is more expensive, provides less coverage. There is a huge cost factor, and there is a huge hassle factor for real Americans right now.

That is our reality. Climate change is real. Can we agree on that simple truth? That is my question today.

Mr. President, therefore, I ask, as if in legislative session, unanimous consent that the Committee on Environment and Public Works be discharged from further consideration and the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 553; 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 just want to make sure it is absolutely clear that that argument is what Republicans have sent to the floor of the U.S. Senate to question the measurements and the facts of climate change. That is what they sent to the floor.

The questions are the talking points of the fossil fuel industry. To what extent does man cause it? Here is what NASA says:

There is unequivocal evidence that the Earth is warming at

an unprecedented rate. [With] human activity . . . the

principal cause.

And lest it be not clear that human activity is fossil fuel burning and emissions. That is not a question. That is a known thing, just ask

I ask unanimous consent that the vote scheduled for 2 o'clock be called immediately.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I move to proceed to Calendar No. 399, S.J. Res. 155.

Mr. President, as the Trump administration has walked back from protecting American consumers to help all of its creepy billionaires who it loves so much, States have had to step up into the breach and enact commonsense protections for regular consumers. That includes 15 States, like my State of Rhode Island, helping to make sure medical debt does not send consumers, American families, into a financial tailspin, blocking their access to credit.

While the Fair Credit Reporting Act continues to provide some key protections for consumers, this rule is particularly concerning at a time the administration has sidelined the CFPB at every turn. Rhode Island consumers have filed almost 13,000 complaints about credit reporting with the CFPB in the past year.

We need its help again. We need vigorous, empowered State enforcement more than ever as well.

I yield back.

Vote on Motion to Proceed

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

Mr. President, I am here now for the 307th time with my trusty and increasingly battered ``Time to Wake Up'' chart to warn this Chamber about how America's worst polluters have occupied the Trump administration from within.

These polluters are up to no good. They are desperate--desperate--to pollute for free. That is their business model, to pollute for free, even though polluting for free is wrong--wrong under the laws of economics, wrong under the laws of morality, wrong under the laws of nature. But they are desperate to pollute for free because the stakes are huge. And the stakes are really huge. The International Monetary Fund has calculated that the fossil fuel industry's subsidy from being allowed to pollute for free is over $700 billion every year.

Mr. President, $700 billion every year is a lot of money, and it is a lot of motive to fund a lot of mischief.

The polluters deny the science of what their emissions are doing to Earth's natural systems. Indeed, they have mounted a massive fraud operation to propagate their climate denial. As I have said in earlier speeches, that is actually phase 2. Phase 1 was when their own scientists warned them what their emissions would do to Earth's natural systems and they chose to hide that information and cover it up.

But once it became more standard science to know that, then they went into the phase 2 part--a massive fraud operation to propagate their climate denial.

Phase 3 was to spend massive amounts of dark money--massive amounts of dark money--to influence and control American politics, specifically to control the Republican Party. I was here when it was OK to be a Republican on a serious climate bill. That was true until January of 2010, the day that Citizen United was decided. And at that point the amount of money that fossil fuel offered made it irresistible for the Republican Party to become the party of climate denial.

And that fossil fuel industry doesn't operate in its own name. It operates through many, many front groups, front groups which they play like piano keys. It amounts to corruption at epic scale.

Today, I highlight the polluters' latest corrupt trick, which is to use the powers of government, a Federal Government that is theirs now to corruptly command, to block low-cost clean energy from getting to the grid.

What is happening is that the polluting industries' expensive polluting plants are being outcompeted--outcompeted by reliable renewable clean energy like wind and solar. The polluters know that their only chance of survival against less expensive, cleaner power is to interfere using government.

So what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Trump campaign. We know it is hundreds of millions. It could have been the whole billion that Trump asked for; but given how complicated dark money is, it is hard to tell. We do know they put at least hundreds of millions of dollars into the Trump campaign.

And the result is a Trump administration that is paying them back to the tune of billions of dollars. And here is the rub: They are using your money to pay them.

From the Environmental Protection Agency to the Department of the Interior to the Department of Energy, polluters have infiltrated the government itself and are using its levers to shut down their clean energy competition.

From EPA Administrator Zeldin to Interior Secretary Burgum to Energy Secretary Wright, the Trump administration first started by telling the big lie--the big lie that clean energy is more expensive than dirty, polluting fossil fuel energy. That is, in fact, a lie. But that was the opening premise, and then they went to work killing clean energy.

At EPA, Administrator Zeldin went after congressionally appropriated and obligated funds that supported the rollout of affordable clean energy. He attacked the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, costing consumers potentially $52 billion in lost energy savings, money out of consumers' pockets.

He went after Solar for All funding, costing Americans as much as $350 million per year in lost energy savings--billions lost to consumers over time.

Zeldin canceled grants totaling over $1.7 billion, including congressionally

appropriated and obligated funding for clean energy projects. The result of all of that was clean, renewable energy kept off the grid, increasing the costs that American consumers have to pay.

The trick is that the extra cost paid by consumers was more money in the pockets of fossil fuel polluters--Trump's big donors. That is EPA.

Over at Interior, Secretary Burgum went after the companies trying to build and operate affordable clean energy projects. Early in 2025, Burgum halted construction on two offshore wind projects off the coast of Rhode Island and New York. Later, he ordered a second halt to five offshore wind projects--the two he had already stopped that were back operational and three more projects in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York.

That stalled nearly 6 gigawatts of clean electricity. If those gigawatts were off the grid, that would mean polluting oil, gas, and coal plants would be picking up the slack. That extra 6 gigawatts of polluting oil, gas, and coal would, in turn, mean billions of dollars to the polluters.

Thankfully, the courts stepped in again against the illegal Trump orders. And the projects continued, but they were stalled.

Now Interior has a new plan: With taxpayer money, pay off companies to walk away from offshore wind leases and, instead, invest the payoff money on fossil fuel projects--again, clean renewable energy off the grid; increased costs for consumers but more profits for polluters-- Trump's big donors. Three different companies have made these dirty deals so far. That is Interior.

Over at the Department of Energy, Secretary Wright made it his mission to ``revive''--their own word--beautiful, clean coal, even where no one seems to want it. Trump's Energy Department announced that it would provide 625 million taxpayer dollars for retrofits, recommissioning, and life-extension projects for coal plants, including at least one instance where neither the grid operator nor the local utility wanted this intervention.

DOE then announced $175 million more from taxpayers to extend the life of six coal-fired power plants in Kentucky, North Carolina, and Ohio. The Department of Energy may have illegally repurposed funds Congress had appropriated for carbon capture programs to subsidize those coal plants.

The net result of all of this--increased costs for ratepayers because of the expense of running these polluting plants but more profits in the pockets of fossil fuel polluters--Trump's big donors.

These attacks from polluters, who have infiltrated the government, drive up costs for consumers by billions. The excess costs consumers must pay flows to fossil fuel. You know how the grid works. They run the clean energy first because it is least expensive. If you can back off that low-cost clean energy, the grid has to climb up the generation stack to more and more expensive fossil fuel plants. And all that added money goes straight to fossil fuel industry pockets--from consumers to the fossil fuel industry, a crooked money pump driving up costs for consumers.

You don't even have to kill the plant. Every day that low-cost clean energy is delayed is another day that money is steered from consumers' pockets into the pockets of the owners and fuel dealers of the expensive, polluting fossil fuel units. Those billions are the polluters' rewards from Trump.

In an America deeply concerned about the cost of stuff, this corrupt extraction of money from consumers to pay off Trump's big donors won't go over well. Cost and corruption are what most concern voters, and this scheme is on the wrong side of both, which brings us to the coming election.

Trump is in desperate political trouble. Costs are exploding, and corruption is epidemic. Voters are angry. So the big polluters need to corrupt the election. A corrupt attack on our elections is the last gasp of the big polluters' and creepy billionaires' grasp on power. They would rather rule corruptly in an oligarchy than live lawfully in a democracy.

Their attack on democracy uses the corrupted Federal Government as its agent. It is an attack coming from inside our own house.

Just recently, the captured Supreme Court delivered yet another vote- suppressing service to billionaire-funded Republicans with its destruction of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais.

The Callais case is the culmination of a yearslong ``judicial project to destroy the Voting Rights Act,'' quoting Justice Kagan.

As we all know, in a normal world, judges are supposed to, as Roberts once said ``call balls and strikes,'' not have projects to destroy legislation crafted by Congress.

So Justice Kagan using those words is powerful. Discarding decades of precedent and ignoring mountains of factual findings made by Congress, the Court supercharged Republican partisan gerrymandering across the south. And, boy, did it work.

In just 2 weeks, we have already seen Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi begin redrawing voting maps to disenfranchise minority voters and benefit Republican candidates.

This all comes on top of the Court's other persistent mischief-- defending, for instance, billionaires' dark money flooding our elections and defending Republican red map gerrymandering.

Even here, Republicans desperately tried to pass the vote-suppressing so-called SAVE Act, supposedly based on the bogus claim that undocumented immigrants are committing widespread voter fraud. That, as experienced in States that have looked at similar legislation shows, is unequivocally false.

What would have happened is that the bill's excessive restrictions would have disenfranchised millions of legitimate voters, just not the kind that Republicans wanted voting.

As we close in now on the November election, the Trump Federal Agencies are already seizing voter files. At least 48 States have received requests for their complete voter registration lists. The Department of Justice sued 30 of those States and Washington, DC, for their refusal to turn over the voter information.

The administration even faked a criminal investigation to seize records in Fulton County, GA, after the DOJ had failed to obtain those records through civil proceedings. I won't explain that here because I have given a speech on that subject, laying out all of the mischief and shenanigans behind that search warrant.

Even the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, seized voting machines in Puerto Rico.

The plot here is simple. It is to make sure the corrupt billionaires keep their control of the government so that they can use their control of the government to prop up their pollute-for-free business model and keep gouging you on cost. Well, to keep gouging Americans on cost and to keep polluting for free and to maintain their corrupt influence over the Trump administration, they have got to mess with the election. So be alert.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, here is a simple truth: Climate change is real.

Earlier this year, I came to the floor and asked my colleagues if they could all agree on this simple scientific fact. This being the Temple of Mammon, run by fossil fuel, to no one's surprise, they could not.

So I hoped that if I broke down the reality of climate change into smaller simple truths, we could then find areas of agreement. But 2 weeks ago, when I asked on the floor if we could all agree to the simple truth that sea levels are rising, I was once again met with an objection.

So let's give it another go. Today's simple truth: The oceans are warming. Can we agree on that?

I have come to the floor several times to talk about the fact that the oceans are heating by the zettajoule. So let's talk for a minute about what a zettajoule is.

A joule is the standard unit of energy--heat energy. A zettajoule has 21 zeroes behind it. It is a spectacularly enormous number.

In the past, I have reported that our oceans are measured absorbing around 14 zettajoules of excess heat every year. If you want a comparison, you can image that that is the equivalent of seven Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating in the ocean every second. That is the size of the heat transfer, and, indeed, that is the number in this resolution.

Sadly, since we introduced this resolution, that measure has increased. Our oceans now are warming by 23 zettajoules a year. We are breaking the ocean heat content record for the ninth consecutive year.

To put that in context, the total energy consumption of all humankind on planet Earth is about one-half of a zettajoule per year--all of it, every turbine, every boiler, every engine. All of our energy is one- half of a zettajoule.

That means that, for the fossil fuel component of that one-half of a zettajoule that human beings create, we add 23 zettajoules of excess heat to the oceans. It is a 50-to-1 magnification, nearly, and it is driving ocean temperatures skyward.

Since 1955, the top 2,000 meters of the global ocean have gained approximately 372 zettajoules of heat. And, as you can see, the trajectory is that things are going to get a lot worse.

By 2100, it is projected that the rate of ocean warming will be somewhere between two and six times greater than the rate of warming at the 14-zettajoule level of annual excess heat. A world in which the ocean is warming at six times 14 zettajoules of excess heat every year rapidly becomes an unlivable world for a great many human beings.

This amount of heat has horrific effects on biodiversity and sea life, happening already--happening already. Fisherman know that fish populations are moving across international boundaries or out into the high seas, causing economic uncertainty and harm for fishermen.

Warming sea surface temperatures shrink populations of the world's most abundant phytoplankton, significantly damaging the ocean food webs on which so many humans ultimately depend. Warming and acidification combined prevents species from being able to create their calcium carbonate shells.

I have often spoken on the Senate floor about the humble pteropod--a species that I think nobody cares very much about here, but they are enormously abundant in the oceans. They have been measured as suffering extreme shell damage in the oceans. And they are not a very long trophic hop from things we do care about, like salmon. When you kick the foundation out from under a food chain, it collapses.

Harmful algal blooms grow in warmer water and become more and more severe, taking a toll on fisheries, on public health, on recreation and tourism. If you want a description of what rotting algae on beaches does to tourism, just look at the stories about what Florida has experienced.

Warmer oceans increase evaporation rates, which increases atmospheric humidity, which fuels extreme precipitation and stronger hurricanes. Those stronger, wetter storms and other climate change-induced threats crashing into insurance markets pose a roughly $25 trillion risk to the global housing market over the next 25 years. When the climate risk gets so severe that it crashes insurance markets, that cascades into mortgage markets, and that cascades into property values. That is where the $25 trillion estimate comes from. If you want to look more locally, Florida now leads the country in property value loss as the first and worst exposed to this climate risk.

The threats don't end there. The risks that stronger, wetter storms pose to agriculture and food production, insurance, tourism, infrastructure, the energy sector, and more are very, very real. Mature and responsible warnings abound.

As we noted in my last resolution, 30 percent of Americans live in coastal areas. Ten trillion dollars of goods and services are produced in coastal counties across the United States each year. There is a lot in jeopardy due to our warming oceans.

It is the simple truth: Climate change is real. Sea level rise is real. Ocean warming by the zettajoule is real. And all of it is already disrupting American lives, pocketbooks, and families, and it is getting steadily worse.

Mr. President, as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be discharged from further consideration and the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 552; further, 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, I would just note for the record that the University of Wisconsin in the good Senator's home State teaches the science of climate change, teaches courses with names like ``Climate and Climate Change,'' ``Climate Change, Human and Planetary Health,'' ``Climate Change Ecology,'' ``Ice and Climate Dynamics,'' ``Climate Change and Health Disparities,'' ``Soils and Climate Change,'' ``Climate Change Medicine,'' ``Climatic Environments of the Past,'' ``Agricultural Weather and Climate,'' ``Climate Action Planning: Sustainable Transportation,'' ``Case Studies Exploring Infrastructure, Sustainability and Climate Change,'' ``Climate Change Governance,'' ``Climate Change, Sustainability, and Education,'' and as a lawyer, I would add ``Climate Change, Human Rights, and the Environment.''

I would strongly recommend that all of my colleagues who are unfamiliar with what is happening in the real world with climate change go to their home State universities that teach the stuff and listen to what their home State universities have to say.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the following statement from medical professionals and their names into the Record on behalf of myself and Senator Reed.

Mr. President, I am speaking in advance of my colleague from Colorado Senator Bennet's effort to seek redress in this body for a wave of pollution that is being unleashed in his State and neighboring States as well.

One of the things about our failed Environmental Protection Agency right now is that one State can't regulate pollution that comes to it from another State. And yet the good neighbor policy that somebody has to be able to say ``Hey, wait a minute; you can't pollute my State from another State'' is one that EPA has just walked away from.

In this case, the problem is a coal facility in Colorado. And just start with coal. It is really indisputable that coal is America's dirtiest, deadliest, and most expensive energy source. It is a dying industry for market reasons. It can't compete because it is dirty, deadly, and expensive.

And yet, since taking office, President Trump has worked desperately to keep coal on life support, perhaps because the coal industry paid $3.5 million in 2024 to help him get elected, and Trump is a man who understands a quid pro quo.

The Trump administration has taken every possible action to benefit the coal industry; never mind our health. Remember, it is the deadliest of energy sources. And never mind our bank accounts. Remember, it is the most expensive of energy sources.

He even rolled back health-protecting standards for mercury and toxic emissions from coal plants. Mercury is pretty seriously, deadly stuff; and he rolled back those standards.

He exempted one-third of all coal plants nationwide from toxic pollution standards. Who loses? Anybody exposed to the toxic pollution they emit. Who wins? Trump's big donors.

He even directed the Secretary of Energy to issue orders under the Federal Power Act to force coal plants to stay online, driving up consumer costs against the wishes of the utilities and even the plants' owners. But they still had to buy and burn coal. So there is somebody out there who is going to make money off that.

And now Trump has perverted the Clean Air Act to trample on States' rights to protect their own citizens.

Coal plants are the Nation's most significant source of haze. The same coal pollutants that drive health issues and deaths nationwide drive haze formations. Under the Clean Air Act's Regional Haze Program, States establish plans to reduce haze-causing pollution. States may choose to include coal plant retirements in their plans. Often, that is consistent with the utility and the plant owner's wishes, as an old plant ends its useful life. When the EPA approves these plans, the retirements then become enforceable.

In 2022, Colorado submitted a regional haze plan to the EPA that included coal plant retirements that Colorado utilities had independently and voluntarily planned for. ``They do better with cheaper, cleaner renewable energy'' is the simple answer.

In January of this year, the EPA turned around and disapproved Colorado's plan, making the argument that Colorado's plan, voluntarily entered into with these utilities, could represent a ``taking'' under the Constitution.

So we have here a really flagrant abuse of Federal authority: Make it more difficult for Colorado to protect its own citizens from toxic pollution and to provide affordable energy. And the resulting pollution won't just endanger Coloradans. This is a national issue because the haze blows, with prevailing winds, toward eastern States.

My State of Rhode Island, for instance, has occasions when we have bad air days. And if you are driving into work in the morning and you are listening to the talk radio, they will say: Today is a bad air day. Children should stay home. Elderly people and people with breathing difficulties should not go out.

It looks like a beautiful summer day. Kids will want to be in the yard, but it

is a bad air day. And so that health warning gets issued by the State of Rhode Island.

And there is nothing the State of Rhode Island can do about it. If every car in our State was an EV, if everything ran off of clean electricity, we would still be out of compliance because we are a downwind State.

And huge powerplants that push their pollution up into the sky, far enough that prevailing winds carries it out of their State and onto ours, they are the ones that are to blame, and there is nothing we can do about it.

So I am very sympathetic to concerns that the EPA has a particularly important job when neighboring States are polluting one another and can't reach a regulatory solution because it is out of State, and that is exactly the predicament that we are creating here today.

When Congress enacted the Congressional Review Act in 1996 to give Congress the opportunity to vote on regulations, well, that is why we are here today. We have a chance to undo this, and I hope we will because everybody here has a good chance of being a downwind State. Even California is often a downwind State from China. So you have got to be able to have protections from upwind pollution, and this would strip that.

So the Trump administration's effort here--at breakneck speed--to tear down protections of Americans' health, safety, and environment we have a chance to claw back. Congressional Review Act resolutions like this one can help hold the administration to account.

I will conclude by saying I just left the EPW hearing with EPA Administrator Zeldin. The point that I made in that hearing was that we are now headed into an election cycle in which the American people are desperately concerned about the cost of stuff. Stuff costs too much, and the Trump administration is ignoring the problem, if not making it worse. Those are basically the two buckets. They are either ignoring it completely or they are deliberately making it worse.

With respect to electricity costs, the Trump administration is deliberately making it worse. They are raising costs for consumers on purpose.

How are they doing it, and why are they doing it? Well, the ``how'' is that they are keeping inexpensive clean energy off the grid. We just went through this in Rhode Island. Our Revolution Wind offshore power facility was stalled by illegal orders of the Trump administration not once but twice, and the result was that power was delayed from coming ashore. Well, Revolution Wind has a contract to sell power onto the grid. That contract specifies a price. The price is 9 cents--9 cents. ISO New England--our grid operator--can do fairly easy math to show what the average grid price is for electricity. And guess what. It is 18 cents. So this 9-cent power was stalled going into an 18-cent grid.

Because it is 9-cent power, what would it have done? It would have been called up first by the grid because every grid calls up the least expensive power first. So that 9-cent power would have been flowing into the grid. It would have been filling up demand, and that would have meant that some dirty fossil fuel-polluting units would not have been called up. They were too expensive to run.

So, when they push all that clean energy off the grid and buy time for the dirty, polluting fossil fuel plants--that is money directly to the fossil fuel industry--two things happen: One, costs go up for all consumers because those new, more expensive plants called online raise the price for everybody. So electricity bills go up. They are driven up on purpose by the delay of clean energy getting onto the grid.

Where do those billions of dollars in extra costs that are extracted from American consumers go? Guess where--to the owners of those fossil fuel plants that are in the margin, the ones that get run because the clean energy has been kept off of the grid.

It is a ginormous money pump out of the pockets of ordinary American ratepayers and into the pockets of the fossil fuel billionaires who put so much money into getting Trump elected. That is being done on purpose. Electricity costs are being driven up on purpose.

Don't tell me that the Department of Energy or the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of the Interior, for that matter, don't understand how the grid works. They have people who know exactly how the generation stack works. They know exactly that the least expensive units get run first and that the least expensive units displace the more expensive units, which is good for consumers, until the heavy hand of a fossil fuel-influenced government steps in and tries to prevent consumers from getting low-cost clean energy. Then the hole that that leaves that would have been filled by clean energy--you have got to go fill that hole by going up the stack to more and more expensive units, and virtually every time, that more expensive unit is a fossil fuel unit.

So, like I said, what the Trump administration has created on purpose is a ginormous money pump to extract billions of dollars from regular consumers who would otherwise be enjoying the benefit of low-cost clean power, and they have done it as a reward for Trump's big fossil fuel donors, the ones who threw hundreds of millions of dollars at his campaign and who are now reaping a multiple-times reward with that investment.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am here with regard to a unanimous consent resolution.

I have tried one before to pursue a simple truth that climate change is real. Earlier this year, I came to the floor and asked my colleagues if they could all agree on that simple scientific fact. Sadly, given the nature of this body, they could not.

So we are going to break it down into smaller bits because the reality of climate change is made up of many, many simple truths; and I hope that by breaking it down piece by piece, I can find areas where my colleagues will agree.

Today's simple truth: Sea levels are rising. Can we agree on that? The resolution specifically says: ``recognizing that sea levels are rising at accelerated rates due to human-caused climate change.''

As global air temperatures rise, obviously, so do the temperatures of the oceans. Here is a graph showing the increase in ocean heat content. It is measured in zettajoules. ``Zettajoules'' is a very big number. ``Zetta'' means it has 18 zeroes. It is a billion trillions or a trillion billions, depending on which way you want to go about it.

To put it at a more practical scale, the entire production of energy by the human species on all of planet Earth adds up to one half of a zettajoule. The price we pay for the fossil fuel component of that half zettajoule of energy is an ocean whose temperature is increasing by around 15 zettajoules a year. It is a 30-times magnifier because of the effect of fossil fuel emissions.

And as ocean heat content grows, seawater expands. The physical nature of seawater is to expand as it warms. And it also melts nearby glaciers, and both result in higher sea levels.

Combined, glacier melt and thermal expansion of water cause global sea levels to rise, and the rates are accelerating over time.

Here is the curve of global sea level rise. It is one of the most unambiguous indicators of what emissions are doing on our Earth to our natural systems.

Sea level rise has been going at accelerated rates since about 1863, which lines up right with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution when greenhouse gas emissions began to rise as we burned coal, natural gas, and oil.

Depending on the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions, sea level rise in the United States could range between 2 and over 7 feet by the end of this century. That is a particularly dangerous proposition when you consider that 3.7 million Americans in the contiguous United States live on land less than 3.3 feet above high tide.

And it doesn't come up like the bathtub; it comes up and is still subject to tide and storm, so it can be driven ashore at far higher levels than 2 feet or over 7 feet.

Most of the impact will be in Florida, Louisiana, California, New York, and New Jersey. My home State of Rhode Island and my colleague Senator Markey's home State of Massachusetts will share that unfortunate experience.

Sea level rise isn't just evidence of a change in climate; it has real consequences. Thirty percent of people living in the United States live in coastal areas which puts them at risk from rising seas, increased flooding, shoreline erosion, and storm hazards.

And it is not just people at risk. Mr. President, $10 trillion in goods and services are produced in coastal areas of the United States.

Rising sea level will not only cause what we call increased sunny day flooding, like when there is no rain to cause flooding; it is just tide and sea level rise, but it will also increase the amount of flooding from storms and from storm surges, and that will cost lives and money.

Indeed, it is already disrupting insurance, mortgage, and real estate markets. I have spoken elsewhere about the meltdown in Florida in those markets. Florida was recently described as the biggest loser for real estate values of all the 50 States, and it relates back to this cascade from climate risk to insurance being unavailable or too expensive to afford, to mortgages being compromised, to property values taking a hit.

There is some lessons we should learn from what has already happened. Mr. President, $8.1 billion of the $62 billion ascribed to Hurricane Sandy connects back to the rise in sea levels. Could have saved $8 billion were the sea level rise not happening.

Everywhere, high water levels that were once rare--1-in-100-year events are becoming 1-in-10- or 1-in-5-year events. Up to 13 million Americans will face displacement from sea level rise by 2100.

That is assuming that all goes smoothly, but all doesn't always go smoothly. There are tipping points in life. My favorite example is a rowboat.

If you put more and more weight in the rowboat, the water goes up and up the side of the boat. And there is not much change as the water goes up and up the side of the boat. But then you hit a tipping point where the water flows over the gunwale and into the boat. That is a big tipping point difference because suddenly it is not just more and more of the hull down in the water; it is the whole boat catastrophically falling, flooding, sinking to the bottom of the lake or the sea. So tipping points are to watch for.

Most ice is found in polar regions with as little as 1.5-degrees celsius of warming. The Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets could be destabilized. That would be a major tipping point. Our Earth has already warmed 1.2 degrees celsius. So getting to 1.5 is not far away. And Greenland, for instance, is warming four times faster than the global average. So that puts us at the risk of the polar ice tipping point very soon.

Sea levels are expected to rise by 20 to 25 feet. Not 2 feet to 7.2 feet; 20 to 25 feet if the Greenland ice sheet melts and an additional 10 to 17 feet if the West Antarctic ice sheet melts.

The disintegration of either ice sheet would render major cities uninhabitable and completely destroy America's coastal communities.

So here is the simple truth: sea level rise is real. It is happening. Fossil fuel-caused climate change is accelerating its effects. Indeed, it is already disrupting American lives, pocketbooks, and families.

Mr. President, I will yield to Senator Markey from Massachusetts and return to make the actual unanimous consent request.

Mr. President, to accommodate the distinguished Senator from Wisconsin, I will move the unanimous consent now and then the Ranking Member of the Commerce Committee will speak.

I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be discharged from further consideration and the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 551; 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.

Would the Senator yield for a procedural question?

I yielded Senator Cantwell's time in order to convenience you, and I am interested in how long you are going to speak because--

--you are now inconveniencing our other colleague Senator Cantwell.

Mr. President, I would wrap things up this evening by simply pointing out that the views expressed by the Senator from Wisconsin related to climate change are not shared by the University of Wisconsin, which actually teaches climate science. It has programs in the Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences Department. It has programs in the Environmental Sciences Department.

Courses include Climate and Climate Change; Climate Change, Human and Planetary Health; Climatic Environments of the Past; Climate Change Ecology; Ice and Climate Dynamics; Soils and Climate Change; Climate Change and Health Disparities; Climate Change Medicine; Agricultural Weather and Climate; Climate Change Economics and Policy; Climate Change Action Planning; Case Studies Exploring Infrastructure Sustainability and Climate Change; Climate Change Governance; Climate Change, Sustainability, and Education; and for the lawyers in the room, even a law class: Climate Change, Human Rights, and the Environment.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the 5:30 scheduled vote begin immediately.

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

Mr. President, people following the Senate floor will know that hundreds of times I have come to the floor with my trusty, increasingly beat up ``Time to Wake Up'' poster to describe the various manners in which the fossil fuel industry has corruptly obstructed our ability to solve the problem of climate change that is caused by fossil fuel emissions.

They might also remember that I have come to the floor dozens of times to give my ``Scheme'' series of speeches about the corrupt manner in which the Supreme Court has been captured and put into the service of a gang of rightwing billionaires who tend to be fossil fuel billionaires.

In this speech, the ``Time to Wake Up'' series and the ``Scheme'' series converge. I don't know quite how to describe it, but maybe it is ``Time to Scheme Up'' because, for sure, that is what has been done in this country by the fossil fuel industry to blockade our efforts to solve the pollution hazard that they have created for our people--a pollution hazard that is now real and immediate in our economy.

Look no further than the State of Florida, where climate risk has thrashed the home insurance markets to the point where the home insurance market collapse has cascaded into mortgage markets, which has, in turn, cascaded into real estate values--property values.

Last year, Florida led the country in lost property values. This year, there was an article in Newsweek just a few days ago about how 6 to 8 percent losses are predicted in Florida real estate values because of that cascade. Property is very hard to sell if you can't get a mortgage on it, and it is impossible to get a mortgage on it if you can't get insurance on it. And even if

you can get insurance, if the insurance costs $14- or $15- or $20- or $30,000 a year, you add all that up, and it comes off the value of the home, which is why you are seeing people unsuccessfully trying to sell homes in Florida for hundreds of thousands of dollars or more less than they paid for it.

So this is on its way. It is coming right now. I am just going to continue to dig into how it is that we got here because how we got here involves a lot of mischief, a lot of real problems. One of those problems came to light just recently in the form of a number of memos from within the Supreme Court from the Justices to each other that were released or leaked--somehow came to the New York Times--that describe how it was that the captured Court put an end to the Clean Power Plan of the Obama administration before it even came to life.

Before even a court decision had been made about the merits of the rule, five Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices stepped in and killed that rule in the crib before it could have any real effect.

Charles Pierce has written a pretty good summary of that New York Times article. He said:

The New York Times published a trove of personal memos from

the members of the Supreme Court outlining the court's

promiscuous use of the so-called shadow docket. It has become

the carefully constructed conservative majority's favorite

work-around to kill policies it doesn't like and support

causes that it and its corporate patrons do.

What appears to have happened here is that the shadow docket was born in the crib-killing of the Clean Power Plan.

This is quoting the New York Times story:

By a 5 to 4 vote along partisan lines, the order halted

President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan, his signature

environmental policy. They acted before any other court had

addressed the plan's lawfulness.

Not a Court of final impression, a Court of first impression--the first one to look at it. That is not the way it ordinarily works.

The decision consisted of only legal boilerplate, without a

word of reasoning.

That is similar to the way the shadow docket has been working--before briefing, before argument--a decision without legal reasoning provided.

It continues about the Chief Justice:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., has cultivated a

reputation for care and caution. [These] papers reveal a

different side of him. At a critical moment for the country

and the court, the papers show, he acted as a bulldozer in

pushing to stop Mr. Obama's plan to address the global

climate crisis.

I will get into this a little bit further as I continue through my remarks, but the basic summary is that the Court concluded that without stopping the EPA's rule before it went into effect, before any court had actually considered it, that would cause irreparable harm to the fossil fuel industry--specifically, mentioning that private industry will suffer irreparable harm--this, at a stage in the proceedings, where the question of whether that harm even existed had still not been properly litigated.

So I go back a ways on this. In 2015, in one of my ``Time to Wake Up'' speeches, I said:

The Supreme Court has handed the polluters a heavy cudgel

with its misguided Citizens United decision, allowing big

corporations to spend--or more important, threaten to spend--

unlimited amounts of undisclosed money in our elections. More

than anyone, polluters use that leverage to demand obedience

to their denial script.

Another one, 2017:

The Supreme Court's Republican appointees got in the habit

of doing what they were told by the forces that appointed

them (which include the fossil fuel industry, which asked for

the Citizens United decision), and in a fateful combination

of obedience and political ignorance, they wrecked our

politics.

A year later, I described how:

Republican strategists are expanding their grip to the

Supreme Court, building there a reliable Republican majority.

I warned that we mustn't try to replicate that apparatus. We must expose it. And when we expose one part of the apparatus, we expose all because it is the same crew behind packing the courts and denying climate change and running the dark money machine.

In January of 2010, I said:

The five Republicans on the Supreme Court gave the fossil

fuel industry the Citizens United decision.

I said:

In January 2010, the five Republicans on the Supreme Court

gave the fossil fuel industry the Citizens United decision;

the industry instantly turned its new political weaponry on

the Republican Party; and bipartisanship on climate change

was stamped out by fossil-fuel threats.

This integration between the fossil fuel industry and the Supreme Court and the dark money power that the fossil fuel industry has used to crush climate action in Congress is something that has been apparent for some time.

In 2020, I added:

Citizens United unleashed toxic doses of money, and

unprecedented doses of virulent dark money, into our

political atmosphere. [Once] democracy is poisoned, stunned

by secret fossil fuel money and threats, [it fails] to listen

to plain warnings.

In 2022, I called this ``the Court that dark money built.''

In 2022, I said:

[I]t is probably more accurate to say that we now have the

Court that dark fossil fuel money built.

So it comes as little surprise that these memos from within the Court should reveal that linkage between the Republican-appointed Justices and the fossil fuel industry. And, of course, it should come as no surprise that the roots of this shadow docket that has been used so politically by the Republican majority on the Court--the roots are found in an act of service to the fossil fuel industry billionaires who captured the Court.

If you look at the scheme to maintain the fossil fuel industry's free-to-pollute business model where they get away with polluting as much as they like with no cost or consequence, you have to look at the Supreme Court facilitating this.

Citizens United, of course, signaled the end of climate legislation because the unlimited dark money that the fossil fuel industry could use to shut down climate action in this body was successful. Unlimited fossil fuel dark money was brought to bear on Congress, and our ability to solve this problem collapsed.

Look before the Citizens United decision. Look back to 2007, 2008, 2009. My first years here, there was robust negotiation on major climate legislation--four different strategies here in the Senate; three major bills, bipartisan bills; and a Presidential candidate in John McCain who ran on a perfectly legitimate climate platform. All of that dead--dead--the day the Citizens United decision came down and the fossil fuel industry pounced with its new dark money power.

But it is not enough to stop legislation. If you want to protect your free-to-pollute business model, you also have to stop regulation, and that is where this Clean Power Plan decision came in. That is where the subsequent major questions doctrine came in. That work by the Supreme Court signaled the end of climate regulation as the Supreme Court intruded into a decades-long regulatory process and rebooted it to protect against regulation that would limit the free-to-pollute business model of the fossil fuel industry.

As I have said in other speeches, that major questions doctrine did not pop from the heads of the Supreme Court Justices in that decision. It was cooked up in fossil fuel-funded doctrine factories, massaged, maneuvered into conferences, propagated by the Federalist Society, called up at conferences. It was groomed and grown so that the Supreme Court could pick it up in a decision, which, of course, they did.

So if you shut down climate legislation and you shut down climate regulation, what is left is climate litigation--that people harmed by all this damage, by all this pollution, usually have a right to bring a lawsuit. And sure enough, lawsuits are emerging. So the next project of the Court is to attack climate litigation, and sure enough, the fossil fuel industry is all over that Court, asking for it to shut down the prospect of climate litigation.

And guess what. That little rascal Leonard Leo, who was the fixer, the implementer of the Court capture scheme, who worked with Trump's counsel, McGahn, to get the three Supreme Court Justices Trump supposedly appointed--separate argument: I think they were actually selected by the Koch brothers' political operation, and Trump was the chump at the end of the deal who signed off on it.

But Leonard Leo and his billionaires were the ones who put that whole

scheme together. They put the whole concept of a Federalist Society list together and the completely untrustworthy President Trump being obliged to say publicly that he would pick off that Koch brothers' list. They called it the Federalist Society list because calling it a fossil fuel billionaires list wouldn't sell so well. And then they ended up with these Justices. The guy in the middle of all of that was this little fixer, Leonard Leo.

Guess what Leonard Leo is doing now. He has an array of maybe 25 front groups that he orchestrates. Some of them are actual corporate entities. Some of them are what are called fictitious names for his corporate entities. So you have a front group, which has a fictitious name, that you operate through. Why you need to do that is a little hard to say, but if you are up to no good, I suppose you want as much camouflage as possible.

What Leonard Leo and his front groups are all over right now is trying to shut down climate litigation, to make it a clean trifecta so that one industry is free to pollute as much as it wants with no legislation, no regulation, and no litigation that can stop it.

Again, it goes without saying that pollution is not something that should be allowed. It is certainly not something that should be allowed for free. But money will buy you a lot, and the fossil fuel-funded phony flotillas of front group amici who come into the Court to tell it what to do--and have, I would say, a 100-percent winning record before the Court--are starting to gather around shutting down climate litigation as well as regulation and legislation. In other words, a captured Court is delivering the goods for the billionaires who captured it.

So let's go through these different memoranda as they came out. The first is from Chief Justice John Roberts dated February 5, 2016. He is responding to emergency applications seeking to have the EPA's Clean Power Plan stayed.

On the very first page, he communicates to the other Justices:

Absent a stay, the Clean Power Plan will cause (and is

causing) substantial and irreversible reordering of the

domestic power sector.

That is a factfinding. It is a factfinding made without any court having found that fact. It is a factfinding by a Court that is not supposed to engage in factfinding in the first place. It is a disputed fact in the case before the case is even litigated. Yet here is the Chief Justice of the United States going with the factual argument of one of the parties even before arguments related to an emergency stay.

He has to admit to his colleagues that ``the rule does not require emissions reductions until 2022.'' It is dated 2016. Six years later, it might require emissions reductions. But then, February 5, 2016, he says that ``its impact is being felt now.''

He is taking the side of one party on a contested fact and saying that the impact of that contested fact, as he sees it, is actually being felt now, 6 years ahead of when anything has to happen.

He says that ``the applicants indicate''--again, an assertion by a party--the applicants untested, unchallenged--``applicants indicate that they are currently in the process of committing time and resources to compliance.''

That is the reason to shut down the Clean Power Plan?

He says that ``the impact of the rule will reduce coal production for power sector use by 2.0 percent.''

Over a 2-percent reduction, he jumps completely out of his lane, makes factfinding, and shuts down the regulation before it has even been considered by the lower courts.

Then he says that the ``harm . . . is irreversible.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have the Chief Justice memorandum printed in the Record at the end of my remarks.

That memorandum was responded to rather quickly by Justice Breyer, who noted:

First, it is unusual for this Court to issue a stay of an

agency's order during the time that the Court of Appeals is

considering its lawfulness.

It is a live legal dispute in the court of appeals, and the Supreme Court is jumping in to stay it? That was not just unusual; it was unprecedented. As Justice Breyer points out, ``it is difficult at this point to say that the absence of a stay will cause irreparable harm.''

Even among the Justices, that is a contested fact, and yet the Chief Justice is willing to rely on his view of that contested fact even though it is supposedly not a factfinding body in the first instance.

As I mentioned a moment ago and as Justice Breyer points out, ``the order does not require any company to take action for six years.'' So it was hardly an emergency.

Finally, he pointed out that ``all of the applicants'' were ``free to renew their applications for a stay'' once the DC court of appeals had done its work and come right back to the Court and get the stay then rather than to jump ahead of the circuit court of appeals. And it notes that the circuit court of appeals has agreed to proceed on an expedited basis.

Well, it didn't take long for the Chief to respond to that. He wrote right back saying that ``private industry will suffer irreparable harm from a rule that is--in my view--highly unlikely to survive.''

So now he is not only making factfindings that are contested even within his Court and that he shouldn't be making in the first place, but he is also predicting the legal conclusion of how this is going to end up in his Court.

He says that the ``Court will not issue a decision until 2018 at the earliest''--still 4 years before that date--``long after the real-world impacts of the rule would have been felt in the absence of a stay.''

Again, more and more factfinding.

He says there will be ``on-going, cumulative, and irreversible harms that private parties are incurring each day.''

Again, that is a contested fact, but he is willing to say that as if it were an actuality and not a point in contention.

Justice Kagan comes back to him to say:

As far as I can tell, it would be unprecedented for us to

second-guess the D.C. Circuit's decision that a stay is not

warranted, without the benefit of full briefing or a prior

judicial decision.

She calls this a ``drastic and unusual remedy'' and points out that this fact that Chief Justice Roberts has so readily lurched to--the applicants' assertion--``is both entirely speculative and highly doubtful.''

So now you have another Justice challenging the fact that the Chief Justice offers as Gospel.

She says:

It is implausible that such a minor emissions reduction--

Two-percent reduction in coal--

to be achieved six years hence will require substantial and

irrevocable commitments of resources in the coming months.

Then in comes Justice Sotomayor.

I agree with Steve's [Breyer] proposal and Elena's [Kagan]

supplement to that proposal. As Elena notes, it would be

unprecedented for us to grant a stay before any court has

reviewed this complicated and complex case.

She says:

[N]o applicant has identified a single real plant--

An actual, real facility--

as opposed to a hypothetical ``model plant''--that is in

immediate danger of closure absent a stay.

She challenges the costs that have been discussed by the Chief Justice, and she points out that ``an emergency stay on limited briefing before the D.C. Circuit will hear argument on this regulation in just four months.''

Just wait 4 months and get the proper order--circuit court of appeals, then Supreme Court.

Faced with that, in chimes Justice Alito, brought onto the Court with Leonard Leo at the White House helping make the selections. He concludes saying:

A failure to stay this rule threatens to render our ability

to provide meaningful judicial review--and by extension, our

institutional legitimacy--a nullity.

Instead of robust judicial review, our opinion will be a

mere postscript.

Remember, this is a rule that won't have effect for 6 years, where there will be a proper appellate court decision below in 4 months, and all of that is intolerable to Justice Alito, a product of the ``billionaires/Leonard Leo'' court-packing operation.

And the closer is Justice Anthony Kennedy, who writes an unusually brief

decision, compared to all the others, or a memorandum, compared to the others, simply concluding: ``[F]airness to the parties counsels that we should grant [the stay] now,'' and ``I agree with the recommendation of the Chief.''

That gave the Chief the votes. They granted the stay, and the Clean Power Plan died.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the remaining memoranda that I referred to be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks in the sequence in which I described them.

Mr. President, what is the backdrop to all of this? The backdrop to all of this is the massive amount of harm that is caused by fossil fuel emissions. The pollution is really astounding.

The International Monetary Fund most recently assessed the cost of fossil fuel pollution and of its free-to-pollute business model in the United States of America at $770 billion in 1 year--$770 billion in benefit to the fossil fuel industry, a form of subsidy, from being allowed to pollute for free and not being obliged to clean up its mess. They are allowed to cause $770 billion worth of harm to Americans for zero dollars.

When you are allowed to cause $770 billion worth of harm to ordinary Americans for zero dollars, you have a massive motive to corrupt. You have a massive motive to apply political influence. You have a massive motive to take advantage of the dark money that you pressed the Supreme Court to allow and authorize, and bring that to bear on Congress to make sure that your $770 billion annual pollute-for-free subsidy is protected.

What did you note about my discussion about the Court's conversation on harm? What you should have noted is that 100 percent of the Court's conversation on harm was on harm to the polluters. It was the only harm that the Chief Justice mentioned or considered.

The entire argument about staying the Clean Power Plan hinged on analysis of harm that only looked at the harm to the polluter. There was no mention of climate change. There was no mention of the harm of emissions. There was no discussion of the health damage from climate change and what it is doing now and could be projected back then to do to insurance markets; what it was causing in sea level rise; what the ancillary pollution of fossil fuel that isn't climate change pollution but is lead, mercury, SOX, NOX, particulate matters, is doing.

They literally turned a blind eye to fossil fuel pollution measured at $770 billion worth of harm, most recently--total blind eye to it-- and focused only on the harm that would be done to the fossil fuel industry from having to comply with clean power rules.

Other studies have shown that the amount of money spent on the operation to capture the Court--a short word on Court capture, it goes back to the well-acknowledged notions of Agency capture or regulatory capture in the bad old days. Mining interests would make sure that all their friends were appointed to the mining safety commission so they could know the mining safety commission would always give them the answer that they wanted.

That is Agency capture.

In the bad old days, railroad barons would make sure that all their friends and lackeys were appointed to the railroad rates commission so they could be sure that all the railroad rates that were set were advantageous to them and that they could make sure that they got the rates that they wanted. That was called Agency capture.

It is a renowned phenomenon. It is written about constantly in administrative law. There is a whole field of economics that studies it.

What happened here is that Agency capture or regulatory capture was brought to bear on the Supreme Court, and it has now turned into, in essence, a captive body that does this bidding.

The number that I am referring to is the amount that was spent on that Court-capture operation. People who do really good research have dug into this, and at this point--more research will make the number bigger certainly. But at this point, it looks like about $600 million-- million with an ``m''--was spent on the Court-capture operation.

Now, that is a lot of money. But it is not a lot of money if you are defending a $770 billion annual subsidy that lets you pollute for free when you shouldn't be allowed to do that and nobody else is allowed to do that.

Protecting that $700 billion for $600 million is probably the most lucrative investment the fossil fuel industry has ever made.

And if you pile up the years since the Clean Power Plan was stopped-- that was in 2016. Now, it is 2026--so 10 years. That subsidy number has grown over the years as the International Monetary Fund has done a more and more detailed and better job of figuring out all the added harms, as harms are piling up.

So if you look at 10 years, it is not $7.7 trillion. It is probably a number closer to $6 trillion. But think about that. What the Supreme Court did in this one decision, by breaking all of its own rules and looking only at the fossil fuel industry's harm, is to set loose $6 trillion worth of harm over the next 10 years that all of us have had to pay for in health, in harm, in lost property values, in increased insurance, in a myriad of different ways--$6 trillion, call it, over those 10 years.

That makes $600 million to capture the Court that made that decision an amazing payback, but a really, really dangerous payback for the American public.

I will conclude by saying that whether you look at this as an aspect of the scheme to capture the Court or whether you look at it as an aspect of the endless fossil fuel pollution that is causing us to need to wake up before it is too late--either way you look at it--the rot runs deep around fossil fuel, and it seems to have infected the Court right over there.

I yield the floor.