Floor Statements

Mr. President, I am here for my, oh, I guess umpteenth ``Time to Wake Up'' speech.

This one comes upon my return from Brazil, where I was the entirety of the United States of America governmental presence at the COP. That was it. Just me. Nobody else went. And not only did nobody else go-- this is not important to anybody really outside the Senate--but for my codel, my congressional delegation trip of one, the State Department, under President Trump, refused to facilitate my trip.

I think this is the first time where the Senate, the legislative body, has been told by the Executive branch: We are not going to facilitate a codel because we don't like what you are doing. I don't think that has ever happened before, and whatever your views are on whatever issue, I would caution that this is a gate we need to close shut because if the Executive branch of government can start telling the Members of the Senate what codels they can and

cannot go on with State Department support and facilitation, we have got a real problem on our hands.

Here is my badge from the event, which the State Department refused to facilitate. So I was there as an observer of the Global Legislators Organization for a Balanced Environment, not the State Department. That is how we had to get around them.

So that is kind of a first, not mattering much, except that it is yet another executive-legislative tradition blown up by the arrogance of the Trump administration, their insistence that everything has to be their way.

But it is also a signal that this is how crazy they are on climate issues, how completely off base they are.

So I went down to Brazil--because that is where the rest of the world was gathering--to discuss the climate crisis. In the facility where we were, the kind of main intersection where the two big aisleways crossed was occupied by China, at one of the key corners, with a huge delegation, a very big pavilion, lots of activity and crowding, and all of the different countries that were there seeing the leadership of China--our rival.

No pavilion for the United States, nothing to be seen, nobody. Across the way, Saudis, not exactly the best friends of climate solutions.

So that was the environment that I went down to, and what I wanted to do was convey four messages.

Message one was: Donald Trump on climate does not represent the United States of America. He just doesn't. He represents the big donors who gathered at Mar-a-Lago, whom he asked for a billion dollars, and who gave him hundreds of millions of dollars in return for his promise to do whatever they wanted. It is that corrupt promise that explains Trump's behavior, not that he is representing the United States of America.

I thought this cartoon made a pretty good image of what is going on in the Trump White House.

And we know that he doesn't represent America because we can do things like test public opinion and polls. And I have a recent one here that asks about some of the sensible solutions to the climate change problem, to all the pollution spewing. Here is one: Carbon pollution limits on big companies.

Obviously, Trump would do everything he possibly could to prevent carbon pollution limits because his big fossil fuel donors wouldn't like that, and he is in tow to them. So zero chance that Trump would support that. But how about the American people? Mr. President, 12 percent opposed, 72 percent support. There is a 60-point margin among the American public on putting a pollution limit, a carbon pollution limit on big companies--72 to 12. That is where the American people are, not in the pockets of Big Oil.

Here is another one: Impose a fee on big polluters. It shouldn't be pollute for free. If you are polluting something, whether it is your neighbor's yard with your waste, your trash, throwing it over the fence or whether it is the river that you are dumping effluent into and ruining things for people downstream or whether it is our common atmosphere, if you pollute, you should pay for the cost of fixing it.

Better still, you should pay enough that you don't pollute in the first place and the neighbor's yard isn't a wreck of your trash and the river isn't dirty downstream and the atmosphere is safe.

Impose a fee on big polluters. Seventy-four percent of Americans liked that, 10 percent opposed. These are massive numbers in our line of work, in which we are always testing public opinion. And this is without much political pressure behind those ideas. This is just the American public in its natural state saying: Yes, by a better-than-60- point margin, we want to impose a fee on big polluters. We want carbon pollution limits on big companies. That is where America is.

Trump is in the pockets of the big polluters. So that was message one.

Message two was: We have got to put that price on carbon, the one that the American people want, because that is the only way we have remaining to climate safety. We have driven by all the other exits on the highway. We are now left with that. And that was my second point. We absolutely have to have what is called carbon pricing, a fee, a penalty, whatever you call it, for pollution.

This is part of a review from work that the Potsdam Institute did. They looked at 1,200 climate scenarios that over the years have been presented to the IPCC, 1,200. Of those 1,200, there are 11 left--11 out of 1,200--11 left that put us on a pathway to climate safety to get us back below the 1.5 degrees centigrade safety margin--maybe safety margin. But that is a conventional one, so I will stick with it, even though it is not a guarantee.

Every single one of them puts a price on carbon. No price on carbon, we fail. Other stuff that helps with climate, that may cause the airplane to crash higher up the mountain, but the only thing that gets the airplane safely across the mountain is putting a price on carbon. Twenty years ago, we probably had other alternatives.

Now, we absolutely must put a price on carbon. And so I, when I met with the Europeans and the Brits and the Australians, said to them: You have our last lifeboat. Don't let Trump sink it for his fossil fuel donors. What is the last lifeboat? It is called the carbon border adjustment mechanism. It is a global price on carbon that comes from tariffs. It is already law in the European Union, and it is about to go into effect next year.

Behind the European Union is the United Kingdom. Under a conservative government, the United Kingdom decided to join the CBAM. They are in the process of aligning their internal carbon prices, and they are in the process of figuring out how they are going to charge their own tariffs.

So you have the EU economy, and then soon, I hope, the UK economy joining, sending a global price signal that, if you are putting in goods that are more carbon intensive than ours, we are going to charge you for that. You cannot pollute and export for free any longer. This is a version of the ``can't pollute for free'' rule.

Pollute for free, by the way, is wrong--not just morally but as a matter of economics. You can go back to the most conservative economist, Milton Friedman, and he will say: Yes, if your product causes harm, if it pollutes, that is what economists call a negative externality. And the cost of that negative externality needs to be in the price of the product or else it is a subsidy, and it should be treated as a subsidy.

The subsidy for fossil fuel, just in the United States, is $700 billion every year. That is how much harm it causes. That is the value to the industry of ``pollute for free'' as their business model.

So the CBAM is beginning to put a price on pollution by causing a border tariff. To impose that price is really, really important.

These are those 11 remaining scenarios. Every single one crosses over 1.5; every single one requires, probably, direct-air capture to get the excess carbon dioxide and other pollutants out of the atmosphere and then bring it back down to safety--assuming no tipping point in here makes it irrecoverable.

So the way that I described it is that our last lifeboat to climate safety is the CBAM. It gets stronger if the UK joins. It gets stronger if the Australians join. They are looking at it as well. That makes it a sturdier lifeboat for all of us.

But we have to do it. It is not a guarantee of climate safety. But sinking that lifeboat is a guarantee of failure for us, for the next generation of young people, for their children and their grandchildren. We are done if we don't protect and, ideally, expand the CBAM.

So I urge all the countries participating in that: Stand by your guns. There is going to be a corrupt fossil fuel-driven attack on this. You can count on it. And be ready. Lock arms. Link up. Prepare yourself for the onslaught, and do not let yourself be cowed. Do not let yourself be stampeded.

So that was point two. Point three was: We have trouble coming. I call it the great climate insurance collapse. It is widely warned of. It is on its way. As I went around the COP, I handed out this little folder wherever I could, which lists just some of the climate economic catastrophe warnings that are out there:

[C]limate change could reduce the level of global GDP per

capita by 10-20%.

This is Fed Chair Powell. He is on my sheet right here: In 10 or 15 years, there

are going to be regions of the country where you can't get a mortgage.

Why is that? Because in those regions of the country you won't be able to get home insurance. And if you can't get home insurance on your property, if it has become uninsurable, no mortgage.

So what he is really saying here is whole regions of the United States are going to become so climate risky that they are uninsurable and, therefore, unmortgageable, and that is why, in those regions of the country, you will not be able to get a mortgage.

Think for a minute about what the economy looks like in an entire region of the country in which nobody can get a mortgage any longer.

Where is this likely to hit first? I will tell you a region that is headed for this fast is Florida. In Florida, the insurance market is already trembling, propped up, perhaps even fake. And if it loses that insurance market and Florida is a region in which nobody can get a mortgage any longer, well, that may be fine for Palm Beach billionaires who are swapping mansions with their extra money, but for a working person who has to get a mortgage to afford a house or for a working person who has a house on which he or she is paying a mortgage and now they need to sell it and they can't find a buyer because the buyer can't get a mortgage to buy the house because the house can't get insurance--the property is uninsurable.

That is how that cascade works. It goes from climate risk to uninsurability, to mortgage collapse, to property values collapse, to recession. That is what the chief economist for Freddie Mac predicted.

This guy, Fed Chair Powell, is not green at all. He is lousy on climate, but he is good on finance, and he sees this coming.

Freddie Mac is not a green organization. It is a mortgage company. So when its chief economist says we are headed for a 2008-style economic recession because there won't be mortgages because you can't get insurance so property values will fall so there will be that recession, you are hearing that from the finance community, not from environmentalists.

We go on. The Economist magazine, in an article entitled ``The Next Housing Disaster''--there is its cover; it was about a year ago-- predicted $25 trillion as the size of the hit to the global real estate market from this climate risk to insurance meltdown, to no mortgages, to property values collapse cascade--$25 trillion.

``Climate change, in short,'' it said, ``could prompt the next global property collapse.''

The president of Aon, one of the biggest insurance companies in the country, testified before the Senate Budget Committee:

Climate risk is a global, systemic risk.

What does ``systemic'' mean?

Climate change is a global, systemic risk.

What does ``systemic'' mean? Systemic is the scariest word in the economic lexicon. Systemic means that when things go bad, it is not contained to the place where the things went bad.

The 2008 recession was systemic, meaning that you didn't have to have a bad mortgage or you didn't have to be one of the financiers who crookedly packaged the bad mortgages to get clobbered. The damage was so deep in that part of the financial system that it cascaded out across the entire economy, and everybody got hurt. Car dealers, Realtors, small businesses, people who lost their jobs got hurt in 2008 because it was systemic.

Now you have got the CEO of one of America's biggest insurance entities warning us about this systemic risk.

Here is an even bigger insurance company, the biggest one in the world, Allianz, put one of its board members out to warn that if we get past the 1.5 degrees here and if you get up to 3 degrees, what happens at 3 degrees? Which, by the way, is very much what we are headed for right now. What happens at 3 degrees? Here is what he says:

[T]he financial sector as we know it ceases to function.

And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable.

Same scenario: climate risk, insurance collapse, mortgage failure, property values crash.

The Mortgage Bankers Association:

[C]hronic physical risk associated with climate change may

. . . exceed the capacity of insurance and government

assistance to sustain some areas.

Whole regions.

By the way, the Allianz guy said the same thing about regions that Jay Powell did, that whole regions are becoming uninsurable.

The Financial Stability Board is the board that looks at the world's banking system. They have put out a warning saying, ``buckle up'' to the world's banks because if the climate risk to insurance collapse, to mortgage market failure, to property value crash transpires, the banks' balance sheets collapses. Its collateral value is gone. Its loan-to- value ratio makes it insolvent. And now you have a bank crash laid over the underlying great climate insurance collapse.

That is not from me. That is not from the League of Conservation Voters. That is not from the Sierra Club. That is from the international Financial Stability Board.

So that was the second message: Look out. This is about to get deadly serious, and people at the top of the finance profession are warning about it.

I will close with Bob Litterman. He was the chief risk management officer for Goldman Sachs, right? Goldman Sachs ain't green--except green with money. And he was their chief risk management officer. Here is what he told the Senate Budget Committee:

A sudden revision of market perceptions about climate

risk--

i.e., the market realizes that climate risk is out there and has not been priced adequately into financial documents--

could lead to a disorderly repricing of assets, which could

in turn have cascading effects on portfolios and balance

sheets and therefore systemic--

Systemic--

implications for financial stability.

Like the Financial Stability Board said.

So I pointed out that this risk was looming, and we need to pay attention to it. This isn't about polar bears any longer. This isn't about green jobs any longer. This is a serious warning about a potential collapse in not just the United States but the global financial system. Remember The Economist magazine said that $25 trillion hit was coming to global real estate markets. That is what this article said.

So how do we prevent that? Well, one thing, as I said already, is you have to put a price on carbon. If it is free to pollute, you are going to get more polluting. There is no excuse for an industry polluting for free. There just isn't. It is morally wrong, economically wrong, environmentally wrong. It is wrong by the rules which your mom taught you--to clean up after your damn self.

But when it is $700 billion every year of harm that you are getting away with for free, that gives you a big reason as an industry to try to fake and lie and pressure your way through it. Now, you don't want to be caught doing that by your own name. You don't want it to be ExxonMobil that is doing all of this in its own name, so you have set up a whole scheme. But for $700 billion a year, you can spend a lot of money on setting up your whole scheme.

And sure enough, here is an image I have used on the Senate floor before. This is a web of all, not all, a significant number of the big front groups that the fossil fuel industry has propped up and funds to propagate its climate denial fraud operation--pretend that this isn't real, pretend that the scientists are just kidding or that they are making it up--and its dark money political corruption operation, which shovels billions of dollars into our politics to make sure that people obediently deny climate change in return for the money that keeps them in office.

So my final point in Brazil was, if we want to win this, we not only have to get the policy right, we have to tell the story right.

This is a story with a villain in it, just like a children's story that has a troll or a witch or an ogre or a dragon. You don't want to tell that story without the troll or the witch or the ogre or the dragon. First of all, it gets to be a really boring story, and second of all, it ain't the right story.

What we have is a situation in which we are in this peril that I described. We are in this peril because the fossil fuel industry has propped up this whole array of phony front groups to spread climate disinformation, stuff that just isn't true.

By the way, they don't care that it is not true. That is the point. So they

don't stand corrected when somebody says ``Oh, that is not true''; they just dial up the volume and say it twice as much. It is not intended to be true. This is not a quest for truth; this is a barrage of noise and propaganda designed to cover the truth.

On the money side, we are into multiple billions of dollars that are poured into this building from fossil fuel industry coffers through all these phony-baloney front groups. I make fun of their names. I made up one: Rhode Islanders for Peace and Puppies and Prosperity--with nothing but a mail drop behind it. But behind the mail drop, creepy billionaires are shoveling in the money so people will ignore this problem for just another year, just another 2 years, just long enough to make a few more billion dollars in profit.

So that was my message.

Trump ain't us on this. Trump is the mouthpiece of the fossil fuel industry. The American public hasn't gone anywhere on this. He has just gone off on a fossil fuel-funded excursion.

If we don't protect the CBAM and put a price on carbon, there is no way out of this mess. We are totally toast, and we are going to see the looming edge of being totally toast coming through our insurance markets. It is already happening in Florida. Watch it. It is there.

I did a poll in Texas. Ninety-two percent of Texans are concerned about their homeowners insurance. Everybody talks about affordability here. They are concerned about their homeowners insurance affordability. They are more concerned about that than healthcare. They are more concerned about that than groceries. This is a top-of-mind concern because of wildfires, flooding, hail exploding the Texas homeowners insurance market.

Sixty-three percent say they are very concerned--very concerned. Sixty-six percent in oil patch Texas, in red Texas, in a State where zero effort has been made to connect the dots, understand that climate change links to extreme weather that is driving their homeowners insurance crisis--66 percent already get that. They are just being ignored because the fossil fuel industry can out-fog horn them with its propaganda and outspend them with its sluice gates open of dark money corrupting our politics.

That takes us to the last point, which is, yes, there is a villain in the story, and we need to put a spotlight on that villain and make them own the harm they are so dishonestly creating.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise to speak on the CRA related to the Environmental Protection Agency, now better known as the ``Polluter Protection Agency,'' trying to unwind methane rules.

So there are three things I would like to say about methane: We all know that it is a pollutant. We all know that it is dangerous. It is even explosive. And yet the fossil fuel industry insists on leaking it in enormous quantities. And for years, they have falsely reported to the EPA how much their leakage was, but it is a lot, and it makes a big difference, particularly on the climate side because methane is a super pollutant in the short run--in the first, say, 20, 25 years. So it is really important to stop leakage of this dangerous substance.

And there is no value to the leakage. This is just laziness and sloppiness and bad corporate behavior. It is not like there is a methane leakage association that wants to see more methane in the atmosphere. It is just waste and sloppiness, bad corporate behavior.

This body keeps rolling over to those folks. One of the first things that we did was to undo the methane fee so that the leakers didn't have to pay anything for their leakage. Now, we had agreed on that, working with the fossil fuel industry through Senator Manchin, who was their representative in these negotiations. And what we settled on was that only the worst polluters would be subject to the fee; only the ones who couldn't even meet their industry's standards, only they would have to pay.

Second, the revenues from the fee would go back to the industry to pay for fixing the mess they were creating.

And third, we front-loaded it so they got nearly a billion dollars upfront.

What did they do? Took the money and called on their Republican friends here in the Senate to undo the fee. It was a complete bait-and- switch.

Now we are here on changes to the methane rules and the effort by EPA to delay those changes. This adds the additional insult to being a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act.

I tell my colleagues: If you continue to sanction these procedural violations of regulatory Agencies, don't think we are going to forget that when the shoe is on the other foot. This set of extensions of the methane rules was done regulatorily, without something called notice and opportunity to be heard--``notice and comment'' is the technical term under the APA.

It is a basic provision of the APA that you have to go notice and comment. If you don't want to do notice and comment--as EPA did not in this case--you have got to show good cause. And what courts have said good cause

is, is an emergency. There is no emergency here.

Look at some of the things that EPA has done. They claim that the industry needed time to adopt technologies which had, in fact, already been widely adopted--flatout lie from EPA.

They said that compliance deadlines were too close. Well, many of them actually had already been in effect. So that can't be the real reason.

And then they delayed the Super Emitter Program for the worst methane leakers, but it had already been up and running for months. So there was nothing new happening. There was no emergency.

So if you all--my colleagues on the Republican side--if this is the way you want regulatory Agencies to behave in a Democrat administration, keep this up because this is flatout rule-breaking by the EPA.

The last thing is, it is kind of pointless because we are going to catch your leakers. You can give them anything you want. You can continue to roll back methane fees; you can continue to roll back methane rules, but we are going to catch the leakers who are telling you to do this stuff.

We are going to catch them because satellite technology can now detect the plumes of methane that they emit, and they can really detect the big ones. They can source it down to a very narrow point of origin.

UCLA just opened up a website where you can go and see a summary of the satellite data: what landfills, what oil facilities, what are the big leak points so the local communities can take action against the irresponsible members of the fossil fuel industry who are leaking enormous amounts of methane.

So you may have clawed back the methane fee and bailed out the worst performers in the industry and you may have violated the APA to postpone these other rules, including rules against super emitters, but at the end of the day, you are not going to get away with the methane leakage.

You are going to be caught. It is going to be visible on satellite. There is going to be every opportunity for naming and shaming and enforcement, and we are going to end up getting this right. So it would be better if you just didn't put us through this, if you behaved properly for the Senate, if you let the methane fees stand, and if you didn't allow EPA to break the rules to give polluters yet another break from this polluter-friendly EPA.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, in fond memory of Dame Jane Goodall, 1934-2025, Explorers Club Fellow, Honorary Member, and Explorers Club Medalist, by L. M. Levie:

There's a tale explorers tell, of a girl with drive and

dreams, Who was born in Hampstead, London in a home of modest

means, With a small toy chimp named Jubilee clutched close

against her heart, And a yearning for the wilderness,

imprinted from the start.

She would read of Doctor Dolittle and apes of Tarzan's

land, While her mother, kind and gentle, held her daughter's

reaching hand. Though she had no lofty pedigree from

university, Jane set out upon a mission that would change

humanity.

Jane would save all of her wages, every shilling, pence and

pound, And she booked a ship to Africa, to Kenya she was

bound. In the camp of Louis Leakey, digging age-old skulls

from earth, He found something in her manner, recognized her

hidden worth.

``You shall study chimpanzees in the wilds of Gombe Stream,

You shall live among the primates and fulfill your childhood

dream.'' So at twenty-six she ventured to Tanzania's lake

shore, Where no woman dared go solo, where no scholar went

before.

And at first the chimps would scatter, running fearful

through the trees, But she sat there day and nighttime under

sun and rain and breeze. `Til one ancient male named David

with a beard of silver-gray, Took a nut from Jane's kind

outstretched hand and gently squeezed to say:

``You are welcome here among us, you may watch us, you may

learn.'' And upon this invitation, science took a mighty

turn. Through the years at Gombe watching, Jane recorded

every deed, How they shared their

food and groomed with care--compassion was their creed,

How they laughed and kissed and mourned their dead with

grief upon their face, How they held the mirror to us,

showing evolution's trace. But in nineteen-eighty-six she

flew far above this wood, And she saw the devastation where

the forest once had stood.

She was no more mere observer, now she'd fight to save and

teach, And she traveled `round the planet, bringing hope

within her reach. On three hundred days of travel, every year

for decades long, Speaking, begging, preaching, pleading,

singing out her urgent song:

``Every person makes a difference, every action matters

true, And the future of our planet, of all life, depends on

you.'' On October first she left us, and she shed all mortal

cares. Ninety-one years of devotion, of a life of answered

prayers.

Jane, who gave her life to nature, and gave voice to all

things wild, Has returned unto the earth now, still a

curious, loving child. So we weep for Jane this evening,

though we know she'd ask us: ``Why? I have lived the life I

dreamed of underneath the broadest sky.''

As we mourn for you, dear Jane, your great legacy burns

bright, And the world's a kinder place because you brought us

to the light. For in every child who plants a tree, in every

soul who cares, In every word of hope and faith, we find you

standing there.

Rest now in peace, dear Jane Goodall, in earth you loved

and knew, You showed us how to live with grace, with courage

strong and true. And when the wind sings through the Gombe

trees, chimps call at dawn, Remembering one who loved them--

Though she's gone, her work lives on.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I would have hoped that the basic operation of American democracy and particularly the basic integrity of America's elections would not be a topic that we would have to come to the Senate floor to worry about, but the character down the road in the Oval Office is making all sorts of threats to the cornerstone of America's democracy--our elections.

I will mention three. First, he nonstop lies about rigged elections. He can't bear to face the fact that Joe Biden beat him by millions of votes fair and square, and so he invented a story of rigged elections.

Well, as has repeatedly been shown, if any election has been rigged recently, it was Donald Trump's first election, where study after study, report after report showed that Russia had been messing around in that election, using covert influence operations to influence American voters and steer them towards their favorite--Donald Trump.

But the lying about rigged elections is a bit of a warning sign because the other thing we have learned about Trump is that his accusations tend to be actual confessions. The bad stuff that he intends to do he announces by accusing others of doing the same thing. So when people notice the mischief that he is up to, he says: Well, everybody does it. That doesn't make it anything other than a lie.

Then he has been out, bullying Republican States, to try to get him more seats in Congress by doing a midseason gerrymandering of their States. This succeeded, kind of, in Texas. When I say it succeeded ``kind of,'' it succeeded in the sense that they got the gerrymandered districts.

But here is the rub: When you gerrymander more Republican districts into a State, you make the freeboard--the win ratio--for each of those districts a little bit less.

And if yesterday was any message, Republicans need to worry about a wave election washing away Trump's poison and nonsense. In a wave election, those gerrymandered districts that you thought you had moved into the Republican column could get sunk in the wave.

In particular, we have already seen from yesterday's results--more analysis will follow--that it looks like Latino voters, important in Texas, are abandoning Trump. So it may be that Texas's gerrymandering blows up in its face, and wouldn't that be a nice turnabout?

Maybe that is what Republicans in Indiana were thinking when they refused to gerrymander their State. They might well be looking at Texas and saying: You know, voters in Texas might actually have cared more about electric bills, about their homeowners' insurance crisis, about their cost of living, and wanted Texan legislators to do something about that, instead of going off on a partisan gallivant to redistrict the State. And those voters might just hold those Republicans accountable for choosing as their priority to use gerrymandering so that politicians can choose their voters instead of paying attention to the voters who want help with costs, who want their homeowners' insurance problems solved, who are concerned about their electric utility bills, and who are sick to death about what is happening with grocery costs.

The third avenue of attack on elections by Trump is that he is modeling government election interference in front of our faces right now. When you send the National Guard into American cities, when you deploy masked, plain-clothed, presumably ICE agents to yank people off the street and fling them into unmarked vans and disappear them, you are getting people used to images that Americans are not used to. You are inoculating Americans against that kind of abuse of both military and law enforcement capabilities so that, when it is election day and that kind of nonsense takes place around polling places to discourage voters, we have gotten used to it.

So the lying--the constant lying--about rigged elections, the bullying--the constant bullying--to force State legislatures to gerrymander even though that is not what their voters want, and the constant modeling of government interference in elections--all of that is a signal that we have to be on our guard to protect our democracy.

It is not just Trump. In doing this, Trump has allies. He has allies on the packed and captured Supreme Court--a Court that Republicans packed and captured specifically to help their big, creepy billionaire donors acquire more power in American democracy. And, boy, have we seen enough creepy billionaire power in American democracy: dark money--the secret, sneaky dark money floods that are poisoning our elections, that allow billionaires to channel multimillion-dollar contributions into races by hiding behind front groups and screens and super-PACs so that voters can't do their duty as citizens of figuring out who is telling them what because the loudest and noisiest and most prolific messages are coming from behind masked entities.

It was one of the dirtiest deeds ever done to our democracy, and it was done by the Roberts Court: voter suppression, making sure that White legislatures could discourage Black and Latino voters by changing the rules for when you can vote and how you can vote. We passed a Voting Rights Act in the Congress to stop that kind of behavior, and this Supreme Court--the Roberts Court--has been diligently pulling out, piece by piece, those Voting Rights Act protections.

When they do, what happens? Instantly, those southern legislatures go to work to make it harder and harder for minorities to vote. Hundreds of bills get filed.

Third, when they were confronted with partisan gerrymandering-- distorting Americans' right to vote by letting politicians pick voters, instead of voters picking politicians--they said: Oh, well, that is all fine. We are not going to look into any of that. Courts are not allowed to look into whether gerrymandering is legal or illegal, constitutional or unconstitutional.

Those three decisions of flooding our elections with corrupting dark money, letting State legislatures make it harder for certain people to vote whom

they don't want voting, and gerrymandering districts against the will of the public--people hate gerrymandering--those three things have collectively done immense damage to our democracy, and those bad decisions are going to play out in this coming election.

I will close with a point about all three of those cases.

The Citizens United case that let filthy, unlimited dark money pollute our elections, the Shelby case that tore down an essential element of the Voting Rights Act, and the Rucho case that allowed uncontrolled, partisan gerrymandering--all three of them share a very important characteristic in common, and that is that they hang on a false fact. To get where the Court wanted to go, those Republican appointees had to make up a false fact that the decision hung on.

In Citizens United, it was that all the unlimited money would be transparent. Well, we know that was false. Every billion dollars in dark money that falls into our elections proves that was false.

In Shelby, it was that things have changed. You didn't need to worry about southern legislatures trying to keep Democratic voters from showing up. But you saw that that was false because all of those laws were immediately passed to suppress voters.

And in the Rucho case, it was that courts can't figure out gerrymandering stuff; it is just too complicated. But, in fact, courts were figuring it out. It is not even that hard to figure out. The Court just made up, falsely, that this was too hard.

When a court is making up false facts to get to an outcome that it wants, that is not a sign of great integrity in those proceedings.

So we have a lot to worry about, and we have more to worry about after yesterday because last night showed that voters do not like what Trump and his Republican cohorts here in the House and the Senate are doing to our country. This was a small wave, and with any luck, it is building to a bigger wave. Instead of adjusting to popular opinion, what we know they are going to do is to try to use even more tools to corrupt democracy, corrupt elections, and defeat our ability to have the American people decide who they want to lead them at the polls. That is the predicament we are in, and it requires us to be on high alert.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, as I come to the floor, I reflect on how I have never understood what it is in the Republican mind that is so fixated on taking healthcare away from people. It really doesn't make sense. It may be some recessive political gene that goes back to when Republicans opposed Medicare, attacked it as socialized medicine, tried to make sure it never happened. But it really doesn't make sense.

But it is active still, and Americans are looking at three waves of attack on their healthcare. The first wave is pulling their Affordable Care credits. That

is a big deal for a lot of people. Twenty-four million Americans are going to be affected and are going to see their costs for healthcare likely double.

In Rhode Island, my small State, tens of thousands of people are going to be similarly affected, with huge increases in their monthly costs for the same healthcare. And because so many of them aren't going to be able to afford that increase, we estimate that 13,000 Rhode Islanders will lose their coverage and have to go to emergency rooms and wait in line and drive up the ultimate cost of care by not getting treatment when it is needed.

But it is not just the Affordable Care credits that are imperiled here. Right behind that is a half-trillion-dollar cut to Medicare-- Medicare.

Some of us remember when President Biden gave the State of the Union and he had a bit of an exchange with Republicans in the House about Medicare. He said: You know, Republicans always are trying to cut Medicare.

And they all jumped up out of their chairs yelling and screaming and said: No, no, no. We will never cut Medicare. We are not for that. You can't say we are for that.

What did they do in the ``Beautiful for Billionaires Bill''? Cut Medicare. They did it in a tricky way because they don't want to own that they are Medicare cutters. You saw that behavior during Biden's State of the Union. They do not want to own cutting Medicare. They know people like and respect Medicare and rely on Medicare.

But the ``Beautiful for Billionaires Bill,'' by virtue of adding over $4 trillion to our national debt, triggered another law, the sequestration law, that automatically imposes cuts on Medicare starting next year--next year. And it is a half trillion dollars in Medicare cuts.

So that is backed up behind the Affordable Care credits being pulled away. And then, behind that, comes the trillion-dollar cut to Medicaid that was right on the face of the ``Beautiful for Billionaires Bill.''

So you add those three things up--you pull the Affordable Care credits from the families that rely on it, you whack Medicare by half a trillion dollars, you whack Medicaid by a trillion dollars--and you have delivered a devastating blow to the American people--such a devastating blow, by the way, that the healthcare providers at the receiving end of those trillions of dollars are likely to suffer to the point of having to potentially close. Nursing homes, hospitals, provider practices, family doctors--they are the ones where this money ultimately lands. And when you take that much money away from our healthcare sector, don't think it is going to be OK because it is not.

So why do we stand and fight to protect the Affordable Care credits? Well, two reasons: one, because it is the first wave of this new Republican assault on Americans' healthcare--Affordable Care credits, then Medicare, then Medicaid. If we don't stand and fight now, with the Affordable Care credits being sent out now, the changes in the prices, then we are in no position to defend when the Medicare cuts come through--half a trillion dollars--and when the Medicaid cuts come through--a trillion dollars.

And the second is we can have some confidence that our Republican colleagues, when they get over this fixation about taking away Americans' healthcare, will realize that a lot of the Americans whose healthcare they are taking away are their own constituents. In fact, all of the evidence is that these Affordable Care credits go more to Republican Senators' constituents than they do to ours, which is why Republican House Members running for reelection are writing letters saying: Let's fix the Affordable Care credits. Let's extend Affordable Care credits for 2 years.

That is why Republicans in this body are saying: Yes, we know we need to negotiate to extend Affordable Care credits. We just don't want to do it right now.

So we can have some confidence in this fight that Republicans' constituents are going to let them know how unwelcome pulling the Affordable Care credits is, and that is before you even get to half- trillion-dollar cuts to Medicare and trillion-dollar cuts to Medicaid.

So this matters, and it matters to a lot of people. And it matters in Republican States. I just happened to pick Tennessee. Here is a little bit about what is going to happen in Tennessee. Tennessee families, thanks to Republicans not willing to negotiate with us, will see their premiums increase, on average, by 320 percent next year--320 percent. More than 600,000 Tennesseans rely on the State Affordable Care Marketplace, healthcare.gov, for their insurance. These families will pay, on average, $464 more for their health insurance.

Here are some examples of how health insurance sticker shock is landing right now in Tennessee, as the notices go out for the next enrollment period. A 45-year-old in Tennessee making $62,000--driving their own truck, working their small farm, operating their small business--will see their average annual premium costs rise by $1,726. A 60-year-old couple making $82,000 will see their average annual premium costs rise by $19,329--a quarter of their $82,000 income, gone like that, because Republicans won't sit down and negotiate like grownups. A family of four making $126,000 will see their average annual premium costs rise by $9,087.

This just isn't going to work, my friends. You are going to have to figure this out. Otherwise, around 210,000 Tennesseans will go uninsured.

And, by the way, because the money flows through to the healthcare providers, providers in Tennessee will take the hit. They will lose an additional $1.3 billion in funding that supports healthcare in Tennessee--$1.3 billion--``billion'' with a ``b.'' So it is time to fix this.

Over and over again, Senate Republicans have said: Yes, we are willing to negotiate. We just don't want to do it now. We want to do it later.

So all of this pain, the damage the President is throwing on with his SNAP cuts, the damage Trump is throwing on by adding that he threatens to close American airspace--believe it or not, this is a President who will close American airspace before he will help Americans get healthcare coverage. Think about that just for a moment. Let that thought land: close American airspace rather than give Americans healthcare coverage.

And the fight, the gravamen of this dispute right now, isn't over negotiating. It is over when to negotiate. Really? It is worth causing all this damage over when to negotiate? I would say you could negotiate right now and we could come to an agreement within a week that would put an end to the continuing resolution and we could go forward.

There is one problem. I think President Trump doesn't want the shutdown to end. I think his creepy minion at the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, doesn't want the shutdown to end. They like the shutdown. They looked forward to the shutdown. They gave ``Gatsby'' parties at Mar-a-Lago during the shutdown. Everything about this shutdown thrills their dark hearts, and they couldn't care less about Americans' suffering.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, each November, we fall back into darkness very literally. If we pass my Sunshine Protection Act and make daylight saving time permanent, we would gain an hour of afternoon sunlight in the winter months for families to soak up after work and after school.

This measure has been so bipartisan that it has previously passed this body by unanimous consent.

Here is what President Trump said about it:

The House and Senate should push hard for more Daylight at

the end of a day. Very popular and, most importantly, no more

changing of the clocks, a big inconvenience and, for our

government, A VERY COSTLY EVENT!!!

My cosponsor before Senator Scott came here was his predecessor from Florida, Senator Rubio, who is now our Secretary of State, who said that we should ``stop enduring the ridiculous and antiquated practice of switching our clocks back and forth. Let's . . . end the need to `fall back' and `spring forward' for good.''

I don't always agree with President Trump and with former-Senator, now-Secretary Rubio, but I sure do agree about this.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise here for the 302nd time to urge this somnolent, compromised body to wake up to the dangers of climate change--again, with my trusted and increasingly battered chart. This time, my focus is on the fossil fuels industry's corrupting influence over the Trump administration and what that means for Americans.

When I stood before you for the 296th time back in January, I predicted that the fossil fuel looters and polluters would take over the Federal Government. I am saddened but not surprised that my grim forecast has already come true. It is only October, and already it is clear that the fossil fuel industry bought, paid for, and now straight up owns the Trump administration, and it is only going to get worse.

For years, I warned that if we let fossil fuel money pour into our politics unchecked, that if we let dark money run rampant, and that if we let polluters sabotage science, then one day the government would cease to belong to ``we the people'' and instead belong to them, the polluters. Well, that day has arrived.

Last month, I set out the fossil fuel industry's four phases of climate denial:

Phase 1: Bury the evidence. Refuse to disclose what they knew, what their own scientists were telling them.

Phase 2: Actively mislead the public when the evidence they had buried ultimately comes out.

Phase 3: Flood the political zone with dark money to buttress the climate denial fraud, using unlimited funding--unleashed by Citizens United.

Now we are in phase 4, where an increasingly desperate fossil fuel operation switches from defense and blockade to attack.

Today, I will do a deep dive on phase 4--the corruption and weaponization of government phase--and how it is playing out across the corrupt Trump administration.

Phase 4 is different. They are not just hiding or misleading or politically obstructing any longer. In phase 4, the fossil fuel industry fully corrupts the entire executive branch and uses the power of government to go after and crush its clean energy competition. Behind this plot are the creepy billionaires who run the industry, who are out to get even richer at the expense of the American people.

Let me be blunt. The Trump administration does not work for you, the American people; it works for fossil fuel billionaires and their sprawling, dark money corruption machine, which--no coincidence--helped put Trump in office for a second time.

Don't take my word about whom they work for. An official from the White House's own, new, so-called National Energy Dominance Council offered ``concierge, white glove service'' to help keep polluting coal plants open and mines in operation. That official, by the way, previously worked for Shell Oil and Valero Energy.

Every Agency, every decision, every policy of this corrupt administration is in the service of its fossil fuel donors and patrons. Fossil fuel's looters and polluters are running the U.S. Government for their own benefit, from the inside. President Trump, EPA Administrator Zeldin, Energy Secretary Wright, Interior Secretary Burgum--the whole lot of them are bought and paid for. So settle in, and I will walk you through it from the offer and acceptance, to the return on fossil fuel's political investment, to the costs to the American people.

Let's start with the moment of sale.

It was April 2024, early April. Candidate Trump was desperate. His criminal trial would begin in 4 days, and his best shot at staying out of jail was winning the Presidency. But the unpopular politician's unpopular policies just weren't moving the needle.

There was one thing left to do. It was time to make a deal. Cornered and starved for cash, Trump invited the fossil fuel donor elite to Mar- a-Lago. Sensing an opportunity, into those faux-gilt halls strolled the oil barons, the gas tycoons, the petrochemical magnates, the pipeline moguls. If you have struck oil or gas in America, you likely received an invitation.

By the way, they were a little desperate themselves because their business model was failing against the relentless pressure of cheaper, cleaner, more popular renewable energy.

There at his club, Candidate Trump delivered his offer. It was not subtle--no think tank jargon or super PAC euphemisms, no speaking in code. He looked out at those assembled fossil fuel billionaires and made a simple pitch: Give me $1 billion, and I will do anything and everything you want.

The fossil fuel billionaires were only too happy to take that deal. Harold Hamm, the fracking kingpin, opened his checkbook. Jeffery Hildebrand, the Texas oilman, poured in millions. Kelcy Warren, a pipeline magnate, joined. Other familiar players, like George Bishop, Tim Dunn, and the Wilks brothers--they all lined up.

The fossil fuel donor elite understood the corrupt bargain: Invest just $1 billion and maybe not all of that $1 billion. They are at hundreds of millions. We are not sure. But let's say it was $1 billion that ended up coming through--$1 billion to preserve the annual $700- plus billion subsidy that fossil fuel's free-to-pollute business model relies on; $1 billion once for $700 billion a year. On top of that, they could reap untold added billions in new tax subsidies, pollution deregulation, protection from legal accountability for misdeeds, and even a government-backed war they could run against their feared clean energy competition.

This was not just a fundraiser. This was no boisterous campaign rally. This was a deal--a $1 billion, quid pro quo deal.

This corrupt deal marked a turning point in American history. Before, fossil fuels influenced using political dark money and dark money threats and promises. They lied, using a decades-long campaign of denial, deception, and doublespeak to hide the harmful effects of their products.

Those two operations--the climate denial fraud operation and the dark money corruption operation--together had blocked any meaningful, bipartisan climate legislation. They killed that dead the instant Citizens United gave them that power.

The 2024 elections gave the fossil fuel barons full control. Under the Trump regime, the U.S. Government has acted exactly as you would expect a corrupted government to act--every Agency captured, climate and energy laws and regulations rewritten, all the inconvenient science ignored, silenced, or worse--erased completely. Say goodbye to government for ``we the people'' and hello to government for them, the polluters. The entire Trump administration works for its fossil fuel donors.

On January 20, 2025--day one in office--President Trump issued industry-drafted Executive orders designed to kneecap fossil fuel's clean energy competition and prop up fossil fuel. One Executive order even wrote wind energy and solar energy out of the definition of ``energy.'' These Executive orders are now implemented by Federal Agencies that are in the hands of the stooges of the big polluters.

Let's start with the Environmental Protection Agency. There is so much rot over there, it is hard to know where to begin, so I will start with personnel.

Atop the Agency is Lee Zeldin. You may know him as the erstwhile Congressman from New York or as the failed gubernatorial candidate, but did you know of his role as the errand boy for billionaire Trump donor and oil executive Tim Dunn? Until January, Zeldin had a cushy role at the America First Policy Institute--a pro-Trump, so-called think tank founded by oilman Dunn. AFPI is hell-bent on increasing fossil fuel production, reducing fossil fuel regulation, and protecting the free- to-pollute fossil fuel business model. Dunn was thrilled to have his boy Zeldin slide slimily into the EPA.

Then there is EPA Deputy Administrator David Fotouhi and head of the Office of Air and Radiation Aaron Szabo, who, before joining the EPA, spent years defending polluting industries in court or making polluters' pitches to us in Congress.

Steven Cook, Principal Deputy Assistant in the EPA's Office of Land and Emergency Management, recently represented the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers in its legal challenge to an EPA cleanup rule. Now he is the regulator he just fought in court.

Nancy Beck, Trump's EPA chemical safety adviser, used to help run the chemical manufacturers' main trade association, the American Chemistry Council.

And Sean Donahue? Well, he is the EPA's top lawyer even though he has never taken a deposition, tried a case to verdict, argued a motion, or authored and signed a legal pleading. But his partner was Deputy Director of Personnel at the White House, and fossil fuel deregulation depends on usefully incompetent lawyers.

The foxes are literally guarding the EPA henhouse. Once the pride of American environmental stewardship, the EPA is now turned inside out. Instead of writing rules to protect the public from pollution, it is writing rules to protect polluters from public accountability.

The EPA's most striking betrayal to date was its move to repeal the endangerment finding--the scientific and legal cornerstone that acknowledged greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and welfare. Without that finding, EPA would have no authority or obligation to regulate climate pollution, which is precisely the whole point.

This is not about science; this is not about law; this is about doing the bidding of the polluting fossil fuel industry, which doesn't want to be regulated and which must pollute for free to survive--never mind the enormous cost and harm that dumps onto American families.

To justify its proposed repeal of the endangerment finding, EPA leaned on a junk Department of Energy so-called climate report--a cooked-up document so baseless that more than 85 real climate scientists issued a comprehensive rebuttal of it as ``fundamentally flawed,'' ``biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking.'' The American Meteorological Society condemned it as misleading and dangerous.

Of course, the so-called climate report was not science; it was propaganda, fossil fuel propaganda. With 99 percent consensus in peer- reviewed scientific literature that fossil fuel emissions are dangerously changing our climate, you would be hard-pressed to find five climate scientists who would downplay or deny climate change. Trump's corrupt Department of Energy found all five. They weren't hard to find, though, because they all worked for fossil fuel front groups. They were chosen precisely because they would deny established science.

Get a load of this crew: Dr. Roy Spencer, previously a visiting fellow at the climate denialist Heritage Foundation, funded--no surprise--by ExxonMobil, DonorsTrust, the Koch Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation--all fossil fuel companies or dark money outfits pushing fossil fuel's pollute-for-free agenda; Dr. John Christy, linked to conservative front group Competitive Enterprise Institute, funded with dark money from the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, the Charles Koch Institute, DonorsTrust, the Heritage Foundation, Marathon Petroleum, and Murray Energy; Dr. Judith Curry, who charges $400 per hour for consulting services to petroleum companies, electric utilities, and natural gas energy traders--a frequent face also here in Congress spewing fossil fuel- funded propaganda in committee hearings; Dr. Steven Koonin, formerly at British Petroleum, now a fellow at the Hoover Institute--a conservative-leaning research organization funded by ExxonMobil, DonorsTrust, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation; finally, Dr. Ross McKitrick of the Cato Institute, funded by Charles Koch, DonorsTrust, ExxonMobil, Murray Energy, and the Scaife Family Foundations, and he is also a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, funded by the Charles G. Koch Foundation, ExxonMobil, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. If you are sensing a pattern, you should be.

Everyone knew the report was nonsense, but it gave the polluters a figleaf behind which EPA could try to deregulate fossil fuel pollution. No surprise, the group of climate deniers was disbanded before they had to answer to the public under the Administrative Procedure Act for their junk report.

Trump's corrupt EPA is also repealing methane standards, undoing auto emissions rules, abandoning air pollution safeguards, scrapping limits on toxic emissions, cutting protections

against pollution from coal plants like mercury and carbon dioxide, even clawing back billions in appropriated funding for clean energy. Hell, EPA literally provided polluters with a special email address to get exemptions from air toxics rules--concierge service indeed.

Trump's EPA had to really bend the rules to roll back State safeguards, like California's Clean Air Act waiver created a half century ago in recognition of California's then-immense air pollution challenges and its early leadership in improving air quality. Waivers allow California and other States, like Rhode Island, that follow California's lead to set tougher pollution standards for cars and trucks sold inside their borders. But tougher pollution standards mean selling less gasoline, and so they went at the California waiver.

There was a trick here. Trump's EPA submitted California's waivers to Congress as so-called final rules, which they weren't and which had never been done before. But it made them vulnerable to undoing by simple Senate majority here under the Congressional Review Act--a trick, by the way, suggested by fossil fuel industry lawyers in the Polluter Page of the Wall Street Journal.

GAO and the Senate Parliamentarian rejected the effort to falsely label the waivers as ``rules,'' so our fossil fuel-funded Republican friends went nuclear, overruled the Senate Parliamentarian, and killed the State waivers--a sour joke from a party that in other circumstances claims to be all about States' rights, States' ability to self-govern, and cooperative federalism.''

Thanks to the corrupt billion-dollar deal, the Environmental Protection Agency is now clearly the ``Polluter Protection Agency,'' bought and paid for. Goodbye, again, to ``we the people''; hello to them, the polluters.

Let's talk about the Trump Justice Department, perhaps better called ``Oil, Gas, and Coal, LLP.'' You can't understand the corruption at EPA without understanding how Trump weaponized the Justice Department to become the fossil fuel industry's taxpayer-funded law firm.

One example: From the get-go, EPA Administrator Zeldin was hell-bent on clawing back more than $20 billion in clean energy grants Congress had appropriated. But he had a problem: There was no legal basis to do so.

Enter Trump's corrupted DOJ, which tried to cook up a fake criminal investigation to provide a pretext to freeze the funds. Zeldin echoed the theme with multiple phony and likely defamatory allegations of criminal and fraudulent behavior by grant recipients, who, by the way, included among them nefarious organizations like Habitat for Humanity.

Next problem: The evidence was so weak that the Chief of the DC U.S. Attorney's Office Criminal Division resigned rather than authorize the fake criminal investigation, and no other career attorney in the whole office would sign on. So Trump's since-fired interim U.S. attorney personally submitted a warrant application with no career cosigner. And guess what. He got shot down by the magistrate judge for lack of probable cause. Any Federal prosecutor can tell you how unusual and how embarrassing that is.

Desperate, Trump's DOJ tried to shop the same failed investigation to other U.S. Attorney's Offices, hoping somebody--anybody--would pursue the failed warrant. In case that wasn't enough, meanwhile, in another courtroom, back in the same DC courthouse, Department of Justice lawyers in a civil matter were denying that they alleged fraud in the use of those funds.

What a mess. Seeking warrants without proof, prompting career officials to resign, making fake public assertions of criminality, failing in court, making inconsistent legal arguments in the same courthouse--all of that to claw back money duly appropriated by Congress and properly obligated to grantees, all to help grow the clean energy sector and reduce air pollution? None of that is normal DOJ. This is weaponized DOJ.

Just last month, DOJ's fossil fuel's law firm went to Federal court in New York to strike down a State law requiring the largest fossil fuel polluters to pay into a fund to redress New York's climate damages for infrastructure, adaptation, for disaster recovery.

DOJ--the U.S. Department of Justice--went to court to argue the polluters' case, that the law was an unconstitutional overreach that Federal courts should rein in. The Justice Department of the United States, paid for by U.S. taxpayers, used its resources to give a taxpayer freebie to the likes of ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, and Koch Industries--companies with plentiful armies of lawyers of their own.

Trump's corrupted DOJ also sued Vermont to strike down a similar State law and even sued Hawaii and Michigan to stop those States from suing fossil fuel companies before the States' complaints had even hit the docket. This is not normal DOJ; this is weaponized DOJ.

Why is DOJ acting so strangely? As a former prosecutor, I am telling you, this makes no sense, unless you follow the money.

After the billion-dollar quid pro quo deal, DOJ has become the polluters' taxpayer-funded law firm. Goodbye to ``we the people'' as the DOJ client; hello to the new client, them the polluters.

Third, is Trump's Department of Energy. It is run by Chris Wright, the former CEO of an oil and gas services company, handpicked to lead DOE by--guess who--oil billionaire Harold Hamm, who organized the Mar- a-Lago billion-dollar-deal donor dinner.

DOE should be advancing clean energy, supporting energy innovation, and funding the energy technologies of tomorrow, as Congress has authorized it to do. Instead, this Department of Energy has become a fossil fuel industry lackey.

You have got to recognize, in looking at what is going on over there, that Trump's Executive orders, supposedly to unleash American energy, are written in code. It is not a complicated code.

In the code, the word ``energy'' is code for ``fossil fuel.'' Understand that, and the rest becomes obvious.

Look at the behavior. The Department of Energy cut clean energy grants for low-carbon technologies and for reducing emissions. Department of Energy slashed funding for solar energy by 87 percent and wind energy by 78 percent. The Department of Energy created a $625 million bailout fund for expensive, polluting, coal-fired powerplants.

During the current shutdown, Trumpsters are piling on for fossil fuel polluters, so far scrapping $7.56 billion in clean energy grants, all of them--I am sure, by coincidence--in 16 States where Kamala Harris won the Presidential election.

(Mr. HUSTED assumed the Chair.)

All of this will raise costs for people. DOE knows how grids work. They know that suppressing clean energy means that the grid has to call up expensive, polluting fossil fuel plants--plants that might otherwise be idle because they are too expensive to run. They know that this moves billions from utility customers' pockets to the pockets of the fossil fuel industry.

This is not a glitch. This is the goal. Oh, and don't forget that it was DOE that cooked up the junk science report and teed up EPA to ditch its duty to regulate fossil fuel emissions. Thanks to the billion- dollar deal, Trump's corrupted Department of Energy is, by its own coded definition, not the Department of Energy; it is the ``Department of Fossil Fuel.''

Again, good-bye to ``we the people''; hello to ``them the polluters.''

Next is the Department of the Interior, once a steward of America's public lands and waters. The billion-dollar deal turned it into a leasing agent for fossil fuel. Trump's Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, another Cabinet member selected by Big Oil's Harold Hamm, is busy as he tries to crush offshore wind, expanding offshore drilling, opening vast stretches of the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska's Cook Inlet to his oil and gas industry clientele.

Onshore, he is handing out leases across the West. Never mind the effects these projects will have on the climate, on water resources, or on nearby communities. Trump's Interior is even lowering royalty fees and environmental standards to make sure drillers get maximum profit at minimum responsibility. Lowering royalty fees, which are already lower than what most private landowners charge, obviously takes money directly from taxpayers and hands it to oil and gas barons--looting and polluting.

At the same time, Trump is out to assassinate clean, reliable wind energy. In New York, Interior halted work on a fully permitted, under- construction 810-megawatt offshore wind farm on justifications so dubious they are almost entirely redacted out of FOIA'd documents.

Off Rhode Island and Connecticut, someone at Moscow Central told Interior to slap a stop work order on Revolution Wind, when it was nearly finished.

Get this: Government lawyers had to go into court and make arguments exactly opposite to arguments they had made defending the same project, in the same courthouse, just weeks before.

No surprise: The fake stop work order cratered in court, but those corrupt shenanigans cost the project at least $60 million.

Here, it is not just blue States. Out west in Idaho, Interior reversed approval of Lava Ridge, a 1,000-megawatt wind project that suddenly had ``legal deficiencies.''

Why would the Federal Government sabotage clean energy projects on their way to completion? Follow the money. It goes to fossil fuel donors. Every electron from clean energy that gets delayed is an electron that gas and coal barons get to burn fossil fuel to sell.

And since wind and solar energy are actually cheaper, your utility bills go up. It is the direct transfer of cash from American families to fossil fuel companies and their billionaire owners.

Interior has even started to auction off wildlife refuges, treasured places that should be sanctuaries for threatened species. Oil and gas companies are now invited to bid on land set aside for conservation. National parks face budget cuts, lost protections, and industrial projects right at their borders.

Trump's corrupt Interior is no longer about preserving these landscapes for future generations but about what can be extracted from them now by big donors. The public loses cherished lands and protections that took decades to establish, all for a short-term fossil fuel payday.

Interior ignores Tribal consultation, pressing forward with drilling projects on ancestral lands without meaningful dialogue or consent. Tribal governments and Native communities--just obstacles to be brushed aside, rather than sovereign partners with legal rights.

This behavior echoes a long, shameful history of disregard for indigenous voices when fossil fuel profits are at stake.

This is no all-of-the-above energy strategy, as the administration claims. It is a fossil-fuel-first strategy that kneecaps clean power while supercharging oil and gas.

The Interior Department is now basically the auctioneer for oil and gas leases. Public lands are no longer treasures for the people. They are commodities for the polluters.

So, again, good-bye government for ``we the people''; hello government for ``them, the polluters.''

Last, we have the State Department. Under visionary leaders like John Kerry, the State Department once led America's global engagement on climate, helping secure the landmark Paris Agreement and accomplishing impressive and enormous international oceans protections from the climate threat.

Now, with Trump calling the shots and Marco Rubio dutifully implementing his whims, the United States has exited the Paris Agreement and impedes cooperation on climate action. Just last week, using unprecedented tactics, the Trump administration bullied the International Maritime Organization into delaying a carbon-based levy for shipping emissions.

Just so you can put this in context, shipping is responsible for more global carbon pollution than all but five countries and is completely unregulated. Shipping emissions degrade air quality around ports like Los Angeles, meaning millions of people breathe dirty air.

There are clean alternatives to maritime fossil fuels. The technologies are ready, and the shipping industry wanted to make this transition. Plus, there is almost no cost to consumers. There is almost no American ship involved. But the Trump administration wouldn't have it because every ship that runs on green ammonia or some other pollution-free fuel means one fewer ship that runs on bunker oil or LNG, and that means less money into the pockets of Trump's fossil fuel donors. Plus, it was a threat. It was a threat to the free-to-pollute business model that fossil fuel wrongfully depends on.

So we will find out more about this, but with truly unprecedented tactics, the corrupt Trumpsters went full Al Capone--or maybe it should be called ``Oil Capone''--to crush it.

I should add that when I said, ``Last, we have the State Department,'' that wasn't completely accurate because Trump has put the whole of government in the service of his fossil fuel donors, not just the Cabinet Agencies. I will just give one example: the Army Corps of Engineers.

The Army Corps has a long and proud history, with a primary role to build and maintain flood control and safety infrastructure--levees, seawalls, and the like. The Army Corps also has a role in permitting energy projects. Last month, it announced that it would prioritize projects that are ``energy dense''--``energy dense''--in other words, those that generate a large amount of power on a relatively small footprint of land.

``Energy dense'' is a made-up thing. It is a fake concept, reverse- engineered from the result that they want to achieve through it to favor supposedly energy-dense fossil fuel projects over wind and solar farms that are more spread out--except it is fake.

Energy density, if it were real, would count the spread of pollution from fossil fuel plants, like soot particulates that can travel hundreds of miles or greenhouse gases causing global harm. If it were real, it would count the huge supply footprint these fossil fuel plants require to run, the mining and drilling for coal and oil and gas and all the related environmental destruction--the trucks, railroads, and pipelines spewing and leaking that deliver the fuels.

In real life, the wind and sunshine that power renewable powerplants have no footprint at all.

The real-life footprint of fossil plants, it is far larger than renewable plants. Yet in fake, corrupted Trump world, fossil fuel plants will get their permits expedited, while the corrupt Trump administration stalls renewable facilities over made-up energy density.

Seriously, does ``energy density'' sound like a policy based in reason, or is it based on campaign cash?

So that is a quick tour of the fossil fuel industry's deep corruption of the Trump administration, of its oily tentacles sliding slimily into Federal Agencies that should be working for the American people.

But this is also a story about who picks up the bill, who pays when government is corrupted.

Spoiler alert: It is you, the regular, hard-working American public.

It is bad enough that the billion-dollar deal allowed our government to be bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry. Add on that every favor and freebee given to the fossil fuel industry costs the American people.

Let's start with disaster costs. Extreme natural disasters cost Americans between $99 billion and $126 billion in the first half of this year alone. NOAA's database of billion-dollar disasters shows the line going up and up and up--storm after storm, flood after flood, fire after fire.

So the Trump administration wants to end that database, as if silencing the burglar alarm will make the burglary end.

Each disaster means billions in Federal aid, billions in rebuilding costs, billions in uncompensated harm to Americans, billions that taxpayers and homeowners have to pay or suffer because polluters pollute for free.

Increasing disaster costs bring something along with them: increasing homeowners insurance problems--problems both in affordability and availability. Premiums are soaring far faster than the rate of inflation.

In Florida, the average premium is $14,000 per year and climbing; in Louisiana, already $11,000 per year. Insurance companies are leaving or abandoning customers, with nonrenewals to homeowners doubling or worse in many States over the last 6 years.

If Americans can't get homeowners insurance, then their property can't get a mortgage, and that spells trouble for property values in climate-exposed communities across the country. About

6 months ago, Fed Chair Jay Powell testified in the Senate that within 10 to 15 years, there would be whole regions of the United States where mortgages were no longer available. That is not coming from a green group; that is coming from the Fed. And it hits home. Families dropped from coverage are left in uninsurable homes that they might have worked a lifetime to buy whose values plummet when mortgages can't be had.

This is all fine fun and games if you are a Palm Beach billionaire selling your mansion all cash to another billionaire, but in real life, it is devastating for hard-working people--say a tradesperson living near Orlando, trying to sell their family's biggest single investment. They bought that home with a mortgage. They need to sell it to someone who can get a mortgage. If they are going to get their price with no mortgage, the price crashes.

This is a cascade. It starts with fossil fuel emissions, which amp up climate risk, creating an insurance crisis, making properties unmortgageable, crashing homeowners' property values, and cascading into full-on economic rescission.

The warnings of this abound, and if fossil fuel weren't so powerful in this building, they would be listened to. Your premiums go up or your coverage disappears and your home value plummets. And what does the Trump administration have to say about this? Well, they are not listening to you. They are lying to you because they are so deep in the pockets of the polluters who caused it all.

Energy bills. Energy bills are getting out of hand. Several things drive this.

First, we subsidize fossil fuel, locking in fossil dependence, so consumers get roasted whenever the international oil cartel jacks up global commodity prices, which we see them do all the time.

Second, U.S. consumers pay more when the fossil fuel industry decides to export oil and gas for higher prices overseas. There is less domestic supply because it got exported, and when there is less domestic supply, that predictability raises prices.

The Trump administration forcing utilities to run aging and expensive coal and gas plants that were slated for retirement will likely add $3 billion per year to your electricity bills--$3 billion. But your added cost is fossil fuel's added revenue. You are the one getting cheated.

The biggest hit will come from Trump sabotaging clean energy technologies--technologies that already produce electricity at lower cost. Here is how it works: When less expensive clean energy can't get on the grid, expensive, polluting fossil fuel plants that would otherwise be idle as too expensive to run get called up instead. Those more expensive plants then set the price for the grid, and your costs go up.

The trick is that the fossil interests that own and fuel those cost- setting plants get an enormous payday. With clean energy on the grid, their revenue can drop to zero because that plant is too expensive to run. But you back out the cheaper clean energy or you don't let new clean energy on the grid, and suddenly, that plant roars back to polluting life, and the money flows to the plant owner, and the money flows to the fossil fuel dealers that bring the fuel to the plant.

It is a direct transfer from ratepayers' pockets to fossil fuel barons, and they are hoping you won't figure that out, that you will blame it on the electric utility and not notice how the grid is being gamed by fossil fuel. Working families and small businesses are getting stuck paying the bill for a system that has been rigged by the Trump administration for Big Oil's benefit.

Climate brings health dangers, and those health dangers are real. Fossil fuel production and combustion release toxins--benzene, hydrogen sulfide, particulate matter, to name just a few--and they have an effect. Children near fossil fuel-fired powerplants and oil and gas wells suffer higher rates of asthma. Nearby communities experience higher rates of cancer, heart disease, and neurological damage. Air pollution just from fossil fuel production and combustion costs the average American about $2,500 in extra healthcare expenses.

Even if you don't suffer from heart or respiratory disease, you still pay more, as health insurance companies spread around their customer base those added costs. Nationwide, that added cost is around $820 billion annually.

That is the cost of fossil fuel. It is a cost of fossil fuel that fossil fuel doesn't pay even though economics says externalities like this should be in the price of the product. But that is the pollute- for-free business model. The industry externalizes their pollution costs, even in the hundreds of billions of dollars, onto families, onto hospitals, onto taxpayers, onto you. You pay for the mess they won't clean up.

Of course, given the control of this building, fossil fuel companies benefit from enormous tax breaks and loopholes. This lost tax money means lost school funding, lost infrastructure funding, lost healthcare dollars. Real people lose real benefits.

Just for one example, the corporate welfare polluters get just from direct fossil fuel subsidies could provide 3 million families with SNAP benefits, food for their kids and families. The billion-dollar deal at Mar-a-Lago takes tax money straight from regular American taxpayers and hands it to billionaire oil barons.

Last, let's consider lost opportunity. Because of fossil fuel corruption here at home, the industries of the future are now developing more overseas, abroad. The jobs of the future are being created abroad. The technologies of the future are being developed abroad.

Here in the United States, fossil fuel is diligently out to destroy these opportunities, and the jobs and the future that comes with them, to protect its dying business model that cheats in the market while making our air smoggier and our water dirtier--polluting for free.

China races ahead in renewable energy, electric vehicles, and clean technology as America is dragged further and further behind by fossil fuel political interference.

That dirty deal day at Mar-a-Lago was a turning point. Donald Trump put our government up for sale, and the looters and polluters wrote the checks. And now every Agency, every policy, every decision reflects their ownership. EPA is their protector. DOJ is their law firm. The Department of Energy is their henchman. Interior is their leasing agent. The State Department is their industry diplomat, their ``Oil Capone.''

The repeal of clean energy programs Trump got in his ``Beautiful for Billionaires Bill'' is expected to cost the U.S. economy $1.1 trillion by 2035--in a decade, $1.1 trillion lost to the U.S. economy. That is a loss to all of us.

Meanwhile, fossil fuel CEOs rake in as much as $40 million a year. Their companies make $30 billion a year, and the industry sponges up government subsidies of over $700 billion a year. That $700 billion is the bill the American people foot every year in more disasters, higher insurance premiums, higher electricity and fuel costs, worse family health, lost good jobs, and a dwindling economic future.

With less clean energy, there will be more emissions, and with more emissions, there will be more disasters, pushing us toward the great climate insurance collapse.

Everywhere are warnings from insurers, from economists, from bankers, from regulators, from ``The Big Short'' guy who predicted the great recession, from The Economist magazine, even from climate-shy Fed Chair Jay Powell. Warnings abound. Warnings are everywhere of climate economic disaster ahead.

Is it too late to wake up?

I hope not. Though, for sure, our pathway to climate safety is narrowing. If we are going to solve the climate danger, we are going to have to take on the democracy danger. We do not have to accept the United States of America turning into a petrostate. We can still act. We can pass the DISCLOSE Act to expose the dark money that enables fossil fuel corruption.

We can call out and spotlight the climate denial fraud operation that has for so long deceived the American people. We can and must end the fossil fuel industry's corrupt, pollute-for-free business model--a model that violates the laws of economics as well as morality and decency. Why should polluter costs fall on taxpayers? It is simple; they shouldn't.

Democracy also should not be for sale--not to fossil fuel billionaires, not to Exxon, not to Chevron, not to Koch Industries, not to the American Petroleum Institute, not to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, nor to the National Association of Manufacturers, for damn sure not to DonorsTrust or to Leonard Leo.

For a whole lot of reasons, with our climate safety right up at the top of the list, we have got to end the corruption. We have got to spotlight the dark money front groups and the armada of special interest organizations spreading fraud.

Democracy needs to belong to the people--not to the highest bidder. When people understand what was done to them by fraud and corruption and dark money, there will be a mighty reckoning, and it cannot come too soon.

So I conclude, once again, as I have in 301 of these speeches, now for the 302nd time: Time to wake up.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to honor the life of my friend Peter Simone, a longtime North Providence Councilman. One of the best things about politics is the people you get to meet, and one of the best people I got to meet was my friend Peter Simone. Peter passed away this week and is survived by his dear wife Irene, his two daughters Helene and Annmarie, his beloved grandson Matthew, and many wonderful friends.

Peter was born in Providence and was a proud graduate of LaSalle Academy, where he met Irene at a LaSalle dance. He moved to North Providence and took a job at the Monet Jewelry factory, where he worked as an industrial engineer until his retirement. In 1976, Peter threw his hat into the ring in politics and won a seat on the North Providence Democratic Town Committee, before running successfully for the North Providence Town Council in 1982. He served as a councilman from District 1 for 22 years, distinguishing himself as a tireless advocate for his community. In a town known for lively rough-and-tumble politics, Peter was a true gentleman who served in public office for all the right reasons.

Peter stepped back from the council in 2004 to spend more time with his beloved family before taking on a new role overseeing the student page program for the Rhode Island Senate, where he mentored the next generation of Rhode Island's leaders, including his grandson Matthew.

Peter was one of the very first people who supported my political career, taking me in when I was just finding my way. You always remember the people willing to take a risk and lend you their credibility, early on, when the outcome is not a sure bet, and I will always remember him. Peter Simone was a sweet and fine man, a political veteran of the old school, and a foxhole friend, and I will miss him dearly.

Mr. President, I just want to supplement the distinguished chairman's remarks with one observation for the benefit of all of my colleagues, and that is that, not long ago, when circuit court nominees were brought forward, they had cleared the Senate blue- slip process because each circuit court seat was associated with a State, except for DC. But, normally, a DC Circuit Court seat was associated with a State, and the Senators from that State had the ability to recommend a nominee to the President.

The Republicans on the Judiciary Committee undid that--what we call the blue-slip rule--for circuit courts. So Senators lost that power.

When we were in the majority, when President Biden was there, there were strident objections when we applied the same standard to circuit court nominees that the Republicans had applied when they broke the blue slip.

With this nomination, we are taking it the next step further. Now, not only are the Senators from the home State not consulted, but in this case, the candidate has almost no relationship with Delaware, the State with which this seat is associated.

She has a summer house there. She has never had a driver's license. She has never had a fishing license. She has never been an income taxpayer. She has never been registered to vote. She has never been a member of the bar. She only recently joined the Third Circuit bar.

She is being airdropped into this seat.

So just be aware that, in the future, when the shoe is on the other foot and people here would like to make sure that their home State is honored and recognized as being the State with which a circuit court seat is associated, that may very well not happen any longer. And we will look back to this minute as the minute that destroyed that tradition.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am here on the floor today to talk about President Trump's completely fake energy emergency, which is nothing more than a pretext to move money from the pockets of Americans to his big fossil fuel mega donors.

You may remember that he had a meeting with big fossil fuel donors and asked for a billion dollars in campaign money in return for giving them whatever they want. Well, I don't know that he got a billion, but he got hundreds of millions, and, sure enough, he is giving them everything they want.

But the side effect of the fossil fuel industry having ownership and control over the Trump administration and all of its policies and decisions is that people's electricity rates are going to go up. They are already going up, and they are going to go up more.

This graph shows how voters are feeling about electricity prices, and it says most voters are feeling some pain from electricity prices.

This is already. It is going to get worse. Already, 26 percent of Americans say it has a lot of impact on their lives; 31 percent say a decent amount of impact on their lives; another 30, a little bit. Only 9 percent say: None at all. It is cool. Electric prices are good with me.

So that is a pretty big hit.

Even among Republicans, 25 percent say it hits them a lot, 29 percent say it hits them a decent amount, and 32 percent say it hits them a little bit. Only 11 percent say: None at all. Electric prices are cool.

So electric prices are going up, and they are going up big time, and they are going up for deliberate reasons.

The one deliberate reason has to do with the AI, crypto, tech bros data centers problem.

As you know, the data center crypto people gave a lot of money to Donald Trump. They are big political donors. They are getting pretty much everything they want from this administration. In return, they are making the Trump family hugely rich in crypto billions. But in the meantime, they are driving people's electric prices up.

They are doing so this way. This is an interesting graph. This shows places where electric bills are going down. Blue means the prices are going down. And what is measured here is how far away you are from a data center.

So here is 0 to about 25 miles away from a data center. So if you live between 0 and 25 miles from a data center, if you are in the range of the electric utility that has to serve that data center when it drops in with its huge electric load, with its huge water demand, with all the traffic and pollution and everything else that it means, you see very, very little in the way of cost decreases.

In fact, if you compare it to places that are farther and farther away--this is about 225 miles away from a data center--you can see that the electric prices going down happens much more the farther away you are from a data center.

This shows the opposite. This shows the places where electric prices are soaring--the price increases. And it is the same deal. This is how far away you are from a data center. If you are from 0 to 25 miles away, compare that to this. The comparison between your electricity price increases, if you are near a data center, versus your electricity price decreases, if you are near a data center, couldn't be more clear.

This is me, with a gold marker, marking off the difference. That is not in the original graph, but it focuses your attention on how, when you are near a data center, you are less likely to have low electric prices. You can see how low it is compared to the further away you get.

But if you are near a data center--the nearer you are to a data center, the higher your electric prices go. And if you are really near one, if you are in this block here, within 25 miles, your electric prices are skyrocketing, and that is not a mistake. That is being done on purpose because the Trump administration won't make these big donors who are in crypto world and data center world bring their own clean energy or provide their own clean water, for that matter, to the grid.

So what they do is they arrive, they dump a huge amount of demand into the existing grid, and that means that new and more expensive units have to come online. As those new and more expensive units have to come online, the price goes up and up and up because in almost every grid, it is the most expensive unit running at any minute that sets the price for the entire grid in that minute.

So if you can drive up demand, you drive up these huge, inefficient, polluting, expensive, powerplants and the price goes through the roof. That is precisely why you are seeing this huge increase in costs when you are near a data center, and it is almost impossible to find a decrease in costs if you are near a data center.

So problem 1, energy emergency 1, caused by the Trump administration to pay off its big crypto donors is this: It is the data center bomb falling on regular electric utility ratepayers who suddenly watch their bills skyrocket.

Here is the other bomb. This is the plot in the Trump administration for the sake of their big fossil fuel donors to try to hamper and hinder and injure clean energy. They have the big lie, which is to say clean energy is more expensive; it is clean energy that is driving costs on the grid.

Oh my gosh, expensive clean energy--wrong. That just isn't true. That is a complete fabrication.

This graph shows the Texas grid. This is an illustration of how that plays out. Texas has a unique grid. It is unique to Texas. It doesn't interact with the other grids the way most of the grids do. They have interconnections, and they can interact with each other. Texas is isolated. That is why that big freeze in Texas shut down all the power and caused people to freeze. That took place because that grid was unified, and they couldn't call in power from elsewhere.

This graph does two things. It takes a look at 1 month, August back in 2018, and it looks at what power costs at different levels of demand on the grid. So in 2018, if you had 40 units of gigawatts of demand, then you were paying about 20 cents per megawatt hour. It stayed about the same until demand got bigger. If you get up to 50 megawatts, 60 megawatts, then it starts to spike here, and it hits $75 per megawatt hour once it approaches 70 gigawatts of load.

So what is important here is the comparison. In 2018, these were the prices in August for that increment of load during August. This, the yellow graph, is 2024, 6 years later. What happened to the Texas grid between 2018 and 2024? What happened to the Texas grid between 2018 and 2024 is that huge amounts of clean energy came onto the grid. In fact, last year, 95 percent of the new power coming on the U.S. grid was clean energy. It was solar, it was wind, and it was battery--95 percent.

Between 2018 and 2024, you see this move in the Texas grid. And look at what happens. Pick, let's say, 60 megawatts of load at a given moment in August of 2024. You paid 20 bucks per megawatt hour for the exact same circumstance. Six years earlier, you would have paid 35, maybe 40 bucks--20 bucks, twice as much, basically.

The reason the cost went down from 2018 to 2024 was new, inexpensive, clean energy coming on the grid.

Why is it inexpensive? It is inexpensive because wind is free. It is inexpensive because solar is free. Once you

have built the infrastructure to capture the solar rays, once you have built the infrastructure to capture the wind flowing by, God made those resources free.

For a fossil fuel plant, you still have to build it, but once you have built it, you have to bring in the fossil fuel, pipe in the fossil fuel, burn the fossil fuel. It is expensive. And so almost always, the unit that is setting the price on the grid for electricity is a fossil fuel unit because they are the most expensive ones. So they set the price for the whole grid.

You can see the difference. Let's go to--let's call this 68 megawatts of load, just comparing these two points. Back in 2018, that would have been a $75 per-megawatt-hour cost--75 bucks, and yet here, it is $25. It is a third the cost on the Texas grid because all that clean energy came on. And you have to get way out here before the price spikes when those polluting, expensive, fossil fuel plants have to come on at 80- plus megawatts of load to even begin to match the prices from 6 years earlier.

Clean wind and solar power save consumers money. So when the Trump administration says it is going to inhibit, hinder, injure clean energy development, that is backing this back out of the grid. Now it starts to look more like 2018. If you are buying electricity at this level of grid load, you are paying three times as much--three times as much.

And this is deliberate. You don't think the Trump people don't understand this? They know perfectly well.

And here is the deal. The extra two-thirds of your cost here that comes out of your pocket if you are in Texas is because the clean energy isn't there lowering the cost. That comes out of your pocket.

Where does it go? Where does it go? I will tell you where it goes. It goes to the fossil fuel units that had to get called up to meet that amount of load. The most expensive units on the grid have to be called up to meet that load, and they drive the price up.

If you are a fossil fuel billionaire and you own a bunch of polluting powerplants, sometimes, particularly with clean energy around, they are sitting idle. They are not being called up. They are too expensive to be called up because clean energy is in there beating them. So if you own those plants, you want to go and talk to the Trump administration and say: Hey, knock that clean energy out of the grid. I want my polluting, expensive plant to run again because that is money in my pocket.

And if you are selling that plant to fossil fuel, you go to the Trump administration and you say: Hey, clobber those clean energy guys. I gave you good money. Clobber those clean energy guys and now I get to sell all that fossil fuel to burn to run those expensive plants.

So the people that make a bundle out of knocking down clean energy are the fossil fuel people who cut that deal for hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump's campaign in return for him clobbering their rivals by making it difficult to develop clean energy projects. And what they don't want you to know is that this is on purpose and this is for fossil fuel.

They don't want you to know how this works. They don't want you to know about how the most expensive units get called up as demand grows-- that when you take out the clean energy, even more expensive units get called up; that those are the polluting fossil fuel units that tend to set the price.

It is a massive transfer of money from the pockets of ratepayers, whose electric utility rates go up, to the fossil fuel industry in return for all the political money they gave Donald Trump. That is the deal. It is a huge transfer of wealth from ratepayers to big fossil fuel donors.

What they are hoping is that you won't know this. They are hoping you will blame it on the electric utility that sends you the bill. They are hoping that you won't notice that behind that soaring electric utility bill is manipulation of the grid to knock out clean energy, to drive up prices.

And if that is not bad enough, what you then find out is that the climate consequences of all that fossil fuel pollution start coming home to roost, as well.

We did some work on this in the Budget Committee. I will use three quick slides.

These are places where nonrenewal rates for homeowners insurance are increasing. What is the nonrenewal rate, you may ask, for homeowners insurance? That is how often the insurance company says to you, their longtime customers: Hey, thanks for being my longtime customer, but you are fired now. I don't want your property. I can't insure it. There is too much climate risk.

If you looked at where it is really spiking, where did you get? Florida--Florida, because they have huge risks from flooding, sea level rise, hurricanes, and storms. Their whole insurance market is melting down. Where else? Out West, where wildfires are making properties uninsurable.

I tell you what, if you know somebody in Florida, ask them about their home insurance. Just do that for me. If you know somebody who lives in Florida, ask them about their home insurance. You will hear an earful from them.

It is not just getting shot down; it is also that insurance rates are going up. Again, look where--along these coastal areas, along these wildfire-prone areas.

What the Trump administration is doing to reward its big fossil fuel megadonors isn't just to transfer money from your pockets to the big donors through electric utility rates. It is not just to transfer money from your pockets to their big crypto donors by letting them irresponsibly dump their demand on the grid. They are also breaking down the home insurance market so that not only are the insurers saying to people, ``I can't insurance you any longer; your climate risk is too great,'' but they are also saying, ``Wow, if I am going to insure you, we have to really raise our rates.''

These are premium increases--100 percent, 200 percent, 300 percent-- that you can find in these areas. In Florida, the average homeowners insurance is $14,000. If you go to Miami-Dade, it is $21,000 for homeowners insurance. If you go to Louisiana here, it is $11,000.

You have got people who try to buy a home in these places. They get the deal together, and they get the mortgage together. They show the Realtor that they can make the nut on the mortgage. Then they try to get insurance to close the deal, and they can't get insurance, and the deal falls apart. There are young families who can't buy homes because of the skyrocketing prices or because the insurers won't insure them because it is too dangerous. And guess what that does. Where does that land? That lands in home values declining.

This is not just me saying this. The chief economist for Freddie Mac--the huge mortgage company--predicts that climate risk makes homeowners insurance unavailable.

When you can't get homeowners insurance, what can you also not get on your property? You can't get a mortgage. If you are a Palm Beach billionaire who is swapping mansions with other billionaires, great, you can pay cash. But for regular families who have bought their homes with a mortgage, when they need to sell them, they need to find somebody who can buy them with a mortgage 9 times out of 10, maybe 99 times out of 100. So when you can't get a mortgage, what happens to that piece of property? When the property is uninsurable and unmortgageable, its value goes down.

That is why the chief economist for Freddie Mac, the mortgage company, predicted the cascade from climate risk to uninsurability, to no mortgages, to what he called a coastal property values crash that could lead to a recession like in 2008.

I remember 2008. It was ugly. I do not want to go there again.

But here you see places in which home values are predicted to change--along the coast here, where there is all the coastal risk; and here, where there is big wildfire risk. And guess what. If you look at the graph, it goes from no change--that is the tan; that is most of it--all the way to--how about that one? You can't read it; so I will tell you what it says: minus 100 percent--a total wipeout of your home's value because it is uninsurable and unmortgageable.

That is the future we are looking at. This is the energy emergency. This is the real energy emergency, and it is an energy emergency that is caused by

fossil fuel pollution. The immediate circumstance also comes through the electric utility bills, as you put less and less clean energy into the grid and make more and more expensive fossil fuels, set the price, and at the same time, you are selling out to the crypto guys. You let them come in and irresponsibly dump their demand on your grid, and supply and demand show that prices spike.

So if you want to know what the real emergency is, the real emergency is that the Trump administration has sold out to the crypto industry; it has sold out to the fossil fuel industry. It denies climate change; it pretends it is a hoax. Literally, the President has said that in, like, words. And that climate change problem is destroying home insurance markets, mortgage markets, and property values. And it has already begun.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, well, we are headed into a miserable situation. It is a miserable situation for all of the Federal employees around the globe who are going to be put into shutdown mode. It is a miserable situation for our country, as the rest of the world looks at us as the gang that can't get its act together and pass simple funding bills for the government.

It is an extraordinarily frustrating moment to be here now. There are very few people for whom this is not a miserable prospect, but there are a few of them, and one of them is OMB Director Russell Vought, who is a strange character who has spent his life in the care and feeding of the fossil fuel industry and big polluters and who takes a perverse joy from destroying American government from the inside.

So there will be misery ahead for most normal people, not counting the weird ones who like inflicting pain and doing damage for the benefit of a bunch of creepy, rightwing billionaires who have propped them up their whole lives.

The reason we are here is really two-fold. One, as they have shown during the Trump regime, Republicans really don't want to govern; they want to rule. They don't want to talk to Democrats even where they need our votes.

Here, they need our votes. Yet what have we been offered to get those votes? Nothing--not even discussions. The President only met with the Democratic leaders just yesterday, and he didn't seem to be aware of what was at stake here for the Americans who are about to lose a huge healthcare benefit.

They just go wildly forward. We have seen it over and over again here on the Senate floor. How many times in just the few months that we have been here in this administration have Republicans done the thing that they were furious we even talked about doing to overrule the Parliamentarian and change the rules to make things easier for themselves rather than negotiate with us? My count is four already-- four--and we are only 9 months in.

They don't want to govern. They don't want to talk to us. They want to rule. They want to dictate to us.

At the same time, the other reason we are here is that there is this strange Republican fixation with taking healthcare away from people. I do not understand it. There are lots of Republican constituents who really depend on Medicaid, who really feel great that they are on Medicare, who really have their family budgets made possible by the credits from the Affordable Care Act. It is not like Democrats get the benefit of this; everybody gets the benefit of this. Yet what have we been put through just in these months? A trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid. A trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid. Already, hospitals and nursing homes and doctors' practices are reeling at what those cuts mean for their financial viability.

Medicare--Medicare--half a trillion dollars in cuts hidden in the bill in a tricky way so that the cuts come through sequestration and nobody has to own them. They can do a Pontius Pilate hand-wash of the cuts.

Well, no. We saw what you did. You own it. It is a half-trillion- dollar cut to Medicare. And why you want to do that, I cannot imagine, but that is what you did.

Now we have these cuts to people receiving help paying for their healthcare under the Affordable Care Act. It is going to be about 40,000 Rhode Islanders. These aren't people who have loads of money. Their premiums are going to, on average, double or better. I mentioned a retired mental health counselor yesterday. She is going to have $477 in added expenses every single month because of this. And it all starts now. It all starts happening now.

So when we are told, why are we forcing the issue now? it is because now is when the issue is upon us. When we are told, why don't we negotiate later? my question is: Why aren't we negotiating now? Why would we believe when we are told that you will negotiate later on this when you won't negotiate now on this? Now when you need our votes, you won't negotiate on something. You say you will negotiate later. Why does that make any sense? Why is that even remotely credible?

The harm starts now; the negotiations should start now. Frankly, what Democrats are asking for is something you ought to be doing anyway just to help your own constituents. This shouldn't be hard at all. We should not be here having this conversation. This should have been resolved already--except that the Republican majority wants to rule, not govern, and they have this strange fixation with taking away healthcare even from their own constituents.

Over and over again, we have seen it. We have seen it with the repeated overruling of the Parliamentarian. We have seen it with the ``Beautiful for Billionaires Bill'' that got rammed through with a simple majority. We have seen it with the change in the rules to allow 100 nominees to go through at a time under advice and consent. We have seen it with clean air standards that help everyone being repealed. Over and over and over again, the Republicans take the path that allows them to rule, not to govern; that allows them to ignore the minority party even when they need our votes, even when what we are asking for is in their constituents' interests, even when what we are asking for is something that their constituents want. Even then, we are up against this blockade.

So I hope Republicans come to their senses. I hope the President realizes what he is doing and that we can put an end to this shutdown as quickly as possible. But let me make this absolutely clear: This is a shutdown that lands entirely at the feet of the Republican Party that controls the Senate, that controls the House, that controls the Presidency, that won't negotiate with Democrats even when it needs our votes, and that has an unhealthy fixation with taking away healthcare from their fellow Americans.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, one of the things I have had the most trouble understanding in the time that I have been in the Senate has been Republicans' bizarre fascination with attacking healthcare systems, with taking healthcare coverage away from Americans. It came to a boil in the ``Beautiful for Billionaires'' bill--which cut about a trillion dollars out of Medicaid--and, in a hidden fashion through sequester, cut about half a trillion dollars out of Medicare and then attacks the Affordable Care Act, which so many Americans rely on to be able to afford their health insurance.

I represent Rhode Island. Rhode Island is probably going to lose up to $5 billion in Federal Medicaid funding. The Medicare cuts would be probably about half of that. And the Affordable Care Act is going to hit about 40,000 Rhode Islanders who will see their insurance premiums explode. And that is going to happen soon.

This is a healthcare crisis that Republicans have created, and we would like to try to protect the American public in all of this. These are not going to be small increases in people's bills. We are talking about an 85-percent increase in already expensive health insurance premiums, as much as $1,200 a year for a middle-class family.

Let me give you just an example of what this looks like in real life. I have a constituent named Carla. Carla is 60 years old. She is retired. She was a mental health counselor, which is noble work but doesn't make you rich. She gets $60,000 in annual income, mostly from her 401(k). She doesn't yet qualify for Medicare, so she got insurance from the Rhode Island State health insurance marketplace.

She has a family history of heart disease. She has hypertension. When the tax credits under the Affordable Care Act expire at the end of the year, Carla's monthly premium will go from $427 a month to $904 a month. That is more than double. That is a $477 per month increase to the expenses of a woman whose total income is only $60,000 a year.

We ought to be able to solve this. All we are asking for is serious negotiations to address the Republican healthcare crisis or, I guess, if they refuse, the Republican government shutdown. It is very much up to Republicans where we go from here. All the reports are that the meeting between the President and congressional leaders went badly; no progress was made at all.

It is really up to the Republicans. Will they really choose to shut down the U.S. Government just to indulge their bizarre fascination with taking healthcare away from Americans? Aren't we better than that?

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, in the Republican ``Beautiful For Billionaires'' bill that Senator Sanders was just referring to, there were a great many dirty tricks tucked in there to hurt people and make billionaires wealthier and happier and more free to pollute.

Of all the dirty tricks in that bill, perhaps the trickiest was the one that was so hidden that it wasn't even mentioned in the bill, and that is, about a half-trillion dollars in cuts to Medicare.

We have heard a lot about the trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid. But without ever mentioning it, the Republican ``Beautiful For Billionaires'' bill will cut Medicare by half a trillion dollars, give or take.

How does it do that? It does that by adding $4.1 trillion to the deficit--one bill, one act of Congress, $4.1 trillion piled on our national debt.

There is another law that exists on the statute books of the United States of America, the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act. What does that do? It requires a look at bills that create enormous additions to our national debt. And to protect our fisc, it requires mandatory cuts to other accounts.

That is supposed to discourage running up the debt by trillions in the first place, and it is supposed to remedy that defect with automatic cuts.

Guess what is lined up for automatic cuts under the Statutory Pay-As- You-Go Act? Yep, Medicare. The same Medicare that we saw that huge demonstration from Republicans about during President Biden's State of the Union speech when he said Republicans want to cut Medicare, and they rose in ire and anger to say: No, that is not possibly true. And he said: Oh, I think we have unanimity here. I think we have agreement: no cuts to Medicare.

Well, that didn't last long. The cuts to Medicare just had to be well hidden, and that is what this bill does.

We have asked the Congressional Budget Office what it means. How big will the cuts be? When will they take place?

Well, here is the outcome: Given the magnitude of this massive increase, it will create a $45 billion cut to Medicare in 2026--next year. Next year, $45 billion cut to Medicare.

Unfortunately, it is not a one-time thing. It is going to keep going. In the following year, it goes up and up. By 2034, the end of the 10- year budget window that we work in, the annual cut to Medicare will be $76 billion.

If you stack up all those cuts year after year to Medicare, starting in 2026 and going through 2034, the total cut to Medicare from the ``Beautiful For Billionaires'' bill is $491 billion. That is where I get half a trillion from. I am rounding the $491 billion number CBO gave us for the total hit to Medicare done by Republicans in their ``Beautiful For Billionaires'' bill.

To head this off, we are going to have to pass legislation that exempts Medicare from those coming PAYGO cuts that are going to happen automatically by operation of law unless we take that step.

Now, Republicans could have, at the time, put a simple provision in their ``Beautiful For Billionaires'' bill saying: For purposes of this bill, Medicare is exempted from the PAYGO Program.

It could have protected, with very simple language, against a looming half-trillion-dollar cut to Medicare. They chose not to. They chose not to.

The question is, Was that an oversight or is this a trick to try to tee up cuts to Medicare that they don't have to own? Well, here is a clue as to whether that was a trick or an oversight: On the other side of this building, over at the House of Representatives, the Republican- controlled House is sending over a continuing resolution to fund the government. They could have put this correction in that bill. They could have added a simple line saying that when it comes to Medicare and the huge addition to the debt from our ``Beautiful for Billionaire's'' bill, pay-go sequestration will be lifted. Again, they chose not to do that.

The American public might not be familiar with sequestration and automatic cuts and how all that works, but I will tell you what--people around here are. Lots of people around here know very well that when you dump $4 trillion-plus onto the national debt, it is going to cascade into cuts to these other accounts, and those other accounts include Medicare.

So to plead innocence about this not being the intention all along is completely unsupportable. To say that it was just an innocent oversight in the ``Beautiful for Billionaire's'' bill is unsupportable. And now, with the continuing resolution coming over from the House, we have more proof that this is a deliberate cut targeted at Medicare done exclusively by House and Senate Republicans.

I want to focus on protecting Medicare. I have a Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act that would require people with incomes over $400,000 to pony up equivalent to what regular workers pay on the higher part of their salary. That would protect benefits and Medicare as far as the eye can see--as far as the actuarial eye can see--for Medicare and Social Security.

I want to put everybody here on record that we need to undo the looming half-trillion-dollar cut to Social Security before it starts to hit families in Rhode Island and elsewhere around the country.

To that end, as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of my resolution, S. Res. 404, submitted earlier today; that the resolution be agreed to; that its preamble be agreed to; and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, there we are.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I am here, I guess, to offer a eulogy for the supposed Republican principle that government should not be used to pick winners and losers. It turns out that principle is soluble in money.

Months before the 2024 election, President Trump offered big oil and coal cronies a super deal: They give him $1 billion to take the White House, of which he got at least several hundred million, and he would pay them back bigly; he would use government to make them winners and clean energy losers. So he has bent over backwards to make Big Oil, big polluters happy.

His efforts to prop up his coal industry donors have been particularly flagrant. Coal as an energy source is a dirty and dying industry. Coal is expensive to mine, coal-fired powerplants are expensive to operate, and coal-powered electricity is expensive to buy. So besides being toxic to mine and burn, coal is a bad financial play-- at least in the real, open market that Republicans claim to want to honor.

So to pick his winners and punish his losers, Trump issued a series of Executive orders directing State and Federal actors to revive the zombie coal industry.

At the beginning of this year, several Indiana utilities had announced plans to retire polluting coal plants and shift to cleaner energy sources. Following Trump's Executive orders and who knows what other private conversations, several of these utilities canceled plans to retire the polluting coal units.

This is a pretty big deal well outside of Indiana because coal plants like these emit hundreds of thousands of tons of pollution each year, including the pollution which forms smog. Exposure to smog is serious. It causes lung disease, it causes cardiovascular problems, and it even causes reproductive issues. It has been documented to cause premature deaths. And it blows into other States. Prevailing winds take the pollution and blow it into other States. In fact, I have argued that there are smokestacks designed specifically to get the pollution out of the home State and land it on the downwind States, like Rhode Island.

Under the cross-State air pollution rule, EPA sets emissions ``budgets'' to protect people in the downwind States from dangerous, smog-forming pollution that comes out of another State and blows across the border from the upwind, coal-fired powerplants. Well, after these Indiana coal plants got their inducement to extend, EPA had to loosen its previously-set emissions budget for Indiana that protected the downwind States in order to allow more smog to spread, because that is what reopening these plants does--it allows more smog to spread.

EPA promulgated this deregulatory rulemaking without a notice and comment process, giving no opportunity to anyone downwind--vulnerable to smog pollution from Indiana--to communicate into the EPA process their concerns.

Well, back in 1996, Congress enacted the Congressional Review Act to give Congress the opportunity to vote on regulations like this. During the Biden administration, the Senate actually conducted 35 rollcall votes in relation to Republican-sponsored Congressional Review Act resolutions of disapproval.

Now the Trump administration is engaged in an effort, at breakneck speed, to pick winners and punish losers, and if doing so requires them to tear down protections of Americans' health, of our safety, of the environment, that is all fine with them.

Congressional Review Act resolutions like this one can help hold the administration to account. I strongly urge a vote upholding our response against this polluting regulation.

I move to proceed to Calendar No. 142, S.J. Res. 60.

If the Senator wishes to speak, I am willing to withdraw my motion to proceed, which actually is not debatable and would cut him off. But I would like to know how much time the Senator would like, and then I would like unanimous consent that we then proceed to the conclusion of Calendar No. 142--and Senator Capito as well.

The distinguished chairman of Environment and Public Works would like some time as well?

Madam President, I move again to proceed to Calendar No. 142, S.J. Res. 60.

I ask for the yeas and nays.