Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 218, submitted earlier today.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 10 a.m., Tuesday, May 18; that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; further that upon the conclusion of morning business, the Senate resume consideration of the motion to proceed to Calendar No. 58, S. 1260, postcloture; further that all time during recess, adjournment, and morning business count postcloture on the motion to proceed; and finally that the Senate recess from 12:30 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. to allow for the weekly caucus meetings.

Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand adjourned under the previous order.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I am here to speak on the upcoming methane Congressional Review Act matter and speak in support of overturning the Trump misrule regarding the problem of methane emissions.

Let's just start by setting the stage that about one-quarter of the global warming that we have experienced has been due to methane and about one-third of that is due to the activities of the oil and gas industry. So this is a very significant part of our climate problem--I should say our climate and oceans problem--and we don't actually know how bad it is.

The Environmental Defense Fund has recently estimated that methane emissions from oil and natural gas operations could be as much as 60 percent higher than previous estimates. So it is a significant part of the problem.

One of the reasons we don't know how bad the problem is, is because of the way the oil and gas industry has behaved about reporting its methane problem. Now, just to understand, what the natural gas industry would like to tell you is that natural gas is a far cleaner fuel, far safer from a climate perspective, than coal or than oil--bunker oil or whatever else you want to burn. And it is true that once natural gas has been burned at the burner tip, it is less harmful. But what the natural gas industry wants you to forget is everything between the well and the burner tip because through that enormous web of piping occurs so much leakage that satellites flying overhead can pick up the pools of methane floating in our atmosphere from the leakage. The natural gas industry doesn't want to talk about that.

One of the things that they did is they got the Trump administration to, early on, withdraw EPA's request that in the previous administration the industries more or less agreed to that would have required oil and gas companies to report on their methane emissions. When the fossil fuel apparatchiks occupied in the Trump

administration the offices at EPA, Energy, and Interior, and other places important to the industry, they did what the industry wanted, and the very first thing, March 2, 2017, was to withdraw the request that would have had oil and gas companies report how bad their methane leakage actually was.

It didn't take long to follow that up on March 28, with an Executive order from Trump directing EPA to suspend or rescind existing methane regulations for the oil and gas industry.

But that wasn't enough for the oil and gas industry. On April 19, they got EPA to postpone implementation of a rule that would have required them to equip new wells with equipment to prevent methane leaks. You wouldn't think that would be asking too much, particularly from an industry that wants to tell everybody that it is better for the climate and the environment than the rest of the fossil fuel industry. But no, they asked EPA to undo that requirement so they could more readily leak methane from new wells.

Even that wasn't enough. In May of 2017, they got the Department of the Interior to suspend a rule that would have required oil and gas companies to curb the flaring of methane from their oil and gas wells on public lands.

And then again, September 11, 2018, they got EPA to propose a rule to weaken the methane leak detection and repair requirements for their new wells--weaken the detection and repair requirements for methane leakage from their own wells.

Then they proposed a second rule to eliminate EPA's regulatory authority over methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. That is getting a little bit out there because methane is a greenhouse gas regulable as a pollutant by the EPA, and it also has a whole lot of unfortunate characteristics for people who have to breathe it in entirely apart from the climate harm and damage it does. But that is what the oil and gas industry wanted the EPA to do, to eliminate its regulatory authority over methane emissions.

Then, more recently, on August 13, 2020, they got EPA to promulgate a rule to eliminate that rule--to eliminate that regulatory authority over methane emissions from oil and gas facilities.

This is dirty conduct by an industry, to take advantage of its ability to plant industry operatives in positions of public responsibility in order to leak more methane, put less equipment in place to protect against methane leakage, and reduce its requirements even to report on the methane leakage that is going on. That is not responsible corporate conduct. These rules are a disgrace. The CRA should pass, and we should get on to taking on this problem of methane.

I will close by pointing out that I have a bill that would do quite a lot to solve this problem. One of the problems in this whole enterprise of pollution is that, when it is free to pollute, people will pollute. If corporations view themselves as having only an obligation to their shareholders and only an obligation to their shareholders that is denominated in dollars, why would they ever spend any money at all to protect against pollution, unless they were required to or unless it had a cost?

We know it actually has a cost. People suffer from pollution; that is a cost. Our oceans are acidifying because of carbon dioxide pollution; that is a cost. People lose their homes in wildfires that didn't used to happen; that is a cost. My State has to plan to lose its current map to sea level rise and to lose precious shorefront land; that is a cost. These are real costs. The industry just doesn't want to pay them. They want a free ride on everybody else's suffering, and one way to solve that is to put a price on the pollution.

And, by the way, this is not a liberal, Democratic environmental agenda. This is economics 101. Milton Friedman, for Pete's sake, said that if you want to have an economic system that works, you have to put what he called ``negative externalities,'' the bad things that happen that hurt other people. You have to put the cost of that into the product. Otherwise, you don't have a market system. You have a subsidy system. You are picking winners and losers.

As much as my colleagues on the other side like to say that they don't like subsidies and they don't want to see government picking winners and losers, when it is the fossil fuel industry that gets subsidized, when it is the fossil fuel industry that is the winner, they can't line up fast enough to subsidize and pick winners and losers.

So we are going to have to work pretty hard to solve this problem because we have some real hazards in front of us. What my bill would do is to measure the thing that they didn't want to do--measure methane emissions from oil and gas production. As I said, new developments in satellite technology means that we don't have to depend on them any longer. We can actually do a lot of this measuring. We can check their measuring. We can, to use Reagan's phrase, ``trust but verify'' what they are reporting with a whole lot of other data that we can pull together.

So get the data. How much are they leaking? Figure it out basin by basin because that is where it really happens. It happens in these pools that emerge from the basins from all of the leakage. And then put a price on it.

It is not hard to do. There is a social cost of carbon that President Obama proposed. President Biden has put it back in at the previous level, while they get to work on figuring out what updates there should be to it. We have a social cost of carbon. You can quantify the methane harm and compare it to the carbon harm. You can make an equivalency between those two and you can determine what the social cost of methane leakage should be. It is really not all that complicated.

We would start it in 2023, so that the industry, which has been so reprehensible in its leakage, in its influence over EPA, and in its influence in the Trump administration--we are actually giving them a chance to clean up their act and do what they should have done all along. So it would begin in 2023, and it would cost them $1,800 per ton of leaked methane.

You leak it; you pay for it. It is not that complicated. When I was growing up, we had a pretty simple rule in my family: You spill it; you clean it up. I don't know why that is suddenly not an appropriate rule when the company and the industry gets big enough and has enough political power and dark money to be pulling strings around here. That ought to be the rule. You spill it; you clean it up. You leak the methane; you pay for it.

So I hope that we can get that methane factor passed into law, as well, because we know perfectly well that this is not an industry that is going to pursue the public interest if it is not required to. We saw that in the Trump administration. We saw it on March 2, 2017. We saw it on March 28, 2017. We saw it on April 19, 2017. We saw it on May 10, 2017. We saw it on September 11, 2018, on August 28, 2019, and on August 13, 2020. Over and over and over again, they hurt the public by using their clout over the regulatory Agency of this country to their own benefit.

You can't count on them to take care of this on their own. They just won't. They have proven that. That is not a contested fact any longer. We gave them the chance to clean up their act without this kind of requirement, and they totally failed. In fact, they spent all their energy trying to degrade the regulatory authority that kept them trying to clean up methane.

Let's solve this problem. Methane is a real problem. There is a lot of it changing our climate. The climate situation has become an emergency. Methane is easily preventable from leaking. And, by the way, here is the added bonus: It gives a lot of people jobs. There is a lot of work that we can do to reclaim the damage that the fossil fuel industry has caused. Cleaning up the wells, cleaning up the mines, cleaning up the piping--those are all real jobs.

So let's get after it. Let's start with the CRA. Let's go on to a proper methane fee to put the leaking out of business and on from there.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I am here to express my support for the nomination of Vanita Gupta to serve as Associate Attorney General.

It is a little strange here on the floor today because under normal circumstances I would talk about Ms. Gupta's exemplary record of service and how she will excel as the third in command of the Department of Justice and that she would be a consensus nominee. But the extraordinary effort to scuttle her nomination on a partisan basis in spite of her exemplary record asks some questions about what is going on here.

Vanita Gupta is an accomplished lawyer with a record of working well with just about everyone. When she was last at the Department, working on really difficult issues like use-of-force guidelines for police, she built solid relationships with law enforcement. So they have thrown their full-throated support behind her nomination.

Here are the law enforcement agencies and leaders that are supporting her: the Fraternal Order of Police; the Major County Sheriffs of America; the International Association of Chiefs of Police; the Major Cities Chiefs Association; the Police Executive Research Forum; the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association; the Hispanic American Police Command Officers Association; NOBLE, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives; and a whole array of distinguished law enforcement leaders.

These are influential groups and respected individuals, and, for some of my Republican colleagues, this kind of support from law enforcement is literally unbelievable.

So here is what my colleague, the junior Senator from Arkansas, asked Ms. Gupta about all these law enforcement endorsements during her confirmation hearing: ``Did you, or anyone on your behalf or anyone in or affiliated with the Biden campaign transition or administration, pressure those organizations with threats of retaliation if they did not support your nomination?''

``No, Senator,'' she answered.

And she wasn't kidding. Law enforcement doesn't brook threats from criminals, let alone Presidential candidates and executive nominees seeking their endorsement.

And, indeed, they stood up to dispute that insinuation. Here is what Jim Pasco, the executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, said in response:

I was kind of shocked by it. If [the Senator] really

suspects that, then he doesn't really know the law

enforcement organizations as well as he thinks he does, and

he certainly doesn't know Vanita Gupta as well as I know her.

Chuck Wexler is the head of the Police Executive Research Forum, and here is how he responded:

Do you really think you can stand up to law enforcement and

threaten them? Do you really think that's going to work? We

never forgot that she stood with us when it mattered.

That is the reason for her support from law enforcement: She stood with them when it mattered. And to say that she is such a radical and so against law enforcement and disdains those who disagree with her-- which would presumably be law enforcement, if she is such an anti-law- enforcement radical, as my colleagues suggest--is completely blown to smithereens by their continued support for her--not disdain: ``She stood with us when it mattered.''

So when that effort to blow her up exploded in their face, colleagues went after an op-ed that she authored 9 years ago in which she supported decriminalization and defelonization of simple possession of small amounts of drugs. It could be read to say decriminalization of marijuana--other drugs, small amounts.

Well, we know a lot today about substance abuse that we didn't know then that people who have addictions require treatment and care, not punishment and incarceration. That is no radical position. The idea that you should not prosecute people for possession of small amounts is the basis of drug courts.

I started the drug court in Rhode Island. It has been a roaring success. It is the basis for diversion programs. As attorney general of my State with full criminal jurisdiction in my State of Rhode Island, we constantly did diversion of cases of possession of small amounts of drugs--all kinds of drugs--

because they don't belong in the criminal justice system. They get swept up, and you divert them out before prosecution.

This is nothing peculiar or unusual. This is the position of the World Health Organization. This is the position of the Organization of American States. This is the position of the International Red Cross. Heck, even former Speaker Boehner supported decriminalization of simple possession of some or all drugs.

So they had to get into rhetorical tricks to try to make the point look different than it actually is. And Republicans repeatedly asked her questions about that statement regarding small amounts with respect to what they call here ``the legalization of `all drugs.''' In response to that, she said:

I have never advocated for the legalization or

decriminalization of all drugs, and I do not support the

legalization or decriminalization of all drugs.

If I were to come up to you, Mr. President, and say ``Do you support the legalization or decriminalization of all drugs?'' what will you take that question to mean? It would seem to mean blanket decriminalization or legalization of all drugs, not small amounts--all.

Well, they went on in this same vein. Here is a question for the record from Senator Hawley describing Senator Cornyn's question ``whether you advocate decriminalization of all drugs.''

That is not what she advocated. What she advocated was decriminalization of small amounts--consistent with diversion, consistent with drug court activity, consistent with the way the substance abuse and recovery community treats this issue, and consistent with the position of all those organizations and many, many more. This is the way we operate in law enforcement these days.

So then they try to focus in on the word ``never.'' Senator Cornyn, who was speaking on the floor a moment ago, ominously said to me, the most important word in that quote is ``never.'' As you can see, it is simply a misrepresentation of what she said in 2012.

Well, you could also argue--``I have never advocated for the decriminalization of all drugs.'' You could also argue that the key word in that sentence isn't ``never''; it is ``all.'' That is the subject of the sentence: ``all drugs.'' Kilos of cocaine, pounds of methamphetamine--no. Small, simple possession amounts--that is the way everybody treats drugs in law enforcement these days.

As lawyers, we know that it is important to get the question right, and it is not unusual for lawyers to flub the question. When you are asking a question in court and you flub the question, you often get an answer you don't like, and the remedy for that is not to call the witness who answered your question a liar. The remedy for that is to get the question right in the first place. And if the question is whether Vanita Gupta advocated decriminalization of all drugs, the answer is, in fact, no because small amounts of simple possession is a very different thing than ``all drugs.''

And now they are hanging this extraordinary rampart of invective-- liar, deliberate liar--all over getting an honest answer to a question that they asked badly or, perhaps, worse yet, a trick question intended to trip her up that she answered honestly.

So what is going on? Why are they going through this exercise? Well, step back a little bit and look what is going on in our country. The first thing that is going on is that there is a massive dark money campaign for voter suppression. There is a guy named Leonard Leo who ran the dark money campaign that pushed three Supreme Court Justices onto the Court. The Washington Post reported that as a $250 million effort--$250 million.

After the Washington Post article came out and Leonard Leo was blown like a covert agent who suddenly is identified with all of this, he has to get out. Where does he go? He goes to something called the Honest Elections Project, which is the sister organization of a group called the Judicial Crisis Network, which--guess what--is running ads against Vanita Gupta.

They used to run ads for the Supreme Court nominees. They spent tens of millions of dollars running ads against Garland, for Gorsuch, for Kavanaugh, for Barrett--tens of millions of dollars. But with Biden in the White House, nobody is listening to them any longer. They are not getting their appointees through, so they moved to voter suppression. And all that money and that same guy, Leonard Leo, are now lined up behind voter suppression.

So you get dark money ads paid for by Judicial Crisis Network against the third-ranking person in the Department of Justice? They are used to going for the Supreme Court. They are going after the third-ranking person at the Department of Justice. Why? Because it is voter suppression--because she has been the head of the Civil Rights Division, which prosecuted voter suppression. She knows that stuff. She will supervise Kristen Clarke, whom you will hear a lot more nonsense about from the other side, who will run the Civil Rights Division and sue for voter suppression.

So what this is really about is the voter suppression project that you see alive and well in the country from the Republican Party. There are reports that say that every single legislative body in the country controlled by Republicans is pushing voter suppression measures. I don't know that it is true, but it sure looks like it is true. And if not, it is darn close. It is a pattern. Wherever you go in the country, Republicans in charge--boom--restrict the ballot.

They know people don't like what they stand for. They know people can't stand the dark money forces behind ads like this. So the secret, as my distinguished colleague Senator Warnock said: Some people don't want some people to vote.

So the two women who will be overseeing the Department of Justice voter suppression resistance, the legal fight against voter suppression, the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, are being subjected to this treatment.

On this, I will stand with Ms. Gupta

Madam President, before my distinguished friend's speech, I ask unanimous consent to have an article appended as an exhibit to the remarks I gave earlier.

Mr. President, I pick up where Senator Van Hollen left off because, when he was fighting for the DISCLOSE Act in the House, I was the manager of that bill on the floor here in the Senate.

It would do something very simple. If you are spending more than $10,000 in an election, we ought to know who you are. That is pretty easy. It is not going to rope in lots of small donors. It will get the big interests who are out there trying to control our democracy and hide who they are while they are doing it.

As Senator Van Hollen said, this started with Citizens United--a wretched decision that unleashed unlimited money into our politics, but it said that the unlimited money was going to be transparent. That was its predicate: It is going to be transparent. You won't have corruption because everybody will be able to see. The ad will say: We are ExxonMobil, and we paid for this message.

Well, of course, the dark money forces, in having achieved that victory at the Supreme Court, went right out and violated that predicate--right out. They have built an entire architecture of deception around their campaign finances since then. It is the 501(c) corporations that don't have to report their donors. It is the donor- advised trusts that are money identity laundering devices for big donors. It is even as simple as phoney-baloney shell corporations. Sometimes they are stacked up, and the money goes to the phoney-baloney shell corporation. The shell corporation launders it through DonorsTrust, and DonorsTrust gives it to the 501(c), and it dumps it into the super PAC. They all know it is going on. This is orchestrated stuff.

So we have a real battle on our hands. We passed the billion-dollar- in-dark-money threshold a long time ago. When people are spending $1 billion in dark money to influence what goes on in this country, you can bet they are winning. You can bet they are winning. They wouldn't keep spending money by the billions if they were not winning. So we have to put a stop to this.

The American people are with us. The polling is unbelievable. It is in the nineties. Whether you are a Bernie Bro or a tea partier, you hate the idea that there is big dark money in politics calling the tune for Congress to dance to, but that is the fact. Look at the outcomes.

Look at climate change. There is no dispute about the science. We all know what needs to be done, but one big special interest, the fossil fuel industry, has shut down one political party. My strong bet is, if you looked at all of the dark money funding the Republican Party in Congress, you would find that it is 80 percent the fossil fuel industry. They have become the political wing of the fossil fuel industry, and they specialize in fake climate denial for that reason, and it is going to cost us. The lost decade on climate is going to cost us.

So dark money is not just a plague to the integrity of American democracy; it is a plague that harms our ability to deal with the other problems that are coming our way--wherever there is a big special interest that can play the game of hiding the money and moving it around.

Let me say one last thing.

Dark money? Not really. It is not dark to the candidate who is the beneficiary. When a big dark money donor sets up a shell corporation and gives it a couple of million dollars and then has that shell corporation launder the money through DonorsTrust and then has that money go into a super PAC to be spent for a particular candidate or against his opponent, do you think they don't find a way to let the candidate know what they did and why? The only people who are not in on the joke are the American people, and we have got to put an end to this.

Democracy behind masks isn't democracy at all. Let's get rid of this stuff. The American public will be with us. It will provide health and hygiene to our democracy again, and we will start to see results for the American people in a way that the dark money has prevented.

I thank Senator Merkley for leading us in this enterprise. This is a public service. This is why we came here. This

is the democracy that needs defending, and, by God, we are going to defend it.

Madam President, I am here to say a few words on behalf of Deb Haaland to be Secretary of the Interior.

There is something wonderfully beautiful and symmetrical about her appointment to this position because of the Department of the Interior's role supervising America's public lands. Well, of course, before America's public lands were America's public lands, they were Native American lands, and Deb Haaland will be the first Native American to serve in any President's Cabinet and the first to serve as the Secretary of this Department. So that is kind of a wonderful harmony with history, and I hope we appreciate that here.

The second thing that I want to say is that it is, to me, deeply ironic how much of the opposition to her as Secretary has come on the theory that she won't be fair to fossil fuels. We have lived through 4 years of a Trump administration with Secretaries of the Interior who were out-and-out operatives of fossil fuel. The fossil fuel hand in the Secretary's glove was obvious.

The idea that anything other than fossil fuel was treated fairly in the Trump administration is a preposterous notion. Basically, anything that wasn't nailed down, they gave to the fossil fuel industry with no consideration for any of the competitors, and they did it so badly and so shabbily and so sloppily because they were so greedy that a lot of the stuff they did got thrown out by courts because they didn't even bother to do their homework.

So, please, let's not talk about fairness after the last 4 years. Our friends on the other side lost their standing to talk about fairness after what they did for fossil fuel in the last 4 years, including outright lies about climate change.

My good friend from Texas talks about hurricanes. He has real hurricanes coming because of climate change. Yet where is the climate plan from the other side? None, because the fossil fuel industry won't let them.

Let me last say as I conclude, I come from the Ocean State. Representative Haaland comes from one of those interior square States. Her Agency is called the Department of the Interior. When you look at things like the Land and Water Conservation Fund, floods of money go to inside America, interior America, upland and inland America, and the coasts always get overlooked. I have made it very clear to Ms. Haaland that has to stop. With climate change coming, with fisheries moving about, with sea levels rising, with oceans warming, with actual seas acidifying in front of our eyes, to overlook the coast can happen no more. I trusted her when she said she would. I will take her at her word, but I also intend to work very hard to make sure that I can support her in keeping her word that oceans and coasts will matter.

I yield to my friend from Minnesota.

Mr. President, I have a request for one committee to meet during today's session of the Senate. It has the approval of the Majority and Minority leaders.

Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committee is authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:

Committee on Foreign Relations

The Committee on Foreign Relations is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Monday, March 15, 2021, at 6 p.m., to conduct a hearing.

Mr. President, nobody on our side likes this amendment, and we urge a ``no'' vote. It would tie the hands of local and State government. It would make it more difficult to rehire or interfere with recovery in our capital cities, so if we could all have a resounding ``no'' vote on the Graham amendment, I would appreciate it and yield back further time.

Vote on Amendment No. 1369

Madam President, for 1 minute.

Madam President, knowing how much my colleagues on the other side love unelected bureaucrats, I want to make sure it is clear that this was a unilateral decision made by an unelected bureaucrat to change the way hospitals are compensated. And the result, at least in my State, is that our hospitals are paid 25 cents per dollar less than the hospital right across the border in Massachusetts and 30 cents per dollar less than the hospital right across the border 20 minutes down the road in Connecticut.

Dr. Barrasso and Dr. Cassidy can understand that a 25-percent hit in hospitals that close together, a 30-percent hit between hospitals that close together, is ridiculous.

And my friends on the Finance Committee will remember me showing this graph to every Health and Human Services witness who showed up.

And none could defend it. I ask your support on this.

The Senator from Tennessee.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

The Senator from Delaware.

Mr. President, I rise today to pay tribute to a beloved figure in the Senate community, the late Barbara A. O'Malley, who passed away on January 6.

For three decades, Mrs. O worked in the office of our former colleague, Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland. She ran the front desk, which means I had the pleasure of seeing her regularly on the way to and from my nearby office. Especially in the mornings, she and I would chat about the news, the Senate, our families, and whatever else. She always greeted me with tremendous affection and kindness and baked some of the most delicious cookies I and my staff have ever had. We will miss her greatly.

Mrs. O deeply loved her family. She was married to her husband, Thomas Martin, for 52 years until his death in 2006. Together, they had six children: Peter, Paul, Patrick, Martin, Eileen, and Bridgett; 15 grandchildren; and 8 great-grandchildren.

She also loved airplanes. While still in high school, she was among the first women to volunteer for the Civil Air Patrol during World War II, earning her pilot's license and taking to the skies. Later in life, she volunteered at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum to bring her love for aircraft and flight to all those who visited.

The saying goes, if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. Mrs. O proved that wrong. She treated everyone with good will and offered an important example of friendship to Senators and staff alike. Mrs. O lived her life in service to her Catholic faith, to her beloved State of Maryland, and to the Senate. I am proud to have called her a friend.

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

Mr. President, I am particularly glad to see the senior Senator from New Mexico presiding on what, for me, is a sentimental moment, because he has been such a terrific friend and colleague and advocate in the battle of climate change.

I am here today because, at last, it is time to say farewell to my battered ``Time to Wake Up'' image board here and to a run of more than 275 weekly climate speeches. It has been one of the Senate's longer runs, I believe, but I think it is time to say farewell.

This long run began in the dark days of 2012, after Speaker Pelosi had passed a serious climate bill and the Senate had refused to take up anything, not even a blank bill to go to conference with and see what could be done in conference. As some of us remember all too well, when Speaker Pelosi passed that bill in 2009 over on the House side, we had here in the Senate a filibuster-proof Democratic majority. This was climate change, and we just walked away. I was told then that it was because the Obama White House told Leader Reid to pull the plug, that after the ObamaCare wars, the White House was tired of conflict and didn't want another big battle. It was not going to take on any fights it wasn't sure it could win.

Think about that. Think of history's great battles and contests, legislative or otherwise, and consider in how many of those battles either side was sure it would win. If you limit yourself to battles you are sure you can win, you are pretty much sure to miss the most important battles, and we lost this one for that most lamentable of reasons--the failure to try. The fossil fuel industry, sure enough, knew it won this one once it saw the Obama administration walk off the field, abandoning Speaker Pelosi's hard-fought victory.

Then years went by in which you could scarcely get a Democratic administration to put the words ``climate'' and ``change'' into the same paragraph in which we fussed, idiotically, about whether to call it ``climate change'' or ``global warming''; in which the bully pulpit--the great Presidential megaphone in the hands of one of our most articulate Presidents--stood mute. We quavered about polling showing climate as issue 8 or issue 10, ignoring that we had a say in that outcome. When we wouldn't even use the phrase, let alone make the case, no wonder the public didn't see climate change as a priority.

Those were, for me, dark, desolate days, so I made a commitment to speak about climate change every single week we were in session--no matter what. The kitchen was dark; the oven was cold, but maybe, somehow, one little pilot light's clicking on every week would help.

Six years after the Waxman-Markey climate bill passed the House, the Obama EPA finalized its marquee climate regulation, which was quickly killed dead in the starting block by the five Republicans on the Supreme Court.

The Clean Power Plan never even went into effect. It had no regulatory core or backstop that was indisputably within EPA's authority. So when the Clean Power Plan's novelties got smacked down, nothing was left.

John Kerry, bless him, led us into the Paris Agreement, but it wasn't signed until the last year of 8 years of that administration. It being so late, the fossil fuel interests behind Trump hauled us right back out of it.

So there we were, after 8 years in which Democrats sometimes controlled both Houses of Congress as well as the White House, and we had, at the end of the day, no law, no regulations, no treaty.

I am hanging up the ``Time to Wake Up'' poster after more than 275 of these speeches because I am going to trust that we bring more spirit and determination to the climate crisis this time, as President Biden has promised that we will.

His opening Executive orders are a fine start. I appreciate particularly the restoration of the social cost of carbon, but perhaps the most important signal is not any specific policy but the

breadth of the scope of the emphasis on climate across the new Biden administration.

Then we had to deal with the Trump years, when sins of omission became sins of commission, and questions of commitment became questions of corruption.

I am personally confident that evidence will reveal that the Trump administration was, in fact, corrupt on climate issues--and not just corrupt in the meaning of the Founding Fathers but corrupt in the meaning of the U.S. Criminal Code, and I will do my level best to make sure we find out. Thank goodness, we can put that disgraceful period of our history behind us.

What did I learn along the way? I traveled to many of my Republican colleagues' home States on climate trips to help me understand the climate change problem there. There is no State whose big State universities deny climate change. Most all of them teach it. So I knew it wasn't lack of knowledge that was blocking progress.

I learned that oceans are at the heart of the climate threat. First, they bear incontrovertible testimony to the dangers. Try arguing with thermometers that measure ocean warming. Try arguing with tide gauges that measure sea level rise. Try arguing with pH tests that school children can do that measure the acidification of our oceans.

I learned that the oceans are suffering extraordinary injury from warming at the rate of multiple nuclear explosions per second and acidification at rates unprecedented in human existence, and from the fossil fuel industry's plastics contaminating our oceans.

In every State I went to, there were businesses alarmed by climate change, whether it was wildfire or flooding or the loss of iconic views and species, upheaval of fisheries and growing conditions of crops or business risk and recreation imperiled.

I heard from western fishermen about warming trout streams and a Glacier National Park with no glacier, and saw ancient western forests dying by the square mile to the bark beetle.

I heard from coastal States about new pests and poisonous algae and flooding risks and fisheries in upheaval. And the Great Lakes, I heard, face similar threats as the ocean coasts.

I heard in the Presiding Officer's State of Nordic ski trails made mud because you can't do artificial snow like on ski slopes, and moose tours--moose tours--that visitors promised never to do again because once you made it down the mud trail, the moose were crawling with thousands of ticks, eating them alive. Things that winter used to clean up but did no longer.

One day I wept in National Airport, sitting at one of those little round linoleum-topped food tables, reading Pope Francis's new encyclical, ``Laudato Si: On Care For Our Common Home.'' Climate effects were everywhere. That wasn't the problem.

So I began looking at the fossil fuel industry and studying the dark money apparatus that it uses to spread climate denial and to obstruct climate progress.

I recalled our bipartisanship here in the Senate before Citizens United, and I saw the death of bipartisanship after, when the fossil fuel industry upgraded its weaponry from political muskets to tactical nukes and set about subjugating the Republican Party.

I came to like and admire Bob Inglis, a conservative the fossil fuel industry could not subjugate. So, instead, they made an example of him for his climate heresy and crushed him politically.

I came with groups of Senators to the floor to identify and call out this corrupt and corrupting fossil fuel web of denial. I came to know and admire the tough band of investigators, writers, and academic researchers who examine and document this corrupt apparatus.

I saw how this apparatus insinuated itself into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce an the National Association of Manufacturers and turned those two business groups into America's two worst climate obstructors.

Thank you, InfluenceMap, for that research.

I learned the ways the industry hid the money trail leading to its front groups through shell corporations, through Donors Trust, through 501(c)(4)s. And I finally came to the realization that this industry was running a massive, covert operation--probably the biggest covert disinformation and political intimidation op in history, and it was running this covert op in and against our own country.

Another thing I learned was how little political effort America's corporations put into doing anything about climate change here in Congress. A lot of them put happy green talk on their websites. They had their consumer relations and public relations and investor relations people spread the happy green talk around. Many of them actually hired sustainability officers and, where it made them money, began changing their internal behavior to actually be more sustainable.

Sometimes more attention was paid to heralding those sustainability programs than there actually was to sustaining anything, but sometimes it was sincere. Bravo to those companies that have really changed the way they operate within their corporate bounds. And a few took climate change seriously enough to start pushing sustainability out their supply chains.

But none--none--took climate change seriously in Congress. This was a battlefield they avoided. Their trade associations were a nightmare. Every one of them--beverages, insurance, banking, chemical, agricultural--you name it, every one of them was silent or worse. Now at last--at last--that seems to be changing.

Here is the 2020 lobbying pitch for Silicon Valley tech giants--the biggest corporations in America, many of the most successful corporations of America, hundreds of American corporations, almost all of which pride themselves on their greenness. They lobby us through a group called TechNet. Here is their pitch sheet--13 pages of bulleted priorities they wanted Congress to achieve, and not one mention--not one mention--of climate change. Not one, not even a mention of renewables from a trade association that has renewables companies in its membership--until now. Until now. I was just notified that TechNet has noticed this omission in its document and that it intends to rectify the error. Good.

Change has even come to the biggest and most obstructive lobby group of them all--the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. I spent a lot of time chasing them with hashtag ``chamberofcarbon.'' I stood out in front of their headquarters and put up a sign that said ``Carbon'' blocking where it said ``Commerce,'' so their own building said ``U.S. Chamber of Carbon.'' They were my nemesis--hostile to climate action in the legislative branch, hostile to climate action in the executive branch and regulatory agencies, hostile to climate action in the judiciary in cases that were being brought about climate. They were the beast.

Well, last week, the chamber announced a dramatic reversal--that it will now support a serious, market-based climate solution. That--that-- is a big shift. And if they fight for climate action anywhere near as forcefully as they fought against it, it could make a big difference. So TBD as to how this turns out over at the chamber, but a tentative big thumbs up.

So as I close my run of Time to Wake Ups, where are we? Well, we again control the House, and the Senate, and the White House, and this time I hope we will be serious.

Senator Markey has joined me, and I mentioned earlier in the speech Nancy Pelosi championing an actual serious climate bill through the House and lamented the Senate's failure to do one damn thing once we had the House bill over here to act on.

That bill was called Waxman-Markey. It was the work of Congressman Waxman and Congressman, now-Senator, Markey. With Senator Markey over here, maybe this time we will be serious in the Senate with all of these departments of government control.

The latent bipartisanship here in the Senate that the fossil fuel industry suppressed is still there. It has been there all along. Talking to some of my colleagues about climate change has been a little bit like talking to prisoners about escape, but the latent bipartisanship did not go away. With these other changes--with corporate America beginning to show up, with the big trade associations becoming less horrible, I am hopeful for a serious bipartisan bill. And if we can't get good-faith bipartisanship, well, we have got reconciliation.

Senator McConnell can't block bipartisan climate bills from coming to the floor any longer. So there is a point to legislating. There is a point to advocates showing up. So maybe corporate America will show up and push back on fossil fuel's subjugation of the Republican Party. A good, hard look at the fossil fuel climate denial machinery can put that corrupt machine back on its heels. In my view, it would be dereliction and malpractice to ignore that apparatus and its treacherous role.

In trade associations, revolts are already taking place, within the chamber and NAM, by members horrified to be outed as supporting America's worst climate obstructors. Want faster change there? Disclose the fossil fuel money that bought the climate obstruction. That will speed things along.

The finance and agriculture sectors and our coastal economies all are looking down the barrel of multiple and serious economic crash warnings. Banks, insurance companies, Freddie Mac, sovereign banks, wherever you look in the world of finance, there are dramatic, dire warnings from sober, serious bean-counter people who are not there to be green. They are there to make green. So corporate climate concerns have moved from the communications shop to business operations and the C-suites.

The famous author Mary Renault, who wrote wonderful historical novels, said: ``There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.'' There has never been a crisis or a catastrophe more warned about by more and more credible sources than the looming climate crisis, and it is going to clobber these businesses. Now they just need to align their political effort with their own stated policies. How hard is that?

All of this can break the right way. The dark castle of denial can fall, and Congress can rise in bipartisan force to stop the harm and cure the damage. But that is not foreordained. We can still screw this up. No doubt about it. So let's not. Let's do our duty. The conditions are at last--at last--in place for a real solution. A new dawn is breaking, and when it is dawn, there is no need for my little candle against the darkness. My little ``Time to Wake Up'' pilot light can now go out.

So instead of urging that it is time to wake up, I close this long run by saying now, it is time to get to work. Whitehouse ``Time to Wake Up'' run, farewell.

Whitehouse at least on time to wake up--out.

I yield the floor.

Thank you, Senator Inhofe. I am grateful to the senior Senator from Oklahoma.

We are, indeed, fairly fierce adversaries on the issue of climate, but it is a fervent prayer of mine that that might change because I have had the experience of working with Senator Inhofe on issues on which we are not adversaries, and let me tell you, the man is a senatorial Caterpillar tractor at getting things done when our interests align. Whether it is cleaning up kleptocracy or fixing the enforcement of pirate fishing overseas or our ocean plastics work, Senator Inhofe has been enormously valuable in those things. And I will confess, because we have had these wars with one another on climate change, that when Senator Inhofe came to Senator Sullivan's and my hearing on ocean plastics, my heart sank. I thought, oh--I won't say the word. This was such a good hearing. It was going so well. Why did he have to show up? Because I thought he was going to ruin everything-- not a bit. He listened. And when it came time to ask questions, he asked terrific questions.

He described an experience in his childhood along the Texas gulf coast and the little sea turtles trying to work their way to the ocean from their eggs, and he asked how he could help. He was an original cosponsor of our bill. He was a strong supporter of the bigger, better 2.0 bill.

So I will close with reiterating my prayer that perhaps in the most marvelous of all worlds, the good Lord can find a way to bring us to work together to solve this climate problem. If so, we may very well have a miracle in this Chamber.

I yield the floor.

Thank you, Senator Inhofe, for your courtesy for coming to say those words. I truly appreciate it.

You are the Hank Aaron. You are the Roger Maris. So I appreciate it and thank you.

Madam President, I have hastened to the floor because I was upstairs, waiting for the House managers to bring the article over, and I heard my friend, the distinguished Senator from Alaska, talking about his concern about the fossil fuel part of the energy sector and his dissatisfaction with what the Secretary of the Treasury was able to assure him of in that regard.

I just wanted to note that I missed a moment of the Senator's remarks when I came walking down here, but as best as I could tell, the Senator never mentioned the term ``climate change,'' and he never referenced ``carbon emissions.'' I have to say, if we are going to deal with our energy sector, we have to deal with it in a way that takes into account carbon emissions and climate change. You can't just whistle past those things and pretend that they are not real and act as if we can continue to go forward in the way we always have--releasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, poisoning our oceans with acidification, warming the planet, and putting coastal communities like mine at grave risk from sea level rise and storm surge. We have to address those things.

As we go forward in this new Congress, I very much hope that my friend Senator Sullivan and I will be able to work together to address that exact problem to make sure that not only is our energy mix strong for our economy but to make absolutely sure that we are not sacrificing the safety of our planet, the economic security of our future generations, and the health of people all around the planet who have, really, no choice but to live close to the land and feel the pounding of climate change in their immediate lives every day. We have to address those things, and I hope we will.

So, in having heard his side of the argument, I just wanted to come back to the floor and offer the other side. Somewhere between us there is a resolution because I know perfectly well that the State of Alaska is getting hit by the acidification and warming side and by the sea level rise and storm surge side of this problem, just as much as Rhode Island is. Perhaps, because, as my friend constantly reminds me, Alaska has a huge advantage of size over Rhode Island, one could even imagine that it is having more of an effect than Rhode Island.

So with those comments and with affection and regard for my colleague from Alaska, I yield the floor

Madam President, I would just close by suggesting that perhaps my friend, the Senator from Alaska, can sympathize, since he fears that the interests that he came to the floor here to defend will not be listened to. Perhaps he can sympathize with the fact that, for 4 years, an entire administration wouldn't give the time of day to the sea level rise concerns that are threatening my State. We are talking about Freddie Mac. We are talking about a property value crash across all of our coasts that is going to cause enormous harm to Rhode Island, and we just left an administration that wouldn't pay one iota of attention to that. It had fossil fuel industry climate deniers, and there is such a thing. Not everybody in the fossil fuel industry is that way, but they picked the bottom feeders to bring into government.

I share the Senator's frustration, but let me say I have got it about 10,000 times over after having lived with the Trump administration for the past 4 years and gotten nothing and after having tried to bring serious climate debate to the floor, knowing that the Republican leader was going to block it. So, yes, I sympathize with his distress, and I hope he sympathizes with my, rather, greater, cumulative distress from the last 4 years.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, it is a great honor to join my senior colleague, Senator Reed, on the Senate floor to remember someone we both knew very well, Jim Taricani, a

legendary investigative reporter, whom not only we knew well but so many Rhode Islanders knew well.

There was a rule in Rhode Island: When Jim called, you answered. He was also tough. He was always fair. He was the founder of WJAR's I- Team, a storied investigative unit for the NBC affiliate in Rhode Island.

Jim started working as a reporter in the 1970s, when the New England mafia was still active on the streets of Providence. He became known for segments exposing organized crime and for sniffing out public corruption, and, at times, a bit of a combination of both. Jim's news sense and his doggedness were legendary.

Jim was a Rhode Island icon. In a small State, with more than its share of stories to tell and plenty of larger-than-life characters, investigative journalists have always had a particular prominence. For more than three decades, Jim was among the best of them all.

He was brave. When a Federal judge ordered Jim to divulge who had provided him with a tape of a bribe being accepted at Providence City Hall, he opted for a prison sentence rather than give up his source. The courage of Jim Taricani made national headlines. He ended up serving 4 months of home confinement and testified before Congress in 2007 in support of a Federal shield law to protect the freedom of the press.

Rhode Islanders felt a personal connection to Jim for another reason. Jim needed a new heart in the 1990s. After having suffered two heart attacks in his thirties, he shared this health saga on the air, allowing WJAR cameras to follow along as he underwent a heart transplant and navigated his recovery.

From living rooms and kitchen tables across Rhode Island, Rhode Islanders rooted for Jim. As his health improved, he ultimately returned to the newsroom. The transplant would give him 23 more years, which he called his bonus.

Jim passed away last month at the age of 69. With the free press under more strain than almost any other point in our Nation's history, Jim's funeral became a really important moment. The photo Senator Reed just showed on the front page of the Providence Journal the next day was a sight to behold. More than 50 journalists showed up to serve as Jim Taricani's honor guard. The honor guard had dozens of reporters from across Rhode Island--not just from WJAR but from all of its competitors too. Journalists came from other parts of the country who had crossed paths with Jim at channel 10 during time they spent in Rhode Island. They had come back to see off a friend, a hero, and a staunch defender of the First Amendment.

I join Senator Reed today in thinking of Jim's beloved wife, Laurie White, and the many friends of theirs who mourn Jim's passing. He will be missed.

I yield the floor.