Floor Statements

Mr. President, while the distinguished senior Senator from Texas, deputy leader, is still on the floor, let me thank him for his kind remarks and express a word of appreciation for his patience through the long process of getting to a conclusion that we appear now to have finally reached on bringing criminal sentencing reform to a vote on the Senate floor.

This is at least the third Congress in which the Cornyn-Whitehouse bill to improve the preparation of Federal prisoners for release, when they are going to be released, has been with us, and it has been a long process. I think the bill we are going to go to is, in majority, our original bill. For a long time, it has been the engine that I think all sides have seen as the means to solve the sentencing piece, which was much more difficult.

Over and over again, our efforts to move our bill have been held up in order to try to make a package, which is a pretty strong sign that our bill is a pretty good thing to get on board with. I want to thank Senator Cornyn for his patience through all of this.

Then I want to say a quick appreciation to Representative Collins and Representative Jeffries, whose bill on the House side was basically started like ours, and then they were able to negotiate what Senator Cornyn and I both agree were improvements--so that we adopted our bill to incorporate the improvements from the House side.

Other than that, we are about where we began with the sentencing improvements that have been added, and it has been a long trip, but I am indebted and appreciative of my colleague in all of this, Senator Cornyn, for having kept the faith through these many years and many Congresses in getting to this point.

Thank you, sir.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the senior Senator from New Jersey, Mr. Menendez, be recognized at the conclusion of my remarks, if he is on the floor.

Mr. President, this week, Nations of the world are gathering in Katowice, Poland, to review--and we hope amplify--their commitments to reduce carbon emissions under the 2015 Paris Agreement and to discuss how they will report and verify reductions in carbon pollution.

The United States of America is technically present in Poland in the form of a small delegation, but American leadership in Poland is decidedly absent. Why? It is pretty simple. The Government of the United States of America has fallen under the political control of the industry most responsible for this mess.

American leadership was essential to forging the global consensus on carbon emissions in the original Paris Agreement. I know because I was there in Paris in 2015 as Secretary Kerry and the U.S. negotiating team worked to seal the landmark pact.

What a pathetic difference a few years make. In 2017, President Trump announced that the United States would become the only country in the world to turn its back on this global agreement. The United States abdicates its leadership, just as the scientific warnings of the dangers of climate change grow clearer and

grimmer. In October, came a new report from the world's scientists working through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Just last month, our own Federal Government released its own sobering news about the worsening risks climate change poses to our Nation and our economy.

Our National Climate Assessment warned of hundreds of billions of dollars in losses we can anticipate due to climate change if we don't act to curtail carbon emissions. Trump responded first by describing his own--and I will quote him on this--``very high levels of intelligence.'' Then he went on to simply deny all the science. He said: I don't see it.

Well, guess what. Pope Paul V didn't see it when Galileo demonstrated the Earth revolved around the Sun, but that didn't change the astrophysics.

The climate science--laid out in black and white by Trump's own government agencies--is that our planet is heating up due to our use of fossil fuels.

The science is even more incontrovertible than when Donald Trump said that climate science was incontrovertible back in 2009. Saying that he now doesn't see it is the very definition of climate denial.

So many people who are engaged in climate denial actually know better but, for a variety of motives, will not act, will not admit it. As to the President's not seeing it, ``willful blindness'' would be another term.

This takeover of our government by fossil fuel forces is having very real consequences in U.S. emissions numbers. After years of decline, U.S. carbon emissions rose in 2018, increasing by 2.5 percent.

This, of course, coincides with the Trump administration's efforts on behalf of its industry benefactors to delay, repeal, and weaken rules limiting carbon emissions from powerplants, from oil and gas wells, from industrial facilities, even from vehicles.

Of course all of these industries share a measure of the blame for not cleaning up their own mess on their own, and you can add to that their culpability for pushing the Trump administration to weaken the safety regulations that, in some cases, the industry had actually agreed to. The auto industry had actually agreed to the CAFE standards and then fought to undo them through its trade group so that they could keep their own hands clean.

Chinese carbon emissions increased in 2018, as did Indian emissions. Among major economies, only the European Union saw its emissions decline in 2018.

This is why international summits like Poland are so important. The world urgently needs to correct course, and we can best do so if countries together do their part to reduce emissions.

According to the IPCC, to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, we need to cut carbon emissions to 50 percent below 2010 levels by 2030, which is just 11 years from now. We have to be 50 percent below our emissions in 2010, 11 years from now, in 2030, and we have to hit net zero emissions--carbon removed for all carbon added--by 2050. That is not that far away.

The IPCC report calls pricing carbon the central policy that will allow us to hold the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius or less. This is not some fantasy of the environmental community. Some of the world's biggest investors--$32 trillion worth of investment represented by these groups--stood up in Poland to say: We need to fix this problem or there will be economic catastrophe ahead. They also said that a price on carbon and an end to the subsidy that the fossil fuel industry enjoys and is at the heart of its political intervention, which has prevented us from taking on climate change, needs to go.

You have to add a price on carbon, and you have to get rid of the fossil fuel subsidies. That is their prescription for avoiding economic catastrophe.

Well, maybe they don't know what they are talking about, but $32 trillion worth of money thinks that they know what they are talking about because they put their money in the hands of these people to make wise investments for the future. A lot of people have bet their savings and resources behind these groups that are now saying: No price on carbon, no end of the fossil fuel subsidies, watch out--watch out for catastrophe.

On an ideological level, if you are sincere about market capitalism, where the costs of a product need to be in the price of the product for the market to work, this is pretty obvious stuff. The only reason this gets difficult is if you are a fake free marketeer who is really fronting for the fossil fuel industry.

But if you are not a fake on market economics when it is the industry that funds your party involved, it is pretty straightforward stuff. It is basic economic market principles.

You put the public harm externalities of a product--those costs--into the price of the product for the market to work--econ 101.

It shows the priorities around here when market capitalism and the principles of free market economics are so readily thrown under the bus by our friends once they cross the interests of big, big donor industries.

The good news is that many governments--from cities, States, and provinces to countries and regions--are already pricing carbon. This chart shows all of the various governments that have set a price on carbon, either through emissions trading--those are the green ones--or through a carbon price, a carbon fee--the various purple ones--and some do both, which is where they are mixed.

The carbon fee involved will vary. Sweden, for example, charges almost $140 per ton of carbon emitted, covering nearly 50 percent of the Nation's emissions.

The Canadian Province of British Columbia enacted a carbon fee in 2008, which has risen over time to its current price of $35 per ton. In the 4 years following the British Columbia carbon fee, fossil fuel use decreased by 17 percent in the Province, compared to increasing by 1 percent in the rest of Canada. So it works at decreasing emissions, and British Columbia's economy grew faster than that of any other Canadian province.

Why would it not? One hundred percent of the revenues raised from British Columbia's carbon fee are returned to taxpayers in the form of other tax cuts. And it is popular; 70 percent of British Colombians support the policy.

So what about the United States? Well, California has put a price on carbon via an emissions trading system, as have the nine Northeastern States, including Rhode Island, that are members of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. For the moment, the prices in California and the RGGI are still relatively low--around 5 bucks for us in Rhode Island for RGGI.

Senator Schatz and I have introduced our American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act again to assess a carbon fee starting at 50 bucks per metric ton of emissions in 2019. It is the midrange of the Office of Management and Budget's 2016 estimates of what they call the social cost of carbon. The social cost of carbon is the name for the long-term damage that is done by carbon pollution, which the fossil fuel industry is fighting so hard to be a public subsidy rather than to be put into the price of their product.

Our market-based proposal is an appeal to true conservative Republican colleagues. As one Republican former legislator said: It is not just an olive branch; it is an olive limb that we have offered. But the fossil fuel industry keeps a stranglehold on the Republican Party, preventing climate action--even climate action using market principles.

Axios just did this chart. I saw it today and had it reproduced for the floor. This is the number of times climate change was mentioned in Congress in press releases, floor statements, and online by Members of Congress. This is how often the Democrats have mentioned it from 2013 to 2018. I am afraid I am probably a measurable piece of those blue columns.

But if you look over here, this is how often Republicans have mentioned climate change. Their best year was 678 mentions. For all Republicans in Congress, in all of their press releases, floor statements, and online communications, the grand total is 678 mentions--I mean, seriously--and it has gone down as it has gotten worse because I think it is difficult to talk about if you are a Republican.

Everybody is looking around at the wildfires; everybody is looking around

at the sea level rise coming up; everybody is looking at the storms; everybody is looking around at the science now, not only warning of climate change but being able to connect specific weather events to climate change, most recently, the massive heat wave that wiped out so much of the Great Barrier Reef.

So here is how often Republicans talk about it, and here is how often Democrats do. We should probably do better. But, anyway, that is where we are.

If that doesn't show the effect of the industry squelching debate and driving Republicans into alignment with their industry welfare, then I don't know what could express that much more clearly.

So I wanted to show that, and this is unlikely to change as long as millions of fossil fuel industry dollars slosh around Washington, protecting this corrupting industry from having to account, as economics would suggest, for the actual economic cost of its pollution.

America is called the indispensable Nation, and American leadership is indispensable if we are to achieve a global response to this global challenge. But American leadership is sorely lacking because the dark money and sleazy operatives of the fossil fuel industry today control the Trump administration and swaths of the Republican Party.

There used to be a guy in this body who said ``Country First.'' We could use a little of that now in this tragic, climate-denying Trump sleaze-fest.

I yield the floor, and per the previous order I think Senator Menendez is here, to be recognized momentarily. I saw him come to the floor a moment ago.

Mr. President, I am both pleased and honored that my distinguished friend Senator Feinstein is joining me today to discuss how climate change is affecting our country, from the East to the West, from one of the biggest States to the smallest one. Of course, we are small in size, but we are long on coastline.

As the Presiding Officer will understand, as coastal States, Rhode Island, California, and the coastal States along the South Atlantic coasts are on the frontlines of climate change. Sea levels are already rising, and as they do, Rhode Island's coastal communities are having to spend more and more money on resiliency projects to protect their roads, their bridges, their beaches, their water treatment plants, their harbors, and other infrastructure.

A 2000 study by our DEM found that 7 of 19 water treatment facilities in Rhode Island are expected to be overwashed by floodwaters driven by climate change. Frankly, just figuring out what this risk looks like is hard for coastal municipalities, so our State's Coastal Resources Management Council developed a project called STORMTOOLS, which allows Rhode Islanders to see how sea level rise is expected to affect their homes, their businesses, their beaches, and their parks.

This is a STORMTOOLS-generated map of Upper Narragansett Bay. The blue color you see here is all land. People have homes and businesses and facilities there. All of this blue is now land, but it is land that gets covered by 10 feet of sea level rise. Ten feet of sea level rise is within STORMTOOLS' business-as-usual scenario in which we continue to burn fossil fuels unabated.

As you can see, some of Rhode Island's peninsulas get cut off to become islands, some of our islands disappear or fracture. Rhode Island becomes an archipelago. I hope my colleagues on the other side can appreciate that changes like this to my State are things I have to respond to.

A recent New York Times article suggested we may have to retreat from the coasts in order to protect ourselves from rising waters and more powerful storms. Why should Rhode Islanders have to retreat from our coasts just to protect polluters? It makes no sense. It is fundamentally unjust.

Many of us not only live near the sea but work and sail and fish on it, so climate change threatens Rhode Islanders' lifestyles, our livelihoods, and our lives.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has estimated for the United States that by 2100, nearly 2.5 million residential and commercial properties, collectively valued at $1.07 trillion today, will be at risk of chronic flooding, and that is just from sea level rise alone. Storm surge and rain-driven flooding amplify that risk.

Drill down to Rhode Island, and Zillow, the real estate firm, has estimated that over 5,300 homes worth almost $3 billion will be lost if the sea level rises just 6 feet. And that is just homes that are already there. People are still building in Rhode Island's coastal areas, so there are more new homes every day.

Why should Rhode Islanders have to face this risk? Why should 5,300 people have to risk losing their homes just to protect polluters? It is not right.

Rising water isn't the only way in which climate change is affecting the oceans off our coasts. Warming oceans are disrupting our traditional fishing grounds and driving valuable species like lobster out of Rhode Island waters altogether.

The just-released National Climate Assessment warns of falling catches. Last week I met with charter boat captains and recreational fishing enthusiasts from Rhode Island and nearby New England. They, like their peers in Louisiana, are facing changes in the size, geographic range, and number of fish that they catch.

Our commercial fishermen tell the same story. They are worried that their kids and grandkids will not be able to experience the traditions and lifestyles they cherish or pursue the same career on the water.

Why should Rhode Island have to lose this heritage just to protect polluters?

Senator Feinstein has seen similar changes in California, and I welcome her remarks.

I ask unanimous consent that Senator Feinstein and I be allowed to engage in a colloquy.

Senator Feinstein, the fires have affected us-- nothing like what you describe. Our State has not burned. Our State is not like

California today, still smoldering from such a massive fire. We don't have the devastation of the photograph that you just showed us, but it has sure affected our air quality.

All the way across the continent, the fires we have had in California, Oregon, and Canada have affected the Atlantic States as far south as North Carolina. As you know, these fires lost tremendous amounts of what they call fine particulates into the atmosphere, and those fine particulates exacerbate asthma and other respiratory conditions, increase the risk of diseases like lung cancer. In a nutshell, bad air equals bad health, and we are getting bad air from these fires.

Of course, forest fires aren't the only way that climate change degrades Rhode Island's air quality. You just make the air warmer, which global warming is doing, and hotter temperatures help to form more ozone. Ozone, as we know, is dangerous for children and the elderly and anybody with a respiratory condition.

One in ten Rhode Islanders has asthma. Our air quality receives a grade of C from the American Lung Association, largely from forces out of our control--out-of-State sources and ozone coming in from upwind States.

This is not just an inconvenience. Across the country, air pollution, much of it made worse by climate change, causes a staggering 200,000 premature deaths each year. Why should Rhode Islanders have to put up with that just to protect polluters?

Of course, those aren't the only ways that climate change affects human health. Temperature extremes worsen health. There have been studies both in Rhode Island and in Senator Feinstein's State that show that as temperatures rise, there are more deaths, often not associated in the coroner's report with heat but clearly statistically following the heat.

ER visits in Rhode Island skyrocket when daily temperatures pass 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and the National Climate Assessment, based on a study of Rhode Island hospitals, predicts that the number of ER visits will increase from these conditions by 400 per year by 2050 and up to an additional 1,500 a year by 2095.

Of course, the list of health consequences goes on: disease-carrying insects, such as ticks and mosquitoes; noxious algal blooms, as the Senator from California mentioned, that produce water-borne toxins and pathogens; longer pollen seasons ramping up people's allergies.

Why should Rhode Islanders or Californians have to put up with these conditions just to protect polluters?

Of course, it is not just the doctors who are worried; economists are starting to paint some very grim pictures. Freddie Mac, our great housing corporation, warns of a coastal property values crash that will rival the 2008 mortgage meltdown. I quote them:

The economic losses and social disruption [ . . . ] are

likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the

housing crisis and Great Recession.

The Bank of England and numerous academic economists warn of a ``carbon bubble''--a separate economic risk that poses what they call a systemic risk to the global economy.

Of course, the National Climate Assessment details grim economic consequences that climate change will have for our U.S. economy. Of course, it doesn't have to be bad economic news. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz testified that ``retrofitting the global economy for climate change would help to restore aggregate demand and growth. . . . [C]limate policies, if well designed and implemented, are consistent with growth, development, and poverty reduction. The transition to a low-carbon economy is potentially a powerful, attractive, and sustainable growth story, marked by higher resilience, more innovation, more liveable cities, robust agriculture, and stronger ecosystems.''

Why would we not want that? That is the advice of a Nobel Prize- winning economist.

A 2018 report from the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate estimates that this green energy transition may increase global economic growth by $26 trillion through 2030 and create 65 million low- carbon jobs. Growth will come not just from those new jobs but also from lower energy costs. As Stiglitz points out, transitioning to renewables can reduce costs. To quote him, ``Many energy efficiency technologies actually have a negative cost to implement.''

Renewable energy, electric cars, battery storage, carbon capture, energy efficiency, low-carbon and zero-carbon fuels--these are technologies of the future, promising millions of great jobs. The question is whether these will be American technologies and American jobs or whether China, Germany, Japan, or other countries will win the transition to a low-carbon economy. Why should America lose that competition just to protect polluters?

Senator Feinstein can eloquently tell us how innovation is California's bread and butter, so let me inquire of the distinguished chairman/ranking member. What kind of exciting developments are you seeing in California?

Exciting developments in innovation are you seeing in California.

I thank the Senator. Of course, California's massive economy is a vitally important part of the innovation that is going to help solve this problem if we can get the political will and the economic alignments to do this.

Rhode Island, of course, has its own small innovation story. We are the first State to get offshore wind, steel in the water, and electrons on the grid. We are very proud of the company that did it. Indeed, the market has responded quite favorably. They have been bought for half a billion dollars by a larger company. That is great progress for Rhode Island.

We are a leader in the composites industry. One of our composites companies, TPI Composites, is manufacturing wind blades for wind towers that spin turbines and generate electricity. We also got our first electric buses in Providence, and the electric bus bodies were built by the same group in Warren, RI, to be light, clean, and efficient.

In 10 years, TPI has manufactured more than 10,000 wind blades and is gearing up to provide more than 3,350 bus bodies. So things are moving.

Our university is following on. It received $19 million in funding from the National Science Foundation for ``developing a new research infrastructure to assess, predict and respond to the effects of climate variability on coastal ecosystems.'' We have to bring innovation to bear on the changes that are coming, and we have to bring innovation to bear to protect against the changes that will be devastating if we don't act responsibly.

I hope that we as a body in the Senate take the message from what is happening around us--your fires, Louisiana's floods, Rhode Island's sea level rise, and predictions for turning ourselves into an archipelago-- and begin to take this seriously, or we could just keep protecting the polluters.

I thank the Senator.

Senator Feinstein may remember, I came here in 2007. I was sworn in in January of 2007. In 2007 and in 2008 and in 2009, just what we would expect to be happening on an issue like this was actually happening in the Senate. By my recollection, we had four bipartisan climate bills, we had bipartisan climate hearings, and we had constant bipartisan climate conversations. This was an issue which was being taken seriously by this body through 2009, then in 2010 something happened, and all of that bipartisan work came to a screeching, dead halt. What happened was that the Supreme Court--five Republican Justices on the Supreme Court--issued a decision called Citizens United, which told big industries, big special interests like the fossil fuel industry: You can now spend as much money as you want in politics. There are no limits on what you can spend. That industry took off like a gunshot, like a runner from the start with that decision--I suspect they anticipated it--and instantly shut down all bipartisanship on climate change by virtue of the political spending and threats that Citizens United allowed them to do.

If we could do it before Citizens United, we ought to be able to do it still now that we have a better understanding of what the threats are. This is a very real proposition to get something done, and I thank the Senator for her leadership over many years on this and many causes.

I thank the Senator, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am here today to express my extremely grave concerns about the person we have just begun to move to a vote to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He would be Commissioner McNamee if we were to confirm him. This is in an administration that has distinguished itself with terrible energy appointments--conceivably the worst. It is too important to our country to have an independent and reality-based Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to allow an industry plant like Mr. McNamee--who will never be independent, who will always have his thumb on the scale for the vested interests--get onto the Federal Regulatory Commission.

In addition to the bad decisions he will make because he will be trying to throw decisions for the fossil fuel industry, he will also create an enormous amount of litigation because people who come before a Federal administrative agency are entitled to an honest look at their claims, and if the regulatory agency is incapable of giving them that honest look, that is grounds for appeal.

McNamee is a walking failure of any honest look at any question in which the fossil fuel industry--and specifically the coal industry--has an interest. Sadly, his position isn't just a question of a personal failing; he comes out of a system, and I am going to take some time to describe the system he comes out of.

No one less than our late friend Senator John McCain was once asked in an interview: Why has it taken so long for Congress to address climate change? Katie Couric was the interviewer. She asked:

Why has it taken so long, Senator?

Here was John McCain's answer:

Special interests. It is the special interests. It is the

utility companies and the petroleum companies and other

special interests. They are the ones that have blocked

progress in the Congress of the United States and the

administration. That is a little straight talk.

The way these industries work is kind of interesting. They figured out pretty early on that if they are a big power company or a big coal company or any big fossil fuel polluter and they come forward into a debate and make their argument as ExxonMobil, as Koch Industries, as Murray coal, people will immediately discount what they are saying because people will understand that the companies have a massive conflict of interest, that they have the massive conflict of interest of wishing to continue to pollute for free. So they have set up this whole array of front groups to disguise that it is truly the fossil fuel industry whose hands are pulling our strings.

We came to the floor some time ago--a considerable number of the Democratic Senators--to point out this coordinated, phony, false-front, fossil-fuel-funded operation, and we made the phony front group so mad that they actually sent a letter disputing that they were a coordinated group of phony fronts by putting all their phony names together on a single letterhead, arguing that they weren't coordinated together in a letter in which they most obviously were coordinated together. That is how upset they were when the mischief they are up to was pointed out.

This was groups like Americans for Tax Reform; ALEC; Cascade Policy Institute; CFACT; Competitive Enterprise Institute; I love this name-- the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, which has nothing to do with Ben Franklin and even less to do with public integrity; Georgia Public Policy Foundation; Heritage Foundation; the notorious Heartland Institute, which distinguished itself by putting up billboards equating climate scientists to the Unabomber--classy group, that Heartland; the so-called James Madison Institute, which has nothing to do with James Madison. These groups love to steal the names of historic figures to try to give themselves a little bit of initial credence. There is also a John Locke Foundation--historians will know how important John Locke was to the founding of this country; the MacIver Institute; Kansas Policy Institute; Montana Policy Institute; NPRI; PRI; Pelican Institute; Rio Grande Foundation; Virginia Institute; and, of course, a Yankee Institute for Public Policy.

This whole piece of public relations and propaganda machinery is an ongoing disgrace, and there are some folks who have been looking at it pretty hard recently and saying some pretty rough stuff about it.

I would like to start with two recent articles by Paul Krugman. He is no fool. He won a Noble Prize for economics. He begins by noting what everybody who studies this already knows:

Climate change poses a major threat to the nation, and some

of its adverse effects are already being felt.

He goes on to say:

There are almost no good-faith climate change deniers.

I think he is accurate about that. I think there are almost no good- faith climate change deniers because, to use his phrase, ``denying science for profit'' has become such a constant activity, as shown by this whole array of phony, fossil-fuel-funded organizations.

He goes on to describe some of the history. ``Climate denial''--I am quoting here--``actually follows in the footsteps of . . . the long campaign by tobacco companies to confuse the public about the dangers of smoking.''

I have given several speeches about this on the Senate floor. The apparatus that the tobacco companies used to confuse the public about the dangers of tobacco morphed into a bigger, more cleverly hidden, and better funded apparatus but basically started with the same route that the fossil fuel industry took to confuse the public about the dangers of its product in the same way that the tobacco industry tried to confuse the public about the dangers of its

product. The tobacco scheme was so fraudulent that they were actually found liable for fraud in Federal court--not just at the trial court level but upheld at the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

He goes on to say:

Every one of the handful of well-known scientists who have

expressed climate skepticism has received large sums of money

from these companies or from dark money conduits like Donors

Trust.

And, of course, it also flows through those phony front groups whom I described who wrote back to us to deny that they were coordinated phony front groups.

``Climate denial is rooted in greed,'' Paul Krugman continues, because it is paid for by the fossil fuel industry.

Then he comes back the very next week with a second article, still on the same theme, bewailing the fact that the Republican Party has ``committed itself to denying the facts on climate change; that it is now ``completely dominated by climate deniers'' and ``hostile to science in general.''

He describes the importance of climate denial and the weaponized fake news and the relentless propaganda as being--to use his words, ``Climate denial, you might say, was the crucible in which the essential elements of Trumpism were formed.'' Denying facts, repeating lies incessantly, manipulating the public debate, delivering weaponized fake news through unreliable sites, and poisoning the public debate with nonsense is how I would generally describe what he was describing.

He says:

Conspiracy theorizing has long been standard practice among

climate deniers.

And these are the organizations that propagate those

conspiracy theories.

He goes on:

Most prominent climate deniers are basically paid to take

that position, receiving large amounts of money from fossil-

fuel companies.

He says:

If we fail to meet the challenge of climate change, with

catastrophic results. . . . it will be a disaster brought on

by corruption, willful ignorance, conspiracy theorizing and

intimidation.

And this question of corruption isn't just coming from the left. There is a free market think tank called Niskanen Center, and Will Wilkinson from that institute just wrote a piece about what he called the ``spiraling crisis of American corruption,'' which includes the ``failure to require financial transparency of those who would . . . fix our fates.'' All of these groups hide who their donors are. There is no financial transparency because they are fronts for the fossil fuel industry, and if they reported all the money they got from them, their purpose as front groups evaporates. Creating, Will Wilkinson continues, ``a class of rich and powerful miscreants who profit by gnawing away at the rule of law.''

God forbid we should have real hearings on climate change, that there should be legislative rule of law. God forbid that we should get honest decisions out of EPA based on the science under rule of law. No. None of that. All of that goes under the wind so that rich and powerful miscreants of the fossil fuel industry can get their way.

Their pooled wealth, Wilkinson continues, can be deployed to keep them in the money, and that is what is going on, creating--and I think this is a really pointed phrase--in our country ``a doom loop of corruption, distrust and institutional degeneration.''

What our friend Senator McCain said was the mischief of the special interests in stopping climate action--this is how it is done--through secret money, dark money, front groups, phony propaganda, all backed up with fossil fuel industry political muscle.

It is sickening, and this guy McNamee comes smack out of one of these groups--the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation has received more than $3\1/2\ million from Koch-related foundations--this is Koch Industries, not Coke the drink; I don't want to disparage the wrong Coke--Koch Industries and Koch brothers-related foundations between 1998 and 2017--$3\1/2\ million. It also received about $1.5 million from Donors Trust. Donors Trust is an entity that has no business purpose. It is set up to identity-launder donations. So if you don't want somebody to know that ExxonMobil is funding you, ExxonMobil gives the money to Donors Trust, and Donors Trust gives the money to exactly who ExxonMobil told them to because it is donor directed, and now you can report: Guess what. I got my money from Donors Trust, not ExxonMobil. No business purpose. It simply sells transparency out, brings obscurity in, and is a dark money conduit for big special interests. It really is a disgrace. This guy comes out of this world. By the way, there was $100,000 from ExxonMobil also, because they don't hide all their money, which goes into the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

The last contribution from the Texas Public Policy Foundation to the Trump's nominee pool was a woman named Kathleen Hartnett White, who did such a horrendous job in the Environment and Public Works Committee, showed such ignorance of environmental matters, and had no clue that carbon dioxide actually reacts chemically with water and is acidifying the oceans--that is science you can do in a high school lab. It is incredibly simple. I have done it here on the Senate floor with one of those bubbler stones for an aquarium and my own breath and our glass of water. To not know that carbon dioxide acidifies the ocean is appallingly ignorant. She also didn't know how much climate change and the warming atmosphere was warming the oceans. Well, it is more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases that have gone into the oceans.

The oceans are warming at such a rate that if you took the explosive power of a nuclear weapon--the Hiroshima nuclear bomb--and converted 100 percent of that energy into heat, you would have to be setting off multiple bombs per second in our oceans to match how fast climate change is warming our oceans. You can measure that with thermometers. This is not complicated. It was too much for her. She couldn't figure it out.

When oceans warm, they rise, because oceans expand. Warm water expands as it warms. This is basic physics--no clue. This you can measure essentially with yardsticks. You can measure it at the tide gauges that NOAA and the Navy have run in some cases for a century. This is the world he comes out of. This is the infiltration of the fossil fuel front groups and Koch Industries into what used to be legitimate institutions of government.

What really kills me is that McNamee, at one point talking about climate science, said:

There's an organized propaganda campaign. . . . The problem

is, it's taken hold . . . and there is a lot of money behind

this.

Well, he is describing something very accurately, but it is not the scientists all across this country, in every one of our home State universities, working on studying and teaching climate science. This is called projection. It is the rhetorical device where you take the sin that you are most obviously guilty of and immediately accuse your adversary of it, so that when you are caught, it looks like it is a tie of mutual criticisms. As Paul Krugman said in one of his pieces, ``Projection much?'' Indeed.

I will close by talking about this guy's effort to prop up coal through these completely bogus power protection plans that have come out of the Department of Energy on his watch and that he has defended here. Even the Trump appointees to FERC threw these dumb things out. They were so bad, totally violating the Federal Power Act. But he was for them.

He has said that if you don't preserve coal, you risk resilience and security on the grid. That is a question that FERC is going to be looking at. He ought to recuse himself on this. He has refused to recuse himself on this, but I will tell you there are people who say that it is actually working the other way.

Here is an article: ``Powering into the Future: Renewable Energy & Grid Reliability.''

In addition, renewable energy can strengthen the grid. . .

. contributing to capacity and resource adequacy, maintaining

local voltage and frequency performance, minimizing grid

disturbances, providing grid balancing services, and creating

a more flexible and diverse generation fleet.

Do you think they are going to get a fair chance in front of this guy when they come to FERC?

Here is another headline: ``Renewable microgrids can enhance grid resilience.''

Here is another one: Against ``physical risk and cyber-attacks . . . the electric grid have made renewable energy sources more attractive.'' They are more attractive when you measure for protecting against physical risk and cyber attacks. They ``can add a layer of protection from physical damage to the grid.'' It is not coal.

Here is a report out of Texas suggesting that the State's power production can be made more reliable by the addition of solar and wind renewables.

Here is an article, headlined: ``Solar energy is better than coal for national security infrastructure--says Department of Energy.'' I would love to know how McNamee let this get by him. This is his Department of Energy telling the truth because nobody seems to notice.

``Deloitte: The case for renewables has never been stronger''--in part because ``wind and solar power are now viewed as a solution to grid balancing,'' says Deloitte, ``while placing downward pressure on electricity prices.'' Solar and wind are ``placing downward pressure'' on solar and wind prices, and they ``have also demonstrated an ability to strengthen grid resilience and reliability and provide essential grid services.''

So give me a break about this ``coal needs to defend the grid'' nonsense. That was cooked up probably by these phony-baloney front groups as an excuse to continue to sell their polluting product.

The Deloitte report itself, in the executive summary says: ``[U]tilities are beginning to demonstrate how distributed, renewable generation in a microgrid setting can be a cost-effective alternative to traditional [transmission and distribution]'' alternatives and protect the grid that way and ``that [independently owned utilities] are exploring opportunities to enhance resilience through strategic renewable integration.''

Integrating renewables strategically improves grid resilience. Here is the clincher: ``Various [independently owned utilities]'' will need ``regulatory license to innovate.'' ``Whether those reforms will drive innovation fast enough to keep consumers' lights on during future catastrophic weather events'' is yet to be determined.

So here they are saying that getting renewables will help to keep people's lights on, but how are they ever going to get a fair hearing from this guy who pretends, based on phony-baloney front group information, that it takes coal grants to keep the grid secure when all these reports show that just plain isn't true? It is nonsense.

The worst of all and the closer for him was that he was on the 2009 transition team for Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli when he was elected attorney general of Virginia.

I am really honored that our departing Senator from Florida happens to be here on the floor today, because he and I are both graduates of the University of Virginia. There was a scientist at the University of Virginia named Michael Mann. He was a climate scientist. He is the guy who did what became known as the hockey stick graph, which showed carbon emissions and then boom, up it goes--like the blade of a hockey stick--at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

So how did the fossil fuel industry react to that? Did they engage him in scientific debate? No, they tried to get him fired. They sent their front groups out to attack his emails to try to get into his emails so they could mock him and set their trolls to work on him. Our university, the University of Virginia, had to fight Attorney General Cuccinelli and take him all the way to the Virginia Supreme Court where his bogus effort to harass and intimidate a climate scientist was finally, once and for all, thrown out by the Supreme Court of the State of Virginia. It was one of the lowest points in rule of law in the history of this country when an attorney general is using his powers of office to flack for an industry that supported him to try to damage the reputation and career of a climate scientist because the science was not showing what the industry wanted.

Their solution was to go after the scientist and try to ruin his reputation. It was a disgrace, and this guy was on his transition team. Give me a break. If we can't do better than this, we should all be ashamed of ourselves.

I yield the floor.

Of course.

That is a very true statement, and I would add that there are very few transcendent moments that take place here in the temple of mammon, where big special interests throw their weight around, but one of them that I have been privileged to be here for was the Senator from Florida, Mr. Nelson, talking about his time in space in a NASA spaceship and looking down on this Earth, not seeing red States or blue States, not seeing sectarian differences or differences among countries, not seeing national boundaries, but seeing us as the small globe spinning through the void that we are. It is a moment I will never forget.

When you look at that and think of that message that he brought and think that we are busily doing everything we can to ruin the balance of the systems upon which we depend because we will not say no to the biggest and most muscling and remorseless industry that probably has ever stalked the halls of this building, it is such a national tragedy that this would happen in the United States of America.

The whole world will suffer for our failing. The finger will end up pointing at us because the story will come out--and it is coming out already--about fossil fuel money and influence and their threats and hidden money and the front groups and the whole piece of stinking machinery in which they operate.

So the contrast between the Senator's transcendent view of the globe from space and the foul politics of this industry that we experience here every day is one of the great discrepancies that is hard for me to take into my heart.

Yes.

That is a true statement.

The scientists of the world have more or less reached consensus that that 2 degrees Centigrade increase is one we do not want to go beyond because it could set in force further consequences that would accelerate the problem--for instance, large amounts of frozen Arctic methane or undersea methane letting loose.

We already see lakes that bubble in Canada and Russia from methane melting up through them. They are methane bubbles, not air bubbles. If that accelerates, there can be a feedback loop in which the input we have done releases more greenhouse gases, which, in turn, makes more greenhouse gases and more temperature and more greenhouse gases and up you go. Of course, a lot of that goes into the oceans, and nobody knows better than Florida what that is doing along your coasts to people's property. So you don't have to wait to hit 2 degrees Centigrade. Right now the safe opinion is that 1.5 degrees Centigrade is all we can afford. The risk that you are wrong is enough to justify trying to stop at 1.5 degrees Centigrade. Why not be safe when you are dealing with our planet?

Even well before then, in your State, we are seeing what is going on and we are seeing the daytime flooding. You and I have been walking around in boots on sunny days as the tide comes washing in where it has never been before--these king tides.

We have groups like Freddie Mac--which is not exactly a leftwing, green organization--warning that because of this, there is a significant chance of there being a coastal property value crash along our coasts as that danger of sea level rise backs into the insurance and the mortgage that you need to be able to buy a house. If you can't insure your house or can't mortgage your house--let me put it another way; if the next person to buy your house can't get insurance or a mortgage, good luck getting a good price on your house. That is it. They predicted it could be as bad as the 2008 mortgage meltdown.

It is happening now, and we think that 1.5 to 2 degrees Centigrade that scientists say is a tipping point, with 2 degrees as a clear point of no return where these knock-on consequences will begin to move us out of control--we can't stop it at that point.

I thank the distinguished Senator from Florida.

He has been a particularly dear friend in our years here together. We sat next to each other on the Intelligence Committee, and I was able to see in that classified session his extraordinary skill as an examiner and cross-examiner of witnesses. He usually began by saying ``I am just a country lawyer from Florida,'' and everybody on the Intelligence Committee knew when they heard that, it was time to pay attention because something really good was about to happen. This country lawyer knew how to get to the bottom of things in a hurry.

His work to protect his home State has been nothing less than inspiring to me, and I appreciate it. If there is one thing we can say is hopeful in all of this mess--on the other side of this building, there are going to be gavels that go into the hands of a party that is not controlled by the fossil fuel industry, and there are going to be inquiries and subpoenas and questions and witnesses, and a lot of what I am talking about is going to become very apparent to the American people.

The coverup of the role of the fossil fuel industry and putting people like McNamee into these positions is going to be exposed.

I yield.

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

Madam President, this evening, the leader or someone standing in for the leader is going to come and close out the floor with a number of unanimous consents. One of them will be a unanimous consent to push consideration of the National Flood Insurance Program-- to reauthorize it--a week down the road.

I will not object to that unanimous consent request, but I do want to speak to the predicament of the National Flood Insurance Program. For coastal States, this is a very big deal, and this is a program that is now completely out of step with the conditions that coastal States see before them, so we have to get this fixed.

The liability of the National Flood Insurance Program ran up to $30 billion after Hurricane Harvey. It borrowed $30 billion from the U.S. Treasury. That is its borrowing limit. It basically maxed itself out. In October, Congress forgave $16 billion. We moved that from a liability of the National Flood Insurance Program to a liability of the United States, in effect putting it on our national credit card. That allowed NFIP to pay out claims for Harvey, Irma, and Maria. At this point, that leaves the program $20 billion in debt. We are not sure, completely, because claims are still being processed from the 2018 hurricane season, but CRS says as of September, the NFIP has only $9.9 billion of remaining borrowing authority.

CRS also points out that repetitive loss and severe repetitive loss properties over the history of NFIP have totaled about 30 percent of all claims--a grand total of around $17 billion--which is almost a perfect match with the $16 billion we had to forgive.

If you look at the properties NFIP now insures, the repetitive loss and severe repetitive loss properties are about 2 percent by number, but they account for about 16 percent of all claims. So it is a pretty big piece of our National Flood Insurance Program liability. It is about $9 billion.

We can keep going forward and funding these repetitive losses time after time after time after time, but there are some real problems with doing that. One is that back in the old days, before sea levels were rising, when you expected the weather on the coast to revert to status quo after a big storm, they made then what seemed a sensible rule that you had to rebuild just what was there. We weren't going to fund improvements and modifications with Uncle Sam's dollars on a flooded house. You had to rebuild what was there. The problem is, maps are changing, sea levels are rising, storm vulnerabilities are pushing inland, and to rebuild in place now no longer makes sense. You have to at least be able to rebuild higher and out of the way of storm surge or you have to be able to relocate. To rebuild every couple of years and get wiped out by a new storm really makes no sense, but the NFIP encouraged people to do just that because it is hard to get paid out to relocate.

The relocation rules of the National Flood Insurance Program has to be triggered by a State or municipality doing its own buyout. If you are, let's say, a small Rhode Island municipality, you have a pretty strong interest in not doing a major buyout of flooded properties because as soon as that happens, they are torn down--it takes a long time to get there just for one thing, these are slow processes--but the property gets torn down, the property goes to public space, and the town loses tax revenue from the ownership of that property. So it is a shot to the municipal budget to go down that road, and it is not a decision made by the homeowner. The homeowner is stuck waiting for the municipality in the State to make that decision.

So the NFIP program--we have to get it stood up again, we have to get it reauthorized, and we have to allow flexibility consistent with rising seas so homes can be lifted if necessary. If it makes no sense to rebuild in that place because it is just going to be washed out again, we have to help make sure this program allows homeowners the choice to simply take their final payout and go elsewhere rather than in order to stay in the program we have to rebuild and rebuild and rebuild a house the taxpayers continue to have to pay for.

For anybody who complains that there is a subsidy in here for coastal homeowners, let me say, the $16 billion in forgiveness--this big, one- time forgiveness that we did--must be compared to $44 billion in crop subsidies from the years 2015 through 2017. If we are going to help inland Midwestern and other farmers with $44 billion in crop subsidies, there is no reason to deny coastal homeowners some protection as well. We can help a lot if we can change these rules in a sensible way.

The States that are being hit are getting hit pretty hard. Florida, it has been estimated by the Union of Concerned Scientists, has the most homes and property values at risk from sea level rise--64,000 homes may see flooding every other week by 2045. Those are going to be a lot of claims on national flood insurance. Half of those claims are in South Florida, so those counties and municipalities are going to take a heck of a hit.

In Georgia, king tide flooding regularly floods St. Mary's, Brunswick, and lower portions of Savannah, according to an article in Atlanta magazine. The road out to Tybee Island flooded a record 23 times in 2015, and it is expected that with just 1 foot of sea level rise, it will be underwater 100 times annually--again creating enormous risk.

(Mr. KENNEDY assumed the Chair.)

It is terrific to see the Senator from Louisiana taking the President's chair right now because the fourth National Climate Assessment highlights Louisiana as facing some of the highest land loss rates in the world.

``Between 1932 and 2016, Louisiana lost more than 2,000 square miles of land.''

I am not even going to talk about what 2,000 square miles means in my small State of Rhode Island, but it is a big deal, and it is due in part to high rates of relative sea level rise.

Getting the National Flood Insurance Program right--getting it reauthorized and adapting it for people who are going to be swept off of their lands by sea level rise--is very important. I do want to commend Senator Kennedy for his persistence and leadership in trying to solve this problem.

North Carolina--according to an article published by the Weather Channel, one beach near East Seagull Drive in Nags Head ``has been eroding at about six feet [back] per year.'' If a beach is eroding at 6 feet per year, a lot of homes are going to be wiped out. We have to get the Flood Insurance Program adapted to that.

North Carolina itself has predicted a rise of 1 meter of sea level rise by 2100. Data compiled and analyzed by NOAA shows the worst-case potential twice that at 2 meters.

According to the Fourth National Climate Assessment, flood events in Charleston, SC, have been increasing, and by 2045, Charleston, SC, is projected to face nearly 180 tidal floods per year--there are going to be a lot of properties making claims against this program--180 tidal floods per year compared to 11 in 2014. This is getting worse, and it is getting worse fast.

In Texas, Rice University and Texas A&M compared flood damage from the storms that hit Houston between 1999 to 2009, and they found that FEMA's flood risk maps only captured about 25 percent of the actual damage. So if you are a municipality, in addition to the problems that you have trying to deal with protecting your tax base and of having people flee valuable coastal property as sea levels rise, you also have the problem that when you look to the Federal Government to figure out what your risk is and which are the problem areas, the FEMA maps are wrong. The FEMA maps are misleading.

We saw this firsthand in Rhode Island as well. We had to do a lot of State-level work to get correct mapping so that our coastal municipalities could have a true assessment of their risk. Those homeowners need to know those facts. Homeowners who are now relying on FEMA maps are being misled. We have to fix that problem as we fix the NFIP problem.

More than half of the homes damaged by Hurricane Harvey were not listed in any flood risk areas, so they didn't have flood insurance. That is another problem. Not only is there going to be a big load of new claims on the National Flood Insurance Program because of sea level rise, not only are we going to have to adapt the way claimants can make their claim so they can raise their homes to survive the next storm or clear out because they can't survive the next storm, but we are also going to have to deal with this problem of homes that aren't covered by flood insurance because FEMA's maps are wrong, and homeowners are then left stuck without insurance.

For a lot of reasons, my patience is wearing out with this continued kicking down the road of the NFIP program. I have been working on this--I hope in a constructive way--and I intend to continue working on it--I hope in a constructive way--but, again, my patience is wearing out with our inability to agree and make these changes.

I yield the floor with, again, my compliments to the Senator from Louisiana, who has been a very constructive and very ardent proponent of finding a solution.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 20 minutes as in morning business; further, that at the conclusion of my remarks, the Senator from Massachusetts, Mr. Markey, be recognized; that we have permission to engage in a colloquy; and that at the conclusion of Senator Markey's remarks, Senator Shaheen of New Hampshire be recognized.

Mr. President, a persistent argument of my climate talks is how corrupt climate denial is. The premise of that argument is that the fossil fuel industry denial apparatus is wrong about climate change and knows it is wrong. That is my case. The fossil fuel industry denial apparatus knows it is wrong about climate change.

Well, it is a beautiful world, and every once in a while, along comes something that proves my case. Last week, on the afternoon of Black Friday, the Trump administration released its National Climate Assessment by 13 Federal agencies describing the monumental damage the United States is facing from climate change. In more than 1,000 pages, the report contradicted nearly every fake assertion Trump and his fossil fuel flunky Cabinet have made about climate change.

Trump's pro-polluter policies are predicated on the lies and nonsense of this fossil fuel industry denial apparatus, and this report is devastating to those policies and to those lies.

So how did the fossil fuel apparatus respond? What did they do to rebut the National Climate Assessment? They did nothing. They did nothing. There was all that big talk from Scott Pruitt about how they were going to ``red team'' climate science. Well here comes the climate science. Where is your red team? Nothing. Instead of engaging with this devastating report by the U.S. Government's leading scientists, they tried to bury it, timing its release for a day of the year when it would be least likely to get public attention.

Consider for a moment the environment in which they backed down from this challenge--no red team, no nothing. They just whimpered and ran away and tried to bury the report on Black Friday. At a time when their industry populates the Trump administration, at a time when the President is in their pocket, at a time when both Houses of Congress are under fossil fuel industry control, their phony climate denial front groups wield more influence than ever. This should have been their moment.

The tell here is that even in this environment, the fossil fuel industry and its bevy of stooges in the Trump administration got this report and did nothing. Why? Why nothing? There is only one answer. Because they know they are wrong. They know the real science is right. They know their science denial campaign is phony, so they backed down. They folded like a cardboard suitcase in a rainstorm.

That, my friends, is an admission. It is an admission by inaction. It is an admission that even the fossil fuel industry knows the climate science is irrefutable.

Interestingly, ``irrefutable'' is just what President Trump and his family said about climate science in this full-page advertisement they signed in the New York Times in 2009, saying that science of climate was ``irrefutable'' and that there will be ``catastrophic and irreversible'' consequences of climate change.

The new National Climate Assessment plus the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report are both very clear. The irrefutable science that these two reports disclose couldn't be more clear: Damage from climate change is already occurring; there is no credible natural explanation for it; human activity is the dominant cause; future damage from further warming will be worse than we previously thought; economies will suffer; and we are almost out of time to prevent the worst consequences of climate change.

The Bank of England report on this--they are the biggest financial regulator in the UK, and they said: The financial risks are far- reaching in their breadth and magnitude, have uncertain and extended time horizons, are foreseeable, but these risk factors will be minimized if there is an orderly transition to a carbon economy, but the window for an orderly transition is finite and closing. We are almost out of time.

These two reports are tough stuff. As the Trump administration summary states, the ``Earth's climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities. The impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future,'' which makes sense, since in the history of human civilization, the Earth has never seen atmospheric CO2 concentrations like we have today.

Many scientists have said warming of around 3 degrees centigrade is now likely. What does that mean? Heating the planet well beyond 2 degrees centigrade would create a ``totally different world,'' says Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University. He says:

It would be indescribable, it would turn the world upside

down in terms of its climate. There would be nothing like it

in the history of civilization.

Here is what the Trump climate assessment chronicles: From our Ocean State, we are concerned about sea levels, ocean acidification, and warming. We note sea levels are rising, as oceans warm and upland ice melts. If fossil fuels are not constrained, the reports says, ``many coastal communities will be transformed by the latter part of this century.'' For my coastal State, that is a pretty ominous warning. Along coasts, fisheries, tourism, human health, even public safety are being ``transformed, degraded or lost due in part to climate change impacts,

particularly sea level rise and higher numbers of extreme weather events.''

You get the sea level coming up, and that extreme weather event-- which is stronger to begin with now--has a lot more ocean to throw at our shores.

Out West, ``more frequent and larger wildfires, combined with increasing development at the wildland-urban interface portend increasing risks to property and human life,'' the report says. By the way, from 2000 to 2016, wildfires have burned at least 3.7 million acres of the United States in every single year except for 3. From 2000 to 2016, more than 3.7 million acres burned in all years but 3. California still smolders as I speak.

More than 100 million people in the United States live with poor air quality, and climate change will ``worsen existing air pollution levels.'' Increased wildfire smoke heightens respiratory and cardiovascular problems. With higher temperatures from global warming, asthma and hay fever rise.

Groundwater supplies have declined over the last century, and the decrease is accelerating. ``Significant changes in water quantity and quality are evident across the country,'' the report finds.

Midwest farmers take a big hit: warmer, wetter, and more humid conditions from climate change; greater incidence of crop disease and more pests; worsened conditions for stored grain. During the growing season, the Midwest will see temperatures climb more than any other region of the United States, the report says. Crop yields will suffer-- a warning that is echoed by grain giants like Cargill.

To sum it all up, the report says climate change will ``disrupt many areas of life,'' hurting the U.S. economy, affecting trade, exacerbating overseas conflicts for our military. Costs will be high: ``With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century--more than the current gross domestic product of many U.S. States.''

Danger warnings already flash in some economic sectors. Freddie Mac has warned of a coastal property value crash, saying: ``The economic losses and social disruption may happen gradually, but they are likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the housing crisis and Great Recession.'' From a coastal State, that is an ominous warning.

The insurance industry agrees. Trade publication Risk and Insurance has warned: ``Continually rising seas will damage coastal residential and commercial property values to the point that property owners will flee those markets in droves, thus precipitating a mortgage value collapse that could equal or exceed the mortgage crisis that rocked the global economy in 2008.'' By the way, the leading edge of this may already be upon us as coastal property values are beginning to lag inland property values, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Separate from the coastal property values threat is another warning about a carbon bubble in fossil fuel markets. Fossil fuel reserves, now claimed as assets, that are not developable in a 2-degrees-Centigrade world become what they call stranded assets. A recent economic publication estimated that collapse of the ``carbon bubble'' would wipe out ``around 82 percent of global coal reserves, 49 percent of global gas reserves, and 33 percent of global oil reserves.'' A separate economic review warns that $12 trillion of fossil fuel industry financial value ``could vanish off their balance sheets globally in the form of stranded assets.'' Twelve trillion dollars is over 15 percent of global GDP, which is why the Bank of England--which I quoted earlier as a financial regulator--is warning of this carbon asset bubble as a systemic economic risk. That may be the blandest set of words in the English language that convey the worst threat. If you were to graph ``blandness of language'' and ``seriousness of threat,'' you would probably come up with systemic economic risk. It basically means economic meltdown. Well, that is what we are looking at.

This level of collapse could cascade beyond the fossil fuel companies. It is not just a question of their shareholders getting wiped out. It is such a crash that it cascades out into the global economy--a crash like that, unfortunately, hits the United States particularly hard because lower cost producers can hold on and unload fossil fuel reserves into the collapsing market at fire sale prices. When they do, the economists warn, ``regions with higher marginal costs''--like the United States--``lose almost their entire oil and gas industry.''

The solution is to decarbonize, to invest in more renewables, to broaden our energy portfolio away from this asset collapse risk. One paper concludes that ``the United States is worse off if it continues to promote fossil fuel production and consumption.'' Another paper concludes--this is the good news:

If climate policies are implemented early on and in a

stable and credible framework, market participants are able

to smoothly anticipate the effects. In this case there would

not be any large shock in asset prices and there would be no

systemic risk.

So how do we get to eliminating this hazard of no systemic risk? How do we get to no systemic risk? We do what works for us anyway: move to renewables. As this graph shows, we have to make a big move to avoid this hazard. A carbon price--which is the remedy the fossil fuel industry pretends to support, while sending its political forces out to oppose exactly the laws it pretends to support--would allow this big move to happen, all while generating revenues that could be cycled back to States and citizens and help the hardest hit areas of transition.

The smart move we need to take to make this happen does not have to be painful. We avoid a lot of pain if we make the move, but that doesn't mean the move itself has to be painful. Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz says it is a win economically. He has testified:

Retrofitting the global economy for climate change would

help to restore aggregate demand and growth. Climate

policies, if well designed and implemented, are consistent

with growth, development, and poverty reduction. The

transition to a low-carbon economy is potentially a powerful,

attractive, and sustainable growth story, marked by higher

resilience, more innovation, more livable cities, robust

agriculture, and stronger ecosystems.

We could do it the hard way--do nothing; get hit with those dire economic consequences because the status quo is not safe.

Fortune magazine summed up the Trump administration's climate report quite beautifully, so I will quote them at some length: ``The report catalogs the observed damage and accelerating financial losses projected from a climate now unmoored from a 12,000-year period of relative stability.''

What a phrase that is. The Earth's climate, which we inhabit, is unmoored from a 12,000-year period of relative stability.

It goes on:

The result is that much of what humans have built, and many

of the things they are building now, are unsuited to the

world as it exists. And as time goes on, the added cost of

living in that world could total hundreds of billions of

dollars--annually.

Which way we now go depends on the Congress of the United States--on whether Congress can put the interests of our people ahead of the interests of the fossil fuel industry.

The record is not good. I will concede that. Since the Citizens United decision, the politics of climate change have turned into a tale of industry capture and control. So far, despite the fossil fuel industry's obvious conflict of interest, could there be a more obvious conflict of interest, indeed? Despite their provable pattern of deception and despite clear warnings from, well, virtually everywhere now, the Republican Party has proven itself incapable of telling the fossil fuel industry: No, we tried our best for you. We held in for you as long as we could, and we did everything we could think of, but we are not going to wreck our economy, our climate, our oceans, our country for you.

So it doesn't look good, but the climate report does say we still have time if we act fast.

I ask unanimous consent that an article by Max Boot, titled, ``I was wrong on climate change. Why can't other conservatives admit it, too?'' be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

It concludes: Why haven't other Conservatives owned up to this danger?

They are captives, first and foremost, of the fossil fuel

industry. . . . It is a tragedy for the entire planet that

the United States' governing party is impervious to science

and reason.

I will close with a reference to ``The Gathering Storm,'' which is Winston

Churchill's legendary book about a previous failure to heed warnings. Churchill quoted a poem of a train bound for destruction, rushing through the night, with the engineer asleep at the controls as disaster looms:

Who is in charge of the clattering train?

The axles creak, and the couplings strain.

. . . the pace is hot, and the points are near,

[but] Sleep hath deadened the driver's ear;

And signals flash through the night in vain.

Death is in charge of the clattering train!

I contend that we are now that sleeping driver, that the signals are flashing at us, so far, in vain, and that it is decidedly time to wake up.

I note that my distinguished colleague from Massachusetts has arrived. We have an order in place in which the Senator from Massachusetts is to be recognized at the conclusion of my remarks and that the distinguished Senator from New Hampshire, Mrs. Shaheen, is to be recognized at the conclusion of Senator Markey's remarks.

With that, I yield the floor to the coauthor of the Waxman-Markey legislation, the person who had done the most successful work to try to solve this climate problem at a time when the situation was slightly less desperate.

Mr. President, let me begin by thanking my senior Senator, Jack Reed, for calling us to the floor to reflect and memorialize a truly splendid Senator who represented the State of Rhode Island, our friend and a great Rhode Islander, Claiborne Pell.

I think my senior colleague has done an exemplary job of following in Senator Pell's footsteps of decency, civility, and quiet determination in the seat that Senator Pell once held. I cannot claim to hold the seat the Senator once held, but I can claim to have the desk at which Senator Pell once sat. If you look here right under where it says ``Pastore''--a Rhode Island Senator--in carved letters, you see in very small letters ``P-e-l-l'' and then ``R.I.''--like anybody needed to know that Claiborne Pell was from Rhode Island.

Claiborne Pell was very important in my political life. He spent years--in fact, decades--refusing to get involved in primaries. ``It is up to the party,'' he would say. When I ran for attorney general the first time I ran for elected office, I was in a three-way primary, and Claiborne Pell, for the first time in his career, endorsed me in that primary. He more than endorsed me; we went to a little park near his house in Newport, and he allowed me to film myself walking with him and conversing with him for my first commercial. Well, you can imagine, in a State like Rhode Island, when a legend like Claiborne Pell in the Democratic Party suddenly appears in your commercial in a primary--let me just say it was not a good day for my primary opponents. It was incredibly generous of Claiborne Pell to break a multidecade tradition on primaries in order to launch my first political effort, and I hope I have conducted myself since then in such a way that I never gave him or his family cause to regret it.

As Senator Reed pointed out, one of the significant lessons from Claiborne Pell's career here in the Senate--and it is one that I think of all the time--was that he looked beyond the scrum of the moment. There is always something going on here in the Senate. There is always some fight or some issue that is on the front page of the Washington Post and on the news channels. That is always, always, always going on, and that bright, shiny object very often attracts an enormous amount of attention in this body. I suspect that Senator Pell paid less attention to that daily scrum than almost anybody who has served in the Senate. He had a much more patient soul and steadily and quietly and modestly worked away at his priorities.

He used to make fun of himself for his interest in ``choo-choos.'' He would say ``choo-choo.'' Well, we have Amtrak in large part because of Senator Claiborne Pell's work. The Pell grant is named after him because of persistent leadership making sure that such a grant existed. Over years of work, he finally got it done. It was ultimately named for him, and it remains today an important part of how many young people here in the United States actually get to college and move toward their dreams.

He fought for years to create the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, and those institutions still exist. They are still doing great work today.

In Rhode Island, we are very proud of Sea Grant. Sea Grant has programs in all of our coastal States. Sea Grant was the invention of Claiborne Pell and Dean John Knauss, later dean of the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island.

When you look back and think of who the Senators were at the time that Claiborne Pell served, you can go through all these desk drawers that I showed you, and there are lots of names of Senators. Many of them are ones you never heard of. They were certainly important in their day, but their day is done and their names are no longer remembered. Senator Pell is remembered. He left lasting legacies like those, and he did it by quietly and patiently sticking with his priorities, which he knew were Rhode Island's priorities and America's priorities. He might not have been on the talk shows as much as other Senators. He might not have been quoted on the front page of the Washington Post as much as other Senators. He was not as attentive to the daily scrum of Washington conflict. But, my goodness, when you look back at the legacy that he left that still operates today, it is hard to find somebody of his era whose footprint is larger than that of this shy, quiet, patient, civil, and persistent man.

I would add to Senator Reed's comments about Claiborne Pell's philosophy a statement that he made to me that he made quite often. He said:

One of the things that you must learn in politics, Sheldon,

is how to let the other fellow have it your way. Always let

the other fellow have it your way.

What does it mean to always let the other fellow have it your way? What I take from that is that it means you have to stand by your principles. You have to achieve the goals you have set out for yourself and for your constituents, but on the way to getting there, if you can give others credit, if you can let other ideas join yours, if you can let other people have it your way, you are more likely to succeed. To this day, I still repeat that quote to new hires in my office.

The picture of Claiborne Pell that he signed for me is still right there on my bookcase, and I see it every time I sit in the chair in my office. He was a remarkable and special individual. He was not your standard-issue U.S. Senator. The particular way he chose to go about his duties has left a larger footprint than most of his colleagues were able to leave.

I will end with a story about one of my final memories. Senator Pell was out of the Senate. His illness had caught up with him to the point where he was barely able to speak any longer. His friend Ted Kennedy, who sat in this space right here--at a different desk but right here at this spot on the Senate floor--was sailing through Rhode Island, and he called up Senator Pell, and he said: I would like to take you out on my boat. So it was arranged that Senator Pell would go out on his sailboat. That required getting a wheelchair onto a sailboat, over the tippy docks that Senator Kennedy's boat pulled up to. Sure enough, we all grabbed a piece of the wheelchair and hoisted it up and stepped over into the boat and set his wheelchair down in the cockpit of the boat. Senator Kennedy started up the motor and drove it off down into Newport Harbor and then shut off the motor and put up the sails. As the wind caught the sails, the boat heeled over, and this old coastguardsman, Claiborne Pell, smiled a smile that I will never forget as the wind took the boat and we began to move out into Narragansett Bay.

The only other thing that was really fun about that was, because Senator Pell could barely speak any longer, he was actually a perfect fit for Senator Kennedy, who could basically not stop talking. There was this wonderful conversation with Teddy Kennedy and Claiborne Pell wherein Teddy Kennedy did all the talking for the both of them, and they both had a lovely time. They reflected on decades of friendship and service here. It was a real privilege to have a chance as a very new Senator to share that moment with those two

very different but mutually beloved lions of the Senate.

I particularly thank my distinguished senior colleague for organizing our chance to come here and reflect on our friend Claiborne Pell. I think nobody better than he carries on the Pell tradition.

I thank Senator Reed.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 20 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. President, it is hard, particularly for those of us from coastal States, to overstate the importance of the Earth's oceans as a storehouse of our food, as a regulator of our climate, as a highway for our travel and trade, and as a source of wonder, joy, and recreation. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, oceans contributed $1.5 trillion to the global economy in 2010. But climate change is putting this all at risk.

I have spoken frequently here on the floor about the threat climate change poses to our oceans and of the warning signals blaring around the world. One of the most overlooked of those signals is the enormous amount of heat accumulating in the oceans.

As CBS News reported last week, ``recent revelations have been particularly alarming'' and ``deserv[ing] of a big neon sign on Broadway.'' My humble floor speeches may not be a big neon sign on Broadway, but I do hope they shine a little light on the plight of our oceans, which ultimately is our human plight.

We know that more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by our greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed by the oceans--no dispute, not even by the Trump administration. The Federal Government's ``2017 Climate Science Special Report,'' a multiagency report by experts from NOAA, NASA, and the Department of Energy, labeled as ``the United States' most definitive statement on climate change science'' by the New York Times, found that the oceans absorbed more than 9 zettajoules of heat energy per year.

What is a zettajoule? A zettajoule is a billion trillion joules. A joule is a measure of heat energy, J-O-U-L-E. So 9 zettajoules is 9 billion trillion joules. That is more than 12 times the total energy that human beings use globally each year, just to put a scale on what 9 billion trillion joules is.

To get another measure of how much energy that is, visualize the power of a detonated Hiroshima-style atomic bomb. Imagine its classic mushroom cloud erupting into the sky. Imagine all of that energy from a Hiroshima-style atomic bomb captured as heat--pure heat.

Now imagine four Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs exploded every second-- every second. That is the equivalent of the excess heat going into our oceans because of climate change, because of our carbon emissions. More than four atomic bombs' worth of excess heat energy is being absorbed by the oceans every second of every day of every year. That is a massive amount of heat energy, and adding it to the oceans has consequences.

The most direct consequence of all that energy being pumped into the seas obviously is increased water temperatures. Global average ocean surface temperature is up around 0.8 degrees Celsius, or 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, since preindustrial times. That is enough to throw off the delicate balance of ocean conditions that marine creatures rely on to survive. Within that global ocean warming are extreme ocean temperature spikes around the world. These marine heat waves in the ocean were first identified and characterized in 2011. This is a newly described phenomenon that climate change has brought to our seas.

Although marine heat waves were first identified and characterized in 2011, they have already caused permanent damage in our oceans. The Great Barrier Reef is the largest coral reef in the world. It stretches for 1,400 miles off Northeastern Australia, and it is one of the seven natural wonders of the world. It is made up of corals--corals that can become heat stressed and evict the tiny algae that support corals and give corals their bright colors. Without the algae, the corals appear white, so these events are called coral bleaching.

In the summer of 2016, the Great Barrier Reef was hit by the most severe marine heat wave on record. It caused the longest and worst mass coral bleaching event in history. Then another heat wave and bleaching occurred the next year, in 2017. These unprecedented back-to-back bleaching events killed half of all corals in the Great Barrier Reef. If there is a wonder of the world, if there is a majestic feature of God's creation, it is the Great Barrier Reef, and we are busily wrecking it in this generation through carbon emissions.

The prognosis for the rest of the world's coral reefs is grim. The U.N. International Panel on Climate Change released a report last month, finding that coral reefs will all but disappear from Earth if we warm by 2 degrees Celsius--which, by the way, is the goal we are trying to stay under through the Paris accord. Even if we stay under that goal, corals will suffer immensely. Without any changes to our fossil fuel consumption, we are on track to blow by 2 degrees and hit 3 degrees Celsius of global warming by 2100, making corals virtually extinct.

Warming oceans are wreaking havoc on the world's fisheries. Fish feed the world and power coastal economies. The World Health Organization says that fish are the main source of protein for around 1 billion people worldwide. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 60 million people are employed in fisheries and agriculture.

Across the globe and here at home we are seeing dangerous shifts affecting the fishing industry. Rhode Island once had a booming lobster industry. But the lobster population is shifting north as our waters warm, leaving Rhode Island lobster traps empty. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports, ``The lobster industry in New York and southern New England has nearly collapsed.'' Maine, as Senator Angus King has pointed out, is temporarily benefiting from the northern movement of lobster, but the lobster will keep moving north into Canada as the oceans continue to warm.

Rhode Islanders and other New England fishermen are also looking worriedly at declining shellfish populations. Total landings for eastern oysters, northern quahogs, softshell clams, and northern bay scallops declined 85 percent between 1980 and 2010. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration identified warming ocean temperatures as the key driver for that decline. On the other side of that decline, of course, are the livelihoods of all the men and women in that industry.

The accumulating heat energy in our seas is also causing them to rise. As water warms, it expands. This thermal expansion is responsible for around one-third of the rise we have measured in sea levels. The rest comes mostly from melting ice, again, thanks to climate change. Global sea level has already risen over eight inches on average in the past 100 years--more in certain locations--and the rate of increase is accelerating.

Warming and expanding waters eat away at the large ice sheets in the Antarctic. As the edges melt away, the glaciers behind them melt more quickly, adding additional water to the ocean. The IPCC warns that as the world reaches warming levels of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius--again, what we are trying to stay at; this is our target. This isn't if it is worse. At that 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius, ice sheet melt could trigger multiple meters of sea level rise over time--meters, not inches. We are already 1 degree Celsius above preindustrial times, so there is not much room for maneuver between where we are and 1.5 to 2 degrees.

Warmer seas also supercharge storms. Hurricanes gain strength from heat energy in the oceans below them. Warmer oceans also evaporate more water to the atmosphere, generating more rainfall. Stronger and wetter storms then ride ashore on higher sea levels, pushing larger storm surges ahead of them into our coastal States.

Many of us remember the devastation Superstorm Sandy brought to the mid-Atlantic and southern New England States in 2012. Here is what Dr. Michael Mann, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, said about that storm:

Sea level rise adds to the storm surge of every single

storm that makes landfall. In the case of Superstorm Sandy,

in 2012, it added a foot to that 13-foot storm surge. One

foot . . . meant 25 more square miles of coastal flooding. It

meant several billion dollars worth of additional damage.

At one point during this year's hurricane season, our tropics faced nine active tropical storms. The hallmarks of these warm, ocean-fueled storms can be seen in powerful hurricanes that hit United States territories in recent years. Hurricane Harvey hit Houston; Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands; Super Typhoon Yutu hit the Northern Marianas, Hurricane Florence hit in the Carolinas, and Hurricane Michael hit in Florida.

No one storm can be blamed wholly on climate change, but scientists are increasingly able to link the increasingly dangerous level of storm damage to climate change, and we have had an eerie streak of record- setting storms in the past few years. Hurricane Harvey was the single greatest downpour in U.S. history, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It dumped over 50 inches of rain on Houston and over 30 trillion gallons of water over Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky. How much is 30 trillion gallons of water? For comparison, the Chesapeake Bay holds around 18 trillion gallons of water. Basically, it dumped nearly two Chesapeake Bays onto those States.

Harvey's deluge was fueled by record warm temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, found that Hurricane Harvey was over three times more likely to have occurred due to climate change and that its rainfall was increased by around 38 percent due to climate change.

Hurricane Florence intensified over water 1 to 2 degrees Celsius above average and dumped record rainfall and flooding on the Carolinas in September. Preliminary analysis suggests that Florence's rainfall was more than 50 percent higher due to climate change.

When Hurricane Michael hit Florida just last month, it passed over water 2 to 3 degrees Celsius warmer than average. As it passed over these waters, Michael's winds increased by 80 miles per hour in just 48 hours, a phenomenon scientists refer to as ``rapid intensification.'' It became the strongest storm ever to make an October landfall in the United States.

The direct link between sea temperature and hurricane intensification is well established: Each degree Celsius of ocean warming causes a 7- percent increase in maximum wind speed, and a storm's destructive potential increases by three times the wind speed increase.

So how does that play through? To quote Professor Mann again:

A 7 percent increase in wind speed is a 21 percent increase

in the destructive potential of the storm. That is with one

degree Celsius ocean warming. With Hurricane Michael, those

temperatures were 2 to 3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial

temperatures. If you do the math, that means it was probably

twice as destructive as it would have been in the absence of

human-caused warming.

The result of the destructive power of Hurricane Michael was the almost complete demolition of the town of Mexico Beach, FL. Michael hit with 155 mile per hour winds and a storm surge of around 9 feet, completely demolishing 70 percent of homes and severely damaging many more.

The degree of damage and the imposing costs of rebuilding mean that many Floridians simply will leave, and that is playing out across coastal properties.

A falloff of coastal property values will spread, many sources anticipate, as people see more events like the destruction of Mexico Beach. Insurance companies, banks, and institutional property investors are already showing signs of anxiety in coastal communities.

Freddie Mac has described the effect of this property value crash on America's coastal regions as follows. Freddie Mac--the great housing powerhouse--has said: ``The economic losses and social disruption may happen gradually, but they are likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the housing crisis and Great Recession.''

Any of us who lived through the 2008 mortgage meltdown should take that warning deadly seriously. It is not just Freddie Mac. Moody's now rates coastal municipalities' bonds for this risk--Moody's, Freddie Mac, Union of Concerned Scientists, the experience of coastal communities. It is all piling up, and yet we do nothing. I haven't even talked about acidification. That is a separate speech--the chemical changes happening in the ocean, in addition to the physical changes of warming and rising. Set that aside, but it is just as dangerous.

Despite these warnings just about ocean warming, Republican heads in Congress and in the White House seem determined to remain buried in the sand. I don't know how many more storms need to hit us before we are willing to take meaningful action. Americans who live and work along our shores--Rhode Islanders and people who live in other coastal States--are the ones who are suffering the most from all of this, and they are the ones who will have to explain our delay. Those Americans are entitled to a voice, not just the lobbyists of the fossil fuel industry. We must protect our coasts for when the next storms batter their way ashore.

This is getting worse, not better. We must take responsibility for the changes we are causing in the world's oceans. We will not be forgiven for our indolence and disregard just because there is a big industry behind our indolence and disregard. Our oceans are warning us loudly, and they are warning us clearly: It is time to wake up.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the passage of the bipartisan America's Water Infrastructure Act, more commonly called the 2018 WRDA bill, is celebrated by a wide spectrum of supporters, including environmental organizations, national associations representing cities and counties, and water and coastal business associations.

I would like to commend the chairman, the ranking member, and the staff of the Environment and Public Works Committee for their hard work on this bill. I appreciate their consideration of my requests and their willingness to work with my staff in ensuring Rhode Island's needs are well represented in the final WRDA bill.

In particular, the American Water Infrastructure Act includes my provision directing the Army Corps of Engineers to study the resiliency of harbors of refuge and hurricane barriers in the North Atlantic, like the Fox Point Hurricane Barrier in Providence, that are under threat from rising sea levels and stronger storm surge. Though they may be able to endure current conditions, extra feet of sea level rise coupled with stronger storm surges will overpower the capabilities of many of these structures. We need to get ahead of these consequences of climate change and protect our coastal communities, instead of waiting for these barriers to fail and imperil coastal homes and businesses.

As oceans overtake our coastal infrastructure, we will also need to look to new and innovative building materials and techniques that can endure corrosive saltwater and other harsh environmental conditions. This WRDA bill also includes my provision requiring the Corps to submit a report to Congress summarizing its research and investments in innovative materials, like Rhode Island-created composites, in-water infrastructure projects, and recommend in which Army Corps projects those materials could be used.

This year's WRDA bill also instructs the Corps to study the extent to which it has made use of its authority to clean up waterways littered with marine debris, like the deteriorating wooden pilings in the Providence River. It also expedites the completion of important projects and studies in Rhode Island, like the Providence River dredging project, Pawcatuck coastal risk management study, and the Rhode Island historical structure flood hazard vulnerability assessment that will bolster Rhode Island's coastal economy and prepare it for future conditions.

Overall, the bill does well to give special consideration to coastal communities, also requiring the Corps to consider natural infrastructure solutions to flood and storm damage risk reduction projects, prioritize coastal erosion mitigation projects in New England, and assess coastal resiliency needs for the Great Lakes. Though only 17 percent of total land area, the United States' coastal counties are home to over half of the U.S. population and were responsible for 48 percent of the country's GDP in 2017. Investing in our coasts is an investment in the well-being of the entire country's economy.

I am also grateful this bill includes a focus on our water infrastructure. In addition to reauthorizing the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund and WIFIA programs, it also creates a new water financing opportunity that will better support water infrastructure projects in small-and medium-sized communities. I am, proud to be a cosponsor of the SRF WIN Act which creates this new program and thank Senators Boozman and Booker for their leadership on this issue.

I look forward to working with my colleagues, the Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Rhode Islanders as we move towards implementing this important infrastructure bill.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of my remarks, the Senator from New Hampshire, Senator Shaheen, be recognized. She will be picking up at the end of my remarks.

Mr. President, it is a real pleasure to be joined here today on the Senate floor by Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. Senator Shaheen has been a tireless advocate for clean energy and is the Senate's bipartisan champion on energy efficiency, alongside Senator Portman.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a major warning last week. Ninety-one authors and editors from 40 countries reviewed more than 6,000 scientific papers to assess what it would take to hold global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. The report says that we will need to invest roughly five times what we do now in low-

carbon energy and energy efficiency by 2050. The Shaheen-Portman energy efficiency legislation would help move us toward that target.

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy says that the bill would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 650 million metric tons over a 15-year period. The cumulative net savings from the bill would reach nearly $100 billion.

My State of Rhode Island is a national leader in promoting energy efficiency, so we know how good programs like the Shaheen-Portman reforms are for consumers, for businesses, and for the environment. Rhode Island has consistently ranked among the top States for energy efficiency. This year, we are in the top three on the State Energy Efficiency Scorecard.

To keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the IPCC tells us we need renewables to grow to about half of the world's energy mix by 2030 and to perhaps 80 percent of the world's energy mix by midcentury. Coal in the global electricity mix needs to be mostly phased out by 2050.

The fossil fuel industry's front groups, of which there is a considerable legion, tell us that this will raise costs on consumers, but renewables are now beating fossil fuel power on cost, and renewable costs are still falling.

In a recent report on global energy trends, Deloitte notes:

Solar and wind power recently crossed a new threshold. . .

. Already among the cheapest energy sources globally, solar

and wind have much further to go.

The Deloitte report shows the top solar States here in yellow, the top wind States here in blue, and these two--Texas and California--are in green because they are leaders in both wind and solar.

If you look at the top 20 U.S. solar and wind States, three-quarters of those States have electricity prices below the national average, so clearly renewables don't hurt energy costs. By the way, these States include some of the reddest politically, including Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Iowa, and Texas.

The cost transition with renewables coming down through the price of fossil fuel is showing up in U.S. solar projects' purchased-power agreements. You can see in this chart from Greentech Media that over time, solar generation costs have come down in line with new-built natural gas generation. That is what this band is. This is the price for new-built natural gas generation.

This dot here represents a new project by NextEra Energy to sell power to the southern Arizona utility, Tucson Electric Power, from a 100-megawatt solar array with an accompanying 30-megawatt energy storage system for $45 per megawatt hour, right in line with new natural gas plants. One industry analyst suggested that this facility effectively took the place of a peak-demand gas plant.

Defenders of old, dirty energy sources paint renewables as unreliable, as intermittent, but Deloitte's report finds that renewables have actually proven ``to strengthen grid resilience and reliability.'' Integrating renewable capacity into the grid has gone well in practice, and FERC analyses predict increased renewable uses to improve grid security and resiliency.

The grid operator in Iowa, the most heavily wind-powered State, figured out a while ago the algorithms to treat wind across its grid as baseload. When you pair wind or solar projects with battery storage, like that NextEra project, then individual renewable projects become baseload power sources. You don't have to aggregate and run algorithms; that is a new baseload source.

The transition involves batteries, and batteries are booming. Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables projects worldwide storage capacity currently around 6 gigawatt hours to grow tenfold, to at least 65 gigawatt hours by 2022; 2022 is right around the corner--a tenfold growth.

Costs are falling fast. Lithium-ion batteries are down in price 80 percent since 2010, just in these 7 years. That is an 80-percent drop in price.

Regulators are adapting. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission just finalized a new rule--a unanimous and bipartisan new rule--for energy storage on America's electric grids.

One study has predicted the rule could spur 50 gigawatts of additional energy storage across the United States, enough to power roughly 35 million homes.

Energy storage is actually coming to market already. The Colorado State Public Utility Commission just unanimously approved an Xcel Energy Program to build $2.5 billion in renewable energy and battery storage, to retire 660 megawatts of coal-fired power, shutting down ongoing plants for cheaper, new renewable battery combinations. The request for bids didn't just smoke out this one bid; it brought out a flood of renewable energy proposals at costs that beat out existing coal and natural gas facilities.

The IPCC warning was particularly serious and specific about the urgent choices before us, and we, too, need to be serious about a new direction to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Renewable energy and energy efficiency are our pathways in that direction, along with a new technology--trapping carbon emissions to use or store them, even pulling carbon dioxide straight from the air.

These carbon-captured technologies have been starved without revenue because of a failure in energy market economics, which is that there is no revenue proposition for capturing carbon pollution. Which brings me to the Nobel Prize in economics just won by William D. Nordhaus of Yale University.

Nordhaus aligns with the well-established market economics that polluters should pay for damage to the environment and to public health. That is econ 101. Without that, the price signal, which is at the heart of market economics, is off, and subsidies result. The market fails. And when the International Monetary Fund estimates the fossil fuel subsidy at $700 billion per year just in the United States, that is a massive market failure.

Nordhaus recommends that we correct the enormous market failure which the fossil fuel industry now so busily protects politically. ``There is basically no alternative to a market solution,'' Nordhaus said in response to the Nobel Prize award. ``The incentives,'' he said, ``are market prices--to raise the price of goods and services that are carbon intensive and lower the ones that are less carbon intensive.''

The science on this, as I think most of us understand, is firmly established, and the economics are widely understood. It is the politics that keep getting in the way--the fossil fuel industry dark money politics.

``This is the last frontier of climate change,'' said Nordhaus. ``I think we understand the science,'' he said. ``I think we understand the economics of abatement,'' he said. He said: ``We understand pretty much the damages. But we don't understand how to bring countries together. That is where the real frontier work is going on today.''

America should be leading at this frontier, not lagging. Lost in our fossil fuel politics, we are failing in leadership. History will not be kind with our failure.

It is well past time for Congress to wake up.

Mr. President, I yield the floor to my distinguished colleague from New Hampshire, saluting her once again for the leadership that I remarked on at the beginning of my remarks in working with Senator Portman to be the Senate's bipartisan leader on energy efficiency.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Ryan Edwards and Kim Binsted, AAAS fellows in my office, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of this Congress.

Mr. President, as a U.S. Senator and a member of the Judiciary Committee, giving careful consideration to Supreme Court nominations is among my most important responsibilities. These lifetime appointments can change not only the course of the Nation but the course of lives.

I began with deep concerns about Judge Kavanaugh: his unfettered views of executive power, effectively believing that the President is beyond the law; his refusal to commit to well-established precedents on critical issues, like women's constitutional rights regarding abortion; his affinity for unlimited and dark political money and his studious blindness to its harm to our democracy; and his very selection and support by big special interest groups. I had significant concerns about his truthfulness and temperament--concerns proven more than justified over the course of these hearings.

Another warning sign was flashing. Senate Republicans were stopping at nothing to get this nominee through. Why, it made we wonder. Why?

Behind all of the shattered norms and traditions of the Senate, behind all of the hidden documents and unanswered questions, stands the looming question: Why?

In my opening comments in the committee, I chronicled a pattern under Chief Justice Roberts, an unpleasant pattern of 5-to-4 partisan rulings for the big corporate and special interests that are the lifeblood of the Republican Party--not 3 or 4 times, not even a dozen or two dozen times, but 73 times--73 times and all 5-to-4 partisan decisions, all wins for the big corporate and special interests that are the lifeblood of the Republican party--73 times.

The pattern is clear in these 5-to-4 partisan decisions. Every time big corporate and Republican special interests are involved, the big interest wins--every time, 73 to 0.

On its way to delivering these Republican special interest victories, the Roberts Court--or I should say the five of them who do this; call it the ``Roberts Five''--leaves a trail--a trail of wrecked precedents, a trail of sketchy, nonfactual fact-finding, a trail of longstanding statutes ignored or rewritten, and a trail of supposedly conservative judicial principles, like modesty, deference, originalism, and stare decisis, all violated. The pattern of these 73 partisan ``Roberts Five'' decisions explains why. It explains why big Republican interests want Kavanaugh on the Court so badly and why Republicans shredded so much Senate precedent to shove him through. The big Republican interests want to be able to pull 5-to-4 wins out of the U.S. Supreme Court as if it were a legislature they controlled.

What are the areas of law where the big Republican corporate and special interests have a stake where the Roberts Five delivered for those big Republican Party stakeholders?

Well, first, they helped Republicans to gerrymander elections in Vieth v. Jubelirer, 5 to 4. This was a big deal. It let Republicans gerrymander their way to control of Congress, to control of the House of Representatives, in a year Republicans lost by a million votes. They lost the House by a million votes and won it by gerrymandering.

The Roberts Five has helped Republicans to keep minority voters away from the polls: Shelby County, 5 to 4; Bartlett v. Strickland, 5 to 4; Abbott v. Perez, 5 to 4. Making it harder to vote--harder for minorities or poor people or the elderly--is a Republican electioneering tactic, and Republican State legislatures went right to work, passing voter suppression laws right after these partisan decisions.

The Roberts Five also helped to unleash big-money political influence, giving big interests unlimited power to buy elections and threaten and bully Congress. McCutcheon and Bullock and the infamous, grotesque 5-to-4 Citizens United decision were their tools.

This is the sockdolager, the really big deal, by the way. There is a very small world of very big interests that have unlimited money to spend and a business strategy to spend it to influence politics. It is not a big group, but it is a powerful group, and it is the heart of the Republican funding machine. These few but big Republican interests were given unprecedented political artillery by the Roberts Five, at least unprecedented since Teddy Roosevelt cleaned house over a century ago.

Our politics since Citizens United has been contorted and corrupted, but those big influences are, oh, so happy.

What else do the big influencers want to get out of courtrooms?

Big special interests that can muscle their way around Congress and capture executive agencies hate courtrooms. There is this annoying thing in courtrooms of being treated equally with regular people. There is this annoying thing in courtrooms about having to turn over your actual documents. There is this really annoying thing in courtrooms about having to tell the truth. So, bingo, the Roberts Five protected corporations from group class-action lawsuits--Walmart v. Dukes, 5 to 4; Comcast, 5 to 4; Epic Systems, 5 to 4--and helped corporations to steer customers and workers away from courtrooms and into corporate friendly mandatory arbitration--Concepcion, Italian Colors, and Rent-a- Center, all 5 to 4 at the hands of the Roberts Five.

What else? Of course, to bust unions, a perennial Big Business special interest classic, kind of a golden oldie for big Republican influencers: Harris v. Quinn, 5 to 4; Janus v. AFSCME, 5 to 4.

And, of course, to protect polluters. Big polluters pour big money into the Republican Party. They do this, they will tell you, to protect your freedom. They talk a lot about freedom. It turns out that it is your freedom to breath dirty air, drink dirty water, smell the river going by, eat chemicals with your food, and have climate havoc and acid oceans. It is all about freedom--indeed, the freedom for big polluters to pollute for free and get away with it. Right with them there is the Roberts Five over and over, for the polluters, even stopping the Nation's Clean Power Plan 5 to 4 for the coal industry.

The list goes on. It totals 73 partisan 5-to-4 decisions under Chief Justice Roberts, each giving big wins to big Republican interests. It is an indelible pattern.

Although the American people might not be keeping exact score--they might not know that the number is 73--they feel the Court is rigged, and the Court is flying all the warning flags of a captured agency, dancing to special interest tunes and rampaging through precedent and principle to get there.

This pattern is a disaster for the Court, and I know Kavanaugh will contribute to that disaster.

How do I know this? I know this because Kavanaugh's record tells me. That is why he is the nominee, after all. That is the why. He has been signaling the big influencers with over 50 speeches to the Federalist Society. I think he has the human record for speeches to the Federalist Society, signaling that he is their guy.

And he has been signaling with his record as a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in the most controversial and salient civil cases, those decided by bare 2-to-1 majorities. When Kavanaugh was in the majority with another Republican-appointed judge, he voted to advance the far-right and corporate interests a striking 91 percent of the time. That is almost a perfect match for the Roberts Five majority rulings in 5-to-4 cases where these conservative groups show up.

The Roberts Five gives conservative groups a 92-percent win rate. Kavanaugh gives conservative groups a 91-percent win rate. No wonder he is their guy.

Ninety-one percent--remember that number.

Kavanaugh reliably voted for polluters and for dark money and for corporate interests with a healthy dollop of anti-choice, pro-gun, religious-right

politics thrown in. Ninety-one percent is how he campaigned for this job.

Big special interests have a habit of turning up regularly in appellate courtrooms like the DC Circuit. Their tool of influence is one of the worst policed tools of special-interest influence in America--the so-called amicus brief, where big special interests fund front groups to file these amicus briefs to instruct courts how they want the courts to rule.

They are called amicus briefs because they are supposedly appearing as a friend of the court, but this has nothing to do with friendship. It is a scandal of secrecy, deception, and manipulation.

How does this involve Kavanaugh? In cases where conservative groups weighed in with these amicus briefs before him, Judge Kavanaugh sided with them--wait for it--91 percent of the time--again, 91 percent. Call him ``Judge 91 percent,'' and you understand why those big interests want him so badly on the Supreme Court and why the Republican Party drove like drunk kids over the curbs and across the lawns, smashing mailboxes of procedure and propriety to get him there.

The overlap between the groups in Kavanaugh's 91-percent club and the groups who fund Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society architect of Kavanaugh's nomination, is telling. The multimillion-dollar scorched- earth ad campaign by groups like the Judicial Crisis Network is funded by big dark money interests.

The NRA poured its own millions into campaigning for Kavanaugh. They promised NRA members that Kavanaugh would break the tie. They are 91 percent sure.

In the face of all this, Kavanaugh feigned impartiality, but then came the ``tell.'' When Kavanaugh returned to the Judiciary Committee to defend himself against accusations of a sex assault, his veneer of impartiality was pulled away, and we saw--America saw--the fierce and rabid conspiracy-mongering partisan within. His performance was recently described by a right-of-center columnist as his ``partisan, unhinged diatribe and nonjudicial demeanor.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the article from which I am quoting be appended to the end of my remarks.

(Mr. LANKFORD assumed the Chair.) He even blamed Bill and Hillary Clinton--seriously.

It shows where we are in this country that this display was not by itself disqualifying. But for the big special interests behind ``Judge 91 Percent,'' this was not at all disqualifying. This was reassuring. This was great stuff. It just confirmed what they knew: Judge 91 Percent would be their boy. The Roberts Five would get back in the saddle, and they would get 73 more 5-to-4 partisan victories.

But that moment gave the rest of the country the opportunity to take true measure of a man who claims he is impartial--a man who asks the Senate to grant him a lifetime seat in judgment of others and claims he will judge fairly--fat chance.

One longtime observer of the judiciary who was an early supporter of Kavanaugh recently withdrew his support. He wrote in the Atlantic magazine:

I cannot condone the partisanship which was raw,

undisguised, naked, and conspiratorial from someone who asks

for public faith as a dispassionate and impartial judicial

actor. His performance was wholly inconsistent with the

conduct we should expect from a member of the judiciary.

Extraordinarily, even former Supreme Court Justice Stevens has warned against Kavanaugh for the same reasons. Kavanaugh's raw, undisguised, naked, and conspiratorial partisan screed may have excited the donors, but it did nothing to address the concerns that had prompted the hearing in the first place. So in addition to an epic fail of any reasonable test of impartiality, Judge Kavanaugh still bears credible allegations of sexual assault levied against him.

I will confess, I believe Dr. Blasey Ford. We have a big dispute here, but I do hope that in this Senate we at least can agree on one thing. If Dr. Blasey Ford's testimony was true, I hope we can all agree that Kavanaugh has no business on the Court.

Well, I believed her then, and I believe her now, and I did not find him credible at all. I found him belligerent and aggressive--just as his Yale drinking buddies said he was while drunk in college--and evasive and nonresponsive.

Dr. Ford's allegations were credible enough to get her here before the Senate. Her testimony here was quiet, open, and powerful. She was calm, composed, and utterly believable. Even President Trump called her testimony ``credible'' and ``compelling.'' So did many of my Republican colleagues.

But then came the smear campaign to discredit and demean her, led by the President's sickening taunts and mockery in Mississippi. Then came the majority leader's criticisms. He knew it wouldn't do to say outright that she lied, but his every accusation fell to pieces if she was telling the truth. His attacks were a bank shot--a relentless, indirect bank-shot smear of Dr. Ford's credibility.

One element of the smear of Dr. Blasey Ford was to describe her testimony as ``uncorroborated.'' We have heard that over and over. The majority leader said that again just this morning on the floor-- uncorroborated. Well, first, that just isn't true. Prior consistent statements are a well-known form of corroboration, and Dr. Ford's prior consistent statements are abundant. It is ironic to have Republicans complain about a lack of corroboration when Republicans did everything possible to prevent corroborating evidence from coming forward. It is deeply unfair to Dr. Ford to disallow, prevent, and freeze out corroborating evidence and then call her testimony uncorroborated, which bring us to the, to put it politely, abridged FBI investigation.

First, the FBI background investigation was closed to this new evidence in an unprecedented break from the entire history of background investigations. Then, the investigation was limited by secret orders from the White House we still have not seen.

What do we see? We see the dozens of credible, percipient, and corroborating witnesses who came forward to say that they couldn't get an interview from the FBI, who were never contacted when they made themselves known to the FBI.

I ask unanimous consent that that two letters from the representatives of Ms. Ramirez and Dr. Ford explaining this be added at the end of my remarks.

Mr. President, many witnesses were fobbed off into a black hole of a tip line--a tip line from which no tip appears ever to have been pursued, a tip line that was just a dumping ground for unwelcome evidence. As a U.S. attorney, had I received the set of witness summaries we saw, I would have sent the package back for more investigation.

A sincere and thorough investigation designed to get at the truth would have broadly interviewed Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford's known contemporaries to probe their recollections.

An investigation to get at the truth would have interviewed the witnesses who corroborated Dr. Blasey Ford's prior consistent statements.

An investigation designed to get at the truth would have tested Kavanaugh's calendar and yearbook entries with contemporaneous witnesses.

An investigation designed to get at the truth would have done interviews of witnesses who corroborate the incident alleged by Ms. Ramirez, like the classmate ``100 percent sure'' he was told at the time that Kavanaugh had exposed himself to Ramirez.

An investigation designed to get at the truth would have interviewed people who recalled Kavanaugh's propensity to drink to excess and his behavior when drunk relevant to these incidents.

An investigation designed to get at the truth would have certainly sought to interview the alleged victims, like Christine Blasey Ford and the accused perpetrator, Brett Kavanaugh.

From public reporting, we know that none of this happened. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that like everything else in this nomination, such as hiding 90 percent of the records from the Bush White House days, putting bogus ``Executive Privilege'' cover over other documents, and claiming documents are ``committee confidential'' through a nonexistent process that was

partisan from start to finish--like everything else, it is hard to escape the conclusion that this investigation was designed not to get at the truth, but to step carefully around it.

I am a huge fan of the FBI. I admire that organization immensely. It must have killed the agents to do such a half-baked and incomplete job because of marching orders from the White House. My heart goes out to the experienced FBI professionals hamstrung by the Trump White House through this investigation. They know better than anyone the holes in what they did, but in this matter they don't have the independence of a criminal investigation. The White House is the client. They must do what they are told. This was yet another Trump abuse of a proud American institution.

So here we are.

A defendant in a criminal prosecution enjoys a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. A defendant in a civil trial must be found culpable by a preponderance of the evidence. An executive agency must make decisions based on substantial evidence. But the question before us is none of those. The question before us is whether Brett Kavanaugh is a man with the character, credibility, impartiality, and temperament to sit in judgment on America's highest Court.

We now know Brett Kavanaugh is not that. He is not close, and Americans know it. But the big Republican interest groups don't care because they see that 91 percent, and they yearn for 73 more 5-to-4 partisan victories.

Service to the law has at its heart an earnest pursuit of the truth. In Kavanaugh's pursuit of office, truth has too often not been his goal but his casualty. The history of falsehoods is well chronicled: denying that he worked on the nomination of the controversial Judge Pryor, denying that he knew of documents stolen from Judiciary Committee Democrats when he was at the Bush White House, denying that he was involved in questions about the knowledge of the secret detention program or the warrantless wiretapping program, denying what he himself said about Presidential immunity from investigation, and complicit in the coverup of millions of documents we should have seen, and on and on.

Once Dr. Blasey Ford and then Ms. Ramirez came forward with sexual assault allegations, the lies came fast and furiously--that he knew nothing about the Ramirez allegations until the ``New Yorker'' story was published; that he had no alcohol problem and never drank to the point of impairment of his memory; that he had unique definitions of phrases in common parlance he related to binge drinking and sex; that he ``always treated women with dignity and respect''; and that claiming himself as a girl's ``Alumnius'' was a sign of affection. As the woman herself retorted: ``There is nothing affectionate or respectful in bragging about making sexual conquests that never happened.''

On they came, little lies and big lies about not having connections to get into Yale, about honoring grand jury secrecy while helping the Ken Starr investigation--none perhaps individually fatal but together adding up to a pattern of dissembling and prevarication. Even before Kavanaugh was nominated, Leader McConnell smelled trouble and urged the President not to nominate someone he knew was a badly flawed nominee with a lengthy paper trail that would likely disclose how extreme and partisan Judge Kavanaugh truly is.

So much has been left by the wayside in the mad rush to jam this nomination through--documents, facts, Senate rules and traditions, real investigation, simple respect for truth--all smashed-up wreckage in the wake of this nomination. But as my fellow New Englander John Adams said, ``Facts are stubborn things.'' The truth has a way of coming out. The millions of hidden pages of Kavanaugh's White House records will come out. The nonassertion assertion of Executive privilege will fall or yield to time. The unheard witnesses will ultimately be heard, and others may come forward, which brings me back to the question I began with: Why all the wreckage? Why all the rush? Why all the damage? Why all the violation? The answer is in the numbers: 5 to 4, 73, and 91 percent. At the end of the day, we go back to a Supreme Court far too often dancing to the tune of a handful of big Republican special interests. The record of this--the pattern of this--is undeniable. As I said, it will be a disaster for the Court, and Kavanaugh will eagerly contribute to that disaster.

This whole mess has been a dark episode for the U.S. Senate, for the Supreme Court, for our image around the world, for our democracy. But there is one bright jewel that can be picked in the midst of all the filth and wreckage and lies; that is that something very special is happening out there. The testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford of her assault at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh, though studiously ignored by so many Republicans and mocked by the President of the United States, has lit a fire.

Just in my small State of Rhode Island, at least 10 women have written to me to share their own personal stories of survival of sexual assault. Like all of us, I get mail everyday about various policies that are being debated here in the Senate. I am coming up on 12 years, and I have never, never had mail like this. These women have come forward from widely different ages and backgrounds--college students and grandmothers--to tell their stories. Some have held these secrets close for years, even for decades. Several of these women gave me permission to share their words--words they have allowed me to free on the Senate floor after years of silence. What a privilege it is. What an honor for me to be trusted in this way by these remarkable women.

Some were moved to tell their stories because they see their own fears reflected in Dr. Blasey Ford's brave testimony--the fear of not being believed, the fear of losing the respect of family or of friends. But they knew that Dr. Blasey Ford's memories were real, and they told me they wanted me to trust that Dr. Blasey Ford's memories were real because they knew that their own memories were real, because their own memories of their assaults were seared into their minds. One told me: ``I am Dr. Ford.''

A woman wrote to me:

I am sure my rapist hasn't thought of me since that night

21 years ago either. In fact, he, like Kavanaugh, would

likely deny anything had ever happened. But here's the thing

about rape--the victims never forget.

The coverage of Dr. Blasey Ford's appearance before the Senate for some stirred deep and disquieting emotions. As one woman wrote:

The past few weeks have been doubly difficult with Dr. Ford

coming forward and all of the constant news threads and

social media threads. I have been triggered with nightmares,

fear of being alone, and emotionally wrecked. PTSD and

triggers are real. No matter how much therapy and time goes

by, one small statement or physical interaction can trigger

someone who has experienced a traumatic assault.

One letter read:

As a rape survivor (I was 19 years old--I am now 66 years

old), I want you to know that that experience does color the

rest of a person's life, informing decisions that you make,

where and how you go somewhere, how you raise your children

and relate to your husband and all other people. Sometimes

through the decades, you think about it consciously and on

purpose, and sometimes outside events can bring it back

without your willing it to be so.

Dr. Blasey Ford's quietly compelling testimony has forced our Nation to face up to the tough questions about how women have been treated. The redemption, if there is one, for this foul nomination process is for us to grasp the power of this moment, for our country to act on the power of this moment. This is about far more than a troubled and troubling nominee. Something big is happening. Women across the country, like these extraordinary women in Rhode Island, are reconciling with their truth, fighting through a long and deeply unfair legacy of shame, fear, and stigma. They are stepping up. They are coming forward, determined, as one wrote to me to leave a different world for their daughters and granddaughters than the world that silenced them for years, for decades.

For me, it is a true personal honor to share this moment with them, to be trusted with these long-held stories, to have the chance to help end that bitterly unfair legacy, and to support them toward that new and better world for their daughters and granddaughters.

I yield the floor.