Floor Statements

Mr. President, I am very happy to join my colleagues to express our view of how pathetic this new Clean Power Plan replacement rule is and how it really makes fools of huge portions of the American people.

For farmers who are out there facing drought and floods like they have never seen before as our weather extremes expand, this makes fools of them. This makes losers of them. For people who live near our forests or work in our forests or enjoy using our forests, and for the people Senator Merkley just spoke of, for those downwind from our forests when they burn--they are made a laughing stock by this new rule. The wildfires that are tearing through our forests are expanding both in season and severity. In some States, where there used to be a wildfire season, there isn't a season any longer. Any time could be wildfire time. This is all new and unprecedented.

For hunters, for fishermen, for skiers, for outdoor enthusiasts of all kinds, the changes that are happening to the species and the weather patterns that folks have come to rely on are damaging. This plan ignores all of it.

Its harm to coastal communities is particularly important to Rhode Island and to the Presiding Officer's home State of Louisiana. We have coastal communities facing dramatic sea level rise. We are seeing new risks for local communities from storm surge as well as from sea level rise. We are seeing great American cities filled with seawater on bright, sunny days just because high tide and sea level rise combine to bring flooding into what once was dry land. All of these concerns are made a mockery of by this phony EPA rule.

Even if you are not a farmer or even if you don't care about or live near forests, even if you have no interest in the outdoors, even if you don't live on or visit the coast, you are a part of the American economy, and the American economy is going to take a whack from our failure to do right by the environment and from our failure to win the transition to a low-carbon economy. We are all involved in this together, and we are all, in that sense, made losers and made a mockery of by this ridiculous rule.

The only other thing I would add is that we are a country that has for a long time been proud of our reputation and example. One of our Presidents said that the power of our American example has always mattered more in the world than any example of our power. Well, what an example we are setting now, the only Nation in the world not to participate in the Paris Agreement. Even the Syrians got in, for Pete's sake, and here we are, strange outliers.

We try to compete in the international contest for the way that people live, putting forward our American system of government and our American way of life. Our American system of government is not looking so good right now on this question, and as the inevitable march of climate change and deep climate havoc continues, our failure to act is going to look worse and worse. People are going to ask questions, and we don't have good answers for those questions. The truth is, the reason we are not doing anything about this is the corrupt influence of the fossil fuel industry, period, end of story.

I was here during the years when we had bipartisan activity in the Senate on climate change. There were multiple bipartisan bills floating around. There were bipartisan hearings. In fact, the first climate change hearing in the Senate was chaired by Republican Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island. All of that came to a shuddering halt in January of 2010, when the five Republican judges on the Supreme Court gave to the fossil fuel industry a pearl beyond price: the Citizens United decision that allowed unlimited political spending by big special interests--unlimited--and it took the fossil fuel industry about 2 minutes to figure out how to make that hidden dark money political spending. The result has been the absolute shutdown of bipartisanship as the fossil fuel industry has moved to exercise full dominion over a once great Republican political party.

I see the majority leader on his feet, from which I deduce that he may seek the floor, in which case, as a courtesy, I am most inclined to yield it to him.

Is that the case, Mr. Leader? Does the leader seek the floor?

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I will take a minute to conclude my remarks and then yield to Senator King of Maine, who I believe will be followed by Mr. Van Hollen of Maryland.

The rule we are looking at is basically about 98 percent Scott Pruitt, if you look at the timing. Scott Pruitt had one of the most disgraceful tenures in any Cabinet position in the history of the United States. To the extent I have anything good to say about him, it is that he wasn't very good.

The EPA, following the direction of the fossil fuel industry, lost over and over again as its phony sham activities, rulings, and regulations were challenged in court. What we saw over and over again was the process at the EPA was a sham; that the review of public comment was a sham; that the legal analysis they had to go through was a sham. As a result, they came up with rules, regulations, and policies that were a sham.

Once you expose some of that stuff in court, where people have to tell the truth, discovery has to happen, you see documents, and you get judges who are not in tow to the fossil fuel industry, it doesn't look so good. I think probably our best hope for this phony-baloney dirty power plan that Pruitt 98 percent put out--and the new Administrator, I guess, we should give him 2 percent partial credit--is it is not likely to last very long. It is not likely to survive judicial scrutiny. It, like so much else the EPA has done in this administration, is completely fossil fuel-funded, phony, and a sham.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am so grateful to join my colleague today, Senator Warren, to discuss the financial and economic risks that are posed by climate change.

You have just heard the Senator from my neighboring State of Massachusetts lay out a powerful case. Given the gravity of these risks and given our recent experience of the 2008 financial crisis, we should be doing everything we can to prevent another economic meltdown.

We know exactly what we need to do to mitigate these economic threats. We need to transition from polluting fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy. We can do this simply by giving renewables a fair market chance against the gigantic public subsidies on which the fossil fuel industry float. Put a price on carbon emissions so the price of the polluting product reflects its pollution costs to society. That is the economics 101 answer.

The problem is that fossil fuel behemoths are desperate to duck the costs of their pollution. They want to protect this massive market failure. Why do you suppose they are the biggest special interest political force in the world? It is to do that work. Look over in the House, where just recently an army of fossil fuel lobbyists and front groups pushed through an industry-scripted resolution and declared, falsely, that pricing carbon would be bad for the American economy. All but eight House Republicans voted the way the industry instructed--for a resolution that was, for them, politically correct in a polluter- obedient kind of way but was factually false.

Today, in my 217th ``Time to Wake Up'' climate change speech, I am going to relate recent testimony by a respected Nobel Prize-winning economics professor, Joseph Stiglitz. Unlike all of that cheap political chicanery around the House resolution, Professor Stiglitz' report was presented under oath and was subject to cross-examination. Fat chance the climate deniers would ever let themselves get cross- examined under oath. Truth is kryptonite for them.

Stiglitz' report came out in Juliana v. United States--a case in which the plaintiffs were children who sued the U.S. Government for violating their constitutional rights through a knowing failure to protect them from the costs of unlimited carbon emissions.

Here is what Stiglitz' testimony states:

[The U.S. Government's] continuing support and perpetuation

of a national fossil-fuel based energy system and continuing

delay in addressing climate change is saddling and will

continue to saddle Youth Plaintiffs with an enormous cost

burden, as well as tremendous risks.

Obviously, when Stiglitz talks about ``youth plaintiffs,'' his testimony actually covers all of the children and future generations who will bear the terrible, foreseeable costs of climate havoc.

In particular, Stiglitz notes that ``rising sea levels will lead to massive reductions in property value,'' just as Senator Warren and Freddie Mac have warned, and children and future generations will have to ``bear the enormous cost of relocating the people and infrastructure that are now on this [inundated] land.''

Of all places, the State of Kentucky has a report that warns that its population might rise because people will have to flee coastal States. Even the leader's own State recognizes this coastal problem.

This testimony echoes other warnings that I have related in recent speeches about this looming coastal property value crash--warnings we hear from sources as diverse as Freddie Mac, as the Union of Concerned Scientists, through insurance trade publications, and now from this Nobel Prize-winning economist. Peer-reviewed research also shows a gap emerging between coastal and inland property values, which is what you would expect as an early warning signal.

Stiglitz' report, however, isn't doom and gloom. It actually shows that economic gains result from a wise transition to sustainable energy sources.

Stiglitz writes:

Retrofitting the global economy for a 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.

Think about that. The fossil fuel industry and its phony front groups have cooked up a phony hobgoblin of economic harm, which just so happens to protect the industry they serve at the expense of everyone else.

Here is a Nobel Prize-winning economist telling us that shifting to renewable energy would actually help us grow the economy. The need for this transition is also echoed in the warnings, which I have spoken about and which Senator Warren just so eloquently spoke about, of a carbon bubble and crash.

Why is it that the clean energy economy grows? The same reason the economy grew when we went from horse and buggy to automobile or landline to cell phones. The key word is ``innovation.'' As Professor Stiglitz says, we get more innovation as we manage this transaction.

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, and other countries will win the transition to a low-carbon economy.

Growth will not just come from new jobs; it will come from lower costs. Stiglitz notes this: ``Many energy efficiency technologies actually have a negative cost to implement.'' Now, you have to be an economist to use the phrase ``negative cost.'' Negative cost, obviously, is ``economics-ese'' for ``that's a good thing.''

The reverse case is the Trump administration's recent decision to freeze fuel economy standards for cars. That is a bad thing. It will cost American consumers hundreds of billions of dollars more at the pump. It is no surprise that all of that extra cost for consumers in gas money goes to Big Oil, which has the Trump administration obediently in its pocket.

Stiglitz's testimony estimates the total benefits to the U.S. economy from shifting away from fossil energy sources at around $1 trillion by 2050--$1 trillion by 2050. As I said, a $1 trillion negative cost is a good thing. It is a really good thing, and if we weren't completely in tow to the fossil fuel industry around here, we would be striving for it.

Stiglitz recommends the policies to get us to that low-carbon economy. First, he says we must put a price on carbon. He testifies that putting a price on carbon could be beneficial to the economy all by itself. He says:

[A] carbon tax . . . could substitute for other more

distortionary taxes. If governments made such a substitution,

the aggregate cost of curtailing carbon emissions could be

even less than zero, providing net benefits to the economy.

Second, he testifies that we must end the enormous, gigantic subsidies we grant to the fossil fuel industry. Here is what he says:

The full amount of post-tax subsidies in the U.S. [to the

fossil fuel industry] has been estimated at nearly $700

billion per year, more than half of the Federal government's

forecasted deficit for the next fiscal year. Eliminating all

fossil fuel subsidies (implicit and explicit, many of which

go to large corporations) could, therefore, both curtail

fossil-fuel production, through forcing companies to bear

more of the true costs of fossil-fuel production, and

substantially reduce our national deficit in one fell swoop.

For the record, Stiglitz adds that ``equity would also be improved with corporations paying more and individuals, such as Youth Plaintiffs and Affected Children, benefiting.''

Of course, around here, corporate interests get better service than the American people, so that observation doesn't count for much, but there it is.

There is one last bit of Stiglitz's testimony that is important. I quote him again: ``The more time that passes, the more expensive it becomes to address climate change.''

Time is not our friend. This doesn't get better or go away. Every day we delay is a missed opportunity. Every day we delay bears a cost, and we have been delaying--we are good at that--for decades.

James Hansen appeared before this body 30 years ago--three decades ago--to sound the alarm about climate change in a hearing called by Senator John Chafee. Stiglitz cites a 40-year-old report--four decades--to President Carter that subsidies to the fossil fuel industry were stifling competition from solar.

For decades, the fossil fuel industry has jerked Congress's chain to keep anything from happening. Even now, their mischief is visible in the hobgoblin about economic harm.

By the way, it is not just Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz who says that pricing carbon emissions would be a good thing. Economists across the political spectrum agree. Just last month, economic researchers at Columbia University found that even if you look only at the pure economic effects, a carbon fee is a winner.

Here is a $50-per-ton carbon fee, and here is a $75-per-ton carbon fee, and both show growth compared to the status quo in the economy. You have to roll them back through the payroll tax, which is something we can do, to see this added growth effect from a carbon fee.

Remember, this growth--that is only the tax effects. This doesn't count the health benefits of a cleaner planet; this doesn't count the environmental benefits of a healthier planet. Both are huge. They are not even counted here. This is just the tax effects.

These carbon pricing ideas are a winner on their own, and it becomes a win-win-win when you add the environmental and health benefits.

So who are we going to believe, the front groups paid by the fossil fuel industry? If there were Olympic medals in having a conflict of interest, these phonies would take the gold. Unfortunately, you would have to hose off the medals platform afterward.

On the other side, you have actual experts, honest experts--the ones cited by Senator Warren, the economists I have mentioned here today, and many others--who all agree. They are all saying that we need to act now. They are all telling us that failure to act puts us in harm's way for serious economic disruption. They are all telling us that pricing carbon and ending fossil fuel subsidies will actually be a boon to the economy.

Our choice is clear. Going with the corrupt guys is not a good look, not when the day of reckoning comes. And warnings are more and more widespread and clear that a day of reckoning draws nigh.

So if you want, go with the oddballs and the fossil fuel flunkies, not the Nobel Prize winners; go with the scripted disinformation, not the sworn testimony; go with the industry protecting a $700 billion subsidy, not the actual scientists; and good luck looking your grandchildren in the eye.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, because the time between now and 11:30 is to be shared between me and the ranking member on the Finance Committee, Senator Wyden, I ask unanimous consent that when Senator Wyden appears, I yield the floor to him; that at the conclusion of his remarks, I be recognized to conclude my remarks; and that in the Record, my remarks be consolidated after Senator Wyden's remarks.

Mr. President, it is terrific to be joined here today by my colleague from Oregon, Senator Wyden, to address some of the devastating effects of a changing global climate from the shores of Rhode Island and our beautiful Narragansett Bay to the forests of southern Oregon.

Rhode Island is looking at losing significant territory to storms and sea level rise. Oregon is seeing ancient forests go up in smoke. For most of the country, this summer has been a scorcher. July was nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit above average, and, before that, the contiguous United States experienced its hottest May and third hottest June on record.

It is oceans too. Just last week, the Rhode Island organization Save the Bay recorded ocean surface temperatures in Little Narragansett Bay, off the coast of Westerly, RI, at nearly 80 degrees Fahrenheit--the highest in over a decade of data and, perhaps, the highest ever in Rhode Island's history.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently released its report ``State of the Climate in 2017.'' The 500 scientists from 65 countries who contributed to this peer-reviewed report, which was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, reported ominous records broken: the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, a new high; heat in the upper ocean, a new high; sea level rise, a new high; sea ice coverage in the Arctic and in Antarctica, both new all-time lows and all headed in the wrong direction.

Out West, the NOAA report called out 2017 as an extreme western wildfire season that burned over 4 million hectares. The total costs of $18 billion tripled the previous U.S. annual wildfire cost record set in 1991.

Right now, in the summer of 2018, blazing temperatures and drought conditions have contributed to wildfire outbreaks worldwide in the U.S., Canada, Australia, South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. The raging Mendocino Complex fire recently became the largest wildfire in the history of the State of California, the previous record being last year's Thomas fire.

Mr. President, I again want to thank the distinguished ranking member on the Finance Committee, and I salute his years of passion on environmental issues and in the defense of his State, which is now suffering so many fires.

We actually have an answer to the question that Senator Wyden proposed rather rhetorically--why this is happening out in the Mendocino fires, for instance. The assistant deputy director of Cal Fire, Daniel Berlant, who is at the state department of forestry and fire protection, has said this: ``Let's be clear: It's our changing climate that is leading to more severe and destructive fires.''

Climate change has doubled the area consumed by forest fires since 1984. According to a report by Climate Central, ``[c]ompared to the 1970s, the annual average western U.S. wildfire season is now 105 days longer, has three times as many large fires (larger than 1,000 acres) and sees more than six times as many acres burned.''

Not only are these fires becoming larger, they are becoming more dangerous. They burn hotter and more intensely. They spread more rapidly and shift unpredictably, putting firefighters at risk.

A 2015 study in The Solutions Journal found that, as compared to 1990, fires are now larger, three times as many homes are burning, and around twice as many brave firefighters are losing their lives.

The Federal Government's ``Climate Science Special Report,'' released late last year, warned that years without large fires in the western United States will become what they called ``extremely rare.'' Years without these large fires will become ``extremely rare.''

The Environmental Protection Agency warns that unless we curb our greenhouse gas emissions, ``climate change is projected to dramatically increase the area burned by wildfires across most of the contiguous U.S.'' The Agency estimates for the western United States a more than 40-percent increase in the area burned by wildfires by 2100, and the amount of land in the Southwest burned each year by fires, including Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, could go up by as much as 140 percent.

These more frequent and more ferocious wildfires are leaving permanent scars on America's landscape. Ordinarily, wildfires are part of the natural lifecycle of a healthy forest, but, as Senator Wyden said, these are not our grandfather's wildfires. The intensity, frequency, and scale of the infernos we are now seeing reflect nature out of whack. Instead of clearing dead trees and groundcover to make room for healthy trees and rebirth of plant life, these superstrong wildfires are simply destroying these ecosystems.

The National Wildlife Federation's 2017 report, ominously titled ``Megafires,'' says: ``If hot enough, extreme fires can even sterilize the soil by killing subsurface seed banks that normally aid in post- fire recovery.'' Some native environments are permanently lost to charred landscapes and invasive species.

A 2017 study reported in the journal Science found that ``thanks to climate change, areas ravaged by wildfires may never recover, wiping out entire ecological communities forever.'' This review of areas ravaged by wildfires showed that ``the proportion of sites with no regrowth almost doubled after 2000`` as compared to the 1980s or 1990s.

Of course, the consequences of these fires to human life are dire. Fourteen people died in last year's wildfires in California, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Utah.

The risk doesn't end with the flames. After last year's devastating fire in California, when rain finally returned to the area, but without trees and other plants to hold the soil in place, the downpours unleashed torrents of mud, rocks, and debris, killing more than 20 people. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 25 to 30 people die each year in postfire floods and mudslides.

As Senator Wyden mentioned, air pollution is another consequence of these wildfires, and it can spread far

beyond the burned-out site of the fire. Hundreds of miles downwind, air can become unhealthy and even hazardous.

I remember visiting Saskatchewan with Senator Graham and seeing skies there clouded from Oregon's fires. Last month, air in the northwest took the title of ``worst in the nation''--not what they were looking for--with officials recommending that residents wear masks when venturing outdoors. Children, pregnant women, and people with breathing difficulties were told to actually leave town, to leave the area.

Wildfires unleash an especially harmful air pollutant: tiny particles less than 2.5 microns in diameter. For comparison, an average human hair is around 70 microns wide. So we are talking about very small particles circulating in the air. Because they are so small, they are easily inhaled and can lodge deep in the lungs and even enter the human bloodstream. Exposure to them has been associated with asthma, heart attack, stroke, and some cancers. Emerging research even links this nasty pollutant to premature births.

A researcher at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, CO, told Science magazine that wildfire smoke is ``one of the largest problems facing air quality and climate issues going forward.'' According to a 2016 study in the journal Climatic Change, wildfires were to blame for more than two-thirds of the bad-air days in the western U.S., with unhealthy levels of particulate matter.

Smoke and pollution from western wildfires get picked up by the jet stream and can be carried 3,000 miles across the United States, all the way to our east coast, contaminating air throughout the country with noxious particulate matter, methanol, benzene, ozone, and other toxins.

This image shows the plume of smoke from west coast fires over here spilling across the country last September. NASA reports that when airborne contaminants are drawn down to ground level, as happened in Iowa last summer, wildfires can trigger air quality warnings hundreds, even thousands, of miles away.

The scourge of these wildfires in Senator Wyden's home State and throughout the West is one of the most dangerous symptoms of carbon pollution and climate change. His Oregon constituents see this devastation firsthand. Senator Wyden has helped to rush additional resources to Federal firefighting agencies to step up the response to these exploding wildfires. I thank him for joining me here today as we implore our colleagues to recognize what is going on.

If you don't believe me, simply go to your own home State universities and ask them. Whether it is Alaska's, Texas's, Oklahoma's, Rhode Island's, or Oregon's universities, they will tell you. This is stuff that is so clear that it is taught in your home State universities. Yet here in the Senate, we continue to indulge the pretense that we don't know what is going on. Well, it is climate change, plain and simple, as we careen toward what could be an irreversible shift in our climate, changing our Earth into what one recent report called a ``hothouse.'' Yet here we are, the great Congress of the United States, stuck in dirty fossil fuel politics, fiddling under the Capitol dome while the western United States burns.

I thank my distinguished friend from the great State of Oregon for joining me here today.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, the big oil companies--particularly Exxon, Shell, BP, and Chevron--want us to believe they have turned over a new leaf, that they are finally in favor of climate action. All four of them claimed to support the Paris Agreement, and Exxon, Shell, and BP all claim to support putting a price on carbon emissions--a price that would reflect the costs of the damage climate change inflicts on the environment, the economy, and public health.

For example, this is on Exxon's website: ``ExxonMobil believes a revenue-neutral carbon tax would be a more effective policy option than. . . .''

and it lists other options. ``A properly designed carbon tax can be predictable, transparent, and comparatively simple to understand and implement.''

So it looks as if they are supporting a properly designed carbon tax, but is that support for pricing carbon emissions real, or is it just PR, just greenwashing by companies desperate to improve their images? Well, Senator Schatz and I introduced a carbon price bill in 2014 to put a fee on products that produce carbon dioxide emissions, and we have reintroduced it in every Congress since. If the oil companies really supported putting a price on carbon emissions, you would think they might have come to see us, the authors of that carbon price bill. You would think that if the oil companies really supported putting a price on carbon emissions, they might have supported our bill or lobbied other Senators to support it or even come to us to say: You know, we would like to support your bill, but you need to change this or that.

Well, they have done none of that. Despite their public-facing pronouncements on a carbon fee or tax, as they call it, we have had no visits from oil company representatives to our offices to work on this bill, no support for our bill--or any other--no lobbying to help or amend our bill. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the giant trade associations these oil companies fund--the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers--are all working hard to ensure that Republicans oppose carbon pricing and, indeed, any proposals to reduce carbon emissions.

Look what the big oil companies do when the prospect of getting a carbon fee on the books looks real. This fall, voters in Washington State will vote on a ballot initiative that would initially put a price on carbon. It would price carbon emissions at $15 per ton. Who is funding the campaign against this carbon price initiative? You guessed it, the oil companies, the very same oil companies that claim to support a carbon fee. Already, Shell, BP, and Chevron have pledged to pour dollars into a super PAC created by the Western States Petroleum Association, which is another trade association that fronts for them to oppose this carbon pricing initiative. The oil companies are backing the opposition in Congress also.

In the House, Majority Whip Steve Scalise got wind that some of his Republican Members were working on carbon fee legislation. He introduced legislation stating that pricing carbon emissions would be bad for the economy. Guess who Scalise's most generous donors are. You guessed it, the oil and gas industry. The industry has given his campaign more than $1.1 million, far more than any other industry has given him. The oil and gas industry has also given his PAC $1.5 million. Again, far more than from any other industry.

As they say, follow the money. Then, where were the big oil companies on Scalise's resolution? Not one opposed it. In fact, when contacted by the press, Exxon, BP, and Shell all declined to comment on the Scalise resolution, but they noted their general support for carbon pricing.

When you look at what the big oil companies actually do on carbon pricing proposals, their general support for carbon pricing begins to look purely hypothetical--or hypocritical. ``General support'' probably gets them a little good PR, fools the unwary, and I guess it lets their executives hobnob with movers and shakers at cocktail parties in Davos or at home at their golf clubs, without having to bear any shame for disgraceful behavior on climate change.

This phony general support is also belied by the climate denial infrastructure the oil companies have set up and funded for years. They have underwritten dozens of climate-denying front groups over the years. Guess what. Their front groups sprang into action to support the Scalise anti-carbon pricing resolution. It is a neat little trick. You say you support carbon pricing, and then you deploy an armada of front groups that you funded over the years to make sure the thing you claim to support never comes to pass.

On July 9, 18 of these phony front groups wrote to House Speaker Paul Ryan urging him to bring the Scalise resolution up for a vote. This letter asserts that pricing carbon emissions would harm the economy, citing a bogus study from the fossil fuel industry-funded National Association of Manufacturers.

By the way, I work pretty well with the manufacturers in my State, and there isn't a manufacturer in my State that subscribes to the National Association of Manufacturers' climate-denying, anti-climate action policies. Somebody somewhere is interjecting themselves so the national organization has become the tool of the fossil fuel industry, but that is not recognized in Rhode Island.

It is not so easy to follow the money behind all these phony front groups that wrote this letter. They and their donors are all very secretive about that. After all, it ruins the purpose of a phony front group if everyone can see the fossil fuel hand in the phony-front-group glove. Enterprising reporters and researchers have been able to shine a little light into this dark money den.

Let's see how much money these front groups have received from the four major oil companies, from the American Petroleum Institute, and from trusts and foundations associated with the fossil fuel magnate Koch brothers.

American Energy Alliance, the top one there: Koch-connected organizations gave the American Energy Alliance at least $1.7 million. A sister organization that shares both the management and the office space of this phony front group received at least $160,000 from Exxon.

ALEC: Koch-connected foundations gave ALEC at least $600,000. We know Koch Industries is also a donor, but we don't know how much it has given. We know Exxon gave at least $1.6 million before announcing this month it was cutting ties with ALEC. The American Petroleum Institute gave at least $88,000, while Chevron gave at least $20,000. Shell and BP also used to fund this front group--we don't know quite how much they gave--before they quit in 2015.

American Commitment received at least $21 million from Koch- affiliated organizations.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute: Exxon gave at least $2 million. Koch-affiliated organizations gave at least $5.2 million.

Americans for Limited Government received at least $5.6 million from Koch-affiliated groups.

The so-called National Black Chamber of Commerce: Exxon gave at least $1 million. American Petroleum Institute gave at least $75,000. Koch- affiliated organizations gave at least $25,000.

Americans for Tax Reform: API, the American Petroleum Institute, gave at least $525,000. Koch-affiliated groups gave at least $330,000.

The Caesar Rodney Institute: Koch-affiliated groups gave at least $50,000. The Caesar Rodney Institute is part of the larger so-called State Policy Network, which itself is funded by the Koch organization.

FreedomWorks has received at least $2.5 million from Koch-affiliated groups and at least $130,000 from the American Petroleum Institute.

The Heartland Institute--there are some beauties--Koch-affiliated groups gave at least $7.1 million, and Heartland got at least $730,000 from Exxon. This is the group, by the way, that has compared climate scientists to the Unabomber--a real classy group. I can see why the others would want to associate with them.

The National Center for Public Policy Research received at least $445,000 from Exxon and at least $300,000 from Koch-affiliated groups.

The Energy & Environment Legal Institute--here is another beauty-- received at least $500,000 from Koch-affiliated groups. Energy & Environment Legal Institute, by the way, is a particularly creepy group whose function is actually to harass legitimate scientists. That is actually what they do. Another super classy group. You can understand why they would all want to be affiliated with them.

Western Energy Alliance is an oil and gas industry trade association. The group's website promises its fossil fuel members that it will ``actively influence regulatory actions and legislation on behalf of your business.'' It is no

mystery who is behind this group, but, as usual, funding details are hidden.

The Cornwall Alliance's funders are secret. When I tell you a bit more about it, you can see why they would want to be secret. I can tell you, I have seen this bogus front group turning up constantly on the climate denial oddball fringe, with other front groups funded by Big Oil. What is more, the Cornwall Alliance's founder doesn't believe in evolution, thinks that tornadoes are a punishment from God, and, quite despicably, believes AIDS is a punishment for being gay--a really great guy for Speaker Ryan to be taking advice from and a great company for all the rest of these groups to be keeping.

CO2 Science received at least $100,000 from Exxon and $280,000 from Koch-affiliated organizations.

The Mississippi Center for Public Policy received at least $340,000 from Koch-affiliated organizations and is also a member of that Koch- funded so-called State Policy Network.

The Institute for Liberty received at least $1.8 million from Koch- affiliated organizations.

That is a grand total of over $54 million from Big Oil and their climate denial allies in the Koch network, and that is the minimum. That is what we know. That is what has leaked through the darkness. Because all these groups and donors are so secretive about their clandestine funding network, we know the total is, if anything, much higher.

Of course, a sophisticated political operative like Speaker Ryan recognized that these were phony front groups and blew this letter off in order to pursue the people's serious business before the House.

Actually, no. What did Speaker Ryan do? He agreed to bring the Scalise resolution to the floor for a vote, of course. With his caucus essentially a wholly owned subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry, how could he have said no? Money talks, and big money commands.

With the resolution heading for a vote, the front groups reappeared-- this time, 41 strong, the whole fossil fuel front group armada was deployed--with a letter to all House Members.

I don't want to go through the list again and add the new groups and which received funding from Big Oil and which from the Koch network and which from both, but suffice it to say, almost all of them have been funded by the oil industry and/or the Koch network or are otherwise tied to them. This is the web of denial my Senate colleagues and I have come to the floor to call out before.

With this type of orchestrated lobbying campaign by the fossil fuel front groups, passage of the Scalise resolution was assured. Indeed, only six House Republicans had the courage to vote against their fossil fuel overlords.

Instead of listening to, say, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz or the researchers at Columbia University and serious think tanks who study this stuff or the dozens of blue-chip companies that all say pricing carbon emissions would be good for the economy, House Republicans listened to these phony fossil fuel-funded front groups, including the group that equated climate scientists with the Unabomber and the group founded by the guy who thinks evolution is fake news and AIDS is punishment for being gay.

How low will you go when your big donors whistle? We just saw. The resolution was rammed through the House.

The failure of the U.S. Congress to act on our climate crisis is a failure of American democracy. When untold tens, even hundreds of millions of special interest dollars slosh through our political system, what voice do the citizens of Rhode Island have or the citizens of Florida or Louisiana who are also confronting ever-rising seas caused by climate change?

When corporate dark money rules and phony front groups get more political respect than Nobel Prize-winning economists--on matters of economics, no less--what chance is there for reason and truth in this body?

The fossil fuel industry and its trade associations and front groups have taken the Republican Party hostage and, with it, our American democracy.

It is corruption in plain view, and history's judgment will not be kind. It is seriously, urgently time for us to wake up.

I yield the floor.

I thank Senator Wyden.

Mr. President, it is great to be here to have a birthday party to celebrate Medicare and Medicaid, which are the kinds of huge successes for a nation that don't happen very often, but they sure did happen in America. And what a change it made when Medicare and Medicaid were there to support American families. There is scarcely an American family today who doesn't to some extent depend on Medicare or Medicaid. We have planned our lives around the safety and security of those programs, and we have avoided enormous human suffering by virtue of those programs.

Of course, coming from a small State as I do, it is very important for us in Rhode Island to celebrate our role in this important legislation because one of the original authors of the Medicare bill was Representative Aime Forand of Cumberland, RI, who served over in the House for 22 years. He served with great distinction. He was passionate about healthcare and about building this program. He was one of the original groups of the Members of Congress who got together and designed the Medicare Program. When it came time to pass it in 1965, it was Rhode Island Congressman John Fogarty of Providence who was then the chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee for Labor, Health, Education, and Welfare. So between one of the original authors of the legislation and one of the key chairmen supporting the legislation, there was a lot that Rhode Island did to accomplish these wonderful goals.

It gives me particular pride as a member of the Rhode Island delegation to come here for the Medicare-Medicaid Senator Wyden birthday party. I am very glad to have the chance to do it.

These programs provide health insurance coverage to over half a million people in my State. That is half the State. Without it, so many lives would be changed for the worse. Nationally, it is a little bit over 130 million Americans. When you consider the families who get the protection of having a family member covered, as I said, it is virtually all of us.

Obviously, it is seniors. Rhode Island has a lot of seniors whom we treasure and whom we love having Medicare and Medicaid being there for, but it is also people with disabilities, children, pregnant women, veterans, and people fighting substance abuse disorders. It is a broad population.

Medicare and Medicaid do their jobs well. They do their jobs efficiently. They do their jobs humanely. They do their jobs with super-low overhead compared to their private sector competition, and they do it in a very reform-oriented way.

It is CMS that is leading the accountable care organizations process that was one of the great achievements of the Affordable Care Act. It is the providers, the doctors, who are in those accountable care organizations who are redesigning care in ways that are wonderful for their patients.

I will briefly discuss the example--because I am so proud of it and mention it all the time--of Coastal Medical, which is one of our biggest provider groups in Rhode Island. It is a doctor-run accountable care organization. What they did is they signed up early on--what they called Pioneer ACOs. The deal was this: We will take some of the risk of how our patients run up costs in the system, and we will share if we can make money back for you.

Now, in the bad old days of managed care, when insurance companies tried to do this, they went in and said: Well, you can't have that, and we are cutting you off on this, and we are not paying you, and we just hired 50 people to make sure that your claim never gets settled. They just, basically, pushed back on paying for things.

That is not the way the doctors work in the ACO process. They have done things like hire social workers, pharmacists, and home visitors. What they have done is to take their patients and to decide they are going to help make them healthier. They are going to have social workers make sure they get the benefits they need. They are going to have home care workers go to their homes to see what they can get done at home. They use electronic monitoring and testing so they can keep better track of the reports and keep better track of people's care. They engage with their patients.

What we have seen--because a lot of people I know in Rhode Island get their healthcare through Coastal Medical--is a lot of really happy patients. Now you can call at 2 in the morning when you are sick, and at Coastal Medical, you will get a live nurse who will talk you through what is going on and help you decide if you actually need to go to the emergency room or not and get you in quick, first thing in the morning, if you don't go to the emergency room and they still want to see you and check you out.

So, for the patients, this has been an incredible boon. They feel so much better cared for, and they are, in fact, healthier. That comes back to all of us here because--guess what--in the time that Coastal Medical has been doing this, it has lowered the cost of care, year over year, for its patients--$700 per patient.

When we were passing the Affordable Care Act, we used to talk about how we were going to bend the healthcare cost curve down. We are not bending the healthcare cost curve down at Coastal Medical; we are actually dropping healthcare costs. It is actually below where it was. It is not just not accelerating so fast. That is the kind of leadership that Medicare and Medicaid and CMS support.

This is a really terrific and exciting program in so many ways, not just in

terms of humaneness, not just in terms of security for American families but also in terms of leadership and in helping us continue to develop a healthcare system that we can be very proud of.

I am delighted to serve on the Finance Committee under the leadership of our ranking member, and I thank him for convening us on this terrific birthday. I would only propose that when we do this again, there be cake.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. President, I am here for the now 214th time to urge that we wake up to the effects of carbon pollution on the Earth's oceans, atmosphere, and climate.

One obstacle to action on the threat that we face from climate change, however, is the manufactured doubt that so often surrounds this issue. We find this manufactured doubt a fossil fuel industry product-- just as oil and gas are fossil fuel industry products--flowing even from the editorial page of one of our Nation's leading publications, the Wall Street Journal. Whenever the issue is harmful industrial pollutants, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page has a long record of misleading its readers, denying the legitimate science, and even ignoring its own news reporting, all to shill for the polluting industries.

A pattern of science denial repeats itself in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal on environmental issues--issues such as acid rain and depletion of the ozone layer and now, and for years, climate change. This editorial page has persistently published editorials against taking action to prevent manmade climate change.

In June 1993, the editors wrote that there is ``growing evidence that global warming just isn't happening.''

In September 1999, the editorial page reported that ``serious scientists'' call global warming ``one of the greatest hoaxes of all time.'' If that is what they are saying, I suspect that what those scientists are serious about is the money they get from the fossil fuel industry.

In June 2005, the page asserted that the link between fossil fuels and global warming had ``become even more doubtful.'' This was June 2005, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page was questioning whether there is a link between fossil fuels and global warming?

Even more recently, a December 2011 editorial said that the global warming debate requires what the page called ``more definitive evidence.'' I guess having essentially all the serious scientists in the world lined up on this is not serious enough.

In October 2013, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal warned that in addressing climate change, ``interventions make the world poorer than it would otherwise be.'' I guess if the world of Exxon shareholders is your world, then it does make it poorer, but in any real world, that just ain't so.

You would think that as the evidence mounted over the past several decades, the Wall Street Journal editorial page would have at some point woken up and begun to publish editorials based on real science and data. To put it mildly, that has not been the case. Instead, the editorial page has doubled down on climate denial.

Just last month, the Journal published a piece titled ``The Sea is Rising, but Not Because of Climate Change.'' This piece is riddled with readily fact-checked scientific errors, and it ignores all the legitimate science on climate change and sea level rise. Not surprisingly, the author of this article, Fred Singer, is a notorious and longstanding climate denier who has for years been affiliated with or funded by the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute, the Cato Institute, and others. He has been funded by a rogues' gallery of climate denial front groups that have themselves been funded by ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers' network.

Dr. Michael Mann and Dr. Andrea Dutton--both actual legitimate climate scientists--wrote a response to the Wall Street Journal. Their article, titled simply ``Water's Rising Because It's Getting Warmer,'' directly addresses the factual problems with Singer's piece.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this article be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

In response to Singer's claim that ice sheets are getting bigger, the actual climate scientists wrote:

No, ice is not accumulating on Earth--it is melting. No,

Antarctica isn't too cold for melting--warming oceans are

eroding the ice from beneath, destabilizing the ice sheet.

And no, legitimate scientific conclusions are not reached in

op-ed pieces, but through careful peer-reviewed research.

Climate denial, by the way, tends to avoid peer review like the plague. It goes straight to FOX News, straight to hearings, and straight to the talk shows, because there it gets the audience it wants without having to face the rigor it would not survive.

Singer also erroneously claims that sea levels are not rising due to warming temperatures. In response, Drs. Mann and Dutton explain:

That research shows that sea levels are rising and human-

caused climate change is the cause. Don't take our word for

it; help yourself to the mountain of scientific literature

showing as much. When water warms, it expands. When ice

warms, it melts. To deny these facts is not just to deny

climate change. It is to deny basic physics.

But in the spirit of climate denial, there is very little that these denialists won't say.

The Trump administration's own ``Climate Science Special Report,'' issued by the Trump administration, found that ``it is virtually certain that sea level rise this century and beyond will pose a growing challenge to coastal communities, infrastructure, and ecosystems.'' The ``Climate Science Special Report'' will serve as the scientific backbone for the Fourth National Climate Assessment, which is due later this year. The authors list is a who's who of top university scientists--many from universities in the home States of Senators here in this body--and experts from NOAA, the EPA, NASA, our National Labs, and the National Science Foundation. By the way, those NASA people have a rover driving around on Mars. They may know a little something about science. The report is backed by the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Commerce, Interior, and State--in all, 13 Federal Agencies and Departments. Or you can believe the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and its phony baloney fossil fuel-funded scientists.

The Journal actually continued its climate denial spree in June, publishing another piece titled ``Thirty Years On, How Well Do Global Warming Predictions Stand Up?'' In this one, Patrick Michaels and Ryan Maue argue that Dr. James Hansen's 1988 climate change warnings were overestimated.

Well, let's start by pulling the curtain back on these two characters who wrote the piece. You will quickly see that they are, to put it politely, aligned with the fossil fuel industry. Patrick Michaels is a senior fellow at the Koch-founded and Koch-funded Cato Institute. Michaels at one point admitted that 40 percent of his funding came from the fossil fuel industry. His

coauthor also joined the Koch-funded Cato Institute last year.

Believe it or not, yes, the fossil fuel industry still pays for this nonsense even as fossil fuel CEOs claim to recognize: Climate science is real, and we support a carbon fee. That, of course, being the latest chapter in the fossil fuel industry's long and ongoing campaign of fraud--now pretending that they support a carbon fee, when all of their political apparatus is dedicated to opposing the very result they claim to seek.

Thirty years ago, Hansen's testimony outlined three scenarios. Remember, this was 1988. The first scenario was a business-as-usual projection with accelerating emissions, yielding 1.5 degrees Celsius warming by 2017. The second scenario showed drastic emissions cuts, yielding 0.4 degrees Celsius warming by 2017. Hansen proposed a middle scenario of continued but not accelerating emissions, resulting in 0.84 degrees Celsius warming by 2017. In his testimony, Dr. Hansen stated that the middle scenario was the most likely.

Michaels and Maue claim that the scenario with the least amount of warming turned out to be correct, and therefore Hansen was wrong, and therefore climate models can't predict climate change. Unfortunately for them, the facts are otherwise.

Hansen's analysis projected that global surface air temperatures would increase by approximately 0.84 degrees Celsius between 1988 and 2017 in his middle scenario, the one he said was most likely. Once you account for the effects of a slight cooling that resulted from the success of the Montreal Protocol in phasing out chlorofluorocarbons, Hansen's projected warming is 0.6 to 0.7 degrees Celsius by 2017.

That, in blue, is the adjusted Hansen projection. I don't think you can fault him for not predicting the Montreal Protocol that happened after his prediction. It is fair to adjust his prediction for the Montreal Protocol and the effect of reduced chlorofluorocarbons. Once you do that, it shows that observed temperature in red tracks pretty darned well with his projections.

If that were my work, I would be pretty proud of it. Here it is 30 years later, and we are off by a gap that my finger can cover on the graph.

Michaels and Maue did not bother to mention that Hansen also predicted which parts of the globe would warm more quickly than others. Thirty years ago, he calculated the Arctic would warm faster, and there would be more warming over landmasses than over the oceans. All of these things are happening. Even Hansen's early climate models were accurate and reliable. And global warming is proceeding, just as the scientists have warned.

As the Wall Street Journal editorial page continues to publish its fossil fuel-funded nonsense--stuff that is written by pseudoscientists, funded by the industry with a massive conflict of interest about this question--it has been 30 years since the warnings of Hansen. Despite all of the evidence that has piled up, consistent with his warnings, despite the regular litany of current events driven by climate change now, Congress has been taking no action. We have been stilled by the forces of the fossil fuel industry.

The real irony here is that the Wall Street Journal claims to be the news source for businesses and financial investors. Off the editorial page, out in the real world of business and finance, real decisions are being made by real executives, backed by real money.

Are they buying what the Wall Street Journal editorial page is selling? No. No, indeed. They are telling their clients and their companies: You must take climate change seriously, and you must take carbon pricing seriously.

In the real world, businesses are demanding better climate policies and investors are demanding better reporting of climate risk. The giant investment firm BlackRock led a group of major investors and broke the back of ExxonMobil's opposition to answering to its shareholders about climate change. They are demanding this. Many companies are even setting their own internal price on carbon to account for the real- world costs of climate change. The business community and the investment community are acting because they know climate change is real, is affecting their prognosis for their companies, and carbon pricing is a key part of the solution.

Increasingly, economists and financial regulators warn that we are actually hurtling toward an economic disruption--that we need to prepare for a possible crash of what they call the carbon bubble. This carbon bubble collapses when fossil fuel reserves, now claimed as assets by the fossil fuel companies, turn out to be useless as renewable energy sources grow more competitive, and those useless assets become what are called stranded assets. How much gets stranded?

A publication by economists in the journal Nature estimated the following impacts in a 2-degree Celsius world: ``stranded assets . . . around 82 percent of global coal reserves, 49 percent of global gas reserves, and 33 percent of global oil reserves.''

Imagine that--82 percent of global coal reserves gone, wiped off the balance sheets; 49 percent of global gas reserves gone, wiped off the balance sheets; and 33 percent of global oil reserves gone, wiped off the balance sheets because they are no longer economically producible.

Is this nuts? Even the Bank of England in an official statement has warned that investments in fossil fuels and related technologies may ``take a huge hit.''

At some point, there has to be a grownup in the room. The fossil fuel industry, obviously, is not capable of being that grownup. They still pay for denial and obstruction. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page is obviously no use. That page is still yapping on the industry's leash.

There is some good news. This week, two House Republicans, at long last, introduced a bill that would put a price on carbon emissions. But we still await one Republican in the Senate, just one--anyone who will face up to this problem, who will stand up for science, who will acknowledge what their own home State's universities are teaching and take some real action. Climate denial is a dangerous and ultimately doomed game, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page should know better.

It is time to wake up.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, Rhode Island has lost a tireless champion in the fight against breast cancer, Marlene McCarthy. Marlene's dedication to this cause was well known throughout Rhode Island and across Capitol Hill.

Marlene cofounded the Rhode Island Breast Cancer Coalition in 1992 and represented Rhode Island on the National Breast Cancer Coalition's board of directors and executive committee. Under her leadership, the Rhode Island Breast Cancer Coalition established a helpline for breast cancer patients and a Breast Cancer Resource Center and provided countless support services to Rhode Islanders facing this terrible disease.

Her advocacy was not limited to Rhode Island. Marlene regularly visited me in Washington, DC, advocating for stronger Federal funding for breast cancer research and broader access to the best possible breast cancer care. At Marlene's urging, I introduced the Accelerating the End of Breast Cancer Act, legislation to set a goal of eradicating breast cancer by 2020.

The driving force behind Marlene's hard work and boundless persistence was her dream of a future free from the scourge of breast cancer for her granddaughters. It is in Marlene's memory that I pledge to continue to fight for policies that will make her dream a reality.

I offer my condolences to Marlene's family and to the breast cancer community. Marlene's legacy will live on through the family and loved ones she has left behind, the continuing work of the Rhode Island Breast Cancer Coalition, and the countless people she inspired through her advocacy and compassion. She will be missed.

Mr. President, I am grateful today to be joined by Senator King, from the great State of Maine, to speak about the troubling changes that we are seeing in the oceans and how climate change is reshaping our States' fisheries.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations recognizes that ``climate change imperils the structure and function of already stressed coastal aquatic ecosystems.'' For the record, Maine and Rhode Island are indeed aquatic.

The oceans have absorbed approximately 30 percent of the excess carbon dioxide that we have pumped into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution began. That is changing the ocean's chemistry. The oceans have also absorbed roughly 90 percent of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by those greenhouse gases. As a result of that excess carbon dioxide and that excess heat, our oceans are warming, and they are rising. They are losing oxygen, and they are growing more acidic. This puts marine life, coastal communities, and the global ocean economy all in jeopardy.

Commercial fishing is an important economy in the United States, and both Maine and Rhode Island celebrate our longstanding fishing traditions. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, over 9.6 billion pounds of wild seafood, valued at $5.3 billion, was commercially landed in the United States in 2016.

Across New England, American lobster was our most valuable fishery. We had lobstermen bringing around $663 million--two-thirds of $1 billion--worth of lobster to shore. Sadly, Rhode Island's lobster fishery is badly knocked down by warming ocean waters. NOAA notes: ``The lobster industry in New York and southern New England has nearly collapsed.'' Maine dominated the catch, bringing in nearly 85 percent of the lobster landed in the region.

According to NOAA, from ``1994 to 2014, Maine's landings surged 219 percent to more than 124 million pounds.'' The lobster population is shifting north, away from Rhode Island, New York, and Connecticut, as waters warm, leaving Rhode Island and other southern New England lobster traps empty. But Mainers are taking notice, too, as warming waters are driving lobster even farther north along their rocky coast. A recent study of 700 North American marine species predicted that lobster populations could move 200 miles northward by the end of the century as waters continue to warm. Senator King can report what 200 miles does to the coast of Maine.

Lobster is not the only fishery feeling the heat in New England. A 2017 study of global warming found that the greater Northeast region is anticipated to warm faster than other regions of the world. According to the ``Climate Science Special Report,'' a Federal report that will form the scientific basis of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, ``the Northeast has warmed faster than 99% of the global ocean since 2004.'' We have a global ocean hotspot off our coast. The Northeast is also expected to see higher than global average sea level rise, putting our ports, fishing docks, and coastal infrastructure all at risk.

Fishermen have noticed. They are keenly aware of the myriad ways climate change is altering the waters that generations of their families have fished, and they see the difference. Fishermen in Rhode Island have told me: ``Sheldon, things are getting weird out there.''

``Sheldon, it's not my grandfather's ocean.''

They share anecdotes of catching increasing numbers of tropical fish early in the summer season and seeing fish

that rarely frequented Rhode Island waters until recent years. As new fish move in and traditional fish move out, fishermen are left with more questions than answers.

In Southern New England, black sea bass has become the poster fish for shifting stocks. As we can see in this graphic, the 1970s had a hub of black sea bass here, with this as the center and then a slight reach upward but basically off the mid-Atlantic coast. This is 2014. The center of activity has moved up closer to Rhode Island. We are right here. Of course, black sea bass populations in our region have increased concomitantly.

This commercially valuable fish, the black sea bass, can help Rhode Island fishermen replace traditional species that are growing more scarce, like winter flounder--the fish my wife studied for her graduate work--which has crashed as winters warm.

The current fisheries' management structure, however, forces Rhode Island fishermen to toss the increasingly abundant and valuable black sea bass overboard. NOAA scientists saw this northward transit of the sea bass coming years ago, but regulatory catch limits did not keep up. They are generally based on historical catches. And States are hesitant to give up quota even after the fish have moved northward and left their shores, so State-specific quotas badly lag the changing distribution of the fish.

A former Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council scientist acknowledged that fish like summer flounder are moving north and told NPR that ``some of the Southern states are having trouble catching their quota, and states to the north have more availability of fish.''

Dave Monti is a friend who is a charter boat captain out of Wickford Harbor in North Kingstown, RI. Dave said:

There's no doubt the waters have warmed and black sea bass

have moved in. The quotas haven't done a good enough job at

figuring in climate change yet.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an article from the Providence Journal describing the changes that Captain Monti sees and our local efforts to deal with these changes.

Mr. President, we have to fix this. To use the black sea bass example, the species is comanaged by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. Rhode Island only has a seat on the Atlantic States Commission; it does not have a vote on the Mid-Atlantic Council. That means that my State is not fully represented in the decision-making process, and perfectly good black sea bass keeps being thrown into the sea by fishermen who ought to be able to bring that catch home.

In 2016, NOAA scientists assessed the vulnerability to the effects of climate change of over 80 commercially valuable species in the Northeast. So this is not just a story about black sea bass or about lobsters; this Northeast climate vulnerability assessment ranked species based on climate risk and sensitivities to changing ocean conditions.

Here is the climate risk factor graph. As we see, all 80 species scored in the high or very high risk of climate exposure categories. All 80 commercially valuable species they studied faced high or very high risk. This is a red flag for our fisheries.

Maine is the place for lobster. In Rhode Island, squid is king. In 2016, 56 percent of the longfin squid caught on the east coast was landed in Rhode Island. According to NOAA, this catch was valued at over $28 million, accounting for nearly 30 percent of our landings value in 2016. But climate change is putting our calamari at risk. Warm waters may actually open more habitat for the species, but its carbon cousin, ocean acidification, is the hazard. Like its shellfish brethren, squid require calcium carbonate--for squid, it is to grow the hard beaks they use to feed. Acidic waters decrease the availability of this necessary compound in the seawater and can even dissolve calcium carbonate organisms' shells under extremely acidic conditions.

On the west coast, shellfish farmers have been dealing with ocean acidification since the mid-2000s. Dr. Richard Feely is the researcher who first identified ocean acidification as the cause for oyster spat failures in the Northwest back in 2005. He noted in a recent NPR article that the acidification problem is only going to get worse. ``The acidification water welling up from the ocean floor now contains carbon dioxide gas emitted 50 years ago.'' Carbon emissions are worse since then. Some hatcheries in the Northwest are already moving operations to less acidic waters off Hawaii, and others are looking to buffer the water with seagrasses to absorb carbon and lower acidity. Shellfish farmers in Rhode Island are facing the challenge of acidifying waters as well.

At the same time, marine species are also facing deoxygenation, increased harmful algae, and other consequences of a warming and acidifying ocean. The symptoms of climate change in the ocean are everywhere.

A recent study in Global Change Biology warned that reduced oxygen availability could limit the growth of fish and other species. Fishermen can't make a living off sick and tiny fish.

California's lucrative Dungeness and rock crab season was cut short in 2015 to 2016 due to a harmful algae bloom.

Our Great Lakes have been hit too. I went out on Lake Erie after the horrible algae event there, and the fishermen who took me out sounded like Rhode Islanders. One of them said: ``Everything I've learned from fishing a lifetime on this lake is worth nothing now, because it's all changing so fast.''

If we have an opportunity to have an open, bipartisan debate on a strong Magnuson-Stevens Act reauthorization, I urge my colleagues not to overlook the toll climate change is taking on our fishing industry. The changes that are happening in our oceans do not care whether you believe they exist. The physics, chemistry, and biology driving these changes will happen anyway, and our fishermen are depending on us to give the scientists and the managers the tools and resources they need to meet the challenges climate change is bringing to our shores.

I now yield to my friend from Maine to give the perspective from his rocky shores.

Mr. President, Senator King and I yield the floor.

First, let me thank him for joining us. Second, with Senators present here from landlocked States, let me make the requests to both of you that, when we come before this body with concerns about what is happening to our ocean economies, which I think are shared by every coastal Senator who is seeing these changes, that you view our pleas with the same courtesy and respect that we show you when wildfires burn through Utah and we come to make sure that there is adequate emergency response or when Oklahoma faces hurricanes or cyclones and tornadoes and the Federal Government and the Senate rally to the response of those who are experiencing the pain of that in your States. Our fishing communities and our coastal communities have a very different distress, but I hope you will see it as an equal distress and pay us the courtesy of your due consideration.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, to follow up on the remarks of our distinguished Democratic ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator Carper, who spoke about the environmental prospects of Trump's nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, should he reach the Supreme Court, I come at this from a very particular angle. Let me start by kind of laying the predicate, if you will, for my comments.

A long, long time ago, when the Founding Fathers were setting up our country, they brought over from England the tradition of an independent judiciary and of the common jury. It was extremely important to the founding generation. The Declaration of Independence made reference to efforts to interfere with the right to trial by jury.

The efforts by British agents of influence to interfere with American juries was a constant thorn. The feeling was that the independence of courts and, particularly, the independence of jurors was a very significant check and balance in the constitutional system that the Founders were setting up.

These were experienced politicians. These were thoughtful people who had read and debated a lot about governance. They understood that there were times when very powerful interests were able to dominate a legislative body, there were times when very powerful interests were able to dominate a Governor or other chief executive and, indeed, there were times when that same very powerful interest could not only dominate the legislative branch but also the executive branch at the same time. Therefore, you needed to have a third branch of government-- an independent branch of government--to which you could go to be sure that you were being treated with justice. They designed it all fairly carefully.

The jury has a lot of advantages to it. You don't get repeat jurors. Every jury veneer, every jury pool, is a new group. The reason for that is to make it hard for big interests to be able to go to people who might be jurors and try to fix the jurors in their favor in the same way they go to legislatures and try to fix legislators in their favor. You do not know who your jury is going to be until it is called up. So you can't apply influence to a jury. If you try, it is actually a crime. It is called tampering with a jury.

We very carefully set up independent judges and pools of regular citizens who were to come in, virtually at random, to do one jury service and then to go back to their lives, and we did it for a reason. Blackstone described that reason as to provide a safeguard for regular citizens against other more wealthy and powerful citizens, more wealthy and powerful interests.

It is an interesting piece of our constitutional analysis because, in most places, what has been set up is a structure that has been designed to protect the common citizen against the excesses of government. The checks and balances have been generally set up to protect the ordinary man and woman against excessive use of government power against them.

With the juries, Blackstone said, it is a little bit different. It is not just abuse of power by government; it is abuse of power by the more wealthy and powerful interests, because the Founders knew that it would be the more powerful and wealthy interests who would come in and try to fix the legislature, who would try to fix the Governor or, at the Federal level, the President, and that, therefore, the jury would stand as the guardian and the bulwark of regular Americans against influence from the more powerful and wealthy interests.

Look around at who the more powerful and wealthy interests are in our country right now. Collectively, the biggest is probably the fossil fuel industry. If you add up the whole Koch brothers' Koch Industries' apparatus, if you add up ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and the whole American Petroleum Institute population, if you look at the extent to which they have seized control of the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and if you put that whole array together, it is very likely not only the most powerful political influence effort now, but it may very well be the most powerful political effort in American history. Those wealthy and powerful interests are hard at work at making sure that their interests come first and that the interests of ordinary Americans come at a very distant second.

The way in which Mr. Kavanaugh comes to this nomination smells of all of that influence already. For starters, he was selected through a very private process--from all of the information we have about it--that is moderated by a group called the Federalist Society but which checks in with all of the big Republican funding special interests to make sure that they are all OK with the nominee. There is a preclearance by special interests that takes place for these judicial nominees. Obviously, the most powerful and wealthy special interest--the biggest political force, perhaps ever--is going to be a part of that checklist.

There can be no doubt that if the fossil fuel industry were not checked off on Brett Kavanaugh, he would not be the nominee. There is no doubt in my mind that they and other special interests--the gun lobby, the anti-choice crowd, the Wall Street folks--all had the chance to say: No, not that guy. Find me somebody who will be good to us.

So Kavanaugh has already cleared that process. Now you see the confirmation process underway, and you see big special interests' dark money already out, campaigning for him.

The last time we had one of these contests, it was this: Is it going to be Merrick Garland? No, we are going to stop him dead and not even give him a hearing. We are going to bring on this character, Gorsuch, and he is going to come in.

Somebody spent nearly $18 million in political ads to support that switch. Somebody felt it was worth $18 million to have Gorsuch and not Garland on the Supreme Court. We don't know who that person was because of the dark money protections that are such a scourge in our democracy right now. That individual donor's hand is hidden behind all of this dark money machinery, but we do know that there is a person--an entity--who spent $18 million to have it be Gorsuch, not Garland.

So that is the track record for this.

Here comes Kavanaugh, and the same machinery is now up for him. He was precleared by the special interests, and big dark money interests are already spending money for him. Who in his right mind would believe that this guy is not predisposed in the direction of those big special interests? It is almost impossible to imagine under these political circumstances.

When you look at his record on the DC Circuit, this is a guy who has been on the warpath against environmental protection. This is a guy who is Scott Pruitt in robes. This guy is really something.

Now, he was not on the original Trump list, as I understand it. So maybe he has been spending his time auditioning on the DC Circuit for this incredibly dominant special interest--the fossil fuel industry-- and exhibiting his ability and his willingness to make anti-environment decisions, to make pro-corporate decisions, and to make pro-polluter decisions so that he can inch his way, maybe, onto the Trump list for the Supreme Court.

Sure enough, not only is he on the list, but he is now the nominee. His record is absolutely abysmal. You would have to call him an environmental extremist. It is truly, truly exceptional to think of all of the different cases in which he has been involved. My colleague from Hawaii is here. So I am not going to go through them all, but as this goes forward, I will have plenty of time to explore these issues with him.

It is going to be very, very important to the big polluters to have Kavanaugh instead of Kennedy because, when you look at the record in the Supreme Court, there has been a considerable array of decisions on environmental matters in which Justice Kennedy has been the swing vote. So extract Justice Kennedy with his retirement and put in Kavanaugh with his record from the DC Circuit, his preclearance by the polluting interests, and the fact that big-money folks are already out there pushing for him. They are going to want something.

I suspect what they are going to want is a reversal of Justice Kennedy's position in favor of the environment and all of the issues on which he was the 5-to-4 tiebreaker in favor of the environment. Now all of those cases will go back the other way, and polluters will rule.

Polluters already rule here. We are incapable of doing anything serious about climate change. Polluters completely dominate over in the House. They have written this ridiculous letter and have told the House that it shouldn't even do a carbon price. They have put all of their polluter front-group names on this letterhead. Of course, Trump still thinks that climate change is a hoax.

You have a situation that the Founding Fathers were concerned about. You have an enormous special interest with extraordinary power that dominates the Senate and the House and that has completely gotten this administration by the choke chain. Now what it wants to do is to extend its power to the one

part of the government the Founding Fathers set up to be able to tell the special interest no, to require it to follow the truth, to require it to look at real evidence, to subject witnesses to cross-examination, to provide discovery so that you know what is really going on, and for there to be penalties if you try to tamper and for there to be penalties if you lie.

This is not the environment that the big polluters like. So they want to control it. I see the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as an effort, basically, at agency capture at the Supreme Court level. We have to be very careful about this.

I yield to my distinguished colleague from Hawaii.

Mr. President, I wish to join my distinguished colleague from Connecticut in commenting on the qualifications and prospects of these two nominees whom we are facing now on the Senate floor. I thank him for his comments.

I would like to take my time to bring to the attention of this body some of the concerns that--what I think are in the nature of concerns that if we do this now, we will learn to rue the day we made these mistakes.

Let me begin, as I did in my comments about Judge Kavanaugh, with just a quick overview of how our Founding Fathers felt about the judicial branch of government and about the jury and what it was there for. The Founders were experienced politicians. They were adept at history. They read widely. They prided themselves on the expertise they had developed in how you design a government, and they were very conscious about doing something that was unprecedented and that they wanted very desperately to have work right. So they put their hearts and souls into trying to get it right, this American experiment of ours.

From sad experience in the Colonies, they knew big special interests could come in and could completely dominate a legislative body; that the legislative body would be at the beck and call of big, private special interests. They had also seen Governors in the Colonies become corrupted by influence. So they were very concerned that it was not enough that you separated the legislative and executive branches and created some degree of rivalry between the two because that left the prospect still that the big special interests that commanded the legislature could also command the executive branch. Then, where would the ordinary citizen go? Where would you go for relief when some big and powerful interest controlled those two branches of government? You would go to the courts. That is why they made the judiciary independent. That is why they insisted and fought so hard to make sure the institution of the jury made it over from England, made it to the Colonies. It was part of our battle with England that the King had tried to interfere with our juries. We took the power of the jury and the independence of the court seriously, not just as a matter of providing justice to an individual person but as part of the architecture of our Constitution, as part of the architecture of freedom that our Constitution represents.

There is something that is interesting about the jury and the courts, but the jury, in particular, that makes it a little bit different than a lot of the rest of what went on in that Constitution because, clearly, the Founding Fathers were concerned that the power of government would be co-opted by powerful interests and then evil work would be done with that power against ordinary people. So a lot of our constitutional structure is designed to protect all of us regular Americans against the power of government, but in the courts, and specifically in the jury, there is a different power that was at issue.

Blackstone was the predominant legal figure in the Colonies at the time. The reference that lawyers of the Revolutionary era used was ``Blackstone's Commentaries.'' Blackstone described how, within the larger context of the judicial branch, the jury was a defense for regular people not against the government, interestingly--possibly against the government--but also, and perhaps more importantly, against the more wealthy and powerful citizens. It was set up so the courts would provide equality between an ordinary American citizen who was being run over by a big, powerful, wealthy American citizen, and they would be treated fairly. It would be the chance where you could stand up against wealth, where you could stand up against power, and even if they controlled the legislature, even if they controlled the Governor, you still had your shot before that jury of your peers and in those courts.

So that is the context for looking at these judges who are being put forward by a special interest apparatus of perhaps unprecedented power in our country's history--certainly unprecedented power in our country's history since Teddy Roosevelt broke the back of the big trusts and the Big Business interests that had dominated in his era.

Here, we have these two characters coming through, and one is Mr. Bounds. Mr. Bounds has a considerable problem with himself, which is that he is filling a seat on the Ninth Circuit that is designated to the State of Oregon. It has, until this moment, always been the tradition of the Senate that the home State Senators associated with that seat have the ability to say no. It is part of our checks and balances. The people from that State who are likely to know him the best--the Senators who are here--have the chance to say no. Both of the Oregon Senators have said no. Has that mattered one whit to the Trump administration? No, they have broken this tradition.

Regrettably, our Republican colleagues are complicit in letting this happen. They are complicit in letting this happen. It is a sad day for the Senate because the blue-slip process--the process by which home State Senators are allowed to say no--is also the only process that defends that this is an Oregon seat in the first instance. There is no other check on the President's power to appoint. So there are a lot of reasons why Bounds is disqualified, but the most compelling one to me is because the two home State Senators have both said no to this person.

Things do turn about. I have been in the majority here, and I have been in the minority. I have been here with Republican Presidents, and I have been here with Democratic Presidents. Things do turn about. When the day

comes that we have a Democratic President making these appointees and when we have Democratic control so we can confirm these appointees, Republican Senators are going to regret that they threw their own blue- slip rights away today on this nomination, and throwing their blue slips away doesn't just mean they lose their vote as to the Oregon Senator for this seat, it means they lose their vote that defends that this needs to be an Oregon judge in this seat.

There is nothing, after the blue slip is gone, that would allow our colleagues from Texas to prevent a Democratic President from appointing a New York City judge to Texas seats on the circuit court of appeals.

So if that starts to happen, don't come crying back to us now about this. Today is your chance to stop that--to stop all of that--and to put the Senate back to respect for our colleagues' judgment, a mutual and bipartisan respect for our colleagues' judgment that has been the standard of the Senate for a century now. It is going today, and it is going today under what pressure? Why would we want to turn to other colleagues and say: For the first time ever, your views don't count about the judge from your home State, Senator. The only reason for that is the power of the political pressure behind these appointees, and that is the big special interests that are putting these nominees forward, that have precleared them through this mysterious, dark process that the Federalist Society runs, that have pushed forward these political campaigns to support them through this mysterious, dark process that is funded through the Judicial Crisis Network, and they are going to be telling them what to do through a mysterious, dark process of funded so-called friends of the court--amici--who are going to be there in the court all day long telling them what to do. That is the process that is breaking the blue slip, and it oughtn't to. It is not right on its own, and it certainly isn't right to break the blue slip.

The last thing I will say is about this character Oldham, who is coming in. Among the leading Republican special interests are the great polluters. They got Scott Pruitt in. What more proof do you need that the polluters are in control than to put Scott Pruitt in charge of the EPA? The man was a joke, and yet in he went, confirmed by the Senate.

Now comes Oldham, who has said that the entire administrative state is enraging to him--enraging to him. It is the illegitimacy of it, he says. ``It is the entire existence of this edifice of administrative law that's constitutionally suspect.''

No, it is not. We have an entire body of law, the delegation doctrine, that controls what is appropriate for Congress to delegate to an administrative agency. It has been that way for decades. This is fanciful stuff, but it is a wonderful red flag waved for the big polluters, saying: Whenever you disagree with a regulatory agency that tries to keep you cleaning up your act, I am going to be with you. That is what the Oldham nomination is all about. It is all about telling the big polluters that we have a friend for you on the courts now.

If there is one thing that ought not to happen in this country, it is that somebody walks up the steps of the courthouse, and before the argument is even made, they know they are going to lose the case, not from the arguments in the brief but from the identity of the party on the front page of the brief.

That is why Oldham is going on the court, so that the big polluters can know they will win their cases in front of him without him even having to read the brief. All he will need to do is look at the cover, see that the big polluters are on the cover, and know he is there to attack the administrative state making them keep the water clean, making them keep the air clean, or making them keep their carbon emissions under control.

That is what this is about. This is not right. It is not right that the blue slip is being torn apart today on the Senate floor. It is not right that somebody who doesn't think that the EPA ought to even exist is being put forward as a judge.

But the connections come back to that same initial point, which is that the big special interests who like to control legislatures and who like to control executive branches would also love to control the courts, because that is the place where they can still be held to account.

So it is with real regret that I face this day in the Senate.

I yield my remaining time.

Of course.

That is absolutely correct. There is not a law that assigns within the Ninth Circuit which judges will be treated as Oregon judges and which judges will be treated as California judges. Within Rhode Island, we are part of the First Circuit Court of Appeals. There is one seat on that court that, by tradition, is designated to Rhode Island.

It would mean that the Senators from that State would have no defense against that change. It would mean that the next Democratic President could appoint Rhode Islanders to Texas. It would mean that the next Republican President could appoint Texans to Rhode Island, and neither the Senator from Texas nor the Senators from Rhode Island would have any defense left against that without the honoring of the blue slip.

They would either be giving up the one defense they have to make sure that the seats on the court that are allocated to their State are in fact filled with judges from their State, or they would be suggesting that there should be two different sets of rules that apply--that there be one blue-slip rule for a Democratic President and that there would be a different blue-slip rule for a Republican President.

I don't think that is credible. I think that once the blue slip is torn down, reestablishing it is virtually impossible. I think the day will come when Senators come to regret that they are trying to get a home-State person appointed from Idaho or Colorado or New Mexico or Texas, and they have given up their ability to see to it that happens, and that a lawyer from San Francisco or from New York City or from Florida or from anyplace else can be dropped into their circuit court seat, and they have nothing left to do about it, because the one tool they have to stop that and to enforce that prerogative is the blue slip, and it dies today.

Mr. President, I spoke before the Fourth of July recess about two financial risks that are coming our way thanks to not getting anything done on climate change.

One, of course, is the risk to coastal properties--not something the Presiding Officer has to worry too much about given his home State but something that Rhode Island, the Ocean State, has to care a lot about and that the distinguished Senator from Florida and his constituents have to care a lot about.

There is a point where rising sea levels intrude on the saleability, the mortgageability, and the insurability of houses. None other than Freddie Mac, the huge Federal housing corporation, is predicting that there will be a coastal property meltdown.

The other risk is that of a carbon bubble. There is a lot of talk in the economic literature about a carbon bubble. One recent financial study reports that ``the potential effects of a carbon bubble on financial stability have been recently discussed in the academic literature and are increasingly on the agenda of [bank] regulators and supervisors.'' Indeed, in an official statement, the Bank of England has warned that ``investments in fossil fuels and related technologies . . . may take a huge hit.'' That huge hit is the other side of a carbon bubble: It pops, and you have a crash. So let's look at the prospects for not just a carbon bubble but a carbon crash.

There are several elements in the runup to a crash. Some of these we witnessed in the crash of the housing bubble back in 2008. When these conditions exist, we should take warning.

One condition is whether you can trust the players. In the housing crash, the rating agencies were in bed with the banks, and you couldn't trust their risk evaluations. The whole thing was cooked. The big fees the rating agencies were taking also took their eye off the ball, and they gave wildly erroneous ratings to high-risk investments. So at the heart of the 2018 housing crash was a failure of trustworthiness.

Can we trust the fossil fuel industry any better than those rating agencies? There is no reason to think so, and there is plenty of reason to think not. This is an industry that has been lying about fossil fuel's effect on our climate for decades, and once you get used to lying about one thing, it is hard to contain the spread of the rot. Exxon even once gave its CEO the infamous, phony Oregon Petition, which urged the United States to reject the Kyoto Protocol, to cite to shareholders at an annual meeting.

I have spoken before about what I consider to be the untrustworthiness of Exxon's response to the BlackRock shareholder resolution, which required Exxon to report the predicted effect of climate policies on Exxon's business model. As fossil fuels are priced out of the market by renewable energy and as nations enact carbon emissions restrictions, fossil fuel reserves now claimed as assets by energy companies may become undevelopable stranded assets.

In a nutshell, Exxon seems to have wildly--indeed, so wildly, you can only conclude deliberately--overestimated the adoption of carbon capture utilization and storage, wildly underestimated the adoption of electric vehicles, and wildly underestimated renewable energy growth, all to reach its rosy conclusions that its assets were more or less secure.

On the subject of trustworthiness, right now big oil companies are still being untrustworthy, telling the world they want a price on carbon, while at the same time telling their political fixers in Congress to kill any such thing. Who knows how much they push around their analysts and others who

are curious about a carbon bubble. What we know is that trusting this industry is asking a lot. That is condition one for a bubble in a crash--untrustworthy actors.

Condition two is market failure. Markets usually correct and have a smoothing effect. If there is market failure, markets can go off course until the correction comes, and then the correction is so immediate and so big that it amounts to a crash. There is market failure in fossil fuel that props up this bubble. Indeed, there are several. The biggest is that the fossil fuel industry rides on what the IMF calculates is a global multitrillion-dollar annual subsidy: $700 billion in subsidy every year in the United States alone, says the International Monetary Fund. That subsidy massively warps the operation of the market.

There is also what appears to be a methodological issue. The oil industry is ordinarily measured financially by net asset value analysis. As one paper noted, this is an ``industry valuation methodology [that] assumes full extraction of fossil fuel reserves.'' A methodology that assumes full extraction of fossil fuel reserves becomes a problem when the question is whether extraction of those reserves is even possible.

There is also what I would call a ``massiveness factor'' at work here. Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns were so massive that it was hard to imagine them vanishing, but they did. The market value of fossil fuel reserves that can't be burned is around $20 trillion, according to the World Bank. That is such a big wipeout that it is hard to comprehend, let alone anticipate. People wait until tomorrow. Then, the tomorrows pile up into a bubble, and then the crash comes when the first person panics and everybody runs.

One other market failure is actually how the crooked political pressure of this industry is causing us not to focus on the 2-degree Celsius ceiling that scientists warn us about for global warming, or, actually, safer yet is the 1.5-degree Celsius ceiling, which burning existing reserves will blow us through. We cannot have both a safe planet and full extraction, and the fossil fuel industry is choosing extraction.

That political castle of climate denial will fall sooner or later. It is false. Not only is condition one met--untrustworthy players--but condition two is met: There is a massive, multiple market failure in fossil fuel awaiting correction, which brings us to condition three: The energy market is undermining fossil fuels as a technology.

We are reaching a tipping point. Here is Lazard's cost curve for onshore wind energy. It shows, over 8 years, a 67-percent decrease in cost. This line shows the cost of wind energy steadily declining from 2009 until 2017.

At the same time these wind costs were dramatically declining, utility-scale solar costs and rooftop solar costs also declined dramatically. This line represents rooftop solar costs. This line below it represents utility-scale solar costs. Again, there was a percentage decrease of 86 percent.

New solar and wind energy projects are already becoming more economical than existing coal plants, as we just saw in Colorado. New solar and wind projects now compete on price with new natural gas plants, as a recent auction in Arizona showed.

The cost trajectory for renewables continues steeply downward. When you compare U.S. wind and solar to other energy sources, you see the trend is clear, and here is the result. On cost, the lowest cost providers are onshore wind and utility-scale solar. More expensive than them is natural gas. More expensive is coal. More expensive still is nuclear. That is not counting the subsidy. That is apparent price.

This same trend is also happening globally. This graphic is prepared by the World Economic Forum, and it shows the same thing for renewables. In particular, here is the rapidly declining cost of solar photovoltaic. Here is the cost of coal, and here, right now, they cross over. We are at the tipping point, where it is cheaper worldwide to develop solar and wind than it is to burn coal.

Stanford economist Tony Seba studies economic disruptions, and he likes to see these two photographs. It will be hard to see from where you are. This is Fifth Avenue in New York City in 1900. If you look at the photograph, you can see that every vehicle there is drawn by a horse. In 1900, every vehicle was drawn by a horse. If you look very closely, it appears there is one leading-edge, non-horse-drawn vehicle. The whole street is filled with horse-drawn carriages and wagons in 1900. Thirteen years later, on Fifth Avenue in New York City, every single vehicle in that street is now an automobile. In only 13 years, there was a complete transition in transportation. If you were a harness maker, this was a tough transition for you. In just 13 years, the world changed, illustrating the point that major economic disruptions can take place fast. Think land lines and cell phones, if you want a modern example.

People still ride horses, and they probably always will, but our transportation sector shifted rapidly from horse-drawn conveyance to automobiles because horse-drawn conveyance was an antiquated technology that got left behind. People still have landlines. I have one at home. We hardly ever use it. The communications industry shifted rapidly, as antiquated landline technology got left behind.

As the energy market shifts to cleaner, cheaper, more efficient renewable technologies, fossil fuels soon will not compete in the marketplace. There is our third condition: not just untrustworthy players, not just market distortion, but also a technological tipping point making the fossil fuel technology obsolete.

There is a fourth condition. This fourth condition basically puts an accelerator on condition three in certain sectors of the energy market. Condition four is based on the fact that the marginal cost of production of a unit of fossil fuel energy varies considerably. Some fuels are low cost and high cost to produce. Some geographical locations are low cost and high cost locations. In this variance, coal is pretty much dead already at the hands of oil and gas, purely because of cost. We can set coal aside for a moment.

In the world's oil markets, much of this cost of production variant is masked right now by energy cartels that prop up the price of oil. Cartel behavior to prop up the price of your product makes economic sense if you can maintain monopoly pressure to prop up the price, but it also only makes sense for the cartel participants if you can anticipate that you can sell your product out into the future. You hold back your output to drive up price and to maximize your return in the hopes that in the future you will be able to keep doing the same thing and you will be able to sell your product.

If you are not sure that there will be another day to sell your product at the propped-up price, you start to get anxious about your product becoming stranded and about your product becoming valueless. At that point, it doesn't make sense to engage in cartel behavior. What makes sense is to maximize your output and to sell as much as you can while your commodity still has value--basically, to have a fire sale.

Low-cost fossil fuel energy producers would be rational to drop their prices and maximize their market-share, fire-sale pricing while their fossil fuel still has value. Get the dammed stuff out the door while you still can. That behavior--dropping the cost, pricing at your marginal cost of production, and selling as much of your product as you can--will fend off the inevitable for low-cost producers for a while. However, for those producers that can't match that fire-sale price, the downward trajectory of their crash steepens catastrophically. As soon as you can't produce not at the cartel price but at the lowered fire- sale price--as soon as you cannot meet that price--you are out of business. There still is a fossil fuel market. You are just not in it. The bad news for the United States is that this is where much of our market is. Economists looking at this carbon bubble mess warn that high-cost regions like the United States could ``lose almost their entire oil and gas industry.'' Let me quote that again: ``lose almost their entire oil and gas industry.''

To recap about a fossil fuel ``carbon bubble,'' the players aren't trustworthy; the fossil fuel markets aren't efficient in the economic sense; fossil fuels as a technology are now tipping into being obsolete, priced out by renewables; and our U.S. industry is particularly vulnerable to an accelerated market meltdown when the tide shifts.

Those four conditions don't make a great scenario. That is a warning we need to start considering. What should we do?

Everyone seems to agree on two safety measures. First, there is one sensible hedge: Don't invest all in fossil fuel. Invest more in renewables. Be on the winning side of the shift. Start making carburetors, not just a mule harness. There is also one important, sensible economic strategy; that is, to manage the transition.

As one paper on this subject concluded, ``The issue of concern is the lack of any transitional strategy. . . . Inadequate, conflicting or slow responses to climate change in investment and finance can entail risks that could be avoided under a more orderly transition.''

You could equate it to jumping out of an airplane. You are going to end up on the ground anyway. Wouldn't you like a parachute to make it a gentler and more survivable voyage? What is the parachute but a transition plan for managing this shift? The best one is a price on carbon.

This takes us back to the discreditable conduct of the fossil fuel industry, which, far from leading through this transition, far from trying to build itself a parachute, is busily still trying to deny that there is any such transition, including, in my view, their falsely reporting to shareholders that this is all going to be OK, and we are going to be able to extract and sell all of our reserves. This is an industry that is still fighting like a wounded bear to prevent anyone from organizing the orderly transition they need.

At some point, there has to be a grownup in the room. The fossil fuel industry has shown no capacity for that role, which makes it up to us in Congress to help America prepare for both the predicted crash in coastal property values, as sea level begins to enter the mortgage and insurance horizon for those properties, and the predicted carbon bubble we see coming and that economists write about coming that we can manage our way through if we are responsible. In that regard, it is time for us to wake up.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. President, this past year and half of the Trump administration has been a constant, daily barrage of scandal, corruption, and chaotic incompetence. In this environment, the Senate now considers the President's controversial nomination of Brian Benczkowski to lead the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. It has been over a year since Benczkowski was first nominated, and there have been repeated calls for his nomination to be withdrawn.

Why this man, for this job, at this time? There is a very good chance that something fishy is happening here. The warning signals of something fishy should be evident to Democratic and Republican Senators alike.

The obvious question is whether President Trump and his political or legal team are using this appointment to sneak a fast one by the American people and put themselves in a position to interfere, from the inside, with the Department of Justice investigation into the dealings between Russia and the Trump campaign--the so-called Mueller investigation, though it has expanded beyond Bob Mueller into several other parts of the Department of Justice.

How would this fast one work exactly? We will be voting tomorrow to install a Trump ally and nominee--a longtime political operative with ties to a Russian bank and to the recused Attorney General Jeff Sessions--into one of the most powerful posts at the Department of Justice, a position that just so happens to have significant supervisory control over Special Counsel Mueller's investigation and the criminal investigation of the Southern District of New York into Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. What could possibly go wrong?

Remember, we are dealing with a President who remains the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation by the Department of Justice. We are dealing with a President who repeatedly violates longstanding rules and norms in his continuing effort to interfere with that investigation. We are dealing with a President who has told the press he believes he has ``absolute control'' over the Department of Justice and who repeatedly criticizes Attorney General Sessions' recusal from the Russian interference investigation as insufficiently ``loyal.''

We are dealing with a President who appears to have actively interfered in the Department's investigations into Michael Flynn, who insisted on ``loyalty'' from his FBI Director, and who admitted that firing that FBI Director was to ease pressure over what he called ``the Russia thing.''

We know all of this in the Senate, often from this President's own mouth and his own tweets. With that backdrop from the Oval Office for this nomination, extra caution is warranted to be sure we are not being led into trouble.

Worse still, it is not just the President who is up to no good with respect to the ongoing criminal investigation. Republicans in the House--I suspect hand in hand with the White House and legal team--are pressing their smear campaign against Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, seeming to want to kneecap the independence of the Mueller investigation and get access to its confidential investigative files.

As a former U.S. attorney, I recoil from the notion that a legislative body wants to peek over the shoulders of prosecutors in an ongoing investigation, particularly when those legislators are so closely allied with the subject of that investigation.

Against that added backdrop of House interference, the Senate is being asked to install a Trump loyalist into a key position of authority and control over the Russia-Trump collusion investigation. Even more caution is warranted for this nomination, given the behavior of the House.

Why this man, for this job, at this time? Why Benczkowski? Let's review. He is nominated to be the Chief of the Criminal Division, a critically important office within the Department of Justice. He will oversee nearly 700 career prosecutors who are some of the most talented and experienced lawyers in the country. Criminal Division lawyers prosecute nationally significant cases, from high-profile public corruption to child exploitation, to complicated money laundering and international organized crime cases.

One thing that is obvious--that is obvious--is that Mr. Benczkowski brings astoundingly weak qualifications to that task. Given the stakes and the complexity of the Criminal Division's work, you would expect someone leading the Division who had years of experience as a prosecutor, who had tried cases to a verdict--someone who knew the ins and outs of the Division's work and knew his way around Federal courtrooms.

To say that Benczkowski lacks this experience is putting it mildly. He may be the weakest candidate ever put forward in the history of the Department to oversee the Criminal Division. He is probably not hirable into the career positions he will oversee. The man has less courtroom time than the average citizen who has sat on a jury. He has never tried a case of any sort, criminal or civil, State or Federal. He has never argued a motion--something most litigators have done in their first years out of law school. He has never worked as a prosecutor. His stints at the Department of Justice were never as a practicing lawyer but always on the political side. In his whole career, he told the Senate, he could only come up with one or two times he ever entered a courtroom on what he called ``routine scheduling or other matters.''

So it is not Benczkowski's experience or qualifications that are the reasons for his appointment. If qualifications and experience are not the reasons for his appointment, why put this prosecutorial neophyte into one of the most powerful, important prosecutorial positions at the Department of Justice? What, one might ask, is the motive? What do we know?

Although serious questions remain unanswered by the Department of Justice and by Mr. Benczkowski, we know from our correspondence with the Department that the Russia-Trump collusion investigation is being run under Department of Justice procedures that require approvals by the Criminal Division for a wide array of investigative and prosecutorial steps. As the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island, I used to have

to work with the Department of Justice and go through those approvals and those steps. The Mueller investigation and the Cohen investigation in the Southern District of New York are both subject to those same rules. That gives Mr. Benczkowski, if he is confirmed, not just a window into the Russia-Trump collusion investigation but the ability to actually interfere.

What else we know about Mr. Benczkowski is that he was a longtime political operative here in the Senate, on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he worked as staff director for none other than Senator Jeff Sessions. Well, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself from the Russia-Trump collusion investigation. It is therefore an obvious question, if this person brings no experience as a prosecutor but plenty of experience as a close political operative for Jeff Sessions, whether that close political relationship is the reason.

That, in turn, presents the obvious question: Since Benczkowski is not there for his experience or for his qualifications, is he being installed as some kind of back channel, either as a trusted intermediary to get information to Attorney General Sessions around his recusal from this investigation perhaps or perhaps, in a worst-case scenario, to be a pipeline to Trump and his lawyers of confidential investigative information--the kind of information that House Republicans are trying to get their hands on? Maybe it is simply to jam the bureaucratic gears whenever Robert Mueller seeks approvals from the Criminal Division.

These are not easy questions, but there is an easy answer to these questions, and that easy answer is, don't worry, Mr. Benczkowski will be fully recused from that investigation. But the Department and Mr. Benczkowski won't say that. There have been no meaningful answers to these questions. Why won't they just say he will be recused? That should be easy.

It gets weirder. Benczkowski has his own Russia-Trump angle. After the election, with his old boss Sessions tapped to become Attorney General, Benczkowski volunteered for the Trump transition team, leading the so-called landing team at DOJ. It was on his way out the door from that role, heading back to his law firm, that Benczkowski told Sessions he was interested in securing a political appointment in the Department of Justice.

Scroll forward 2 months to March of 2017, when Benczkowski got a call from one of his law partners. The firm was representing the Russian Alfa Bank against allegations that Alfa Bank was serving as a back channel to the Trump organization. Alfa Bank is one of Russia's largest banks, and its owners reportedly have longstanding ties to Vladimir Putin. The partner wanted to know whether Benczkowski--fresh off the Trump Department of Justice transition team--could help the Russian bank. Benczkowski joined the firm's Alfa Bank legal team.

The next month, in April of 2017, Benczkowski was contacted by the Attorney General's office to ask whether he would like this job to head up the Department's Criminal Division. Press reports as early as May 4 indicated that Benczkowski was likely to be tapped for this Criminal Division job. Surely a person of sound judgment at this point would have stopped representing a Russian bank that might be under DOJ investigation for secret ties to the President. Surely. But no. Rather than withdraw from his representation, Benczkowski expanded his portfolio with Alfa Bank to review the now famous and widely verified Steele dossier.

The Steele dossier has been a feature not only in the Russia-Trump collusion investigation, it has also been a feature of Republican political efforts to discredit and besmirch the collusion investigation.

Benczkowski's new portfolio was to advise whether Alfa Bank, the Russian bank, should file a defamation suit against publisher BuzzFeed for disclosing the Steele dossier, which Alfa Bank subsequently did in New York State court.

There is more. Benczkowski's nomination to this position triggered confirmation obligations to disclose information to the Senate Judiciary Committee about his background, publications, and clients. This client was a Putin-tied Russian bank, and Benczkowski's work related to the red-hot Steele dossier. So obviously he disclosed this client relationship--actually, not. Benczkowski's Senate Judiciary questionnaire included no mention whatsoever of the Russian bank. Only when Democratic Senators reviewed Benczkowski's confidential FBI background report did questions arise about his relationship with Alfa Bank and his review of the Steele dossier for this Russian client. Benczkowski explained the troubling omission, telling us that he had been forbidden by his firm's confidentiality agreement from disclosing his work for Alfa Bank.

Some people would have thought his obligations of disclosure to the Senate mattered more than obligations of nondisclosure to such a client. These disclosure issues are customarily waived by clients in these circumstances or the nominee can withdraw. You don't just fail to list such a client, but that is what he did.

Mr. Benczkowski was voted out of the Judiciary Committee on a party- line vote a year ago. Now, with the Russia-Trump investigation heating up, with significant new potential cooperating witnesses, and with millions of pages of new documents available to the Department of Justice from Michael Cohen, now Republicans bring this nomination forward. Particularly this week, when the country has turned its focus to the Supreme Court announcement--an announcement obviously likely to dominate the news cycle--this bizarre nomination gets called up for a vote. It is almost as if they don't want people watching while this happens.

This is a nomination that should fail on qualifications alone. In the long history of the Department of Justice, there has never been so unqualified a nominee, in my view. In the name of the 700 career prosecutors in the Criminal Division who deserve an experienced and capable leader at their helm, in the name of the crime victims our criminal laws and their enforcement are intended to protect, I urge my colleagues to vote no just on qualifications. But this goes beyond an unqualified nominee; this is a nominee exhibiting a flashing array of warnings that there may be mischief afoot here. No Senator should take this vote unaware of these obvious warnings. Why somebody so unqualified? Why somebody so politically connected to the Attorney General? Why right now, right in the middle of constant interference by President Trump and his legal team and constant interference by House Republicans with this investigation? Now we put someone in who won't say he will recuse himself, who will have a window into this investigation, who will have the power to interfere with this investigation? That seems like a lot to let pass.

In the name of the integrity and independence of the Department of Justice, Senators should vote no because of the contamination risk Mr. Benczkowski poses even if he were qualified for the post. This combination of lack of qualification--a flagrant, flat-out unqualified nominee--and the risk of contamination in an environment in which there are abundant political efforts to interfere with this investigation-- that is a combination no Senator ought to accept--not for this man, not for this job, not at this time.

If mischief is afoot and if these dark prospects should come to pass, Senators, we will have been warned. We will have been warned.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I rise today to honor the career of one of Rhode Island's most respected ocean and coastal experts, my friend Dennis Nixon. Throughout his career, he has demonstrated a deep commitment to Rhode Island and ocean and coastal issues more broadly.

Mr. Nixon first arrived at the University of Rhode Island in 1975 to pursue his master's in marine affairs. Thankfully for us, he received his degree and then decided to stay in the Ocean State as a professor at the university. Since then he has been a mainstay on the University of Rhode Island's campus, teaching courses in maritime and coastal law and publishing over 50 articles and a casebook on the topic.

He served as associate dean of academic Affairs for the College of Environment and Life Sciences and then for 4 years as associate dean for research and administration at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography. In that position, Mr. Nixon managed the school's beautiful Narragansett Bay campus and the 185-foot National Science Foundation research vessel Endeavor. Mr. Nixon also serves as the risk manager and legal advisor to the University National Oceanographic Laboratory System, based at URI's Graduate School of Oceanography, which coordinates among oceanographic universities for research time on vessels like Endeavor.

His influence does not stop at URI; he has lectured on 6 continents and in more than 25 States. Mr. Nixon was instrumental in the creation of the unique dual degree program in marine affairs and law between the University of Rhode Island's Department of Marine Affairs and Roger Williams University Law School. Outside academics, he cofounded Point Club, an insurance cooperative for fishing vessels.

I first encountered Mr. Nixon when the tanker World Prodigy crashed into Brenton Reef, causing an oilspill. I was a young staffer in the Rhode Island attorney general's office, and Mr. Nixon joined the team as our maritime law expert. Later, I was U.S. attorney when the tug- and-barge Scandia/North Cape caused another massive oilspill, and I turned again to Mr. Nixon's professional advice. We worked well together and became friends.

In 2013, Mr. Nixon was appointed director of Rhode Island Sea Grant. His deep connections to Rhode Island and expertise in ocean and coastal issues have helped Rhode Island Sea Grant further its reach into the State's coastal communities and raise its profile nationwide. Among its priorities, the State's Sea Grant Program is currently supporting research into the causes and consequences of harmful algal blooms and the effects of the Block Island Wind Farm on fishing interests and home values. Mr. Nixon's regard in the State was on display when he was tapped to moderate the marine debris symposia put on in conjunction with the Volvo Ocean Race's stopovers in Newport in 2015 and 2018.

His drive to ensure Rhode Island maintains its leadership in marine scholarship, development, and conservation is evident throughout his career. Mr. Nixon obviously cares deeply about ocean and coastal resources and the fishermen, businesses, and communities that rely on these resources. He is even a fairly presentable sailor himself. For over 40 years, the Ocean State has benefited from Mr. Nixon's passion and leadership, and for this sincere dedication to Rhode Island and coastal communities around the world, I stand today to recognize and salute him.

Fair winds and following seas, my friend.

Mr. President, as I rise for my 209th ``Time to Wake Up'' climate change speech, I return to a familiar subject: disgraced Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.

Not that long ago, I was here discussing the baker's dozen of ethical scandals swirling around Pruitt. From his $43,000 ``cone of silence'' phone booth to the millions he spent on a 20-

person security detail, to his lights-and-sirens escapades, to fancy DC restaurant Le Diplomate, Pruitt has come to personify the swamp President Trump promised to drain. And he just keeps on getting swampier.

In just the few weeks since my last speech on Pruitt, we have learned that he used one of his closest aides to plan his vacations, hunt for a Washington apartment, and, most bizarrely, solicit a used hotel mattress from the Trump Hotel. The aide did many of these tasks on government time when she was supposed to be working for taxpayers. That is a clear violation of Federal employment rules. Federal rules also bar officials such as Pruitt from accepting gifts from their subordinates, including these kinds of personal services even on personal time. So one way or the other, this was pretty swampy. We also learned, in a scene worthy of the finest banana republic, that Pruitt had his staffer approach the founder of the fast food chain Chick-fil-A about securing a franchise for Pruitt's wife.

As the New York Times recently wrote, ``Grifters Gonna Grift.'' But with all deference to the editorial writers at the Times, I would add that Pruitt's actions aren't just matters of grift; they also reveal his servility to the interests of his fossil fuel backers over the interests of the American public. My Republican colleague, Senator Ernst of Iowa, recently said that Pruitt's efforts to undermine the renewable fuel standard, including the abundance of waivers for refiners, amount to broken promises to American farmers. ``He is about as swampy as you get here in Washington, DC,'' she said. Amen.

You would think that someone so corrupt would not be long for a President's Cabinet. You would be wrong. Just last week, in the face of all of Pruitt's latest scandals, President Trump reaffirmed his support for his EPA Administrator, saying that the Agency is doing really, really well under Pruitt. The President doesn't see anything wrong with having someone as scandal-plagued as Pruitt in his Cabinet. What he can see is that the fossil fuel industry is solidly lined up behind its servant, Pruitt. He has oil company interests and the front groups they fund telling him to keep Pruitt on the job because Pruitt is rolling back regulations polluters don't like.

Let's look at how well Pruitt is really doing for the polluters. Let's start with Pruitt's record in the courts.

A number of EPA's regulatory actions or its failures to regulate have been challenged in court.

Republicans continue to rubberstamp Trump's activist, extreme- rightwing, and polluter-friendly judicial nominees, but American courts nevertheless remain a forum in which outright lies are not countenanced and in which regulatory agencies such as EPA have to demonstrate the scientific, technical, economic, and legal basis of their regulatory decisions. An agency whose political leadership dissembles or doesn't do its homework won't do well in court.

So how has Scott Pruitt's EPA fared in the courts? In two words, not well. Our Environment and Public Works Committee ranking member, Tom Carper, recently released a report analyzing Pruitt's record in court. As you can see from this chart, 66 cases have been filed against Pruitt's EPA in relation to ethics and transparency. I know this comes as little shock, given Pruitt's numerous and continuing ethical shortcomings. Of the 14 of these ethics cases that have already been decided by a judge, EPA lost 13 of them. That is a 7-percent success rate for Pruitt. The other 79 cases challenge EPA's regulatory actions or inactions.

This is what Pruitt is supposed to be there for--rolling back rules protecting public health and the environment to make his fossil fuel patrons happy. This is why he still has industry support. This is why he is still running EPA despite all the scandals. You can be corrupt in this administration as long as you are corrupt for the right people.

Of the six of these cases that have been fully reviewed by the courts, Pruitt's EPA lost four of them, succeeded in delaying arguments on one, and got another dismissed on mootness grounds after withdrawing the challenged rule. In other words, Pruitt is zero for six before the courts when it comes to defending his regulatory rollbacks. Pruitt is a former baseball player, so he will understand it when I say that he is batting way below the Mendoza line.

The courts have blocked Pruitt's attempt to delay the implementation of a rule curbing methane emissions from new oil and gas wells. Methane, of course, is a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. The courts also blocked Pruitt's effort to slow-walk EPA's revision of lead paint standards. Pruitt wanted another 6 years to revise the standards, and the courts gave him 90 days.

Many of Pruitt's biggest deregulatory actions, after a splashy announcement, have yet to even be finalized, so they aren't yet ripe for judicial review. But even on these half-baked rollbacks, Pruitt is making mistakes that will provide ample ammunition in court for those who will sue him.

Take Pruitt's rulemaking to rescind the Clean Power Plan--President Obama's blueprint to reduce carbon emissions from the power sector. As Oklahoma attorney general, Pruitt sued three times to block the Clean Power Plan. He has a long record against the Clean Power Plan in the press, at industry conferences, and on social media. Many of the same fossil fuel industry donors who have bankrolled Pruitt's political career are on the other side, suing to block the Clean Power Plan.

Pruitt has not even revealed the full depth of his fiscal engagement with the fossil fuel industry because he has never fessed up to who gave money to his dark money political operation, so it is actually probably worse than we know.

Well, here is where America's rule of law kicks in. America's rule of law provides that those who are interested in an agency rulemaking ``have a right to a fair and open proceeding; that right includes access to an impartial decision maker.'' Here, given Pruitt's strident opposition to the Clean Power Plan as attorney general, combined with his sickeningly close financial and political ties with the industry opposing it, can there be any doubt that Pruitt possesses what under law one would call an unalterably closed mind when it comes to the Clean Power Plan? Courts will take notice of that sort of thing.

Then there is Pruitt's effort to exclude certain scientific studies from consideration in rulemaking. Pruitt claims it is to boost transparency. That couldn't be phonier. It is an effort to boost two industries that are big donors to his political operations--fossil fuel and tobacco.

For decades, fossil fuel and tobacco have pushed to prevent regulatory agencies from considering scientific studies that rely on people's medical records. They have figured out that because people like their medical records to be private and because public health studies rely on private medical records, if they can cook up the notion that that is somehow a transparency problem, they can take the entire corpus of public health science based on medical records and put it in the bin. Blocking that public health evidence is a way for these industries to screen out the most damning evidence in actual Americans' actual health records of the effects of tobacco smoke and air pollution on human health.

Pruitt's own Science Advisory Board isn't buying that one. He rebuffed the Board's request for information about this proposed rule and issued it without the Board's input. When he claimed that his proposed rule was consistent with the position of various scientific journals and groups, those journals and groups stood up and said: Oh, no. They were quick to correct the record. And EPA's Science Advisory Board just voted unanimously to examine the policy anyway.

You might think that such a rule may also exclude some industry- funded studies, but never fear--internal emails obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists show that Pruitt's lackeys, themselves former industry lobbyists, knew they had to make sure industry studies could still be considered by EPA.

It would be great to take all of the real public health studies that rely on real healthcare information, pretend that is a transparency problem, shove them off to the side, and then have industry-funded studies left to rely upon. Well, the Pruitt lackeys pulled a little trick and put in the proposed rule that

the Administrator can include any study he likes, regardless of what the rule may require, opening up a nice, safe harbor for his industry sponsors' industry-funded studies.

All of this sounds pretty arbitrary and capricious to me. And ``arbitrary and capricious'' by the way, is the legal standard courts will use to evaluate challenges to this phony baloney rule.

Pruitt's drive to weaken fuel economy standards also looks to be on shaky legal ground. They cobbled together a 38-page document in April announcing Pruitt's intention to roll back the 2012 auto fuel efficiency standards. That cobbled-together report is devoid of the type of serious, detailed analysis that courts typically look for in such a rulemaking. Half of that little document is just quotes from car companies objecting to the rule. By comparison, the Obama administration assembled a 1,217-page document justifying those standards, chockful of real scientific, technical, and economic analysis--all of the stuff the Pruitt EPA is allergic to.

Once again, Pruitt's work product looks pretty arbitrary and capricious--short on facts, short on analysis, long on giveaways to industries that fund him. It is entirely understandable that the interests to which Pruitt is beholden would be fighting for him to keep his job. They love this. For them, Pruitt running this public health agency into the ground is a feature, not a bug, of the Pruitt tenure. They are just in it for the regulatory rollbacks.

I hope they recognize a lot of Pruitt's work is so sloppy that, ultimately, it will likely not stand up in court. I hope President Trump understands the guy he thinks of as his great deregulator isn't very good at deregulating.

Only time will tell how long Scott Pruitt can survive the mounting, swirling, ethical ordeals of his own making. We will also see how his industry friendly regulatory record fares under the scrutiny of honest courts. Something tells me I will be back here in the not-too-distant future with more to say about the troubled and disgraceful tenure of Scott Pruitt.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, first, let me say what a pleasure it has been to work with Senator Crapo on these issues.

Our situation is pretty simple. We have a U.S. Navy that generates spent nuclear fuel through its operations; we have a U.S. industry of next-generation nuclear technology that needs that spent fuel in order to test those innovative technologies; and we have extraordinary National Labs with world-class expertise in handling that nuclear material and supporting that innovation.

This amendment brings those three together. It allows the U.S. Navy's spent fuel to be delivered to National Labs so that pursuant to a law we just passed in the Senate recently, the cooperation between the National Labs and the nuclear innovation community can move forward. We have already passed that bill. I hope we will pass this bill.

I will close by saying there is something else in this that I think is worth our consideration. We have an enormous national liability with respect to our existing stockpiles of nuclear waste. Presently, we have no realistic plan for dealing with that. There is a prospect--it is definitely a maybe; I don't want to overpromise anything--there is definitely a prospect and it is the intention of some of these next- generation technologies that we will be able to develop nuclear technologies that will go through our nuclear waste stockpile and turn that into productive electricity generation. If we can get there, that would be a terrific Holy Grail. In the meantime, this is a smart and efficient way to support American innovation in these technologies.

I urge all of my colleagues to vote yes. I, again, appreciate Senator Crapo's leadership on this and the extraordinary National Lab that he has in his home State.