Floor Statements

Mr. President, when we think about climate change-- something we don't do much of in this body--we often think about rising global temperatures and heat waves, and we think of changing weather patterns, stronger storms, or sea level rise threatening coastal communities. We actually see these effects unfold across the United States and around the world as heat records fall, winters shrink, and waters creep ever higher along our coastlines.

We also see the economic consequences of climate change. Just last year, the United States suffered a record 16 separate billion-dollar weather disasters, adding up to well over $300 billion in damages. Acidifying seawater has devastated shellfish harvests in the Pacific Northwest. Rhode Island fishermen struggle as their traditional catches move farther north and offshore. Insurers and bond rating agencies warn that coastal regions are becoming too risky to build homes and infrastructure.

Among those various hazards, there is another hazard: the effects of climate change on public health. The Rhode Island Department of Health has produced this guide for Rhode Islanders to help them understand the health risks they face from climate change and to better learn how to protect themselves from what are often new risks.

Perhaps the most obvious effect of climate change on public health is increased heat-related illness and mortality. This link has been well studied across the country, often cross-referencing temperature records and death certificates. Work has been done by a lot of places; one of them is Rhode Island's own Brown University.

Here is the Rhode Island Health Department report. Over the last century, Rhode Island's average temperature has already increased by more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit, and temperatures are expected to keep on climbing due to climate change. Currently, Rhode Island sees on average only about 10 days of 90-plus degree temperatures. Starting in the next decade and running through the end of the century, the number of days that the heat index will hit at least 90 degrees will rise to between 13 and 44 days each summer. That is as much as 6 weeks in a summer of heat in the nineties. That increase of hot summer days caused by climate change puts many Rhode Islanders at risk, particularly those who don't have air conditioning, either because they can't afford it or because, right now, they don't need it. Heat waves are the leading cause of extreme weather-related deaths in the United States, causing an average of more than 600 deaths a year and thousands more hospitalizations. Rhode Island, even though we are in the Northeast, is not spared, and with climate change, it will only get worse.

Hot days pose a health risk to many different groups of people, as shown here in Rhode Island's Department of Health report. Children, the elderly, people who work outdoors, athletes, the disabled, pregnant women, and folks who are on medications that reduce their bodies' ability to dissipate heat are just some of the many people who are especially at risk from heat waves. Because of the nature of their responsibilities, emergency responders are particularly vulnerable.

When I visited Phoenix, AZ, I was told by their emergency response leadership that they are having to restructure the duty schedules to protect firefighters from being overcome, if they are out fighting fires or responding to an emergency in daytime temperatures, because they overheat. So you have to rotate them through much faster and add cooling and hydration teams to support the fire crews as they speed through their heightened rotations.

An ER doc from the Lifespan health system in Rhode Island visited my office and told another story about an older woman who was treated for a heat-related illness. She had just been sitting outside on a hot day, in the Sun, enjoying herself. Perhaps she didn't feel the need to hydrate herself. Perhaps some routine medication that she was on made her more susceptible, but she was not aware of how quickly she was overheating. When her husband returned home from work, he found her lethargic and unable to move, with a body temperature of 107 degrees.

Hotter temperatures are bad on their own because of the effects they have on people's bodies and because of the added deaths that they cause, but they also work to create more ozone. Ozone is dangerous. Ozone is dangerous for children. It is dangerous for the elderly. It is dangerous for anyone with asthma or other breathing-related difficulties. Again, from Rhode Island's health report, Rhode Island's asthma rates are 33 percent higher than national averages for adults and 40 percent higher for children. So asthma is pretty serious for us, and people go to the hospital for this.

This is not just an inconvenience. In Rhode Island, we have heard air quality alerts on morning drive-time radio. You are going in to work and listening to the radio, and the announcer is saying, ``Kids, seniors, people with breathing difficulties, you need to stay indoors today.'' It is a sunny, perfect summer day, it seems. Ozone is not visible, but because it is there and because of what it does to lungs and to asthma, people in Rhode Island are told they can't go outdoors that day. That kind of bad day alert, because it is for ozone, is going to become more frequent as climate change warms up our climate and produces more ozone.

It works this way. Our air in Rhode Island is polluted, primarily, by midwestern powerplants. Out in the Midwest, they run the emissions up supertall smokestacks. The pollution is then injected up into the atmosphere and is carried away on prevailing winds. Guess what. It bakes in the Sun,

turns to ozone, and it lands on us--not them, us. It is their pollution, our lungs.

Thanks a bunch, guys.

Our air is also worsened by smoke from forest fires, even from as far away as Canada, and the warming climate, as the Presiding Officer knows, has created an extraordinary fire situation out West. Changing precipitation patterns have produced more fires, and that means more smoke in downwind States, and we are a downwind State.

The result of all of this is that Rhode Island's air quality receives only a C from the American Lung Association. This poor grade is largely because of ozone, most of which comes from out of State. We end up with grade C air because of, primarily, out-of-State pollutants. This is not just some minor inconvenience. Across the country, air pollution--much of it made worse by climate change--is responsible for a staggering 200,000 premature deaths each year.

Pollen is another problem. Shifting seasons produce a longer pollen season. Increased pollen levels, particularly with increased air pollution, kick in allergies, which takes us into another risk. The warmth of earlier springs and later falls also means that tick and mosquito season in Rhode Island lasts far longer than it used to, and that moves us to yet more health risks and diseases.

Rhode Island already has the fourth highest rate of Lyme disease in the country. We have over 900 cases a year, and as temperatures increase, we are likely to see the number of ticks in Rhode Island increase, which would be expected to lead to even more cases of Lyme disease. In States not too far north of us, the tick situation has gotten so out of control that they are actually seeing moose calves die off because they are so swarmed with ticks. I am sorry. I know this is a little bit gross, but calves are dying when their bodies can't support both their own metabolism and feeding the ticks that have crawled up onto them in the thousands--in some cases, over 10,000 ticks. So we have to be concerned about this not just for ourselves but for the wildlife around us.

Warmer temperatures also provide a longer breeding season for mosquitoes. More downpours--yet another result of climate change-- result in more standing water, which is habitat for mosquito larvae. Rhode Island has been up 76 percent in extreme downpours since 1950. That is the largest increase in extreme precipitation events out of all 50 States. Of course, these little critters, the mosquitoes, carry the West Nile virus, the Eastern equine encephalitis, and other illnesses we didn't used to see in our State.

As if all of this were not bad enough, climate change is also worsening another natural hazard that threatens public health--harmful algae blooms. Algae naturally occur in lakes and oceans, but in certain conditions, algae populations can explode. These blooms, they call them--blooms of algae--can slime waterways and overwhelm ecosystems, eating up nutrients, and they can deplete oxygen in the water and in the oceans so completely that no other life can exist, so that other creatures--fish--actually suffocate in the water. Algae are often, therefore, the reason behind massive fish kills.

Some kinds of algae even produce toxins. People can become sick from exposure to the contaminated, toxin-filled water and even from the air if you get enough surface turbulence and churning of waves that it aerates the toxins, and then it is inhaled. The toxins can get into our food chain. They end up in shellfish and seafood on our dinner plates. Depending on which toxin it is, the consequences for people, for pets, and for wildlife can range from rashes and skin irritation, to pretty severe neurological and gastrointestinal symptoms, to respiratory arrest, and even death.

In 2016, New England was hit for the first time by a Pseudo-nitzschia bloom--a kind of algae that produces a toxin, domoic acid, which caused large swaths of Narragansett Bay to be closed to shellfishing. The Providence Journal reported: ``In the more than 15 years officials have tested for [domoic acid], Rhode Island . . . never had a bloom reaching dangerous levels.'' In March of 2017, Rhode Island was forced, once again, to institute emergency shellfish closures in Narragansett Bay-- stuff that did not used to happen before this--when algae produced dangerous levels of domoic acid.

This may seem funny to my western colleagues, but people make their living doing this stuff, so it is not funny to us in Rhode Island when climate change is warming our oceans and creating these risks. Harmful algae blooms have also been advised for ponds in Portsmouth, Cranston, Greenville, and Tiverton.

In all of these ways--from heat-related illnesses, to respiratory disease, to allergies, to tick- and mosquito-borne illnesses, to toxic algae blooms--climate change has serious and wide-ranging effects on public health. Rhode Island's Department of Health has done an excellent service with this report--in helping Rhode Islanders learn how to be aware and to protect themselves. It was supported, by the way, by a grant from the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in its Climate and Health Program. It was a small $10 million program, but it helped this project's report come to fruition in Rhode Island. We appreciate it. It is a wise investment to help prepare Americans for unfamiliar diseases that are being driven into our neighborhoods by a change in climate.

As I conclude, I know that there are colleagues here who do not care to listen to environmental groups, but they might want to listen to the American Medical Association. The American Medical Association writes: ``Scientific surveys have shown clear evidence that our patients are facing adverse health effects associated with climate change.''

Colleagues might listen to the American Lung Association, which writes: ``Climate change seriously threatens our wellness--especially our lung health.''

Perhaps colleagues might consider the opinion of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which writes: ``Tackling climate change could be the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century.'' They write that because here is the problem: ``Climate change poses threats to human health, safety, and security, and children are at particularly high risk.''

We may disagree about a lot around here, but when the American Academy of Pediatrics is telling us that climate change poses serious threats to human health, safety, and security and that children are at particularly high risk, it is a very callous thing to pay no attention. It is time to wake up. Our constituents' health and well-being actually does hang in the balance, and this Rhode Island report shows it for our State at least.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I am here to react to the President's selection of Andrew Wheeler to be the proposed No. 2 at the EPA. This is a selection that continues the Trump administration's essentially complete subservience to the fossil fuel industry in the entire environmental arena.

I have described Scott Pruitt, Rick Perry, and Ryan Zinke, who is over at Interior, as the three stooges of the fossil fuel industry, and I reiterate that today.

Scott Pruitt, in addition to being one of those stooges, also has some of the most extraordinary displays of unethical and self-serving political acts of anybody I have ever seen. I can only imagine what this floor would look like if an Obama appointee had engaged in those kinds of behaviors. In all of those seats, we would have had Republicans shouting and jumping up and down in their being infuriated by that misconduct. Yet, because it is Pruitt, because it is Trump, and because the fossil fuel industry is getting everything it wants out of this guy, the silence is deafening. But that doesn't change the underlying fact that the American people are owed folks in high office who take their public duty seriously. There is very little chance that Mr. Wheeler is going to take his public duties seriously as No. 2 at the EPA. It is not like it is with the No. 1 at the EPA, where there is a stopgap who is going to defend us.

This is a very dangerous duo. Scott Pruitt is a complete flunky of the fossil fuel industry--largely disgraced but still hanging on there and his only claim to fame being that he will do anything the fossil fuel industry tells him to do. That is why he is hanging on. Now coal lobbyist Wheeler is coming on to be his No. 2. That is a dangerous combination to lead our Environmental Protection Agency.

There was an interesting series of photographs that actually got the photographer fired in this administration for having released these photographs. There was a little meeting over at the Energy Department with Secretary Perry and Bob Murray, who is the head of Murray Energy. He is a coal baron, and he, obviously, has one interest in mind, which is to sell more coal, burn more coal, and to heck with the rest of you, more or less.

This was Mr. Murray as he arrived at the Department of Energy, up in the Secretary's conference room. The bald gentleman is Mr. Murray. The man whose head is obscured behind him in this torrid hug is our Energy Secretary. So you knew things were going to go well for Mr. Murray at this meeting after that nice, cozy reception that he got.

Then the photographer went on and took this picture, which is of Murray Energy Corporation's recommendations to the Honorable Richard Perry as to what he should do about the environment. I will spend some more time on that memo in just a moment. After long delays, we were actually able to get our hands on it. They delayed and they fiddled and they faddled and wouldn't confirm that they had it. When the photograph showed that they had it, they said: OK. We will give it to you when we give our FOIA requests.

Great. Thanks a bunch. So much for congressional oversight.

I hope that if the now majority is ever in the minority in the Senate, that it doesn't get treated this way--being told to line up with the FOIA folks as they are not interested in responding to oversight requests for memos, but that is what we got.

Here is another photograph from that meeting. Here is Mr. Murray telling the Energy Secretary what to do. There is the Energy Secretary--fresh out of his nice hug--being told what to do. Here is Mr. Wheeler, the guy who is going to be the No. 2 at the EPA. He was right in the room where the Murray directions to the Trump administration were being discussed and delivered.

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

Here is the action plan. It reads: ``Dear Secretary Perry, enclosed is an Action Plan for achieving reliable and low cost electricity in America and to assist in the survival of our country's coal industry.''

What are the recommendations?

Page 1: ``SUSPEND THE COAL-FIRED POWERPLANT EFFLUENT LIMITATION

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of Senator Brown's remarks I be recognized for my remarks.

Mr. President, I am here on the floor for my 202nd ``Time to Wake Up'' speech. I would like to begin by thanking this body for the passing of the National Oceans and Coastal Security Fund as part of the measure that Republicans and Democrats agreed to before the recent recess. The Presiding Officer obviously represents an extremely coastal State. I represent Rhode Island, a very coastal State. This new program will provide resources for the communities along our shores to be able to deal with the threats they are seeing from sea level rise, fisheries moving about, worsening offshore storms, tides that now come ashore on bright sunny days, and the various hazards that they must undertake so that they are not left alone trying to address them.

I often use these speeches to explore why it is that we get nothing done in Congress on climate. I point out that the major reason is the insidious fossil-fuel-funded web of climate change denial, with a parallel lobbying and electioneering effort.

I point out that this network is funded by the fossil fuel industry in a deliberate and systematic effort to misdirect public discussion and to distort public understanding of climate change and climate science.

I point out that it is actually working. It has been so effective at infiltrating our political system that the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is a full-on fossil fuel flunky. I discuss the fossil fuel industry's parallel web that directs rivers of dark money into our political system and deploys related, but more clandestine, threats and promises to work the industry's will in Congress.

Like I said, it is working. The web of denial and political enforcement organizations has so far achieved its purpose: to prevent Congress from carrying out its responsibility to rein in carbon pollution. We are, as a result, failing to protect the American people and our economy from the effects of that pollution, particularly our coastal economies. But now agriculture and other economies are feeling it too, and Congress is still doing nothing.

So this secretive and insidious apparatus deserves our attention. Nowadays, this apparatus is dedicated to denying science, confusing the public, and holding a political whip hand over Congress on the issue of climate change. Nowadays, it does this to protect the fossil fuel industry from responsibility for its pollution. But it is actually not a new enterprise.

We have never seen this machinery operating at this scale before. It is bigger and more multifaceted than ever, but we have seen its tricks before. The science denial playbook, commissioned by the Koch brothers, ExxonMobil, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to stymie climate action, is the same doubt-mongering playbook we have seen used by Big Tobacco, by chemical industries, and by other corporate polluters for decades.

I am not the only one who has noticed. A lot of work has examined this denial apparatus--how it is funded, how it hides its funding, how it communicates, and how it propagates the denial message. This is valuable work because the better America understands the mechanisms of this deceitful operation, the better America can inoculate itself against that deceit.

So I have brought some of this work with me to the Senate floor today. It is kind of a beginner's bibliography of this apparatus.

I will start with a book called ``Deceit and Denial,'' and, on the cover, described by Bill Moyers as ``the best detective story I've read in years.'' This

book is written by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, who have been tracking the efforts of industry to hide scientific facts about pollution for a long time. They point out in their introduction here:

Some industries . . . have reassured the public that their

products are benign by controlling research and manipulating

science. Throughout much of the twentieth century, most

scientific studies of the health effects of toxic substances

have been done by researchers in the employ of industry or in

universities with financial ties to members of that industry.

At times their results were subject to review by industry; if

the results indicated a problem, the information was

suppressed.

This goes way back into the annals of denial.

My next book is ``Poison Tea.'' It is a book written by Jeff Nesbit. It goes back into the tobacco documents that were protected in the tobacco settlement. The attorneys general demanded that the documents of the tobacco companies be set aside as a permanent reference. Jeff Nesbit was present at some of the efforts to create the tobacco industry version of climate denial. He saw it happening up close. He was in some of the meetings. In chapter 25, he opens up with this:

If the 14 million internal tobacco industry memos and

documents show one thing clearly, it is this: political

campaign networks built to defend and promote large corporate

interests with integrated goals, messaging, targets, and

allies simply don't materialize overnight. The funding and

strategies behind them take years to develop before reaching

maturity. And they build on each other over time.

I turn now to ``Doubt is Their Product.'' This is David Michaels' book. The subtitle is ``How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health.''

The quotation I have selected moves from the general principle of science denial on behalf of industries into global warming as this scheme moved forward:

Take global warming. The vast majority of climate

scientists believe there is adequate evidence of global

warming to justify immediate intervention to reduce the human

contribution.

Now, this was written, just to be clear, in 2008, a decade ago--a decade ago:

The vast majority of climate scientists believe there is

adequate evidence global warming to justify immediate

intervention to reduce the human contribution. They

understand that waiting for absolute certainty is far

riskier--and potentially far more expensive--than acting

responsibly now--

That is, 10 years ago--

to control the causes of climate change. Opponents of action,

led by the fossil fuels industry, delayed this policy

debate--

And for another decade--

by challenging the science with a classic uncertainty

campaign.

He cites what he calls a cynical memo that Republican political consultant Frank Luntz delivered to his clients in early 2003, saying:

The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet

closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge

the science.

Luntz understood that his clients can oppose (and delay)

regulation . . . by simply manufacturing uncertainty. Doubt

is their product.

The next book is by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, entitled ``Merchants of Doubt,'' which was actually made into a film as well. They have done a lot of work in this area.

Here is the conclusion:

Doubt-mongering works because we think science is about

facts--cold, hard, definite facts.

This is a mistake. There are always uncertainties in any

live science because science is a process of discovery.

Doubt is crucial to science . . . but it also makes science

vulnerable to misrepresentation, because it is easy to take

uncertainties out of context and create the impression that

everything is unresolved. This was the tobacco industry's key

insight: That you could use normal scientific uncertainty to

undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge.

``Doubt is our product,'' ran the infamous memo written by

one tobacco industry executive in 1969.

``Merchants of Doubt'' goes on to describe how that exact same technique--and many of the same individuals and organizations--carried that over from tobacco smoke to global warming. Subtitle: ``How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.''

This is a book by Pulitzer Prize winning author Steve Coll. He is actually speaking tonight at the Library of Congress. This book is called ``Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power.'' It describes the mischief that Exxon got up to in pursuing its political goals here in Washington. He describes the underlying structure of Washington policy debates. He calls it a ``kaleidoscope of overlapping and competing influence campaigns, some open, some conducted by front organizations, and some entirely clandestine.''

Obviously, if you are ExxonMobil, you don't want your name on all of this stuff--hence, the ``kaleidoscope of overlapping and competing influence campaigns, some open, some conducted by front organizations, and some entirely clandestine.''

He continues:

Strategists created layers of disguise, subtlety, and

subterfuge--corporate-funded ``grassroots'' programs and

purpose-built think tanks, as fingerprint-free as possible.

In such an opaque and untrustworthy atmosphere, the ultimate

advantage lay with any lobbyist whose goal was to manufacture

confusion and perpetual controversy. On climate, this

happened to be the oil industry's position.

In his book ``The War on Science,'' Shawn Otto goes in some detail through the scheming that backs up what he calls ``a steady stream of pseudoscience that can be used by foot soldiers to sway the public debate.''

He goes through a number of steps that are the standard parts of this campaign, starting with phony science:

Phony science . . . that creates ``uncertainties'' about

the accepted views of mainstream science.

So you start off with phony science that creates phony uncertainties about the accepted views of mainstream science.

Step two follows with slanted press materials spoon-fed to

journalists by industry-affiliated nonprofits and bloggers.

A third step of this PR battle is what he calls ``building and financing industry-aligned front groups (fake public-interest organizations) and astroturf groups (fake grassroots organizations).''

And we sure do see those fake public interest organizations and fake grassroots organizations whipped up by the fossil fuel industry today.

Step 4 is outlier scientists--the ones who can cook up the pseudoscience that can be used by foot soldiers:

Outlier scientists are recruited to publish in phony

journals and speak at conferences of physicians, lawyers, and

other professionals, emphasizing the controversy and sowing

``uncertainties'' and denial, thus using peer-pressure to

create true believers among the influential opinion leaders.

You then shove out into ``industry-aligned, or otherwise sympathetic talk-radio and cable-news purveyors, who reference these mainstream sources, react with outrage, and call for policy action.'' This provides political cover for legislative or other ``policy action by partisan allies in government.''

Industry representatives can step safely out from behind

the curtain for the main act of the culture-war drama and

plead their case to policymakers. . . . The strategy is

designed to neutralize the primacy of objective knowledge--

We wouldn't want to make decisions around here based on objective knowledge--

and slowly move public opinion toward accepting the

industry's position as the only truly reasonable one,

subverting the democratic process.

From my experience, that is a pretty good description as to how this game is played.

Thank you, Shawn Otto.

Two of the people who do some of the best work looking at this climate denial apparatus and tracking its funding are academic writers Riley Dunlap and Robert Brulle. Their book, ``Climate Change and Society,'' drills into this pretty well. Here is the description.

Over time, manufacturing uncertainty has evolved into

``manufacturing controversy,'' creating the impression that

there is major debate and dissent within the scientific

community over the reality of anthropogenic climate change.

To accomplish this, corporations and especially CTTs have

supported a small number of contrarian scientists (many with

no formal training in climate science) and other self-styled

``experts'' (often social scientists affiliated with CTTs) to

produce non-peer-reviewed reports and books, publish in a

handful of marginal journals, hold ``scientific''

conferences, compile dubious lists of supposed scientists who

question climate change, and in general mimic the workings of

conventional science . . . fashioning a ``parallel scientific

universe'' that serves to generate confusion among the public

and policymakers.

Thank you, Riley Dunlap and Robert Brulle for your years of research.

Recently Jane Mayer's book, ``Dark Money,'' has gotten a lot of attention. It focuses on the extent to which the Koch brothers specifically use the caverns for subterranean dark money to mess around in our politics. Following up on the use of conservative think tanks, we have an early--I guess you would say ``strategizer'' of this effort quoted as saying:

It would be necessary to use ambiguous and misleading

names, obscure the true agenda, and conceal the means of

control.

That is the background. This whole development of the think tank is described here this way:

In the 1970s, with funding from a handful of hugely wealthy

donors . . . as well as some major corporate support, a whole

new form of ``think tank'' emerged that was more engaged in

selling predetermined ideology to politicians and the public

than undertaking scholarly research.

To use her phrase, it was ``the think tank as disguised political weapon.''

That is part of what we are up against.

``Democracy in Chains,'' a book by Nancy MacLean, looks back at some of the early history through which the Koch brothers and others funded this operation. It points out that ``the Koch team's most important stealth move, and the one that proved most critical to success, was to wrest control over the machinery of the Republican Party, beginning in the late 1990s and with sharply escalating determination after 2008.''

What made them want to do this? I will read. The Koch cadre identified the public's embrace of environmentalism as a problem early on. They then pulled together--

a circle of less-known Koch-funded libertarian think tanks

driving what two science scholars describe as systematic

environmental ``misinformation campaigns.'' They spread junk

pseudoscience to make the public believe that there is still

doubt about the peril of climate change, a tactic they

learned from the tobacco companies that for years sowed doubt

about science to keep the public from connecting smoking and

illness.

The Koch team by then could count on its Club for Growth to

fund primary challenges to ensure that the party line on

environmentalism would be maintained by Republican members of

Congress. . . . ``We're looking at a party,'' the economist

and columnist Paul Krugman rightly points out, ``that has

turned its back on science at a time when doing so puts the

very future of civilization at risk.''

Backing up that chokehold on federal action is what one

reporter called a ``secretive alliance'' between red-state

attorneys general and fossil fuel corporations.

Again, we link back to my earlier remarks. One of the red States' attorneys general who link up with the fossil fuel corporations is none other than our EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt.

She concludes it this way:

To put all this another way: if the Koch-network-funded

academics and institutions were not in the conversation, the

public would have little doubt that the evidence of science

is overwhelming and government action to prevent further

global warming is urgent.

I will close with a return to Jane Mayer, whose research on this whole dark money problem that bedevils our democracy has been nothing less than heroic, in my view. She wrote recently:

If there was any lingering doubt that a tiny clique of

fossil-fuel barons has captured America's energy and

environmental policies, it was dispelled . . . when the Trump

Administration withdrew from the Paris climate accord. . . .

[A] majority of Americans in literally every state wanted to

remain within the agreement, and . . . the heads of many of

the country's most successful and iconic Fortune 100

companies, from Disney to General Electric, did, too. . . .

Yet . . . a tiny--and until recently, almost faceless--

minority somehow prevailed.

How this happened is no longer a secret. The answer . . .

is ``a story of big political money.'' It is, perhaps, the

most astounding example of influence-buying in modern

American political history.

It is focused now on climate change because climate change is--and I quote her again here--`` `a direct challenge to the most powerful industry that has ever existed on the face of the Earth. There's no depth to which they are unwilling to sink to challenge anything threatening their interests.' ''

That is a pretty good description by a lot of very well-regarded, and some in cases, Pulitzer Prize winning and award-winning writers and researchers about where we are. The result of all that is the gridlock that these interests have bought and paid for in Congress on this critical issue and an administration that is driven by fossil fuel interests to roll back all regulations that impinge on fossil fuel profits. Using that screen these authors have talked about--and that I have talked about--of think tanks and foundations and public relations firms and trade associations and, of course, those rivers of dark money flowing through subterranean political caverns, this industry--the fossil fuel industry--has taken control of and disabled our American political system. That is a very inconvenient truth for those in our political system, but its inconvenience takes away nothing from its truth.

Thanks to these authors and researchers and many others like them-- many others like them--the truth of what has happened is plain. It is not just plain in these books. It will be plain before the reckoning gaze of history. There will be a reckoning. History always looks back, ultimately. If you look at these books and you look at others and you look at the record of what has taken place and the reporting, there is no doubt that this is the biggest influence-buying operation of all time. Do we in Congress really want to be found on the side of this crooked apparatus when that reckoning comes? God, I hope not. It is time to wake up.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, we are more aware than ever of the accelerating pace of climate change and of the serious threat that rising seas, higher temperatures, and changing weather poses. I suppose I don't need to lecture the Presiding Officer from Florida on the threat of rising seas.

The real-time effects of climate change are becoming clearer and clearer every year. Here is a telling example unfolding right now in the Arctic.

In this graphic, we see the mean area of Arctic sea ice over the last several decades. The maximum yearly extent of the ice, which occurs around this time of year, continues to shrink each decade.

This line tracks the sea ice in the Arctic in millions of square kilometers, running from February through to May. This is the track of the sea ice extent during the 1980s. If you take all the years in the 1980s and you average them together and you run through the calendar, it is like a clock going this way through these months. You would see the sea ice growing and fading away as spring came to the Arctic.

That is where the ice was when averaging the 1980s. This green line is the exact same thing; it is just for the 1990s. So we can see how much sea ice has been lost averaged decade over decade.

The blue line here is for 2000. Once again, we see a loss of sea ice--a considerable loss from the levels back as recently as the 1980s.

The purple line right here is the average of the years in this decade so far, from 2010 to 2017--that is the average of those 7 years. This dot is the high, the maximum ice extent recorded in 2016. This lower dot is the lower high of the ice recorded in 2017. So you can see that even though this is the average, the trend remains downward.

This red line is what we have measured so far in 2018. Here we are right now in March of 2018, and it is well below. Decade after decade, we see the ice melting away.

As these facts and so many others relentlessly pile up, it has become harder and harder for the fossil fuel industry and the web of front groups and the Trump administration officials who do its bidding to claim that there is nothing to see here: Folks, move along; it is all just a big hoax.

The University of Alaska is our closest university to the Arctic. The University of Alaska actually has a climate science center where they are studying and teaching the science of climate change. The University of Alaska also actually has the Ocean Acidification Research Center. As I have pointed out in these speeches over the years, one of the most obvious and pernicious consequences of climate change is that when you ramp the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, the oceans, which cover 70 percent of the surface of the world, absorb not only excess heat, but they actually chemically absorb the carbon dioxide. When that happens, they become more acidic. In the wee hours of a morning months and months ago, I actually did the experiment right here, where I blew the carbon dioxide from my breath through an aquarium bubbler into a glass of water that had pH-sensitive dye in it, and you could see, in the moment that it took for me to exhale that carbon-dioxide-rich breath through the water, how the color changed, and you could measure it against the color chart for pH and see how just that one breath changed the acidity of the water and made it more acid.

That is happening across the planet, and it affects creatures like terrapods, which are a very important species for salmon, which is, in turn, a very important industry for Alaska. That is why Alaska has the Ocean Acidification Research Center--some hoax.

For this, my 201st ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, I wish to get into some of the reasons why I remain optimistic even in the face of relentless attacks on the environment, both from the fossil fuel industry and from the Trump administration. There are success stories, including bipartisan wins in Congress and major advances outside of Congress. We are still making progress on climate and energy policy, even under political siege by the fossil fuel industry.

First, there is an explosion in renewable energy. In 2017, renewables provided nearly 20 percent of electricity generation in the United States. Wind and solar energy costs fell, and utilities across the country, even in red States, invested heavily. The renewable energy industry in America hit 3.3 million jobs--more than all fossil fuel jobs combined. The private sector is leading renewables purchases. One example is AT&T. AT&T recently signed onto the World Wildlife Fund's Corporate Renewable Energy Buyers' Principles, a criteria to help energy producers meet the needs of large customers like AT&T. As part of that commitment with the World Wildlife Fund, AT&T has signed two agreements with NextEra Energy for wind power--220 megawatts from an Oklahoma wind farm and 300 megawatts from a Texas wind farm. It is one of the largest corporate renewable energy purchases in history. I congratulate my Texas and Oklahoma colleagues for these new, home- State, renewable energy jobs, and I congratulate AT&T for its foresight and leadership.

Another business breakthrough came when the massive asset manager BlackRock helped break Exxon's and Occidental Petroleum's resistance and forced through shareholder resolutions requiring those oil producers to report their climate risk to their shareholders, to their investors. I, for one, don't think those shareholders are yet getting the full story.

The multinational insurance firm, AXA, announced that it would divest from its tar sands holdings and it would stop providing insurance for pipelines that transport tar sands oil.

Credit rating agency Moody's announced that it will consider climate risk in rating coastal communities' municipal bonds. So our coastal municipalities in Rhode Island, the Presiding Officer's coastal communities in Florida, and coastal communities across the country are now going to have to take into account the climate risk, what infrastructure and what hazards they face from sea level rise and increased storm activity, and all of the things we associate with climate change. It is going to be part of how the rating agencies value their municipal bonds. That is going to change behavior, and it doesn't matter whether you are a red State or a blue State.

Companies like Microsoft and Unilever have baked into their own internal accounting their own internal carbon prices to help them reduce the carbon intensity of their operations. And, of course, virtually every Republican who has thought the climate change problem through to a solution has come to a price on carbon as being the market-based solution to that problem.

When the President announced that he would withdraw the United States from the historic Paris Agreement, leaving us as the pariah nation--the only one in the world to reject this global pledge--many American companies pledged that, as to that Paris Agreement, they are still in.

The corruption of the Trump administration by fossil fuel interests has not affected many State and local officials. In Colorado, for instance, the Colorado State Public Utility Commission is working with Xcel Energy to build out a cleaner energy mix and retire older fossil fuel units. Specifically, Colorado is looking to retire 660 megawatts of coal-fired generation--close it down--and replace it with renewables. Their recent request for bids brought a flood of new renewable energy proposals at costs that came in beating out existing coal and natural gas facilities. New-built renewables on price beat out existing fossil fuel. The market is speaking, and it is saying that fossil fuel, even with all its scandalous and well-defended subsidies, can't compete. Fossil can't compete.

On the Paris Agreement, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Virginia, Washington State and--I am proud to say--Rhode Island all declared that they, too, are still in. They will meet their goals. Alaska announced that it would meet its Paris Agreement goals. What is more, California and Washington State have combined with Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico in a plan to put a price on carbon that would reach up and down virtually the entire Pacific coast of the Americas--from Canada all the way down through Chile.

One problem for the fossil fuel folks' political influence, which is so deadly

effective here in Congress, is that it doesn't do so well in government agencies where the rule of law, not politics, prevails. So the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a Federal administrative agency bound by rule of law, more or less blew off a preposterous proposal by fossil fuel flunkies at the Department of Energy to subsidize coal even more. Instead, FERC recently finalized a rule for energy storage in America's electric grids. This will not only expand energy storage, but it will also accelerate renewables like wind and solar. A recent study predicted that the rule could spur--hold on--50,000 megawatts of additional energy storage across the United States, enough to power roughly 35 million homes. This estimate could turn out to be conservative, if renewables prices keep heading in their current trajectories. That FERC rule, by the way, was unanimous and bipartisan.

FERC oversees the system operators, like ISO-New England, which are steadily improving the role of renewables in regional markets, removing the obstacles that had kept renewables from competing fairly in capacity auctions and dispatch decisions. With wind power being such a large part of Iowa's energy mix, for example, its midwestern ISO figured out the algorithms to treat wind as reliable, baseload power. FERC's storage rule will give these system operators a new avenue for further progress on clean, renewable energy.

Believe it or not, even Congress has acted. Just last month, Congress passed a bipartisan budget agreement that included legislation I cosponsored with Senators Heitkamp, Capito, and Barrasso to spur investment and innovation in next-generation carbon capture, utilization, and storage technologies. Our bill attracted what I would call an unlikely coalition of energy, industrial, agricultural, and technology companies, as well as environment and labor groups.

This bill puts a positive price on carbon reduction through a tax credit for projects that capture and utilize or store carbon dioxide emissions. Without that price signal, there was little incentive to innovate how to turn carbon pollution from powerplants and industrial facilities into something safe or even useful. The bill even incents technologies to pull carbon pollution directly from the atmosphere. The key is that Congress, for the first time, put a dollar value on reducing carbon pollution.

The Senate also just passed a nuclear innovation bill written by Senator Crapo and me to increase collaboration between private industry, universities, and national laboratories in advanced nuclear technologies. Our bill was also cosponsored by Senators Booker, Murkowski, Risch, Hatch, and Durbin. It would put private innovators together with our National Labs, with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and with the Energy Department--all working together on safe, new nuclear technologies.

My goal here is not only to help bring new carbon-free technologies forward, ultimately to a carbon-free power grid, but also to explore technologies that just may allow us to turn our present hazardous nuclear waste stockpiles to productive use--to generate clean energy, to move those waste stockpiles from the liability to the asset column on our Nation's books. What an achievement that would be.

Although Congress may be blockaded still by fossil fuel interests, it is nevertheless the law of the land that administrative agencies must take into account the social cost of carbon--the cost that fossil fuels carbon pollution imposes on society--in making energy-related decisions. That test will remain, and lawsuits are slowly closing in on the moment of discovery, when lawyers finally get access to the fossil fuel industry's files, and decades of lies, denial, and political manipulation are exposed for all to see.

The well-funded climate denial machine, with its front groups and trick-pony scientists and political muscle operation, can only keep the denial castle propped up for so long. But until that battlement of lies collapses--and it will--until it collapses, nevertheless, progress still continues all around us.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, let me thank the Senator from Wisconsin.

Like Wisconsin, Rhode Island has a one-word motto as well. Hers is ``Forward.'' Ours is ``Hope.'' Together, they point in the right direction.

Americans are dissatisfied. Opinion surveys tell us that only 35 percent of Americans believe our country is headed in the right direction. Why this alarming dissatisfaction? We don't have to guess. Popular opinion tells us quite plainly. In a survey taken after the 2016 election, 85 percent of voters agreed that the wealthy and big corporations were the ones really running the country. That includes 80 percent of voters who supported Trump. It is not just opinion. Academic studies have looked at Congress and confirmed that the views of the general public have statistically near zero influence here--that we listen to big, corporate special interests and their various front groups.

Even our Supreme Court is not immune. In a 2014 poll, more respondents believed, by 9 to 1, that our Supreme

Court favors corporations over individuals rather than vice versa. Even among self-identified conservative Republicans, it was still a 4-to-1 margin.

So hold that thought: The wealthy and powerful corporations control Congress, and people know it.

As I give my 200th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, the most obvious fact standing plainly before me is not the measured sea level rise at Naval Station Newport; it is not the 400 parts per million carbon dioxide barrier we have broken through in the atmosphere; it is not the new flooding maps that coastal communities like Rhode Island's must face; it is not the West aflame; it is not even the uniform consensus about climate change across universities, National Laboratories, scientific societies, and even across our military and intelligence services, which warn us, as Senator Reed indicated, that climate change is fueling economic and social disruption around the world.

No. The fact that stands out for me, here at No. 200, is the persistent failure of Congress to even take up the issue of climate change. One party will not even talk about it. One party in the executive branch is even gagging America's scientists and civil servants and striking the term ``climate change'' off of government websites. In the real world, in actual reality, we are long past any question as to the reality of climate change. The fact of that forces us to confront the questions: What stymies Congress from legislating or from even having hearings about climate change? What impels certain executive agencies to forbid even the words?

No. I intend to give my remarks, but I appreciate the Senator's intervention.

Before the Citizens United decision was delivered up by the five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court--a decision, by the way, that deserves a place on the trash heap of judicial history--we were actually doing quite a lot about climate change in the Senate. There were bipartisan hearings. There were bipartisan bills. There were bipartisan negotiations. Senator McCain campaigned for President under the Republican banner on a strong climate platform.

What happened? Here is what I saw happen: The fossil fuel industry went over and importuned the Supreme Court for the Citizens United decision; the five Republican-appointed judges on the Court delivered the Citizens United decision; and the fossil fuel industry was ready and set at the mark when that decision came down.

Since the moment of that decision, not one Republican in this body has joined one serious piece of legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Our Senate heartbeat of bipartisan activity was killed dead by the political weaponry unleashed for big special interests by those five judges.

The fossil fuel industry then made a clever play. It determined to control one party on this question. It determined to silence or punish or remove any dissent in one political party. This created for the fossil fuel industry two advantages.

First, it got to use that party as its tool to stop climate legislation, and it has. Remember the movie ``Men in Black''? I would make the analogy that today's Republican Party bears the same relation to the fossil fuel industry as to climate change that the unfortunate farmer in ``Men in Black'' bore to the alien who killed him and occupied his skin for the rest of the movie--complete occupation with nothing left but the skin.

The second advantage for the fossil fuel industry is that it could camouflage its own special interest special pleading as partisanship and not just the muscle and greed of one very big industry that wanted to have its way.

That is why we are where we are. That is why one's talking to Republicans about climate change resembles one's talking to prisoners about escape. They may want out, but they can't have their fossil fuel wardens find out.

Climate change is a prime example of how our institutions are failing in plain view of the American people. It is a small wonder the public holds Congress in low esteem and thinks we don't listen to them. Frankly, it is amazing that there is any shred of esteem remaining given our behavior.

Congress remains a democratic body on the surface with all the procedural veneer and trappings of democracy as we hold votes and as there are caucuses and hearings. Yet, on issues like climate change, which most concern the biggest special interests, Congress no longer provides America a truly functioning democracy.

Underneath the illusory democratic surface runs subterranean rivers of dark money. Massive infrastructures have been erected to hide that dark money flow from the sunlight of public scrutiny to carve out subterranean caverns through which the dark money flows.

If you want to understand why we do nothing on climate, you have to look down into those subterranean chambers, understand the dark money, and not be fooled by the surface spectacle. Of course, it is not just the spending of dark money that is the problem. When you let unlimited money loose in politics, particularly once you let unlimited dark money loose in politics, you empower something even more sinister than massive anonymous political expenditures; you empower the threat of massive anonymous political expenditures--the sinister whispered threat. Once you let a special interest spend unlimited dark money, you necessarily let it threaten or promise to spend that money.

Those sinister threats and promises will be harder to detect even than the most obscured dark money expenditures. You may not know who is behind a big dark money expenditure, but at least you will see it. You will see the smear ads. You may not know what is up, but you will know something is up. But a threat? A couple of people, a back room, and a silent handshake are enough. If you give a thug a big enough club, he doesn't even have to use it to get his way. This is the great, insidious evil of Citizens United, and this, I believe, is why we are where we are.

In the Gilded Age, the Senate was described as having Senators who didn't actually represent States but ``principalities and powers in business.'' One Senator represents the Union Pacific Railway system, another the New York Central, still another the insurance interests of New York and New Jersey. We cannot pretend it is impossible for the United States to be disabled and corrupted by special interests. Our history refutes that thought. So, as Americans, we need to keep our guard up against corrupting forces, and this unlimited dark flow of money into our politics is a corrupting force.

Congress's embarrassing and culpable failure to act on climate change is one face of a coin. Turn it over, and the obverse of that coin is corruption exactly as the Founding Fathers knew it--the public good ignored for special interests' wielding power. In this case, it is the power of money--climate failure, dark money; dark money, climate failure. They are two sides of the same evil coin. If that thought is not cheerful enough, wait. There is more.

There is the phony science operation that gives rhetorical cover to the dark money political muscle operation. This phony science operation is a big effort, with dozens of well-funded front groups that participate that are supported by bogus think tanks, well described as the ``think tank as the disguised political weapon.''

Today's phony science operation has a history. It grew out of the early phony science operation run by the tobacco industry, which was set up to create doubt among the public that cigarettes were bad for you. How did that work out? I will tell you how. That effort was so false and so evil that it was determined in court to be fraud--a massive corporate-led fraud.

After the tobacco fraud apparatus was exposed, it didn't disappear. It morphed into an even more complex apparatus to create false doubt about climate science. The goal, exactly like the tobacco companies' fraud, is to create something that looks enough like science to confuse the public but which has the perverse purpose of defeating and neutralizing real science. It is a science denial apparatus. By the way, this fossil fuel-funded science denial apparatus has some big advantages over real science.

First, the science denial apparatus has unlimited money behind it. The IMF has put the subsidy of the fossil fuel industry at $700 billion per year in the United States alone. To defend a $700 billion annual subsidy, you can spend enormous amounts of money, so money is no object.

Second, the science denial apparatus doesn't waste time with peer review--the touchstone of real science. Slap a lab coat on a hack, and send him to the talk shows. That is enough. The science denial apparatus is public relations dressed up as science so it behaves like public relations and goes straight to its market--an inexpert public-- to work its mischief.

Third, it has the advantage of Madison Avenue tacticians to shape its phony message into appealing sound bites for the public. Have you read a scientific journal lately? The Madison Avenue message gets through a lot more sharply.

Fourth, the science denial apparatus doesn't need to stop lying when it is caught. As long as it is getting its propaganda out, the truth doesn't matter. This is not a contest for truth; it is a contest for public opinion. So debunked, zombie arguments constantly rise from the Earth and walk again.

Finally, it doesn't have to win the argument. It just has to create the illusion, the false illusion, that there is a legitimate argument. Then the political muscle those five Justices gave this industry can go to work.

I suggest, 200 speeches in, that it is time we stopped listening to the industry that comes to us bearing one of the most flagrant conflicts of interest in history. It is time we stopped listening to their fraudulent science denial operation. It is time we put the light of day on this creepy dark money operation and stopped listening to its threats and promises.

If we are going to stop listening to all of that, whom should we listen to? How about Pope Francis, who called climate change ``one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.'' How about the scientists--we pay hundreds of them across our government--whose salaries our appropriators are funding right now and who, under President Trump, released this report? This report reads that there is ``no convincing alternative explanation'' for what it calls ``global, long-term, and unambiguous warming'' and ``record-breaking, climate- related weather extremes.'' It is our human activity.

How about listening to our intelligence services, whose ``Worldwide Threat Assessment,'' issued under President Trump and signed by our former colleague, the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, actually has a chapter titled ``Environment and Climate Change.'' Here are the identified consequences in that report: ``humanitarian disasters, conflict, water and food shortages, population migration, labor shortfalls, price shocks, and power outages,'' and most dangerously, the prospect of--and I quote the ``Worldwide Threat Assessment'' here--``tipping points in climate-linked earth systems'' that can create ``abrupt climate change.''

Or how about listening to Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., and Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and the Trump organization in 2009, when they took out this full-page ad in the New York Times saying that the science of climate change was ``irrefutable,'' and its consequences would be ``catastrophic and irreversible.'' Donald J. Trump, chairman and president--where did that guy go?

How about listening to our own home State universities. Every one of us can go home to Old Miss or Ohio State, to the University of Alaska or LSU, to Utah State or West Virginia University or Texas A&M. We can each go home to our home State's State university. They don't just accept climate change; they teach it. They teach it.

If you can listen quietly, you can listen to the oceans. They speak to us, the oceans do. They speak to us through thermometers, and they say: We are warming. They speak to us through tide gauges, and they say: We are rising along your shores. They speak to us through the howl of hurricanes powered up by their warmer sea surfaces. They speak to us through the quiet flight of fish species from their traditional grounds as the seawater warms beyond their tolerance.

If we know how to listen, through simple pH tests, the oceans will tell us that they are acidifying. The oceans will tell us that they are beginning to kill their own corals and oysters and pteropods. We can go out and check and see the corals and the oysters and the pteropods corrode and die before our eyes. It is happening.

The fishermen who plow the oceans' surface can speak for the oceans. As one Rhode Islander said to me: ``Sheldon, it's getting weird out there.''

``This is not my grandfather's ocean,'' said another. He had grown up trawling with his granddad on those oceans.

It is not just oceans. I went on Lake Erie with seasoned, professional fishermen who told me that everything they had learned in a lifetime on the lake was useless because the lake was changing on them so unknowably fast.

We choose here in Congress to whom we are going to listen, and it is time we started to listen to the honest voices and the true voices. If you don't like environmentalists or scientists, listen to your ski industry. Listen to your fishermen and lumbermen. Listen to your gardeners and birders and hunters. Listen to those who know the Earth and the oceans and who can speak for the Earth and the oceans.

It is an evil mess we are in, and if there is any justice in this world, there will one day be a terrible price to pay if we keep listening to evil voices.

The climate change problems we are causing by failing to act are a sin, as Pope Francis has flatly declared, but that is not the only sin. To jam Congress up, fossil fuel interests are interfering with and corrupting American democracy, and to corrupt American democracy is a second and a grave sin.

The science denial apparatus--to mount a fraudulent challenge to the very enterprise of science, that is a third grave sin.

Perhaps worst of all is that the world is watching. It is watching us as the fossil fuel industry, its creepy billionaires, its front groups, its bogus think tanks all gang up and debauch our democracy.

From John Winthrop to Ronald Reagan, we have held America up as a city on a hill, with the eyes of the world upon us. From Daniel Webster to Bill Clinton, we have spoken of the power of our American example as greater in the world than any example of our power. Lady Liberty in New York Harbor holds her lamp up to the world, representing our American beacon of truth, justice, and democracy.

I have a distinct memory, traveling with our friend John McCain to Manila and waking up early in the morning to go visit our American military cemetery, the Sun coming up over the rows of white gravestones standing over our dead, the massive, gleaming marble arcade of names, carved on walls stretching high over my head, of the Americans whose bodies were never recovered--over 17,000 in all, remembered in that cemetery.

After their sacrifice, after the accomplishments of the ``greatest generation,'' can we not do better than to sell our democracy to the fossil fuel industry? What do you suppose a monument to that would look like? I wonder.

America deserves better, and the world is watching us; we, this city on a hill.

With gratitude to the many colleagues who have joined me today, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am here for the happy task of moving a piece of bipartisan legislation that has been cleared on both sides of the aisle. I am particularly pleased to be doing it in front of the Presiding Officer because the Presiding Officer and I and Senator Heitkamp and others worked so hard on the Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage Act, which provides a means of encouraging carbon capture technologies to develop. This is a related bill that I joined with Senator Crapo on to advance. Senator Crapo has been our lead on this bill. The bill will encourage innovation in the nuclear industry. So it is a great pleasure for me to be here, and I am very honored that my distinguished colleague Senator Crapo has joined me on the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 153, S. 97.

Mr. President, it has been the Senator from Idaho whose leadership has driven this bill forward more than anything else, and I express my great appreciation to him for the opportunity to work with him to accomplish this success.

Like Senator Crapo, I want to recognize our colleagues in this effort, Senators Risch, Booker, Durbin, and Murkowski. I particularly thank Senator Murkowski because she is the chair of the Senate Energy Committee, and she and Senator Cantwell together cleared this bill, so we could bring it to the floor, and gave it the blessing of their committee.

I also thank Senator Inhofe from Oklahoma, who has been a strong supporter of our efforts at nuclear modernization, and I ask unanimous consent that a U.S. News & World Report editorial, which Senator Crapo wrote with Senator Inhofe, Senator Booker, and me, be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

I thank Senator Alexander from Tennessee--the home of Oak Ridge, the other National Lab that focuses so much in this area--who has been a constant advocate and has been very interested in all things nuclear for a very long time.

This bill, the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act, has been so well summarized by Senator Crapo that I will not go back and resummarize it, but I will emphasize that it is our intention that it provide an opening for nuclear innovation into next-generation, third- generation, even fourth-generation nuclear technologies, with the goal that we can compete effectively internationally to be the producers of clean and safe nuclear energy, with the hope--and at this point I think it is somewhere between a hope and a prospect--that this technology will develop to the point where we can begin to look at our existing nuclear waste stockpile and use these new technologies to turn hazardous and dangerous nuclear waste, for which we have no present plan, into something that is valuable and can help create energy. We need to work on how to price that because, at present, there is no mechanism that provides any value to someone who might have a solution to that problem for lifting this cost off of our books. But that is something Senator Crapo, Senator Alexander, Senator Inhofe, Senator Booker, Senator Murkowski, and I can continue to work on. That, I think, is a really valuable prospect in all of this, and it is one of the things that moves me to do this.

Let me close by thanking Senator Crapo for also working with me on NEIMA, the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, which we are still working to get passed but which we hope will get passed. It parallels very nicely with this legislation because what that would do is get the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to update its permitting process to accommodate new technologies.

When I am asked what I mean by that, I use a very rough example, which is that the current light water reactor permitting process makes about as much sense as the test for these new technologies as taking a Tesla and having it pass the DMV carburetor requirements. It is a new technology; it requires a different testing regime. Our other bill would authorize and require the NRC to update and work with the innovation community to make sure that when these things are ready for permitting, permitting is, in fact, ready for them.

Mr. President, with great appreciation to Senator Crapo, the distinguished Senator from Idaho who has been my leader and partner in all this, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, the reason ``I came to speak on the floor [right now is to talk] about an issue that many in Washington would prefer to ignore; that is, [the] climate changes that are being caused by our carbon pollution.''

That is how I began these speeches, with that sentence, on April 18, 2012, from this desk. I have returned week after week to try to make sure there would not be silence in the Senate on the climate crisis. This is my 199th weekly foray; next week will make it an even 200.

Back on that April Wednesday in 2012, debate about climate change had all but died in Congress. Just a few years prior, the House of Representatives had passed the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, led by our colleague, now the Senator from Massachusetts. In this body, Republican colleagues had openly acknowledged the existence of climate change and called for legislative action to cut carbon emissions. Since John Chafee, climate change had been a bipartisan concern.

In 2010, came the Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United decision, which allowed the fossil fuel industry to unleash limitless dark money on our elections. The polluters' money and threats cast a shadow across any Republican who might work on carbon pollution, and it ended that bipartisanship.

When I gave that first speech, even the White House had thrown in the towel on climate change, after letting Waxman-Markey die on the vine. You couldn't get them to put the words ``climate'' and ``change'' in the same paragraph, at least not until the President engaged on this issue in his speech in June of 2013. Washington had gone dark on climate.

I knew I couldn't match the financial muscle of the big polluters, but I believed if anything was going to change around here, we would need to shine a little light on the facts and on the sophisticated scheme of denial being perpetrated by the polluters. I decided to put at least my little light to work, and I started these speeches.

The last 6 years, unfortunately, have offered no shortage of bad climate news and dubious milestones. This chart shows the 4 hottest years ever recorded have occurred since I began giving these speeches. Global warming is, of course, driven by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

When I gave the first ``Time to Wake Up'' speech in April 2012, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 396 parts per million. Today, it is at 408. It has never been so high in the history of the human species. It is not just the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that has been rising. So has the sea, as warming seawater expands and glaciers melt, making our coasts--particularly in my Ocean State--ever more vulnerable to flooding and storms. The oceans are becoming more acid, as ocean water reacts chemically with the heightened carbon concentration in the atmosphere.

During the 6 years I have been giving these speeches, the United States has experienced more and more extreme weather events, many of which scientists tell us are linked to climate change: from deadly storms, including 2012's Hurricane Sandy and 2017's Harvey, Irma, and Maria, to California's record drought and wildfires, to temperatures so warm in the Alaskan Arctic that the computer algorithms thought the thermometer had broken.

In 2017 alone, the string of U.S. extreme weather disasters--six major hurricanes, wildfires in the West, catastrophic mudslides, temperature records breaking all over the country--caused well north of $300 billion in damage and killed more than 300 people. The last 6 years provide us with a menacing preview of things to come.

Scientists, including scientists at all of our home State universities, say these changes are driven by carbon pollution. Our national security leaders warn of the increasing danger of international strife caused by climate change, as well as the threat to U.S. military facilities and force readiness.

Faith leaders urge us to protect creation and those less fortunate than we are, led by Pope Francis, who, on this, has been magnificent. The insurance and credit rating industries, whose business models depend on accurate and responsible assessment of risk, warn us, as do major American corporations and leading investors--folks who can't let climate politics interfere with their bottom lines. I have spoken about them all.

I also visited States across the country to see for myself and to talk to people firsthand--folks who know climate change is real because they see it

where they live, because they study it. In North Carolina, business leaders were organizing to protect the local coastal economy from climate change and associated sea level rise. In South Carolina, tide gauges in Charleston were up over 10 inches since the 1920s. In Georgia, I went out on the water with a clammer who showed me how changes in climate are hurting his livelihood. In Florida, the Army Corps of Engineers officials in Jacksonville gave a dire presentation of what the sea level rise portends for the Sunshine State. In Ohio, I saw the ice cores from faraway glaciers that record our looming climate catastrophe.

In Utah, the ski resorts fear climate change will ruin their ``greatest snow on Earth.'' I know the Presiding Officer takes pride in Utah's greatest snow on Earth. In Pennsylvania, child health specialists from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia see climate change worsening children's asthma. In Iowa, Des Moines Water Works was busy preparing the city for more frequent and severe climate-driven flooding. In Arizona, they are changing the staffing for emergency responders facing summer temperatures the human body cannot sustain. New Hampshire is forecasting that its State bird may no longer be seen as its range moves ever northward out of New Hampshire on our warming planet.

I traveled on to Texas, Iowa, Nebraska, Delaware, and more. I brought stories to this floor from every corner of the country, hoping colleagues would heed the warnings from their own home States, to match what I was hearing from Rhode Island, from Rhode Island's coastal towns and scientists and fishermen: ``Sheldon, it's getting weird out there,'' I was told. ``It's not my grandfather's ocean.''

Many Democratic colleagues joined me to discuss the changes they see in their home States, including 30 colleagues who held the floor all night long in 2014.

In July of 2016, 18 Senators and I took to the Senate floor for days to expose the fossil fuel-funded front groups that were behind the campaign to deny climate science and stymie legislative action. There is a whole carefully built apparatus: phony-baloney front groups that are designed to look and sound like they are real; messages honed by public relations experts to sound like they are truthful; scientists on the fossil fuel payroll whom polluters can trot out as needed.

This industry-fueled misinformation campaign has been a theme of these speeches. I relayed the findings of researchers who study the flow of money through the climate denial network and the journalists who uncovered Exxon's coverup of what they knew of the climate dangers. I compared the fossil fuel polluter playbook to the fraudulent tactics of the tobacco industry to bury the truth about the health effects of cigarettes.

I listened to conservative economists and offered market-based solutions. Back in March 2013, I described the market failure of carbon pollution's not being baked into the price of the product. Market economics doesn't work when corporations can just offload their costs onto the general public. It is called a negative externality in economics jargon, and we see it all around us in storm-damaged homes and flooded cities, in drought-stricken farms and raging wildfires. The big oil companies and the coal barons have offloaded those costs onto society.

Virtually every Republican who has thought the climate change problem through to a solution comes to the same place: put a price on carbon emissions; let the market work; and return the revenues to the American public. This concept is supported by a who's who of former Republican Cabinet officials and Presidential economic advisers. I listened, and, in November 2014, I introduced with Senator Schatz the American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act to establish an economywide fee on carbon dioxide, return all of the revenue to the American public, correct the market failure, promote energy innovation, and, of course, dramatically reduce carbon pollution.

I have seen over the years of these speeches that the landscape is shifting. The Senate has actually held votes that show that a majority here believes climate change is real, not a hoax, and is driven by human activity. It took years, but I guess that counts for progress around here.

Outside of Congress, the Paris Agreement in 2015 committed the nations of the world to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius by reducing carbon emissions. America's part was the Clean Power Plan--to reduce carbon emissions from the power sector by one-third by 2030 from 2005 levels.

Automakers adopted new fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks in 2012. Vehicles would get nearly 55 miles per gallon by 2025, saving consumers billions of dollars while eliminating billions of tons of carbon emissions.

The EPA issued new rules in 2016 to limit the flaring of methane--a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide--at oil and gas wells, and the Obama administration helped negotiate the Kigali Amendment to phase out the use of hydrofluorocarbons, which have powerful greenhouse gas heat-trapping properties in the atmosphere. Secretary Kerry convened wildly successful international oceans conferences, which are still ongoing and are scheduled for years ahead, to address the warming and the acidification of the seas.

In sum, up through 2016, even if Congress had been trapped in fossil fuel muck, the United States had still been making slow but steady progress on climate policy. Then Trump was elected President, and he decided to see if he could reverse all of this.

He announced that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. He put the three stooges of fossil fuel--Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, and Rick Perry--in charge of climate policy. Trump completely forgot his and his family's own words from a full-page New York Times advertisement in 2009, calling climate change ``irrefutable'' and portending ``catastrophic and irreversible consequences.'' That was Donald Trump and his family in 2009.

As bad as the news became coming out of Washington, we saw action around the country to give us some reason for optimism. The leadership void left by the Trump administration was filled by State and local governments, businesses, academic institutions, and faith organizations which pledged to honor the Paris Agreement. California and Washington State joined with Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico to announce a plan to put a price on carbon that would reach virtually up and down the entire west coast of the Americas.

Over management opposition, BlackRock, the great investment firm, helped force ExxonMobil to report its climate risk to its shareholders. Moody's announced it will start using climate risk in rating the bonds of coastal communities. Companies like Microsoft and Unilever adopted an internal carbon price to help them reduce the carbon intensity of their operations.

At heart, this is a battle of truth versus lies, and courts are a good forum for the truth. California municipalities as well as New York City have sued fossil fuel companies, under State law, over the huge adaptation costs they will have to bear from sea level rise and extreme weather. The State attorneys general in Massachusetts and New York are pursuing a fraud investigation into what ExxonMobil has been covering up about its fossil fuels.

So there you have it. Over the last 6 years, we are ever more aware of the accelerating pace of climate change and ever more aware of the terrible threat that rising seas, increased temperatures, and more frequent extreme weather events pose. It has become harder and harder for the fossil fuel industry and the web of front groups and Trump administration officials who do its bidding to claim there is nothing to see here, folks, that it is all a hoax, and to move along.

Yet, despite all of the information and all of the evidence, this great institution--the U.S. Senate--continues to sit silent, paralyzed by the threats of retribution that come from the fossil fuel lobby. When this started, I had hoped we would never get to 100--let alone 199--of these speeches. We ought to have solved this years ago. It is a disgrace that we haven't, and it is a disgrace as to why we haven't. If we remain as ineffective as we have been during the last 6 years, we will have failed ourselves and all future generations.

America deserves better than this. A city on a hill, with the eyes of the

world upon it, can ill afford to ignore such a problem--worse still when the reason is one all-powerful industry that demands obedience. America deserves better. The countries and people around the world who rely on and look to American leadership deserve better. At long last, it is time for us to wake up here and meet our responsibilities.

Nuclear Innovation Bill

Mr. President, the distinguished chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee has come to the floor. While she is here, may I thank her for her work in clearing the nuclear innovation bill that Senator Crapo and I passed into law this afternoon by unanimous consent. The chairman's work, along with the ranking member's, in clearing that bill was essential to getting it passed, and she was a cosponsor and a critical force in getting it done. I am grateful to her.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I will be joined by a series of my colleagues who are coming to the floor this afternoon to talk about the November 2018 elections coming up and the steps we need to take to make sure that the Russian influence effort that bedeviled our 2016 election is not replicated in the 2018 election.

I guess the first question to answer is, Is this a realistic prospect? Is this something we should concern ourselves with--that the Russians would come back again in 2018 and try to meddle in our elections?

Everyone in the Trump administration who has been asked about this, perhaps outside of the Oval Office itself, has said: Yes, absolutely. They are coming. The Director of the CIA, the Director of National Intelligence, the head of the FBI, the Attorney General, the Department of Justice--there is no contest. There is no disagreement. There is no doubt, even among the President's senior national security and law enforcement team that they are coming back, that they are going to do this again. That leads us to the question of what we are doing about it.

It seems that the silence from the Oval Office on this subject is deafening. The White House doesn't ever want to talk about doing anything about this. To the extent that we get signals from tweets and things like that, they are usually nonfactual and highly politicized challenges to the basic facts that all of the President's senior Cabinet staff seem to agree with.

I don't know why they haven't sorted out why the President says one thing and all of his Cabinet officials say something else, but that is for them. What is for us is to review this in Congress, to do oversight, and to do what legislation might be necessary to raise our defenses to make sure that we can effectively counter what we have been warned is coming at us.

We have no proposal from the administration. One would think with something like this, where we have an election that has been attacked by a hostile foreign country--one would think that would be the kind of thing that would bring our country together and would get the President's attention. He swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, and last I heard, the elections are a part of our Constitution. Yet there is nothing--crickets.

Where is the proposal? Where are the congressional hearings on our proposals? Where are the markups? Where are the bills? We are seeing an extraordinary lack of interest and initiative in something about which we have been very forcefully warned.

The failure at the White House is very profound. Over and over again, we have heard senior Trump officials say that they have not been instructed by the President to take this seriously. My senior colleague, Senator Jack Reed, asked Director Chris Wray of the FBI about whether the FBI had taken specific actions to confront and blunt Russian influence and disinformation activities. On February 13, in the Senate Intelligence Committee, he said, ``not as specifically directed by the President, no.''

To read the transcript more completely, Senator Reed asked:

So let me begin with Mr. Wray and say, has the President

directed you and your agency to take specific actions to

confront and blunt Russian influence activities that are

ongoing?

Wray: We're taking a lot of specific efforts to blunt

Russian . . .

Reed: . . . directed by the President?

Wray: Not--not as specifically directed by the President,

no.

Similarly, 2 weeks later, February 27, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the NSA's Director, ADM Mike Rogers, said that he had not been granted the authority nor directed specifically by the President to take action to disrupt Russian election hacking operations.

Again, Senator Reed asked:

So, you would need, basically, to be directed by the

President, through the Secretary of Defense, to get--

Rogers interrupts:

Yes, sir, as I--I mentioned that in my statement.

Reed: Have you been directed to do so, given the strategic

threat that faces the United States and the significant

consequences you recognize already?

Rogers: No, I have not.

There is a lot of room for improvement here. You can also add to this list the failures of activity at the State Department, which was allocated $120 million to counter foreign efforts to meddle in elections to sow distrust in democracy. According to the March 4 story in the New York Times:

Not one of the 23 analysts working in the department's

Global Engagement Center--which has been tasked with

countering Moscow's disinformation campaign--speaks Russian,

and a department hiring freeze has hindered efforts to

recruit the computer experts needed to track the Russian

efforts.

So when Congress provides $120 million to the State Department to take steps to protect against Russian election interference, what we get back is that none of that money gets spent, and a hiring freeze prevents the people with the necessary qualifications from even coming in to do the job. That is not taking the problem seriously--not at the FBI, not at the NSA, and not at the State Department.

As far as I can tell, there actually is no formal executive branch interagency process that is designed to examine what the Russians did and put together legislative recommendations for Congress to follow up on. In national security matters, that is the President's role; that is the executive branch's role. We have the authority to make the laws, but because they are doing the day-to-day work, we count on the executive branch to put the proposals together for us. And again, there is nothing.

There is one thing that we did do. We wanted to send a strong signal to Vladimir Putin that there was a price to be paid for this kind of misbehavior--manipulating our elections. We voted, virtually unanimously, in this Chamber, 98 to 2. I don't know the numbers on the House side, but it was equally virtually unanimous on the House side.

It was 98 to 2 here in the Senate. We passed tough sanctions to hit Vladimir Putin where it hurts, which is right in the oligarchs. That is what he cares about, the oligarchs who support him, the oligarchs whose corrupt enterprises he has corruptly engaged with. That whole racketeering enterprise that runs the Russian Government is what the sanctions would go after.

Well, the administration has refused to implement them. The State Department has said that they are not needed. Not needed? We are hearing from all of the Trump administration's own senior executive agencies that they are going to come and do this again in 2018. How are they not needed if this is no deterrence for what they did in 2016? It would be one thing to say they are not needed if the evidence was: OK, they got the message. They are not going to do this again. We are fine in 2018.

But that is not what Trump's own Cabinet officials and national intelligence leaders are telling us. They are telling us that they are needed because they are coming at us again. So this added bit of deterrence would be very important.

When it came to something as simple as putting together the list of targeted oligarchs to put maximum pressure on President Putin, they didn't even put a list together on their own; they went to Forbes magazine and took the list out of a public magazine. That doesn't look like a serious or conscientious effort.

So right up and down the administration, you see failure to take this seriously traceable directly to the White House, and that is very, very regrettable.

The other thing that we don't know is what the White House has been up to with respect to Congress. There was a lot of talk early on about how we needed to have an independent committee to take a look at this, to be independent, to put together a package of reforms, observations, and recommendations, and we have had no

support for doing that. What we were told was: Don't worry. Work through the committees.

Well, the committees aren't doing much, to tell you the truth. It is like the gavels are made out of foam rubber around here. We could do a lot better, and there is no independent commission.

It raises the question, what was the role of the White House? What was the role of the President in stopping an independent commission? How active were they in doing that? Those are questions that need answers, but obviously, if there aren't serious investigative processes going on in our committees, it is hard to get those answers.

Here is another question: What was the role of the White House in coordinating or colluding with the House Intelligence Committee--with Representative Nunez and/or his staff--in preparation for the so-called Nunez memo?

We have learned a lot about that memo since it came out. We have learned that it was essentially phony. It had a couple of basic accusations. One was that the FBI had misled the FISA Court. They were misled that one of the sources that supported the affidavit that got the FISA warrant for the surveillance of Carter Page--that one of those sources had been in touch with or had been funded by a political campaign; that this was a phony effort cooked up on behalf of the Clinton campaign and run before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Well, as it turns out, the FISA application stated specifically the FBI's speculation that the source, Steele, had been hired to ``find information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1's campaign''-- Trump's campaign. As somebody who has pursued affidavits for search warrants and for surveillance warrants before, I can tell you that it is common and standard FBI and Department of Justice practice to leave out unnecessary names. So the fact that Mrs. Clinton wasn't mentioned is perfectly consistent with longstanding Department practice.

The other thing that it omitted was that the Steele information was actually corroborating information for a lot of other information that had begun this investigation beforehand. So the theory that this all depended on this particular source and that this source had an undisclosed relationship with a political opponent was simply baloney. The fact is that that was disclosed in the warrant, and there were additional sources.

That leaves me with the question of why. Why would a legislative committee apparently deliberately put together a report that contained misleading or false statements but tried to create an erroneous or false impression about something that had taken place? Well, did the White House have any connections in that process? That is the question we are entitled answers to. If this was just a botched job by a partisan crew in a legislative committee, that is one set of problems. If this is the Congress of the United States taking its oversight authority and handing it over to the executive branch of government, handing it over to White House operatives when the White House itself is the subject of the inquiry, that is a very different problem. And we are owed an answer as to what the communications were between the White House, the Trump legal team, and the staff of the House Intelligence Committee that prepared the Nunez report.

I have been joined by the distinguished Senator from Connecticut, so I will leave my remarks there.

I yield the floor

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Blumenthal's legislative fellow Mary Miller Flowers be granted floor privileges until the end of June 2018.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

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

Mr. President, I am here for my 198th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech with my increasingly dog-eared and beaten chart.

My last two speeches focused on, shall we say, the peculiar role two of this country's largest trade associations play on climate change. They have dozens and dozens of member companies that support action on climate change. Renewable energy now provides more jobs than fossil fuels and lots of American manufacturing. Yet the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers spend millions and millions of dollars lobbying Congress against climate action, against renewables, and in favor of the fossil fuel industry. Go figure.

In 2016, Senator Warren and I surveyed the 108 companies on the chamber of commerce's board, and we couldn't find a single one that would endorse the chamber's anti-climate lobbying--not one. Many of these companies had very public pro-climate positions. None said they had even been consulted by the chamber about the chamber's anti-climate crusade.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's war on climate action isn't just in lobbying Congress. It also spends tens of millions of dollars in elections, using political attack ads to sink pro-climate candidates. So I asked in my last speeches: Why? Why does the chamber and NAM advance the special interests of the fossil fuel industry, opposing climate action, ignoring their own pro-climate members, and turning their backs on the whole renewable energy and green technology economy? Why, indeed.

Well, today I would like to talk about a fossil fuel trade association--the American Petroleum Institute,

API. API is a slightly different beast than the chamber and NAM. It represents the oil and gas industry. You wouldn't expect it to care about renewable energy or green technology. API's policy positions should align with the big oil companies it represents, but it gets complicated. It gets complicated because the big oil companies all claim to support action on climate change. Here is what ExxonMobil claims: ``The risk of climate change is clear and the risk warrants action.''

In 2009, then-Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson said the company supported a price on carbon. That is supposedly ExxonMobil's position today.

Here is Shell on carbon pricing: ``The transition to low-carbon solutions is best underpinned by meaningful government-led carbon `pricing' mechanisms.''

On the Paris Agreement, Exxon publicly supported the Paris Agreement, as did Chevron, as did Shell, as did BP. In addition, BP and Shell signed on to an initiative to eliminate methane flaring.

So summing up, all of the major oil companies supported the Paris Agreement. Three out of four, including ExxonMobil--the big kahuna-- publicly support putting a price on carbon emissions, and two of them even support eliminating methane flaring.

So where is the American Petroleum Institute on these policies? Let's start with the Paris Agreement. API funds a group called the American Council on Capital Formation, which, along with the Chamber of Commerce, funded the debunked study claiming that the Paris Agreement would cause massive job losses and huge costs. This debunked report was cited by President Trump as justification for withdrawing from the Paris accord. So API funded the report used as a basis for withdrawal-- but wait. It gets better. The authors of this API-funded study are the same two characters API hired way back in 1997 and 1998 to write similar reports critical of the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol, of course, was violently opposed in the Senate by the fossil fuel industry and API.

So here we are 20 years after Kyoto, and API used almost exactly the same playbook--even the same personnel--against the Paris Agreement that they had used against the Kyoto accord, except that this time API paid for the report through a front group to hide API's hand in torpedoing the Paris Agreement. How do you relate that to the stated position of the four oil majors for the Paris Agreement? You would have to ask API to explain.

So now let's look at API's position on carbon pricing, which three out of those four oil majors say they support. API's President has claimed that his organization doesn't have an official position on carbon pricing, but if you take a look at API's website, it is loaded with comments critical of putting a price on carbon, and API also funded yet another study claiming that a price on carbon emissions would be bad for the economy.

On the issue of methane flaring, API out front led the charge against Department of the Interior and Environmental Protection Agency rules. Its lobbying campaign has paid off, as two of Trump's fossil fuel stooges, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, are busily trying to dismantle these rules. Luckily, they are not very bright about it, and courts keep upending their schemes.

Let's look at the lobbying. Big Oil money provides much of API's power in the Halls of Congress. API has spent over $100 million lobbying the Federal Government, and apparently its lobbying goes against the wishes as stated by its biggest clients, the four oil majors. If you look, there is a big bump up in 2009 and here through 2016--the Obama years--when they wanted to go in and stop all kinds of progress on climate change.

In this building, we all know perfectly well that API is not here lobbying for a price on carbon. We know perfectly well that if a Republican were to say, ``I am for a price on carbon,'' or sign on to a bill, they would probably get a visit from API saying, ``Whoa, not so fast there, partner.'' We know perfectly well that they are not in this building lobbying for the Paris accord.

So why the discrepancy? Is it possible that all of this money--$100 million--is being thrown around without the approval of the big oil companies? Has the American Petroleum Institute sort of gone off on its own, off the leash, free range, running away from the oil companies? It is a puzzlement, this vast gulf between the pro-climate policies the oil majors say they support and the anti-climate policies the API lobbyists support.

I said one possibility is, Big Oil doesn't know how its lobbying money is being spent. Maybe those CEOs have lost control of their own trade association and don't even know it. I mean, after all, around here, who pays attention to their own lobbying operation, anyway? Maybe the $100 million is such chump change to the big oil companies that they have just lost track of it, like we might lose change in our couch cushions.

Maybe--cover your ears, young pages, because I may say something shocking here--maybe it is a scam. It is totally shocking that a big corporation will say one thing and do another. What a concept, but it is a concept that works out great for Big Oil. The Big Oil CEOs get to go to cocktail parties in Davos or on Fifth Avenue. They get to go to international conferences, and with all their sophisticated friends, they get to say: Hey, we are not a bunch of science-hating, heads-in- the-sand climate deniers. We have sensible climate policies.

At the same time, they can send their lobbying goons out to make sure no one in Congress takes that ``sensible climate policies'' nonsense seriously. It is great. Have your front group do your dirty work for you, fill your websites with happy assurances, while you let API loose on Washington to crush any pro-climate policies that might actually reduce carbon emissions and threaten your bottom line.

Hypocrisy? Yes, but then hypocrisy is famously the tribute vice pays to virtue. I suppose it is at least a start. It is a sign that we have reached the point where Big Oil recognizes the need to try to at least look virtuous. That is a start, but it still leaves us with this huge disconnect between the pro-climate policies the big oil companies claim to support and their American Petroleum Institute's relentless anti- climate lobbying.

Remember, throughout the oil industry's decades-long campaign against climate action, they knew all along. Exxon knew decades ago about the effects of carbon pollution, but they worked through an elaborate web of front groups to propagate doubt and denial about the science they knew.

Shell knew too. In 1991, Shell even produced a documentary warning about the serious threat climate change posed to the future of civilization. Despite acknowledging this threat, Shell, like Exxon, continued to fund API and other front groups that sought to mislead the public about climate change and opposed climate action here in Congress.

Exxon's trade group--this American Petroleum Institute--also knew. They knew of the reality of climate change. They knew it was caused by carbon emissions from fossil fuels, and they knew of the danger it poses. Way back in 1959--almost 60 years ago--API was warned by an eminent scientist that if we kept burning fossil fuels, we would increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Back in 1959, they were warned. The prediction they received was that it would warm the atmosphere, melt the icecaps, and submerge coastal cities and towns, as we are beginning to see along the Florida coastline right now. That was the prediction in 1959.

In 1959, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 316 parts per million. Then, in 1968, a group of scientists API had itself commissioned warned API that significant temperature changes could occur by the year 2000 and that, ultimately, potential damage to the environment could be severe. By 1968, the atmosphere concentration of CO2 was up to 323 parts per million.

In 1980, scientists hired by API again warned API that carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels were likely to have catastrophic effects. By 1980, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was 339. In 1983, API disbanded the scientific working group it had created to study global warming. Apparently, API didn't like what it was hearing so, in 1983, they shut it off. There is a legal term for when you are on notice but

then just turn away; it is called ``willful ignorance.'' By 1983, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was 343 parts per million.

Then came 1999, when James Hansen's famous Senate testimony threatened API's willful ignorance scheme. So API and its Big Oil members founded a front group with the misleading name Global Climate Coalition. What is it with these front groups and these people, anyway? Why is it always these front groups? Global Climate Coalition began to spread falsehoods and disinformation about climate science, even though in 1989 they knew. In 1989, they had known for 30 years, since that first report in 1959, and by 1989 the atmospheric concentration was 353 parts per million.

In 1993, API hired one of the same men who wrote those phony Kyoto and Paris reports that I mentioned to write a report attacking President Clinton's so-called Btu tax on fuel sources. In 1993, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was up to 357 parts per million. In 1998, API did that report attacking the Kyoto Protocol. It also commissioned what it called its Global Climate Science Communications Plan, a plan designed to mislead Americans about climate science. By 1998, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was 367 parts per million.

In 2009, API fought and killed the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation that would have controlled carbon emissions. By 2009, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was 387 parts per million.

Now here we are in 2018. API is still fighting climate action. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now 407 parts per million, almost 30 percent higher than it was when API probably first learned what climate science meant. As we have kept dumping carbon pollution into the atmosphere, temperatures and sea levels have indeed steadily risen--just as API was told they would. They knew, but they lied.

For decades, they lied on a massive industrial scale. They lied through phony science. They lied through phony front groups and bogus studies. They lied through talk shows. They lied through rightwing media. They lied through AstroTurf, and well-paid PR firms. They lied for decades, and now the American people have to pay the price of climate change to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

So, from their point of view, what the heck? After decades of lying about climate change, what is a little discrepancy now between what Big Oil CEOs say and what Big Oil lobbyists do? The industry's sophisticated and expensive disinformation and lobbying campaign has blockaded climate action in this country for more than half a century. When you have been lying that long, maybe it is a hard habit to break.

Looking back at this whole scam, I guess API and its members actually see it as a win--nearly 60 years of industry profits they protected behind the barricade of lies, but at what price to our country? At what price to Americans whose lives have already, in many cases, been upended by climate change? At what price to people around the world who will suffer the effects of climate change and one day want an answer about why America, through all this period, let this take place--why America let them down.

The time for deception, the time for front groups, for misinformation, for inaction is over. API and its fossil fuel allies over at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers have blocked climate action in Congress long enough. Look at the price we paid to allow the fossil fuel lobby to dictate climate policy in this great body. Four hundred seven parts per million is a measurement, and it is a measurement unprecedented in the full span of human history on this planet.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, today, I pay tribute to Rhode Island's assistant attorney general Michael Rubin, who will retire this year after serving our State for more than three decades. I had the pleasure of working alongside Mike during my time as attorney general and during my time on the attorney general office staff. I am proud to call him my friend. He is a skilled leader in the Rhode Island legal community. He will be missed.

Mike piled up a strong record of accomplishments during his time as the assistant attorney general of Rhode Island and chief of the Rhode Island Attorney General's environmental unit. He was an advocate for every community in the State and worked every day to promote a safe, clean environment for our kids and preserve public access to our beautiful shores. Just this past year, Save the Bay Rhode Island awarded Mike with its Environmental Achievement Award for his important work as the head of the environmental unit. ``Without the efforts of advocates such as Mike, who tirelessly work not only for the good of the environment, but for our ability as a citizenry to access and enjoy our coastline, the quality, and in some cases, quantity, of publicly accessible coastal lands and waters would be significantly depreciated,'' the organization announced.

I got to see his determination firsthand when I was attorney general. In 2001, Mike had been trial counsel in the State proceedings when I argued a case to defend our State's environmental preservation regulations before the Supreme Court. More recently, Mike helped file lawsuits in 2016 against dozens of big oil companies over the hazardous messes they were making in Rhode Island wells and reservoirs and pursued $65 million for the cleanup.

In addition to his good work in the attorney general's office, Mike has contributed a great deal to our community. I know he will remain a committed leader in our State. I wish him health and much happiness in his days to come. Here is to less time writing briefs and more time enjoying Rhode Island's natural beauty, whether that be on your bike, in your kayak, or on your ice-skates.

On behalf of all Rhode Islanders, thank you for your work, Mike. You have made our State proud. Godspeed.