Floor Statements

Mr. President, I come to the floor today for the 184th time to ask us to at least wake up to our duty as a Congress to enact prudent policies to address the effects of climate change. The Presiding Officer is well aware of what Alaska faces from ocean acidification and ocean melting and sea level rise and all of that.

For the generations who will look back at this, I have tried in these speeches to chronicle the political tricks and bullying that have put Congress--the Congress of the United States--in tow to a massively conflicted special interest, such that we are incapacitated on this vital subject. The shamelessness of the fossil fuel industry and the spinelessness of Congress under its sway will provide a long lesson in modern-day corruption and political failure.

The Trump administration has been particularly loathsome, threatening the emissions standards for cars and trucks, pressing for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, disbanding science advisory committees, lifting the moratorium on Federal coal leasing, trying to expand offshore drilling, and open national marine monuments and sanctuaries to energy companies. The Environmental Protection Agency is working to eliminate rules on the leaking and flaring of methane and has rescinded requirements for reporting methane emissions. The President has announced his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement.

One particular target of this corrupted administration is the Clean Power Plan, the 2015 EPA rule to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from American powerplants--a rule that many utilities and States supported. But it is the industry's bottom-dwellers who have the President's ear, and they want to undo even this flexible framework for meeting emissions-reduction targets.

When EPA balanced the costs and benefits of the Clean Power Plan originally, it offset things, like between $14 billion and $34 billion in health benefits in the form of preventive illnesses and deaths, against the costs of industry compliance.

The net benefits of the Clean Power Plan came out to between $26 billion and $45 billion every year.

So with its official proposal to rescind the Clean Power Plan, EPA administrator and fossil fuel operative Scott Pruitt had to cook the books to wipe out this public benefit. Here is how he did it. There were two tricks. One derives from the fact that harms, injuries, and losses caused by carbon pollution can take place many years after the pollution is emitted. In financial matters, future costs and benefits are balanced against present costs and benefits, using what is called a discount rate. It is more valuable to receive $1 million now than $1 million 20 years from now. That is the theory.

But even the George W. Bush administration recognized for healthcare rulemaking that ``[s]pecial ethical considerations arise when comparing benefits and costs across generations,'' and they urged care about using a discount rate when a rule is expected to harm future generations.

In 2015, the United States settled on a 3-percent discount rate to estimate the out-year costs of carbon pollution to society. Scott Pruitt jacked that up to a 7-percent discount rate so out-year harms, injuries, and losses would count for less. Mind you, our children and grandchildren will still suffer the exact same costs at 3 percent or at 7 percent. It is just that present-day polluters--Scott Pruitt's masters--get a way-big discount.

Pruitt's second trick is only to count the carbon pollution harm within our borders. You might say: That is OK; we are Americans, after all. But it is worth taking a look at what this rule does if all countries were to use it because there is a trick hidden in the middle of it. The fact is that we are harmed by other countries' carbon emissions, and they in turn are harmed by our carbon emissions. On the flip side, we harm other countries with our emissions, and they harm us with theirs.

There is a total amount of global emissions, and there is a total amount of global harm. If you call the total global emissions X and the total global harm Y, what happens when every country follows the Pruitt method of only pricing local emissions and local harms?

For purposes of illustration, let's say there are three countries in the world, and each emits one-third of the total carbon pollution and suffers one-third of the global harm from the collective global emissions. If each country only counts its own emissions and the harms only to its own country, guess what happens. All that cross-border harm never gets counted. It never gets counted. It disappears off the balance sheet. It vanishes into this trick of calculation. If you are the tool of the fossil fuel industry, how rewarding it must be to implement a trick that just vanishes so much of the fossil fuel industry's harm to the world.

In this hypothetical, how much harm simply vanishes? Two-thirds of it does. Two thirds of the harm simply vanishes, never to be accounted for--not in the real world. Nothing has changed in the real world. In this three-country hypothetical, the total emissions is still X and the total harm is still Y. None of that has changed. This Pruitt trick of accounting just wiped two-thirds of the harm off the books. A happy day for polluters, and a happy, happy day for the polluters' tool, for there will no doubt be rewards for implementing this trick.

Those fossil fuel industry bottom-dwellers no doubt think that this is pretty cute and that this is pretty clever stuff, indeed. There are high-fives in the corporate boardrooms that they have a tool in office who will pull such a trick of magical, vanishing carbon pollution harms. But the problem with these crooked little schemes is that the whole world is actually watching. Anybody can do the analysis that I just did and show that this is nothing more

than a trick, and sooner or later, consequences do come home to roost.

Out in the real world, the Pacific Island nation of Kiribati is buying up land in Fiji so it can evacuate its people there when rising seas engulf its islands and eliminate the nation. It is on its way to becoming a modern-day Atlantis, lost forever to the waves. You can replicate that risk along the shores of Bangladesh, Burma, Malaysia and the Maldives.

You can add in the risk of lost fisheries that left a country's EEZ for cooler waters. If you think that is just a hypothetical, ask Connecticut and Rhode Island lobstermen about their catch. Add in the expansion of the world's desert areas in the Sahel and elsewhere that forces farmers' crops and shepherds' flocks away from their historic homes.

Add unprecedented storms powered up over warming seas. As bad as things have been in Houston, Florida, and Puerto Rico, we are rich enough to rebuild, to throw billions of dollars at the problem, and we are. Other places do not have those resources. Without the help, imagine that suffering.

To those who will suffer in the future, what do we say? On that day of reckoning, on that judgment day, what do we tell all those people who suffered? Ha-ha-ha, do we say? We came up with this little trick that wiped most of your suffering off our books. We used a discount rate that discounted your suffering to virtually zero. Is that the kind of America we want to be? Remember the saying: The power of America's example is more important than any example of our power. Some example we would be, some city on a hill, if that was the way we behaved.

The natural world does not care about self-serving or ideological arguments. The natural world is governed by immutable laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics. Scott Pruitt's polluter-friendly mathematics just doesn't add up. As Michael Greenstone, an economist at the University of Chicago who helped develop the social cost of carbon, put it, Pruitt's plan was not evidence-based policymaking. This was policy-based evidence making.

There is enormous pressure in the Trump administration to get rid of the social cost of carbon. What is bizarre about the Trump administration is that they don't try to get rid of the social cost of carbon by getting rid of its social costs, by lowering carbon emissions, by addressing the harms that it causes. They try to get rid of the social cost of carbon by getting rid of the scoring mechanism that counts all of that. It is like saying: My team is winning because I tore down the scoreboard.

Well, no, the world is getting clobbered out there by carbon pollution and the climate change that causes it, and tearing down the scoreboard doesn't help change the game on the field. You cannot just cook the books and reduce the social cost of carbon.

For one thing, the social cost of carbon analysis is too well established in the honest world. Courts have instructed Federal agencies to factor the social cost of carbon into their regulations. States are using the social cost of carbon in their policymaking. Most major corporations, even ExxonMobil, factor a social cost of carbon into their own planning and accounting.

The social cost of carbon pollution is at the heart of the International Monetary Fund calculation, for which the fossil fuel industry gets an annual subsidy in the United States of $700 billion a year. Even to protect a multihundred-billion-dollar annual subsidy, Scott Pruitt can't just wish the social cost of carbon away and just can't stop counting it. Courts will take notice.

They may take notice that these stunts are arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act. They may take note that Pruitt has massive conflicts of interest with his fossil fuel funders. They will surely note that the Supreme Court has said greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and that EPA is legally obligated to regulate them. They will surely note that the EPA itself has determined that greenhouse gas emissions endanger the public health and welfare of current and future generations, a determination that the DC Circuit resoundingly upheld.

But we are not in an ordinary situation. Pruitt has a long history of doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry. In the recent Frontline documentary, ``War on the EPA,'' Bob Murray of Murray Energy, a strong Pruitt supporter, bragged about giving this administration a three-page action plan on environmental regulations and bragged that the first page was already done. That is the world we live in now, where the regulated industry brags that it controls its regulator, gives it direction, and that its work is already being done.

Courts that look at any rule proposed by Scott Pruitt must recognize that there is a near zero chance that he is operating in good faith. Our Nation's environmental regulator went in captured and has stayed captured by our Nation's biggest polluters. Scott Pruitt is not their regulator; he is their instrument. That is a conflict of interest.

I recently hosted my eighth annual Rhode Island Energy Environment and Oceans Day, bringing together members of our business community from the public sector, from government, and academia, to hear directly from experts about the latest environmental news and initiatives. I was very excited to be joined by excellent keynote speakers, including former Secretary of State John Kerry, who has done such magnificent work on oceans particularly but on climate change generally, leading us into the Paris climate agreement. Also, there was former U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern, who has labored in these vineyards so many years, and ocean advocate and Oceana board member Sam Waterston. They were all great, but one phrase stood out.

Sam Waterston called on us to tackle today's ocean and environmental problems with what he called a ``battle-ready kind of optimism''--a ``battle-ready kind of optimism.''

So let us go forward with a ``battle-ready kind of optimism'' to clean the polluter swamp at EPA, to clean our Earth's atmosphere and oceans of unbridled carbon emissions, and to clear the reputation of our beloved country of the obloquy it is rapidly earning at the hands of a corrupting industry.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, the Janus decision coming up in the U.S. Supreme Court, which Senator Brown has just spoken about, is one that merits the attention of people who are concerned about the country and the Court.

I wish to make two points in my remarks. The first has to do with the very difficult to explain--or at least very difficult to comfortably explain--pattern of 5-to-4 decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, in which the five consist entirely of Republican appointees.

The Supreme Court makes a lot of decisions, of course. But there is something that is particularly interesting about the 5-to-4 decisions, where the five Republican appointees line up and roll the other appointees. When we start looking at those decisions, there are some really significant patterns that emerge. The first pattern goes to issues in which the court is treading into the world of politics.

Bear in mind that when Sandra Day O'Connor left the Court, it lost its only member who had ever run for office. What Justice O'Connor left behind was the first Court in the history of the United States that had exactly zero experience with elections and politics. There has never been as ignorant and green a Court in the history of the United States when it comes to politics; yet there has rarely been a Court so flagrantly eager to jump into politics and make very consequential decisions.

When we look at the 5-to-4 decisions--which I think are probably the bulk of those--each one aligns with the political interests of the Republican Party--each one. It is not one or two or even three. It goes on and on and on.

The oldest one in the series is probably Vieth v. Jubelirer, which was the decision in which the five Republicans said: This whole gerrymandering thing is just too difficult for us. We are going to declare open season. There is going to be no judicial remedy. We can't figure out one, so we don't have one.

It is not just me who is saying that. The ABA section on election law said in its volume: Look, basically, it is game over for court review of gerrymandering. What immediately happened after that was the Republican Party went to work with that green-light signal and did the REDMAP project, which created massive, bulk gerrymandering through the battleground States. This was not an easy plan because, in some cases, they had to spend millions of dollars to win one or two State legislative seats, so they could then control the State legislature, so they could then change the districts consistent with the bulk gerrymandering scheme.

The result is what happened in States like Senator Brown's, where, when he was reelected, he was on the ballot with President Obama, who was also reelected, and the majority of the votes cast in his State for Members of Congress were cast for Democrats, but against that background, many more Republicans than Democrats actually went to Congress in that election.

A similar thing happened in Pennsylvania. My recollection is that on the same set of facts, Senator Casey, a Democrat, was reelected; President Obama, a Democrat, was reelected; a majority of Pennsylvania votes were cast for Democratic Members of Congress; the delegation was 13 Republicans and 5 Democrats. Somebody is messing around, and it was a 5-to-4 Republican Supreme Court that opened that can of worms and unleashed REDMAP on the political landscape.

They have a chance to review that now. Senator McCain has written a bipartisan brief asking them to wake up and smell the coffee about what has gone wrong here. We will see if they do or not, but, clearly, that was a decision that benefited the Republican Party's polls, and, clearly, it was 5 to 4.

Then you go to the Voting Rights Act cases. There were two of them. In the first one, Bartlett v. Strickland, the five Republican members teed up a new standard, which they mentioned, but they didn't really act on it. Then, when it came to the home run pitch, Shelby County v. Holder, they created this new theory about which very conservative judges, like Posner, said that, basically, it stands on thin air. It has no basis whatsoever in any real legal theory. They knocked out the part of the Voting Rights Act that requires States with a wretched history of abuse of minorities and Democratic voters at the polls to get preclearance from the Department of Justice or from a court before they can change their State laws to scare people or keep people away from the polls.

With that knocked out, guess what. All these legislatures across the South went straight to work. They passed law after law after law to deny people access to the polls, and over and over again, the courts that reviewed those and the appellate courts that reviewed the district court decisions found that the laws had been intentionally discriminatory, that the legislature had intended to keep people away from the polls, that they had intended to discriminate against Democrat and minority voters, and that they had chosen to do that deliberately.

Of course, you can go back after all that litigation and clean it up and try to get the laws stricken and all of that. But in the meantime, you have had election after election in which the effect at the polls was had.

They couldn't have been more wrong about the notion that if you lifted the preclearance requirement, everybody was going to be fine. Those were just the bad old days; it was a whole new America; racism didn't exist; efforts by one party to keep the other parties away from the polls weren't anything to worry about. Move along, move along; nothing to see here, folks. They were just plain dead wrong. They had absolutely no clue, and they have been proven dead wrong since. But, again, both of those cases were 5 to 4, all Republicans together.

Then, of course, the big whammy came when the big special interests that so often are the core backers of the Republican Party decided that they felt really constrained by having to live under campaign finance limits. They wanted to be able to spend unlimited money in elections. Well, that is fine. It reminds me a little bit of the story of the French philosopher who touted the majesty and equality of the French law, which forbid both rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges and begging for bread. Well, guess who actually sleeps under bridges and begs for bread. It is not rich and poor. And guess who can take advantage of a rule that you can spend unlimited money in politics. Only those who meet two conditions: One, they have unlimited money to spend, and, two, they have a good reason to spend it. In other words, really big special interests.

The Court's decision, presuming that this spending was going to be either independent or transparent, has been turned into a mockery by events since. They obviously did not know what they were talking about. Facts have borne out that they did not know what they were talking about. They were completely dead wrong.

Interestingly, since then, despite the presumption of their decision having been cut completely out from underneath it, the Court has shown no interest in a correction. They have shown no interest in correcting their error. They seem completely happy, the 5 to 4--the five Republican appointees--completely happy to have the landscape of American politics polluted with this money.

There again, it wasn't just one decision. It was a bunch of them. Citizens United was the big one; Tradition Partnership, Inc. v. Bullock another; McCutcheon v. FEC yet another; Davis v. FEC yet another; Arizona Free Enterprise Club's FreedomClub PAC v. Bennett yet another-- all 5 to 4, all the Republicans lining up, all throwing out precedent or laws that had stood for 100 years.

So Janus fits right into this pattern of 5-to-4 decisions. Indeed, it is actually a little bit worse because something weird happened early on when one of those 5 to 4--the Republican five Justices on the Supreme Court--signaled to the corporate supporters of

this ideology that he was interested in taking a whack at unions in a particular way.

There is a pet peeve of the union-busting rightwing and the corporate sector, which was a decision from 1977 called Abood v. Detroit Board of Education. That decision allows unions to collect some dues from nonmembers on the grounds that their work for their members has benefit to other members. So you break out their wages work, which helps everybody, from their political work, which you can disaggregate from, and it allows you to collect certain dues--not complete dues, but certain dues--from nonunion members. What Abood did was to help unions keep revenues from the service that they give to nonmembers who benefit from their work. Without that rule, employees would be encouraged to be free riders and just get the benefit of what the union is doing without making any contribution to support it whatsoever. Of course, if that were to happen, the balance of power between corporations and unions would shift further toward corporations.

The story is told quite well in the New York Times by a reporter named Adam Liptak, who is a Supreme Court reporter. I will read his story.

In making a minor adjustment to how public unions must

issue notifications about their political spending, Justice

Alito digressed to raise questions about the

constitutionality of requiring workers who are not members of

public unions to pay fees for the unions' work on their

behalf. . . . Justice Sonia Sotomayor saw what was going on.

``To cast serious doubt on longstanding precedence,'' she

wrote in a concurrence, ``is a step we historically take only

with the greatest caution and reticence. To do so, as the

majority does, on our own invitation and without adversarial

presentation is both unfair and unwise.''

Michael A. Carvin, a leading conservative lawyer, also saw

what was going on. He and the Center for Individual Rights, a

libertarian group, promptly filed the challenge Justice Alito

had sketched out.

I would say that he had invited.

Indeed, Mr. Carvin asked the lower courts to rule against

his clients, a Christian education group and 10 California

teachers, so they could high-tail it to the Supreme Court.

Let me interrupt my reading of the story for a second and make the point that this lawyer wanted to lose his case in the lower courts. It is rare for lawyers to go into a court wanting to lose. You have to have kind of a weird motive to take a case into court that you want to lose. The obvious motive here is that Mr. Carvin had heard the signal from Justice Alito that he was willing to rule his way if he would just bring the right case. So it didn't matter whether he won or lost. Losing is actually quicker. It gets you right up to the Supreme Court. He is not interested in litigating the matter truly on the merits; he is only interested in getting as quickly as possible to the Supreme Court. Why? Because he knew that 5 to 4, he would get the right decision.

When you are a lawyer, the most sickening feeling you can have is to go into court with the belief that the judges you are going to argue before are prejudged against you. The confidence that Carvin must have had to want to lose a case deliberately below so that he could hightail it at high speed up to a court that he knew was going to rule his way because they told him they would--that is not American justice in the way it should be delivered.

As it turned out, they took up the case. It was called Friedrichs. It was going to be 5 to 4, just as expected, and then Justice Scalia unexpectedly passed away. If you read about how the press took that, it was very clear that the fix had been in on this case.

``Corporate America had high hopes,'' the Journal said,

because ``the Supreme Court appeared poised to deliver long-

sought conservative victories.''

Since when should a court be poised to deliver long-sought conservative victories, not fair, dispassionate adjudication? But that is the reporting of the friendly Wall Street Journal. And those long- sought conservative victories were going to take the form of `` `body blow[s] that business had sought against consumer and worker plaintiffs.' The cases `had been carefully developed by activists to capitalize on the court's rightward tilt.' ''

Come on. This is not adjudication any longer; it is just the exercise of political power. And these 5-to-4 partisan decisions by the Supreme Court are degrading the reputation of the Supreme Court, they are degrading the integrity of the Supreme Court, and they are degrading the role of the judiciary in our vaunted scheme of constitutional government in the United States of America.

With that, I yield to my distinguished colleague from Oregon.

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

Mr. President, it is nice to see the distinguished Senator in the chair presiding. I am not sure, in my 183 ``Time to Wake Up'' speeches, I have yet had the pleasure of speaking while the Senator was presiding.

I am here to once again call for us to wake up to the corporate capture of Congress and this administration--the capture of governance by the fossil fuel industry that keeps us from honestly addressing climate change. There is a saying that ``personnel is policy.'' Well, the Trump personnel for positions at the Environmental Protection Agency reflect a policy to undo the public welfare mission of the Agency and align it with the special interests of the fossil fuel industry.

There is a word for that. It is called corruption, at least as the Founding Fathers knew the meaning of that term. It starts at the top. Trump named Scott Pruitt head of the EPA. Pruitt has a long record of dark money fundraising and long, cozy relationships with Big Energy industry political donors. In effect, he is a tentacle of the fossil fuel climate denial operation, wiggling and wriggling in the Administrator's chair, near his new $25,000 ``cone of silence'' secret communications booth that he built so no one would hear him checking in with his masters.

Results are as expected. The New York Times has reported: ``How Rollbacks at Scott Pruitt's EPA are a Boon to Oil and Gas.'' No surprise. In the 4 months that followed his appointment, Pruitt moved to undo, delay, or otherwise block more than 30 environmental rules benefiting his fossil fuel friends. This regulatory rollback, larger in scope than any over so short a time in the Agency's near-half century history, went straight into the pockets of the fossil fuel industry.

Longtime Pruitt benefactor Devon Energy is cashing in dividends on its investment in Scott Pruitt's political career, as Pruitt is working to eliminate rules on the leaking and flaring of methane, and has rescinded requirements for reporting methane emissions. Devon, as you may recall, is that company whose letter to the EPA Pruitt put on his own Oklahoma attorney general letterhead to mask Devon's hand and submit their work as his own official work as attorney general of his State.

So this hand-in-glove relationship between Devon as the hand and Pruitt as the glove goes back a long way. The EPA has career scientists and legal experts who bring decades of experience in environmental law and science to the EPA who are all being cut out as the Administrator takes drastic steps to undo environmental protections. Just this week, EPA scientists were yanked from a conference in Rhode Island where they were going to talk about climate change. The matter of climate change on Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island is pretty significant. This is the day's Providence Journal, our leading newspaper in Rhode Island. Headline: ``Will climate change negate Bay cleanup?'' It has a big map of Narragansett Bay with all the facilities at risk of being flooded and overwhelmed. It is front page news.

It is a matter of extreme importance in Rhode Island, and EPA yanked out its scientists. They weren't allowed to come down and talk at an event where they were going to talk about climate change. It is not just yanking the scientists. Here is a New York Times article by Lisa Friedman from October 20. Headline: ``EPA scrubs a climate website of `climate change.' '' An EPA website has been scrubbed of scores of links. ``About 15 mentions of the words climate change have been removed from the main page alone. . . .''

It is not just at EPA. Here is today's exclusive headline: ``The Interior Department scrubs climate change from its strategic plan.'' I mean, they act as if this is the Soviet Union and the government is allowed to tell scientists what they can say and not say and put phony propaganda onto official websites and keep scientists from going to meetings because they might actually tell the truth about climate change.

I am the son and grandson of Foreign Service officers. I grew up serving in countries that did that, where the government could tell the scientist: No, you don't say that. No, you don't go there. No, this is the party line. I never thought that would happen in the United States of America--and here we are.

To aid Pruitt in his fossil fuel industry crusade, our President has nominated a parade of fossil fuel lackeys, lobbyists, and operatives whose main qualification seems to be allegiance to their corporate clients and benefactors. It is not just the fossil fuel industry that gets their hacks planted in government offices.

Do you remember in the ``Cat in the Hat,'' where they had Thing One and Thing Two running around? Let's look at Hack One and Hack Two, who just cleared committee today in the Pruitt ``EPA for Sale'' roster.

Hack One is a toxicologist who consults for major chemical corporations and has spent the better part of his professional life fighting regulation of potentially toxic compounds in consumer goods. His name is Michael Dourson. President Trump nominated him to run the EPA Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. A lobbying group for sellers of pesticides, fungicides, and rodenticides called Dourson ``a perfect fit'' for the job--the perfect industry hack for that job, more like.

Hack Two is William Wehrum, nominated to run the EPA Office of Air and Radiation. Wehrum is a lobbyist who has represented a host of major industrial and energy corporations, and the Rubber Manufacturers Association, the American Forest and Paper Association, and the American Petroleum Institute. President George W. Bush actually nominated this guy to the same post in 2006, but the White House withdrew his nomination because it was so controversial.

Well, that was 2006. That was before Citizens United. That was before that decision amped up industry power to the point where it can now ram through conflicted and objectionable candidates with--as happened this morning--unanimous Republican support. Not one Republican Senator on the committee would voice an objection.

When Senators asked questions for the record in the Environment and

Public Works Committee nomination hearing on Wehrum and Dourson, these captured nominees played dumb about the central issues and programs they will oversee if confirmed.

For instance, I asked Dourson if he agreed that ``the tobacco industry manipulated and obfuscated scientific research into the dangers of smoking for decades.'' Dourson, who conducted scientific studies designed, reviewed, and paid for by the tobacco industry and whose name is all over, in hundreds of places, the discovery records of the tobacco industry's denial operation, replied: ``I do not have firsthand knowledge to comment.''

I ``do not have firsthand knowledge to comment''? This is the President's selection to run the office that protects Americans from dangerous chemicals who doesn't know the tobacco industry's history of falsifying science? Please. He worked for them. He was part of it.

Remember that the tobacco industry was taken to court by the U.S. Department of Justice--back when the Department of Justice would take an industry to court--and the Department of Justice won a judgment declaring that tobacco had engaged in a fraud conspiracy to deny tobacco's harms. Dourson sees no evil. He knows nothing.

I asked him whether he believes that hydrofluorocarbons are greenhouse gases and about the global warming potential of methane. His response: I am not sufficiently familiar with the definition of greenhouse gases and do not have the expertise to answer these questions.

He is not familiar with the definition of greenhouse gases? This is basic high school science. Every one of us has a home State university that teaches this stuff. This has been science for more than 100 years.

On to Hack Two, Bill Wehrum. When I asked Wehrum about carbon dioxide's role in the observable effects of climate change, he replied: ``The degree to which manmade greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to climate change has not been conclusively determined.'' This claim just doesn't match the scientific record.

The EPA--the very Agency to which Mr. Wehrum is nominated, along with NOAA--states that ``carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change.'' This consensus is held by published climate scientists, by scientific agencies and societies, by all of our National Laboratories, and by universities in America and around the globe.

As I said, every one of us in this room--I haven't found an exception yet, and I have looked, but I expect every Senator has a home State university that doesn't just know this to be true, but it teaches it in its curriculum. But Hack Two sees no evil. He knows nothing.

Wehrum's disregard for well-established science provides a grim preview of what we can expect from him if confirmed. His predictable dodging falls in lockstep with Administrator Pruitt, who has stated he does ``not agree that [carbon dioxide] is a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.'' That puts him in a very small circle of people, every one of whom I think is connected by money to the fossil fuel industry.

I asked Mr. Wehrum what he believes is a healthy standard for ozone. Now, bear in mind that one of the goals of the Clean Air Act is to set national ambient air quality standards for ozone, that the office to which he is nominated oversees this ozone standard, and that the EPA has had ozone standards in place since 1971, more than 45 years.

In response to my question, Wehrum answered: ``I am not familiar with the current science on the health effects of ozone, so I cannot comment on your question as to the appropriate level of the standard.'' Really?

I asked Wehrum whether he agreed with EPA's 2009 finding that the current and projected concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations. I asked if he would commit not to narrow or weaken the EPA's endangerment finding. Wehrum wrote back that he had not read the endangerment finding or the record prepared in support of the finding; therefore, he said: ``I currently do not have a view.'' I currently do not have a view? That is funny.

I bet he had a view when he was being paid by the Rubber Manufacturers Association, the American Forest & Paper Association, and the American Petroleum Institute. I guess it was the miraculous, evaporating view.

Maybe these ``see no evil'' nominees, Dourson and Wehrum, don't know the basics of the problems they would confront. Maybe they just don't know, but let's not be fooled here. Polluters have paid these nominees well for their services over the years. They were expert enough to be hired by industry groups as lobbyists and consultants. We know where their allegiances lie. We know who has been paying them. We know whom they will serve.

A preview of coming attractions, coming up before the EPW soon is Andrew Wheeler, Trump's nominee for the EPA's second in command. Wheeler was a top lobbyist for the coal mining behemoth, Murray Energy. Not only did this company support Trump's campaign and provide $300,000 to help pay for his inauguration, Murray Energy has also donated to Pruitt-affiliated political action committees to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I can't wait to hear his answers on the role of coal in climate change, childhood asthma, and mercury poisoning.

The sad part of all of this is, the polluting interests that own these nominees also throw their weight around in Congress. So good luck getting an honest look at this mess through congressional oversight.

Over and over, appalling nominees get through confirmation with no Republican dissent, more ``see no evil.'' It is just wrong.

For now, the American public will pay the price of dismantling these regulatory safeguards. They will pay the price in poisonings and carcinogenic exposures, in rising seas and raging wildfires, in childhood asthma and northbound tropical diseases. Mark my words, one day there will be a reckoning for all of this.

When captured EPA officials put payback to their donors first and clean air and public health a way distant second, it stinks. It is crooked by any reasonable definition of the term. It is corrupt in exactly the way the Founding Fathers understood corruption.

The fossil fuel industry will one day be held to account for this binge of corruption and manipulation. ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, Arch Coal, Murray Coal, Peabody Coal, you own this just as the Republican Party does.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to say a few words about the battle between the jury system and a system in which regular Americans are forced into arbitration, which has a terrible record.

I can remember years ago, when I was attorney general, the attorneys general shut down one of the arbitration systems because it was so corrupted and was throwing decisions to big corporate interests, and you cannot really understand that unless you understand the importance of the role of the jury in our country.

For centuries, the jury has served as a last sanctuary within our constitutional structure for people who seek justice and fair treatment under the law. It was designed for a specific purpose. When Big Interests control our executive officials, as the Founding Fathers knew they could, when lobbyists have the legislatures tied in knots, as our Founding Fathers knew they could, and when media outlets steer public opinion against individuals, as our Founding Fathers saw that they could, the hard, square corners of the jury box stand firm against that tide of influence and money.

There is a lot of history here. It was the earliest American settlers who brought the jury to our country as precious cargo from England.

The Virginia Colony established the jury in 1624, roughly a year before the Dutch even settled the island of Manhattan. Early Americans created juries in 1628 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1677 in the Colony of West New Jersey, and in 1682 in Pennsylvania. Indeed, in our Declaration of Independence, our colonists put forward a list of grievances and admonished King George III for--and I quote them in the Declaration of Independence--``depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.''

When the original Constitution was silent on the jury, Americans sounded the alarm, and the Seventh Amendment was sent to the States in the Bill of Rights.

Alexander Hamilton, a famous Revolutionary-era Founder, stated in Federalist No. 83: ``The friends and adversaries in the plan of the convention, if they agree in nothing else, concur at least in the value they set upon the trial by jury; or, if there is any difference between them, it consists in this: the former regard it as a valuable safeguard to liberty; the latter represent it as the very palladium of free government.''

Going on to the mid-19th century, when Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his famous ``Democracy in America,'' he observed that the jury should be understood in America as a ``political institution'' and ``one form of the sovereignty of the people.'' What did he mean? How does the jury protect the sovereignty of the people? Well, in two ways, as Sir William Blackstone explained.

Sir William Blackstone was probably the most cited source in those early days of the founding of our Republic and in the early days of the development of our laws. Sir William Blackstone explained that trial by jury ``preserves in the hands of the people that share which they ought to have in the administration of public justice, and prevents the encroachments of the more powerful and wealthy citizens.''

Those are two separate thoughts. First, the civil jury devolves a share of government power--power which they ought to have--directly to the people. But second and uniquely, in a Constitution otherwise devoted to protecting the individual against the power of the State, the civil jury is designed to protect the individual against other individuals--more specifically, against other more powerful and wealthy individuals.

Even former Chief Justice William Rehnquist observed about this era that ``the Founders of our Nation considered the right of trial by jury in civil cases an important bulwark against tyranny and corruption, a safeguard too precious to be left to the whim of the sovereign.''

That is at heart what this fight is about. Remember Blackstone's words: The jury ``prevents the encroachments of the more powerful and wealthy'' citizens. That means the jury is intended to be a thorn in the side of the powerful and wealthy. It is intended to make the powerful and wealthy stand equal--annoyingly equal to them--before the law with everyone else. The jury is intended to be the little branch of government that the wealthy and powerful can't get to, can't fix, can't control. That is why jury panels are new every time. If you had a permanent panel of the same jurors over and over, the powerful and wealthy would tend to influence the institution. The jury stands against all that tide of influence. That is what it is there for. That is how it was designed. Who is more powerful and wealthy today than mighty corporations and big special interests? And guess what--big corporations and special interests hate the jury. The small institution has big enemies.

It would astound the Founding Fathers to see how far we have fallen from the popular affection and loyalty for the jury trial in 1776. Juries are indeed about dispute resolution and about making sure that everybody can get a fair shake and that powerful and wealthy interests can't put the fix in, but more than that, the civil jury helps check power.

The American system of government is built on the premise that divided government and separated powers--checks and balances--will best protect individual liberty. The civil jury distributes authority of the State directly to citizens, giving them direct power to resolve disputes--sometimes very important disputes--and it gives them this power in a way that makes it very hard for special interests to control.

Well, if we look around today, the influence of wealth and power suffuses the legislative and executive branches. Corporate lobbying and corporate and billionaire election spending are at unprecedented levels. In our political debate, dark money dollars drown out the voices of average citizens in what has been called ``a tsunami of slime,'' and all that money is not spent for nothing.

Powerful interests love a game that is rigged in their favor--always have, always will. It is a tale as old as time. Well, rigging the game doesn't go over well in the jury box. Special interests may seek special influence with legislators and regulators all of the time. It is their constant activity, licensed and regulated by lobbying and campaign finance laws. Their every waking moment is devoted to tampering with the legislative and executive branches, but tampering with a jury is a crime, and it is a crime for a reason.

In a world where so many feel powerless, juries give regular citizens real authority. In a world of fractious partisanship, juries make citizens work together and decide together. And in a world in which injustices pile up against barricades of well-kept indifference, a jury can blow the status quo to smithereens. This is the vital constitutional role of the civil jury. This is what mandatory arbitration is designed to attack--to remove the access of regular citizens to this institution of our government which was so important to our Founding Fathers because it is an institution that the wealthy and powerful cannot control. They can control mandatory arbitration. Over and over again, it has been shown to be subject to corporate favoritism and control. There is a reason that the big and powerful special interests want to get rid of access to a jury and want to force people into mandatory arbitration. They are not doing it for the sake of having their adversaries and opponents get better access to justice; they are doing it to shut off access to the civil jury. They want everybody forced into rigged games.

We ought to be fighting to preserve and enhance the civil jury as an element of the uniquely American system of self-government. Our forefathers fought and bled and died to create and preserve this system of government in which the civil jury has a vital role. From Alexander Hamilton to Alexis de Tocqueville, to William Blackstone, to William Rehnquist--you can go on and on in our history with people who have pointed out the vital role of our jury. Squelching it is the task of the wealthy and powerful, mighty corporations that seek to squelch it and force everybody into corporate-friendly, mandatory arbitration.

We should think on this question in the long view--not who gets the immediate benefit of not having to face trained lawyers, not having to face people in an open forum, not having to be before a free and independent jury. We should think of the message of our Founding Fathers, who put the need for a civil jury right into the Declaration of Independence, who demanded it as part of our Bill of Rights, and who saw it as an essential element of our liberty.

With that, I yield.

I see my distinguished colleague from Maryland.

Mr. President, I was just going to ask whether my colleague would yield for a question.

My distinguished colleague from Connecticut is an extraordinarily experienced and able lawyer. He was U.S. attorney in Connecticut; for a long time, he was his State's attorney general, and I think he has argued more before the U.S. Supreme Court than perhaps anybody in modern history now in the Senate. One of his passions and one of the things he focused on in law enforcement was consumer protection, bringing to justice big entities that had done wrong to consumers.

My question for him, if I may ask one, would be, are there circumstances--do you have experience of circumstances in which very big and powerful entities, corporations, or industries engaged in misconduct, even fraud, in which the individual harm to each of the consumers was not very big--a bogus $30 fee, a bogus $100 surcharge, something like that--but multiplied by thousands or tens of thousands of customers, it became an enormously lucrative fraud for the institution involved? Is that a situation that happens in real life, in your view, I ask my distinguished colleague?

If I may ask if the Senator will yield for another question.

As I understand from the Senator's response to my last question, if you force the victims of low-dollar but multi-victim fraud to have arbitration as their only remedy, you are way less likely to get consumers asserting their rights, and ultimately you may have low-dollar, multi-consumer frauds that remain very remunerative for the crooked outfit conducting the massive fraud.

I get the Senator's point that the incentives are such that it is very hard for an individual consumer to be willing to pursue that claim. If there is no way to aggregate themselves together into a class action, then there is really no way to pursue that claim.

But my second question goes to a further point, which is that the power of a court in a matter like that includes the power not just to award damages but to provide other relief: to direct the company to quit the fraud, to give orders to people to clean up their act, to promise never to do it again, and so forth. I am not aware of any arbitration panel that has ever been given that authority or has ever used their limited power as arbiters or arbitrators to try to influence the behavior of the corporation.

Is there not also a significant difference between an individual consumer being forced to go to an often stacked arbitration panel to pursue a claim that is so small, it is not worth their money, and the simple power to provide the real remedy the public seeks, as the Senator so wisely said, to protect the next consumer? It is not just about the people who got their pockets picked, who paid their unreasonable fee, who got defrauded; it is about stopping it so the future consumer is protected. I am not familiar with arbitration panels having that power.

And not infrequent in class action cases?

In conclusion, is it fair to say that the measure we are about to vote on will indisputably have the effect of shifting enormous power

from consumers to corporations that engage in high-volume but low- dollar fraud?

Mr. President, I am pleased to urge all of my colleagues to give a strong bipartisan voice vote in support of the amendment by the Senator from Georgia. The current budget process does not produce a meaningful budget, does not control the debt or the deficit, and does not contribute to bipartisanship or compromise. What it does produce is a meaningless, partisan vote-arama. If you believe we can do better than a vote-arama, if you believe we can have an improved and meaningful budget process, voice vote aye.

Mr. President, let me echo the remarks of the senior Senator from Ohio.

Like Ohio, Rhode Island has a very significant opioid problem, and we came together in this Chamber to support the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. I had the privilege of being the principal Democratic author of that piece of legislation, and Senator Portman of Ohio was the principal Republican author of that legislation. We worked for years to set it up--to hold the hearings necessary, to get the information together, to make it work. When we did, it passed this body with a massive bipartisan expression of support.

It makes no sense to nominate somebody to this position who does not understand what we understand, which is

that the drug epidemic is, at its heart, a public health emergency and an illness. A reversion to law enforcement harshness in dealing with this problem will simply not be effective.

Mr. President, today I wish to honor the service of my friend Anne Maxwell Livingston. Mrs. Livingston has served since 2011 as chairwoman of the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council, CRMC, which protects Rhode Island's coastal resources through research, regulation, and restoration.

During her 6-year tenure, CRMC has been a nationally recognized leader in ocean and coastal management. One of the shining jewels of CRMC's work has been its innovative Special Area Management Plans, or SAMPs. These plans are ecosystem-based management strategies developed in collaboration with government agencies, municipalities, and other stakeholders to best manage coastal systems. During Mrs. Livingston's tenure, the council saw its

groundbreaking ocean SAMP, the first formally adopted ocean spatial plan in the country, pay real-life dividends. In developing this plan, CRMC engaged a diverse group of stakeholders and laid the groundwork for cooperation among a multitude of regulatory agencies. This effort and CRMC's continued engagement in the process paved the way for the successful development of the Nation's first offshore wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island.

The CRMC has also helped Rhode Island towns and residents understand the increasing effects of sea level rise and storm surge. Using the latest climate change predictions and state-of-the-art modeling, CRMC, in cooperation with the University of Rhode Island and others, developed an online tool, STORMTOOLS, that gives anyone with an internet connection free access to information that can be used to help decide everything from what neighborhood to buy a home in to where to site a new stormwater treatment plant. CRMC is now developing a coastal environmental risk index that can show Rhode Island homeowners individualized flood risks in 3-D.

In addition to her service on the CRMC, Mrs. Livingston has served Rhode Islanders as a board member of the Jamestown Tax Assessment Board of Review and on the board of the Girl Scouts of Rhode Island and the Jamestown Education Foundation. She also continues to serve as treasurer for the Opera House Theater & Performing Arts Center in Newport and on the advisory boards of the Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island and the Providence Children's Museum. Mrs. Livingston is a passionate and committed leader, and I am grateful for her many years of service to our State's CRMC.

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

Mr. President, this week on an island nation one- tenth the size of Rhode Island, more than 60 countries will gather at the fourth international Our Ocean Conference. Catalyzed by then- Secretary of State John Kerry, the United States hosted the premier international ocean conference in 2014 and 2016. Secretary Kerry's legacy continues with the Malta Conference now going on, hosted by the European Union, and that will be followed by scheduled conferences in Indonesia in 2018 and Norway in 2019.

Nations come to these conferences to share ocean conservation achievements and to pledge future efforts in sustainable fisheries, marine debris prevention, marine protected areas, maritime security, and climate change. At last count, conference organizers in Malta are anticipating more than 150 separate pledges from governments, NGOs, and the private sector. Since Secretary Kerry started it, the Our Ocean Conference has produced hundreds of commitments, totaling nearly $10 billion and protecting nearly 4 million square miles of ocean. Though the oceans cover more than 70 percent of our Earth, they are often taken for granted. Oceans drive our weather, cool our planet, provide food and income for billions of people, and absorb much of our carbon dioxide emissions.

So for my 181st ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, I will return to the topic of what we are doing to our oceans. The oceans provide a hard-to- deny reminder of what is happening, thanks to greenhouse gas emissions, climate change denial, and America's legislative paralysis.

Physics and chemistry don't care about fossil fuel industry propaganda. It doesn't affect them at all. Science measures how our carbon pollution continues to drive unprecedented change in the Earth's oceans.

The oceans have absorbed about one-third of all the excess carbon dioxide emitted by human activity since the Industrial Revolution; that is, around 600 gigatons of carbon dioxide absorbed by the ocean. The effect of absorbing all that carbon dioxide is chemical, making ocean water more acidic at the fastest rate in 50 million years. Humankind has been on the planet only about 800,000 or so years, so 50 million goes way back.

This acidification is potentially calamitous for the ocean ecosystem. Off Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, 50 percent of pteropods were measured to have ``severe shell damage,'' mostly from acidified sea water. If that species collapses, the bottom falls out of the oceanic food chain, with a cascading effect up to us at the top of the food chain.

Ocean acidification is causing real economic concerns on coasts all around the country. It is affecting Florida's reefs, for instance. Rhode Island's clammers, lobstermen, and aquaculture growers watch with real alarm the damage acidified seas are doing on America's northwest coast. Oyster hatcheries there experienced significant losses when new hatches were unable to grow their shells in the acidified seawater. Those hatcheries now need to buffer ocean water to keep the pH at a survivable level for baby clams, oysters, and other shellfish. Well, you can do that for your aquaculture lab, but you can't do that for the ocean. So it bodes well for the future of these shellfish.

In addition to the CO2 the oceans have absorbed--30 percent of that--they have also absorbed heat. They have absorbed over 90 percent of the excess heat that climate change has trapped in our atmosphere, thanks to the operation of the greenhouse gases we have emitted. The oceans, in doing that, have conferred on us an extraordinary blessing because without their absorbing more than 90 percent of that heat--forget the 2 degrees Centigrade cap that we worry about--we would likely be already more than 36 degrees Centigrade hotter. That isn't just life changing; that is species-changing variation in our planet. When oceans absorb all of this heat, which is equivalent to more than a Hiroshima-style nuclear bomb per second going off, the principle of thermal expansion kicks in. As oceans warm, they expand, and as the world warms from the remaining heat, ice melts. So between the two, sea levels rise.

NOAA, in January, updated global sea level rise estimates based on the latest peer-reviewed scientific literature. Ice sheets and glaciers are melting faster than previously expected, raising global sea level rise estimates in this century--under the ``we do nothing on climate change'' scenario--by around 20 more inches on average.

Apply these findings to the U.S. coast, and the news gets particularly harsh for the northeast Atlantic coast, including my home State of Rhode Island. Rhode Island's Coastal Resources Management Council is now telling us that we need to plan for as much as 9 to 12 vertical feet of sea level rise by the end of this century. The refusal of the Republican majority to do anything serious about climate change is going to have a big effect on the very map of my State.

This is the present Upper Narragansett Bay, including Providence up here, our capital city, down to Greenwich Bay down here, and Warwick on the west side. Over here, we have Bristol and Warren on the east side of the image, and it still looks actually very much like it did when early explorers first came to Rhode Island in the 1600s. And it looked very much like that for centuries before, when the Narragansetts and the Wampanoags lived here. But as climate change raises sea levels, all of this is changing rapidly.

The Coastal Resources Management Council has developed something called STORMTOOLS, which is an online simulation to model sea level rise and storm surge, so we can see how rising sea levels will affect my State.

This is the same image as that one. I will put one over the other so that you can see the match. Everything that is blue is land and is now submerged on these 9-to-12-foot sea level estimates. It all has changed quite dramatically. Warwick Neck breaks off and becomes Warwick Neck Island. Much of the town of Barrington here becomes a new salt lake. This is a bedroom community with a lot of wealthy people living in very nice homes, and it all goes under water. Down here, Bristol and Warren become an island, and off of them, Poppasquash Point becomes two islands. This continues all around the State. The map changes, and we become a Rhode Island archipelago. Look at Newport, Little Compton, Tiverton, Providence, Jamestown, Point Judith. Flooded areas in my State represent billions of dollars in losses to Rhode Islanders.

Of course, around the visibly flooded areas are the less visible areas where legal setbacks, flood zones, velocity zones, and other building restrictions prevent construction. In those areas that are still above water, it is still unbuildable because the property has become uninsurable, unmortgageable, or unsellable. That is a pretty hard hit to expect my State to take without objection.

It is not just Rhode Island; all sorts of changes are happening along America's coasts. Up in the Gulf of Maine, ocean waters are warming faster than nearly any other place on earth. A study published in Elementa last month found that summer temperatures in the Gulf of Maine last two months longer than in the 1980s. Longer, warmer summers benefit some species, but others get hurt, including what little is left of the iconic cod.

Native villages in Alaska and island communities in Louisiana and Maryland are facing tough decisions about abandoning traditional shorelands and islands and relocating. Around the world, entire nations are planning for relocation as the ocean steadily rises over their island homes.

Layered on top of this sea level rise is the worsening risk of storm surge

and flooding from hurricanes and other storms. The Presiding Officer does not need to be told about this. His State has experienced it firsthand.

This satellite image is a snapshot of this particularly destructive 2017 hurricane system. From the left to right, we see Hurricane Katia, Hurricane Irma--at category 5 strength--and Hurricane Jose down here.

As the recovery efforts continue for our citizens in Puerto Rico, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, and we look at hundreds of billions of dollars in disaster relief emergency spending, here in Washington we might want to think about helping coastal States around the country get serious about predicting what is coming, shoring up our coastlines, fortifying coastal infrastructure, and preparing for what climate change has in store for us.

Climate change is not the only way we are damaging the oceans. Each year, around 8 million metric tons of plastic waste enters our oceans from land. By 2050, we could see as much plastic in the oceans as fish in the oceans by weight, since plastics do not fully degrade in the ocean. They just break down into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic, and those travel the globe on ocean currents.

Plastic is now everywhere; on our beaches, in our oceans, ingested and entangling our wildlife. It is even in tapwater, salt, and other foods that we humans consume. Plastic waste has been found on remote islands, in deep-sea sediments, and in sea ice.

In an area previously inaccessible to researchers due to that sea ice, the Arctic is apparently releasing frozen plastic back into the oceans. That is how badly we are polluting our oceans. An international research expedition to the North Pole even found chunks of plastic littering that remote region.

Thankfully, there is interest in solving our ocean trash problem in the Senate. At last year's Our Ocean Conference, over $1 billion was pledged to combat marine debris. Additional commitments are expected this year. Our Senate Oceans Caucus work parallels work around the world. The Senate Oceans Caucus is a bipartisan group. There are 36 of us. We have made marine debris one of our focus areas.

In August, by unanimous consent, we passed the Save Our Seas Act, a bipartisan bill to reauthorize NOAA's marine debris program and expand its ability to deal with severe marine debris events, where tsunamis or huge storms sweep enormous amounts of plastic garbage into the oceans and then ultimately onto our shores.

The bill asks the President to increase U.S. international efforts to reduce marine debris, including improving international waste management practices and improving research on plastics that will actually biodegrade in the ocean. It also directs the U.S. Trade Representative to start considering marine plastic debris--much of which comes from just a few countries--when dealing with them in future trade agreements.

We reinforced this piece of the bill recently in the National Defense Authorization Act, which we passed just last month.

The Save Our Seas Act garnered support from environmental NGOs, from corporations, from chemical trade groups, but there is still much more work to do. We have abused and ignored our oceans for far too long. The oceans are warning us in every way they know how, and we can't afford to ignore those warnings any longer. We must start taking serious action to respond to what we are doing to our oceans. I promise you, anybody who knows anything about oceans hears those alarm bells ringing. It is time for us to wake up.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, may I bid a public farewell to Emily Enderle, who is here with me and who has served as the lead on my very active and busy environment unit for quite some time now. She is going on to another role in Washington and will continue to serve our cause. She has done an amazing job, and I want to be sure to say that on what will be her last appearance on the floor with me for one of our ``Time to Wake Up'' speeches.

Climate Change

Mr. President, I have spoken before, as you know, about the fossil fuel industry's persistent effort to undermine public understanding of climate change and to confuse people about the actual effects of carbon pollution on our atmosphere and oceans.

I have mentioned Drexel University Professor Robert Brulles' follow- the-money analysis, which reveals the complex network of organizations and funding--what we have called the web of denial--that is designed to obscure the fossil fuel industry's fingerprints and to perpetuate the fossil fuel industry's climate denial.

Dr. Brulle calls this ``a deliberate and organized effort to misdirect the public discussion and distort the public's understanding of climate.'' That is what this industry is up to.

One front group for that industry is called the Heartland Institute. It is a nice name, but they are not very nice people. For decades, the Heartland Institute has played a prominent role disseminating alternative facts and fake science at the behest of its industry funders. They have a long history of doing the bidding of industry funders. In the 1990s, it was teamed up with Philip Morris to challenge the facts about the health risks of tobacco. Using the same tactics-- along with funding from the Koch Family Foundations, ExxonMobil, and other fossil fuel interests--it undermines public confidence in the established scientific consensus about climate change. Heartland is quite shameless in its methods, once sponsoring a billboard comparing those who accept the science of global warming to the Unabomber.

For my 180th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, I would like to explore the Heartland Institute's latest gambit, which is to airdrop climate denial propaganda directly into children's classrooms.

This spring, Heartland delivered packages to hundreds of thousands of K-12 and college-level science teachers across the country. These materials were designed to have a veneer of credibility. Each one was stamped with the headline ``Study: Science Teachers Giving Unbalanced Education on Climate Change.'' This intriguing story was attributed to something called Environment & Climate News.

Inside the package, the teachers found a report titled ``Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming.'' It was issued by something called the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. As a bonus, each teacher also received a DVD copy of the ``History of Climate Change in Greenland,'' produced by Idea Channel.

A cover letter from Heartland's Center for Transforming Education-- transforming education into propaganda, I assume is how that sentence gets finished--asks teachers to ``consider the possibility'' the science of climate change isn't settled.

That is the package they got. Let's look behind that veneer. When you do, the smell gets pretty rotten. It turns out that the Environment & Climate News is not actually news. It is not a news outlet. It is the monthly newsletter of, guess who, the Heartland Institute. They are citing themselves, masquerading their newsletter as a news outlet. The foolishness goes on.

Their featured article, ``Study: Science Teachers Giving Unbalanced Education on Climate Change'' was written by a person named Bonner Cohen, who is a featured expert--guess where--with the Heartland Institute, who previously held senior positions in--believe it or not-- Philip Morris front groups.

Their Nongovernmental International Panel On Climate Change sounds like a well-known actual authority: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The actual Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a United Nations-sanctioned, Nobel Prize-winning scientific body that reports the findings of thousands of climate scientists from hundreds of countries. The Heartland group--this so-called Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change--is a misleading decoy designed to mimic the real entity.

The three experts who wrote the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change report Heartland pushed out do not have degrees in climate change modeling, do not having degrees in climate science. All are paid by Heartland. All their claims have been repeatedly debunked by real science.

There is one faint hint of accuracy in this propaganda publication Heartland put out. There actually is a PBS series called Idea Channel. However, the Idea Channel DVD in the Heartland packet has nothing to do with that series. It was actually produced by something called the Free To Choose Network, whose funding, like Heartland's, is linked to the fossil fuel industry. It is another masquerade designed to mislead.

One of the tricks of Heartland's little scheme was to dupe legitimate scientists into participating. One of the experts interviewed, Rie Oldenberg, the curator at Greenland's Narsaq Museum, was told she was participating in a video on Norse history for the Discovery Channel. When she found out what she had been duped into, she said: ``I am somewhat horrified.''

Other participants are frequent fliers in the climate denial circus, like Willie Soon, who received over a million dollars in funding since 2001 from the Koch brothers, the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, and other fossil fuel interests. The year the video was released, Willie Soon received nearly $20,000 from Free To Choose.

The Heartland cover letter asked teachers to ``consider the possibility'' the science of climate change isn't settled. Even that is not new. This echoes the infamous Big Tobacco declaration, ``Doubt is our product.'' The heart of the fossil fuel industry's scheme is to undermine legitimate science with false doubts. Because of the financial stakes behind industry science denial and because of the communications advantages propaganda has over real science--you don't need to waste a lot of time in peer review, for instance, you go straight to the networks--this scheme is a real problem for institutions like our schools that cherish and support real science.

All this masquerade and subterfuge by Heartland Institute looked a lot like fraud. Senators Schatz, Warren, Markey, and I wrote to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to ask whether DeVos and her staff at the Department of Education helped or coordinated with the Heartland Institute on this scheme to pollute our classrooms with phony science.

That simple request drew quite the response from our friends at the Heartland Institute. ``Your letter is a monumental misuse of your office and a betrayal of the trust of your constituents,'' wrote Heartland CEO Joseph Bast. He called our letter ``defamatory'' and ``despicable.'' ``Shame, shame, shame,'' he proclaimed in bold font-- this, unironically, from that same classy group that put up the billboard comparing anyone who accepts climate science to the Unabomber, just to give you an idea of their level of shame.

Even that little outburst is considerably nicer than in 2015 when Bast called some of us ``fascists'' and ``ethically challenged . . . mental midgets.''

Why is the Heartland Institute so very touchy? We obviously hit a nerve. The lesson is, poke an imposter and the imposter gets very agitated. Fortunately, teachers are smart people who follow real science. Imposters like Heartland that pretend their stuff is coming through an Idea Channel that it isn't, that mimic the name of real organizations to try to fool people, that pretend their newsletter is real news and package the whole thing up as if it is intended to be helpful to teachers face an uphill battle against informed educators.

One example, Nebraska recently approved new State standards requiring climate change to be taught in schools. According to the Omaha World- Herald, Nebraska's new standards ``challenge kids to think and act like scientists,'' which is exactly what our science classrooms ought to do.

One Omaha resident encouraged the school board to ``do the ethical thing and tell the next generation what's going on with climate.'' A science professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln said the standards represented ``good solid science, good solid science education.''

This is what we need in science education--real-life scientists from real institutions of higher learning engaging and helping our children learn. What we don't need are fossil fuel front groups pumping out more phony science to pollute public education, just like they pollute our oceans and atmosphere.

I have been pretty heartened to hear about this from teachers working in classrooms in my home State of Rhode Island. Holly Emery teaches science to seventh and eighth graders at Exeter-West Greenwich Junior High School. Her students focus on solutions to climate change-- something we could use a bit more of around here. They examined Germany's plan to significantly reduce its carbon emissions. Students were so motivated by what they heard, they requested to share their projects with other grades in the school. One of Miss Emery's students said: ``This is important and the other kids need to know.''

Students in Jane Ramos's eighth grade science class at Gallagher Middle School in Smithfield learn about climates around the world. They read, research, and make slides about the human contributions to climate change, including the carbon cycle, burning fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect, deforestation, livestock practices, and the production of methane. They discuss the effects of warmer oceans, expansion of water, melting ice, and rising seawater levels. These are important issues for Rhode Island, the Ocean State.

Science students from Brenda Dillmann's class at South Kingstown High School planted grass on the Narrow River salt marsh as part of a major unit on climate. During the lessons, the students learned about the role that salt marshes play as carbon sinks--absorbent carbon from the atmosphere. They went out and got dirty and planted by hand some 35,000 seedlings of 3 different types of salt marsh grasses.

Since 2007, more than 500 students have become climate experts in Kara Ratigan and Renee Hadfield's fourth grade class at James H. Eldredge Elementary School in East Greenwich. Ratigan and Hadfield have developed a curriculum that integrates climate change across all subject areas. For the kids, the year begins with a visit to a local assisted living facility, where students pair up with a senior buddy. The students interview their senior buddies, asking how the climate has

changed over time and looking for lessons that can be applied today.

In their math class, students learn how to read charts and graphs and how to frame a convincing argument through data. In social studies, the students learn about the regions of the United States, about their differing climates, and about how each is affected by climate change. In science, the students learn about erosion and weather patterns and the effects of human activity on rock, soils, and sediments. Students make observations about climate change all around them and delve into society's responses to the harms of climate change.

This past spring, the Norman Bird Sanctuary, in Middletown, hosted seventh graders for a beach ecology lesson at nearby Third Beach. The director of education, Rachel Holbert, and her staff led a discussion with the students about the greenhouse effect associated with burning fossil fuels. They explained how the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere puts stress on the oceans, undermining the oceans' ability to stabilize the global climate and, of course, leading, as we have seen, to a higher frequency and strength of extreme weather events, such as powerful hurricanes. The kids' lesson ended with a focus on solutions. If the oceans are the heart and lungs of the climate, what can prevent future damage?

Teachers like them play such an important and formative role in helping the next generation understand the world we live in. They teach our children to make observations, collect information, and use evidence to formulate conclusions. They are honest and they are decent.

The fossil fuel industry, on the other hand, is neither honest nor decent. The filthy hand of the fossil fuel industry has, regrettably, a firm grip on this Congress. There is a reason that we never do anything about climate change, and it does not involve the merits of the issue. It involves the politics of the industry. We have, perhaps, not yet plumbed the bottom of how low they are willing to go, but, surely, this is a new low to reach with their game of phony science, masquerade, and subterfuge into our children's classrooms, like Ms. Emery's, Ms. Ramos's, Ms. Dillmann's, Ms. Ratigan's, and Ms. Hadfield's. These honorable, decent teachers help their students gain a fact-based understanding of the changing world around them and the issues facing our society. Unfortunately, these Heartland Institute materials may require those teachers to teach about politics and propaganda as well.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Caroline Normile, an AAAS fellow in my office, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of this Congress.

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

Mr. President, each week that you see me standing here means another week in which the Senate of the United States has sat out doing anything to address climate change and another week of carbon pollution streaming into our atmosphere and oceans. Carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is changing our atmosphere and our oceans. We see it everywhere. We see it in storm-damaged homes and flooded cities. We see it in drought-stricken farms and raging wildfires. We see it in fish disappearing from warming, acidifying waters. We see it in shifting habitats and migrating contagions.

All these harms we see carry costs--real economic costs--to homeowners, business owners, and taxpayers. That cost to homeowners, business owners, and taxpayers is known as the social cost of carbon pollution. It is the damage that people and communities and States suffer from carbon pollution and climate change. The Office of Management and Budget last calculated the social cost of carbon to be around $49 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted. If you just do some simple math, you can multiply the total measured U.S. emissions coming from energy production alone in 2016--that is emissions of over 5.7 billion tons of CO2--by the $49 cost per ton. It is pretty simple math: $49 times 5.7 billion tons gives you about $280 billion. So $280 billion is the annual cost that the fossil fuel industry offloads onto the American public in harm from the carbon dioxide emissions. That is a big number and a big consequence--$280 billion per year.

There was a more complex analysis than my simple math that was done by the International Monetary Fund. The International Monetary Fund has a lot of smart people. They don't have any conflict of interest that I am aware of in dealing with this issue. Their calculation puts the annual subsidy just in the United States of America for the fossil fuel industry at $700 billion per year.

So is it my simple math where the social cost of carbon is $280 billion per year or is it what the International Monetary Fund calculated at $700 billion per year? Whichever it is, it is a big enough harm to the American public that you would think we might do something about it here in the Senate. But of course, we don't because that huge social cost of carbon, that huge subsidy gives the fossil fuel industry the biggest incentive in the world to--instead of fixing up its situation and cleaning up its mess--come over here and instead mess with our politics so that our ability to deal with this issue is silenced by their political muscle and manipulations.

One way in which they play this game is to populate the climate denial machinery with one-eyed accountants--accountants who can only see the pollutants' side of the ledger. Honestly, we hear their testimony. The only thing they see is the cost to polluters of reducing their pollution. They don't see the public harm side of the ledger. They pretend it is a liberal conspiracy cooked up by the Obama administration. Or say you are the Republican chairman of the House Science Committee and you say: The social cost of carbon is a ``flawed value . . . to justify the [EPA's] alarmist reasoning for support of the Clean Power Plan and other climate regulations.''

Actually, if you take away the bad words ``flawed'' and ``alarmist'' and all of that stuff, the statement is actually true. There is a value to avoiding carbon pollution, and defending that public value from the polluters does justify the Clean Power Plan. This is the social cost of carbon. Let's go back for a minute to 2006, when the Bush administration's National Highway Transportation Safety Administration put out a rule for vehicle fuel economy standards. There was some dissatisfaction with that rule. States and other stakeholders complained that this rule failed to take into account the social cost of carbon emissions from cars--something that should matter for a rule that is looking to reduce emissions from cars. Well, that went up on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and in 2007, the Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. The court acknowledged that there is a cost of carbon pollution, and that cost is ``certainly not zero.'' So it told the agency to go back, redo the rule and to come up with a real social cost of carbon. Thus was born the legal requirement that agencies consider a social cost of carbon in decisions.

Because of this decision, the Bush administration produced a wide range of numbers up to $159 per ton of carbon emissions. The Obama administration continued the effort to calculate a social cost of carbon. An interagency working group, including scientists and economists from across the Federal Government, relied on existing scientific literature and on well vetted scientific models to produce a first standard in 2010, with additional updates in 2013, 2015, and 2016.

When Federal agencies didn't apply any social cost of carbon, courts corrected them. In 2014, a Federal judge in Colorado faulted the Bureau of Land Management for failing to account for greenhouse gas emissions when it approved an Arch Coal mine expansion in the Gunnison National Forest. The court suspended the approval until the Bureau of Land Management either used the social cost of carbon or gave a valid explanation as to why not. When agencies did use the social cost of carbon, their decisions were upheld. In 2016 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld the Department of Energy's use of the social cost of carbon in the agency's standards for commercial refrigeration equipment. The industry objected, and on appeal, the Seventh Circuit said: No, they did the right thing putting that in there.

Just last month, a three-judge panel from another U.S. circuit court of appeals--in this case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit--ruled that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has to consider the effects of carbon emissions that would result from building three pipelines in the Southeast. Specifically, the ruling directed FERC to either better calculate the project's carbon emissions, using the social cost of carbon, or explain why it didn't use it.

Also last month, another U.S. district court blocked another coal mine expansion in Montana, citing the agency's failure to assess the environmental effects of coal. Specifically, the judge referenced the agency's failure to include any social cost of carbon.

Just last week a Federal appeals court in Denver told the Bureau of Land Management that its lack of analysis on the climate effects of four coal leases in the Powder River Basin was ``irrational'' and told them to start over.

It is not just Federal courts. Agencies at the State level are also using the social cost of carbon pollution in their activities. The New York Public Service Commission affirmed the importance of the social cost of carbon in its zero-emissions credit program. The Illinois State legislature also incorporated a social cost of carbon into its zero- emissions credit program, and prevailed in a challenge in the courts. These State zero-emissions programs were the programs that were rolled out to help existing nuclear energy providers against competition by natural gas plants. The carbon price allowed carbon-free nuclear generation to better compete in the wholesale markets.

Up in Minnesota, since 1993, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission has required utilities to consider the estimated cost of carbon emissions in planning for new infrastructure projects. This year, the commission voted to raise its social cost of carbon to $43 per ton.

The Colorado Public Utilities Commission recently ordered the local utility Xcel to use the social cost of carbon in its resource planning documents. Colorado told its utilities to use $43 per ton starting in 2022 and to ramp up to nearly $70 per ton by 2050.

It is not just Federal courts and State agencies. Private companies in the United States and around the globe are incorporating the social cost of carbon into their own operations and accounting. Investors are beginning to demand that corporations perform this kind of analysis in order to qualify for investment. Big investors like Black Rock have taken on big companies like Exxon in order to break through the denial.

Just last week, the Washington Post reported that 1,200 global businesses either have adopted or are adopting a carbon price in some form. The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions found that companies like Microsoft,

Disney, the insurance giant Swiss Re, Unilever, Shell, BP, the mining corporation Rio Tinto, and General Motors have all taken steps to put a price on their own use of carbon.

Courts have made it the law for agencies to use the social cost of carbon. States are deploying the social cost of carbon. The business community recognizes and is incorporating into its financial planning the social cost of carbon. Yet here in Congress and down at the Trump White House, the leaders of the Republican Party continue to ignore climate change, pretend it doesn't exist, and ignore the very real costs that society bears from carbon pollution.

It goes without saying that the storm that has just ravaged Florida was spun up by warmer ocean waters, carried more rain because of warmer air, dumped more rain, and pushed storm surge further into Florida because of risen seas and those other characteristics.

Are we seeing any action? No. The President in March issued a sweeping Executive order rolling back Federal energy and environmental standards. It disbanded the interagency working group, and it asserted that the social cost of carbon was ``no longer representative of governmental policy.'' Nice try with that, given where the courts are.

Of course, the House and the Senate Republicans followed suit by introducing a pair of bills by Congressman Evan Jenkins on the House side and our colleague from Oklahoma, Senator Lankford, on our side that purport to prohibit the Federal Government from using the social cost of carbon in rulemaking and in regulatory processes. Of course, you can't do that, and those laws aren't going anywhere. Why? Because they violate a very basic principle both in courts and in administrative agencies. That very basic principle is at the heart of the rule of law, and it is that facts have to be factual and that conclusions have to be logical. Any decision that fails this standard-- that is, to use the administrative law terms ``arbitrary and capricious'' or ``not based on substantial evidence''--fails as a matter of law. Although Congress, of course, is bound and gagged by the polluters and their front groups, it is going to be hard for those polluters to try to stop the social cost of carbon in courts and administrative agencies. Despite the efforts of ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers to make America their fossil fuel banana republic, we still are a rule-of-law country and those rule-of-law principles that facts must be factual and that conclusions must be logical are too basic for our courts and administrative agencies to ignore.

In our courts and administrative agencies, lying and misleading can be exposed on cross-examination, for instance, and lying and misleading gets you punished, unlike in Congress where lying and misleading have been fossil fuel tactics for decades and sickeningly successful ones backed up by huge political muscle.

The failure in Congress and the remedy in the courts is one reason the Founding Fathers designed our government that way so that even where political branches of government were captured by special interests, there would still be a path for the truth, and there would still be a means for justice to have its way.

If the courts and the States and so many major businesses are all behind recognizing the social cost of carbon, who is behind the President and our Republican colleagues in denying that it is real? In my experience, it is powerful trade associations like the American Petroleum Institute, the American Chemistry Council, the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and others that have a distaste for any honest assessment of the social cost of carbon.

Right now, since the costs of those industries' pollution is offloaded onto the rest of us for free, why not? Why would they want to start paying for the harm they cause right now?

Think tanks and front groups funded by the Koch brothers and other polluters have vigorously fought against recognizing the fact of the social cost of carbon for years. These groups have neutral sounding names--maybe even friendly sounding names--like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Energy Alliance, the Heritage Foundation, FreedomWorks--my personal favorite--the Heartland Institute, a group so good that it put up billboards comparing climate scientists to the Unabomber. It is really a classy contribution to the debate.

One thing this crowd of bad actors does know is how to throw its weight around, especially since the Citizens United decision threw open the floodgates of special interest money into our politics. That is what has put Congress in the thrall of the polluters. It is an indecent and wrong place for us to be, but with any luck, the adherence of courts and administrative agencies to the rule of law--the principles that facts must be factual and conclusions must be logical--will help us get out of the political trap that the fossil fuel industry has constructed.

With that, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, as the Senate considers the annual authorization of our military and national defense programs, I am here for my 178th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, to discuss the security risks climate change presents to our Nation. I urge my colleagues to heed the warnings from our national security experts, not just the self-serving propaganda of the fossil fuel industry that blankets us. What are these national security risks?

A first order of security risk is the physical damage climate change is causing in our atmosphere, oceans, and environment. Science and our senses are already perceiving this damage, indeed already measuring this damage. This order of security risk--risk to the Earth's natural order--will hurt farming communities, coastal communities, fishing communities, and anyone vulnerable to wildfires and extreme weather all around the world. Of course, the poorer you are, the more vulnerable you are to this risk.

The second order of security risk from climate change is the consequences in human society from those physical, biological, and chemical changes in our Earth's environment. As farms or fisheries fail, people are impoverished and dislocated. Scarcity of resources leads to conflicts and confrontations. Storms and fires and floods can make the suffering acute. People who are hungry or dislocated or

torn from their roots can become desperate, can become radicalized and violent. That is why the Department of Defense has for many years called climate change a ``catalyst of conflict.''

Researchers from NASA and the University of Arizona determined that drought in Syria was very likely the worst in a thousand years. Massive crop failures and livestock losses moved farmers into stressed cities, where popular protests met brutal violence from the Assad regime. The tide of refugees from that chaos swamped Europe. To the extent the droughts in Syria were a root cause of the discontent that led to the conflict, and ultimately to the flight of refugees, European governments have seen this second order of security risk up close.

There is a third order of security risk, and that is damage to the keystone institutions of our present world order--market capitalism and democratic government. We depend for the quality of life we enjoy on market capitalism and democratic governance, and those institutions-- capitalism and democracy--in turn depend on popular approval and confidence. But if you are a person whose livelihood has been harmed by the first-order environmental effects of climate change or if you are a person swept up in the second-order societal effects of climate change or even if you are simply a person who is dismayed as you witness the suffering and harm caused by climate change around you, you will want answers. It is human nature to want answers. When people are hurt, they want a reckoning. When that reckoning comes, the discredit to institutions like capitalism and democracy could be profound for having failed to act in face of a known risk.

Add to that failure to act a moral failure--why the failure to act? Fossil fuel companies, corporate entities, are knowingly causing this harm, and at least in the United States, they are aggressively fighting political solutions to the problem. They are fighting with professionally administered misinformation. Climate denial is the original fake news--with an absurd arsenal of political money.

Companies not in the fossil fuel industry often have excellent climate policies within their corporate fence lines and sometimes even for their supply chains. But as we know in this building, these good companies collectively take essentially no action, particularly here in Congress, to offset the political force of the fossil fuel industry. Indeed, many companies with good climate policies nevertheless support industry organizations that are the instruments of the fossil fuel companies in preventing solutions. This all stands to be a lasting and dangerous discredit to the corporate sector and to market capitalism generally, and the discredit will worsen as the danger worsens.

In Congress, we have nothing to brag about. We have shown ourselves unable to resist the fossil fuel industry, despite knowing it to be deeply burdened with obvious and enormous conflicts of interest and despite clear and repeated warnings from our national security experts. They could not have made it plainer. The Pentagon's 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review described climate change as a ``global threat multiplier,'' warning that ``the pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world.'' Similar were the 2010 QDR and our national intelligence reviews.

During his Senate confirmation process, Secretary of Defense James Mattis told this body:

Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world

where our troops are operating today. It is appropriate for

the Combatant Commands to incorporate drivers of instability

that impact the security environment in their areas into

their planning.

That is, climate change needs to be a part of command planning.

In response to a question from the Armed Services Committee, he testified:

I agree that the effects of a changing climate--such as

increased maritime access to the Arctic, rising sea levels,

desertification, among others--impact our security situation.

I will ensure that the Department continues to be prepared to

conduct operations today and in the future, and that we are

prepared to address the effects of a changing climate on our

threat assessments, resources, and readiness.

Former Admiral Samuel Locklear, as head of U.S. Pacific Command, warned in 2013 that climate change was the biggest long-term security threat in his area of operation, noting the need for the military to organize for ``when the effects of climate change start to impact these massive populations.''

``If it goes bad,'' he said, ``you could have hundreds of thousands or millions of people displaced and then security will start to crumble pretty quickly.''

The Government Accountability Office is our Federal Government's watchdog. GAO has warned that climate change could affect military testing, training, and operating activities, hampering readiness and mission continuity. They have also warned of DOD's ``fiscal exposure'' to climate change. GAO says that climate change is already affecting our defense infrastructure around the globe--555,000 facilities and 28 million acres of land, with a replacement value of close to $850 billion. For instance, the Army's Fort Irwin, CA, is susceptible to heavy rain and flooding. Air Force radar installations in Alaska stand on unstable, thawing permafrost. The Diego Garcia installation in the Indian Ocean and Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia each face rising seas.

In his new book ``The Water Will Come,'' author Jeff Goodell quotes the former Norfolk naval station commander, Joe Bouchard. The commander said:

It was not a nuisance problem--it was not a minor

operational issue. Sea-level rise was interfering with the

combat readiness for the Atlantic fleet.

I repeat: Sea-level rise was interfering with the combat readiness of our Atlantic fleet.

The Navy is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to raise piers and other infrastructure above the rising waters. Goodell writes:

But a base like Norfolk . . . is the hub of an entire

ecosystem that has grown up around it . . . fuel suppliers

and electrical lines and railroad tracks and repair shops and

. . . housing . . . and . . . schools. . . . You can't just

move all this to some random spot.

What is happening in Norfolk is pretty damn serious.

In 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry went to Norfolk, and he asked officers there how long they thought the base could hold out. ``Twenty to 50 years,'' Captain J. Pat Rios replied. Goodell describes it as what he calls ``an extraordinary moment in the annals of American military history: A U.S. naval captain had just told the Secretary of State that the strategically important base, home to six aircraft carriers and key to operations in Europe and the Middle East, would be essentially inoperable in as little as 20 years.''

The bill approved by the Armed Services Committee recognizes this and requires the Pentagon to submit a ``comprehensive threat assessment,'' describing the climate risks to military missions and the climate- related vulnerabilities of that massive DOD infrastructure. The Department is further directed to submit an ``implementation master plan,'' detailing the steps that DOD will take to mitigate climate- related mission risks, incorporate climate-related events in combatant commanders' theater campaign plans, address military infrastructure vulnerabilities, update military construction standards for predicted flooding and extreme weather, and evaluate DOD's progress adapting to climate change. I commend Chairman John McCain and Ranking Member Jack Reed, my senior Senator, for seeing to it that this language was included in this bill.

I also commend my House colleague Jim Langevin for getting similar language into the House version. The House provision states--by the way, this was a big bipartisan provision when it was voted on in the House. It states: ``Climate change is a direct threat to the national security of the United States,'' and it further requires that the Department of Defense be ``prepared to address the effects of a changing climate on threat assessments, resources, and readiness.''

In the shadow of Harvey and Irma, storms that were amped up by warmed seas and that flooded further inland due to risen seas and that held and dumped more rain because of warmed air, and watching the unprecedented fires blazing across the American West and with these bipartisan provisions agreed to in the NDAA bills, I hope we

may be on the brink of finally freeing ourselves from the relentless, remorseless political pressures of the fossil fuel industry. They have had their way around here long enough. We need to have a long overdue discussion of the effects of climate change on our national security, on our health, on our economy, and, ultimately, on our national reputation.

Pope Francis has reminded us that we have ``a moral responsibility. We have to take it seriously.''

He said: ``You can see the effects of climate change and scientists have clearly said what path we have to follow.''

He went on: ``If someone is doubtful that this is true, they should ask scientists. They are very clear. They are not opinions made on the fly. They are very clear.''

Pope Francis is a scientist himself, and having heard plenty of confessions, he is also a man of the world, and he understands the weakness of humankind. He understands political pressures. ``When you don't want to see, you don't see,'' he said. But he reminds us that ``history will judge the decisions.''

America is an exemplary Nation. As an exemplary Nation, one that projects power by example and not just by force, America will be stronger and more respected if we pull together and craft American climate solutions. For a country that seeks to stand as an example in this world--a city on a hill, we often say--and a country that benefits from the power of that example, this shaming display of out-of-control special interest influence will have consequences. The world is watching. We have a role to play in this world, we Americans, and it is time we got about it before the consequences of climate change become, to quote Donald Trump in 2009, ``catastrophic and irreversible.''

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.