Jay Inslee

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, Republicans and Democrats mourned the losses in the gulf, and it is very disappointing that my Republican friends will not stand to try to prevent this tragedy. The fact is, oil is killing the oceans in many ways--in one way, in a small way, by this giant oil slick, but in a large way because of carbon pollution. I just think we can't have this debate without recognizing this. In fact, every oil well that we drill puts carbon pollution in the atmosphere when we burn that oil. That carbon pollution then goes into the oceans, into solution, and that carbon pollution makes carbonic acid. The oceans today are 30 percent more acidic because of the oil we burn. Let me show you what this has done to the bottom of the food chain. This is a picture of plankton, what happens when you expose it to ocean water that is as acidic as it will be at the end of the century; plankton dissolve in the water. This bill is not too much; if anything, it is too little. Our Nation needs an energy policy so we stop carbon pollution. That is America's destiny.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, the previous speaker had a cute poster showing Uncle Sam talking about cuts, and we know that we have a long- term deficit issue to deal with. But I think it's appropriate to look at the numbers, and the simple numbers are things that we ought to be able to agree on in a bipartisan basis. The numbers show that this year's bill that we will pass today spends $500 million, $500 million less than last year's bill. I want to repeat that, $500 million cut compared to last year's bill. We are aware of the situation, and we are reducing this expenditure by $500 million. That's the math. It should be bipartisan math, and there is no question about it no matter what kinds of pictures you want to bring out on your posters. But I also want to point out this bill does some things that are smart, looking to our future. Number one, it makes an investment in trying to move to cleaner aviation fuels so that we can reduce carbon pollution from our air aviation industry to invest in biofuels. We just flew the first algae- based biofuel Green Hornet, an Air Force F-18, at supersonic speeds. We think we can replace a significant number of fossil fuels with green fuels. This makes an investment. Second, this bill makes an investment in moving to the electrification of our transportation system. Americans, for the first time, are now going to be able to buy American-made cars that run on electric engines. We need a place to plug them in. This bill helps to move having plug-in stations. We are starting that effort on the I-5 corridor up in the State of Washington and Oregon. This bill will extend those efforts to work with local communities so Americans will have a choice to buy American-made electric-powered propulsion systems, plug them in with American made plug-in stations. This is a vision for the future. We are starting with cuts to this bill and moving with targeted investment to move to the next generation of vehicles. It's a good plan for America.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, we are involved in a race today. It's a race to grow clean energy jobs, and we are in a race with the rest of the world and particularly China. China recently announced they will be investing over $750 billion over the next 10 years to grow clean energy jobs in China. They have announced they are going to put a cap on carbon so that they can create demand for the creation of new, clean energy jobs. What are we doing in this country? Unfortunately, the other Chamber, the U.S. Senate, has dropped the ball and isn't moving a ball to create a demand for these new clean energy jobs with a cap on carbon. We can lose this race if we don't get off the dime and get into this race. But I want to assure folks we are going to get into this race one way or another and one way is with the Environmental Protection Agency creating a limitation on carbon so we can create the demands for these clean energy jobs so we can make clean energy electric cars in this country and sell them into China. For those people who are going to object to the EPA regulation of carbon, you had your chance and you can't be heard to squawk. We are going to move forward on clean energy jobs.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. I wish to address the security of our citizens. Here's a headline July 26 that we're going to see repeated across the country in the next year: ``Linwood Cops Face Job Cuts.'' We are facing a 25 percent reduction of police officers in Linwood, Washington, because we can't pay for them, our first line of security in our neighborhoods. But today we would be voting for something on the order of over several years of about $4 billion to train police officers in Kabul, Afghanistan. It is wrong to be borrowing money from China, laying off American police officers, to train police officers in Afghanistan. And it is wrong because it isn't showing respect for the few families that are fighting this war, our troops and their families, while the rest of us go to the beach and not be fiscally responsible for this war. If we're going to fight this war, we should pay for it. And we should pay for it in a way that keeps our cops on the beat, our first line of security.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, one thing good about our country, we always go forward, not backwards. And we are not going to go backwards to allow the privatization of Social Security. We are not going to go backwards to allow the removal of important protections against Wall Street, abuses of the U.S. economy. We're going to go forward. And we're not going to go backward on environmental protection. I'll say why this is important. This morning we were doing our investigation of the BP oil spill. We had President Bush's Secretary of the Interior, Gail Norton, testify. And you know what we discovered? During the Bush administration's rapid ramp-up of offshore drilling, they learned that 50 percent of the blow-out preventers that were supposed to be the fail-safe system to prevent these massive oil spills, 50 percent of them didn't work. But they refused to do anything about it. They learned that they had a problem with their own investigators, that the wells weren't being cemented appropriately, but they refused to do anything about it. We are not going to let folks go backwards on Social Security, go backwards on Wall Street reform, or go backwards on environmental protection. This is a country that goes forward.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize the employees of Aerojet-General Corporation's Redmond, Washington operations facility. Aerojet-Redmond has recently been selected by the United Space Alliance to receive the Space Flight Awareness Supplier Award for Aerojet's sustained superior performance as a key supplier on NASA's Space Shuttle- program over the--course of nearly- 30 years. This most significant achievement will be commemorated with a presentation from United Space Alliance and celebration ceremony held at Aerojet's facility in Redmond, Washington on Thursday, July 8, 2010. Aerojet is a world-recognized aerospace and defense leader principally serving the space and missile propulsion, defense and armaments markets. The Space Flight Awareness Supplier Award is a very prestigious award bestowed upon United Space Alliance supplier companies--from among over 2,000 active suppliers located throughout the United States--who have performed extraordinary work that added to safety, mission success, schedule compliance, and enhanced flight capability. Aerojet's Redmond Operations will be only the twenty-first company to receive this highly selective award. Aerojet-Redmond is the world leader in the in-space propulsion market and as such is the manufacturer of the 38 primary and 6 vernier Reaction Control Thrusters used on every Space Shuttle mission. The Shuttle's Reaction Control System is used to position the Space Shuttle during flight operations such as payload insertions and International Space Station docking. On the occasion of this most significant milestone, my colleagues and I are proud to join together and lend our voices to congratulate and honor the more than 425 Aerojet workers in Redmond, Washington on a job well-done.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, we now are at a critical juncture to determine whether or not we will respond to a terrible problem in the oceans, and that is not just the oil spill in the gulf; it is the acidification of the oceans now caused by carbon dioxide that comes from the oil and gas industry and some other fossil fuel industries. I would suggest Members may want to take a look at a new report. It was in Science magazine, published 2 days ago by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This is their conclusion: ``The world's oceans are virtually choking on rising greenhouse gases, destroying marine ecosystems and breaking down the food chain, irreversible changes that have not occurred for several million years.'' We have a chance to restrict and restrain this pollutant, carbon dioxide, in a bill now pending in the U.S. Senate. We hope that in conversations with the President next week we come out with a firm, clear cap on carbon dioxide so we can stop what will otherwise be irreversible changes in our oceans.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, today, in order to attend important meetings in my district, I was absent from votes on H. Res. 1368, Supporting the goals of National Dairy Month; H. Res. 1409, Expressing support for designation of June 20, 2010, as ``American Eagle Day'', and celebrating the recovery and restoration of the bald eagle, the national symbol of the United States; and H.R. 5502, ECO-Gift Card Act. Should I have been present, I would have supported these resolutions.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that in the engrossment of the bill (H.R. 2008) to authorize the Secretary of the Interior to facilitate the development of hydroelectric power on the Diamond Fork System of the Central Utah Project, the Clerk be directed to carry out the modification that I have placed at the desk.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution (H. Res. 989) expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States should adopt national policies and pursue international agreements to prevent ocean acidification, to study the impacts of ocean acidification, and to address the effects of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems and coastal economies.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the resolution under consideration.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, we have a resolution before us that deals with a problem of extraordinary dimensions having to do with the health of our oceans. I want to thank Chairman Rahall, Chairwoman Bordallo, Majority Leader Hoyer, Subcommittee Chair Brian Baird and their help in getting a resolution to the floor to deal with this extraordinary threat. We know how much Americans today are feeling heartsick about the damage to our gulf and perhaps the Atlantic Ocean as a result of the oil spill we are now suffering. But what our resolution attempts to do is to focus on another perhaps worse threat to the oceans today associated with the burning of fossil fuels, and that is the sad, unalterable, unambiguous, scientifically certain fact that our oceans are becoming more acidic, substantially more acidic, as a result of carbon-based pollution from our burning of oil and coal and other fossil fuels. Because what we have learned in our research--and we have had a number of hearings on this--is the scientific community is telling us that, because of carbon dioxide pollution that comes from burning oil and coal, what happens is that the carbon dioxide that is coming out of our smokestacks and our tailpipes is going over the oceans and then is going into solution into the oceans of the world. Fully over a quarter of all the carbon that we have burned, after digging it out of the ground and piping it up from below, has now found its way into the oceans. This is a scientific fact. All scientists, Republicans and Democrats, agree on this. As that carbon dioxide goes into the ocean, it creates acid, it creates acidic conditions. Today, the oceans are almost a third, 26 percent, more acidic than they were before we started to burn fossil fuels. Now, the disturbing part of this is that acid, as you can imagine, does not seem a safe, benign condition in our oceans. The bad news is that the scientists have told us in our investigations that this acidification of the oceans is now increasing at dramatic rates. The oceans are 26 percent more acidic than they were before we started to burn coal and oil. But by the end of the century, by the end of my grandchild's lifetime, the oceans will be 100 percent, they will be twice as acidic as they have ever been during humans' time on Earth. And this is presenting extraordinary danger to humans because we have an attachment to the oceans. And what we are being told by the scientific community is that the danger of these acidic conditions are that it makes it difficult, if not impossible, for huge swathes of the life in the ocean to survive. The reason is that large parts of the ocean community depend on taking calcium carbonate out of the water. They precipitate--that's a scientific term--they precipitate calcium carbonate into their shells. Coral reefs take calcium carbonate to make coral reefs. Clams take calcium carbonate out to make shells. Perhaps most importantly, large amounts of the plankton that are the base of the food chain take calcium carbonate out to make the little structures of their bodies that make these little shell-like forms. And as the water becomes more acidic--and this is what's disturbing and this resolution is intended to focus America's attention on--as the waters become more acidic, these life forms actually dissolve in the acidic water of the oceans. We are now approaching the area, the level, where the acidic waters of the Pacific, Atlantic, Southern, Northern oceans will actually dissolve these life forms. Let me tell you how dangerous this is. Dr. Jane Lubchenco, the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has come to us and actually shown us photographic evidence of shells, the little calcium carbonate sources of 40 percent of the base of the food chain. She showed us pictures of these little creatures actually dissolving in water that will be as acidic as it will be at the end of the century if we don't change things. Now, there is no mystery about this. It's a scientific fact that the waters are becoming more acidic because of carbon dioxide, and it's a scientific fact that large parts of the Earth's oceans are dependent on this phenomena of taking calcium to form their life. So what does that mean to us? Well, what it means to us in our grandchildren's lifetime is if we don't change what we are doing in an industrial basis, we will have significant reduction in mankind's use of the oceans, because fully 500 million people in the world depend on their protein from the oceans. Many Americans, including 2 million Americans, make their livelihood from the oceans that are going to be in jeopardy because of ocean acidification. Seventy billion dollars a year of the U.S. economy is dependent on what is now jeopardized by the oil spill today in the gulf. But when you see those shrimp farmers and oystermen and fishermen whose livelihoods are at jeopardy in the gulf coast today, it is all the fishermen around the world whose livelihood is jeopardized by ocean acidification. Let me note some of the scientific evidence about this. I will quote from Dr. Richard Feely of Texas Tech. Quote, ``Already we've seen water showing up off the coast of northern California that's acidic enough to actually start dissolving seashells. It's thought that this kind of corrosive water showing up will become more and more common.'' A quote from Nature magazine this year: ``By mid-century, if we continue emitting carbon dioxide the way we have been, entire vast areas of both the Southern Ocean and the Arctic Ocean will be so corrosive that it will cause seashells to dissolve,'' close quote. Quote from Nature: Quote, ``In decades, rising ocean acidity may challenge life on a scale that has not occurred for tens of millions of years,'' close quote. Perhaps the most disturbing quote I have heard is from Ken Caldeira, an oceanographer from Stanford, who basically has told me we're heading for something he likens as an ocean full of weeds because of the destruction of these multiple life forms. And the one that's most telling to what we are seeing today in the gulf, a quote from Donald Waters, a commercial fisherman who fishes for red snapper and king mackerel out of Pensacola, Florida: Quote, ``This is a devastating ghost lurking in the shadows that would change our whole lives,'' close quote. So what we have today is a resolution by the House that we need to adopt policies and move forward in efforts to reduce this evil that is now lurking in the oceans of ocean acidification. We know what the culprit is; it is carbon dioxide. We know what the solution is, which is new clean energy technologies that we can embrace to try to reduce this pollution. And we know the ultimate outcome if we do not act, which is that our grandkids are not going to have an ocean as we know them. And, personally, I can tell you it's already hit my State. Our oyster production now in the State of Washington has been severely dampened, probably because of ocean acidification that prevents the oyster larva from surviving. We don't know this for an absolute certainty yet, but this is the kind of thing that we are starting to see happen. We are better than this. We know what the oceans mean to us, and we do not intend to leave behind an ocean without the Creator's creation of coral reefs and all the other creations of the ocean. So I commend this resolution. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I commend this to the House. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. INSLEE. If the gentleman will yield, it's a great question, and the answer is clear. You look at Americans who today have it really deep in their hearts what's happening in the gulf. I know in your district, all of our folks, Republicans and Democrats, understand the damage that's being occasioned. What Americans are not aware of yet is this other looming potential disaster in the oceans. We believe it's important for the U.S. Congress to go on record to say we, in fact, are going to deal with this, not just in a research component--and I appreciate the gentleman's pointing it out; we have passed a component to increase our research. But research is not enough. We need action in the oceans. We need to reduce our carbon pollution in the oceans. And simply studying this problem is not enough. We can't study the problem for the next several decades and let the oceans die. So that's the reason for this resolution.

Mr. INSLEE. Well, there are numerous policies that could deal with this problem, and our resolution does not specify any particular policy. We look to the bipartisan efforts that we hope will succeed here in an effort that will reduce what causes ocean acidification, which is carbon pollution. There are many policies that can do that.

Mr. INSLEE. A cap could be one of those, but there are many other policies that could be beneficial, many of which have already passed the House of Representatives, including our efforts to start building electric cars in America rather than China, building lithium ion batteries. We are opening up our first plant in Michigan where we are putting to work hundreds of out-of-work autoworkers. All of these are great policies. We do not specify in this resolution any particular policy.

Mr. INSLEE. May I inquire how much time we have remaining on our side?

Mr. INSLEE. I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cohen).

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I just want to make the point and make sure Members know we are not advocating any particular policy. What we are advocating here is that we, on a bipartisan basis, take the blinders off to a problem that we have to face on a bipartisan basis. You can't run or hide from ocean acidification. The oceans will have 150 percent increase in the acidity of the oceans if we don't find a bipartisan solution to this problem. We will have more CO2 in the oceans than the last 650,000 years if we don't find some bipartisan solution to this problem. So we just think the first step of any solution is recognizing the problem. We think we ought to recognize reality. We ought to take the blinders off, and we ought to take the first step of recognizing the problem. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time to close.

Mr. INSLEE. To close, I would just like to comment. We're going to have lots of debates about the right policy to deal with this problem, but the country that put a man on the Moon should not be the country to blind itself to an obvious problem. And we are going to be swallowed by this and the oceans are going to be swallowed by this unless we first recognize the problem. It's a simple bipartisan step to say we've got a problem, we've got to work together to solve it. Let's do that. I commend this and move the motion.

Mr. INSLEE. Well, the national policies will be decided by this Congress rather than just myself or the gentleman. This will be a decision, the policies that we will make, hopefully, on a bipartisan basis. The resolution does not pertain to any particular policy. There are probably a thousand good ideas here. We hope to find the best thousand and put them all to work.

Mr. INSLEE. I yield myself such time as I may consume. I would like to just make a couple of points. First off, I want to make clear that there really is no scientific debate or uncertainty about a couple of physical facts, and I just want to make this pretty clear. You can really search the world over, and you really will not find any scientist who will dispute the conclusion that when we put carbon dioxide into the air, much of it ends up in the ocean and dissolves and creates more acidic conditions. That's an established scientific fact. The second scientific established fact is now, because of some of the great work done in part by NOAA on behalf of the Federal Government, we are finding that the oceans are becoming more acidic. I met the NOAA ships when they docked in Seattle about a year and a half ago when they came in. They did very specific studies where they dipped little containers in the water at various places in the water column. They bring it up and they do a pH experiment to determine its acidity. We did this as juniors and seniors in high school. This is very well established science. That is an established fact. There is really no debate in the scientific community about this. Now, there is a question of how soon the coral reefs will disappear. Is it 40 years? Is it 60 years? Is it 100 years? There is still scientific research to be done on that, but we know at some point the acidity changes the ability of these life forms to exist in the water. That is very disturbing because vast amounts of the ocean is dependent on these creatures at the bottom of the food chain. At least 15 percent of food from around the world comes from fish that are dependent on coral reefs, and when they're gone, the fish are gone. When 40 percent of the plankton are gone, the salmon are gone that my people like to go out on a Saturday and catch. I can tell you with a scientific certainty that my people do not want to risk the survival of salmon because we continue this pollution policy without dealing with it. That is a political certainty. So I think there is plenty of certainty. Now, what policies we adopt on this, the gentleman knows there are many things to do. One of the policies that we have adopted on our energy bill would call for research to find out if there is a way we can sequester carbon dioxide from burning coal, for instance, so that if we can bury the carbon dioxide from the coal, we can continue the burning coal. That is part of our energy bill that we passed in the House of Representatives, just one of the policies of many we have. One other comment I want to make. There is a lot of disagreement in the House about climate change and the science of climate change. We understand that. But I want to make people understand that this resolution has to do with a connected, but separate, phenomenon. If you don't think there is any climate change, if you believe that the melting of the Arctic in the tundra and Greenland is not associated with burning carbon dioxide, that's fine; but this issue we ought to have total bipartisan consensus on because there really is no disagreement about where the carbon dioxide goes. A substantial amount of it goes into the ocean and makes acidic conditions. So I am hoping we have bipartisan consensus on this. This is related, but you don't have to be a believer in climate science to understand the clear acidification science. When you add carbon dioxide to the water, it makes it acidic. We learned this in high school. And now it's time for us to do something about it. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, this morning the Sustainable Energy and Environment Caucus had a meeting with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, and she told us something that I thought was encouraging, which is that the United States Federal Government has insisted that British Petroleum drill a second relief well to make sure that we've got a relief well that can ultimately stop this horrific spill in the gulf coast. And it's encouraging because the Federal Government has to be the ultimate decider to make sure this job gets done. BP only wanted to do one well, but the President and his administration insisted that they do two wells to make sure that we get one that works. But there's a disturbing effort now going on in the U.S. Senate to deprive the EPA of the ability to clean up the industry that is now putting pollution in the air as well. We've got to preserve the Federal Government's ability to enforce our air pollution and clean water laws. The American people deserve that. We ought to stand strong to have a sheriff in charge of this operation.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.