John Kerry

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, today I am introducing the Big Cats and Public Safety Protection Act to protect public safety, improve animal welfare, assist international big cat conservation, and to help clarify the existing patchwork of current state regulation. This is a companion for legislation previously introduced in the House by Representatives Howard McKeon and Loretta Sanchez. Amazingly, it is unknown even how many big cats such as lions, cougars, leopards, and cheetahs live or are bred in private possession in the United States. This bill would prevent the private possession and breeding of big cats, while still allowing properly accredited zoos and wildlife sanctuaries to continue to operate in the critical conservation and animal welfare roles that they occupy today. Why is this legislation so important? First, this is a public safety issue, which was made tragically clear almost a year ago in Zanesville, Ohio, when the owner of a backyard zoo opened the cages of his tigers, leopards, lions, wolves, bears, and monkeys before killing himself. Wild animals were literally roaming the streets where children were playing and people were going about their daily lives. Sadly, the situation gave police no choice but to shoot and kill almost 50 animals, including 38 big cats, before they could enter populated areas. Public safety officials were, understandably, not trained or equipped to deal with large exotic animals especially 300 pound tigers. This tragedy should serve as a chilling wakeup call about our lack of safeguards around large, wild species being kept as pets. In the past 11 years in the United States, incidents involving captive big cats have resulted in the deaths of 21 people, 16 adults and 5 children. During the same time period, there have been 246 maulings, 253 escapes, 143 big cat deaths, and 128 confiscations. This is also an animal welfare issue. Research shows that the captive big cat community is characterized by a systemic culture of inhumane mistreatment of the animals. One major reason for this is that once individual big cats have outgrown the infancy stage when they are most profitable, they are often warehoused in terrible conditions. Because private ownership is allowed to continue, many sanctuaries for mistreated or unwanted big cats are at or nearing capacity and lack financial reserves to provide greater assistance. The recent closure of a major sanctuary in Texas that had over 50 big cats has made matters worse. Third, this is a matter of conservation. Tigers, for example, are extremely endangered by poaching and trade, and illegal tiger products continue to be smuggled into the U.S. from foreign countries. One of the biggest threats to wild tigers is the demand for tiger parts and products, and leakage of captive tiger parts and products into the illegal market continues to encourage demand, perpetuating poaching and threatening remaining wild populations. Finally, this bill will address the current patchwork state regulation. There are still two states that have no regulations or permits at all regarding private ownership of exotic animals including big cats. Seven other States have little to no regulations of private ownership of exotic animals including big cats. Another 14 states allow big cat possession only with a state permit, and 27 states and the District of Columbia have enacted full bans on private ownership of big cats, though all of those exempt federally-licensed exhibitors. Given the risks I have already outlined, this kind of regulatory patchwork is simply unacceptable and could be dangerous. I believe that the Big Cats and Public Safety Protection Act will help ensure that lions, tigers, and other potentially dangerous big cats do not threaten public safety, harm global conservation efforts, or end up living in squalid conditions where they are subject to mistreatment and cruelty. A number of organizations are supportive of this bill, including the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Humane Society of the United States, Born Free USA, Big Cat Rescue, the Animal Welfare Institute, and the World Wildlife Foundation. I would like to recognize Senators Lieberman, Sanders, and Blumenthal as original cosponsors of this bill. I look forward to continued progress in enhancing the protection and conservation of wild big cats and in increasing public safety from the dangers of these untamed animals.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, today I am introducing the Big Cats and Public Safety Protection Act to protect public safety, improve animal welfare, assist international big cat conservation, and to help clarify the existing patchwork of current state regulation. This is a companion for legislation previously introduced in the House by Representatives Howard McKeon and Loretta Sanchez. Amazingly, it is unknown even how many big cats such as lions, cougars, leopards, and cheetahs live or are bred in private possession in the United States. This bill would prevent the private possession and breeding of big cats, while still allowing properly accredited zoos and wildlife sanctuaries to continue to operate in the critical conservation and animal welfare roles that they occupy today. Why is this legislation so important? First, this is a public safety issue, which was made tragically clear almost a year ago in Zanesville, Ohio, when the owner of a backyard zoo opened the cages of his tigers, leopards, lions, wolves, bears, and monkeys before killing himself. Wild animals were literally roaming the streets where children were playing and people were going about their daily lives. Sadly, the situation gave police no choice but to shoot and kill almost 50 animals, including 38 big cats, before they could enter populated areas. Public safety officials were, understandably, not trained or equipped to deal with large exotic animals especially 300 pound tigers. This tragedy should serve as a chilling wakeup call about our lack of safeguards around large, wild species being kept as pets. In the past 11 years in the United States, incidents involving captive big cats have resulted in the deaths of 21 people, 16 adults and 5 children. During the same time period, there have been 246 maulings, 253 escapes, 143 big cat deaths, and 128 confiscations. This is also an animal welfare issue. Research shows that the captive big cat community is characterized by a systemic culture of inhumane mistreatment of the animals. One major reason for this is that once individual big cats have outgrown the infancy stage when they are most profitable, they are often warehoused in terrible conditions. Because private ownership is allowed to continue, many sanctuaries for mistreated or unwanted big cats are at or nearing capacity and lack financial reserves to provide greater assistance. The recent closure of a major sanctuary in Texas that had over 50 big cats has made matters worse. Third, this is a matter of conservation. Tigers, for example, are extremely endangered by poaching and trade, and illegal tiger products continue to be smuggled into the U.S. from foreign countries. One of the biggest threats to wild tigers is the demand for tiger parts and products, and leakage of captive tiger parts and products into the illegal market continues to encourage demand, perpetuating poaching and threatening remaining wild populations. Finally, this bill will address the current patchwork state regulation. There are still two states that have no regulations or permits at all regarding private ownership of exotic animals including big cats. Seven other States have little to no regulations of private ownership of exotic animals including big cats. Another 14 states allow big cat possession only with a state permit, and 27 states and the District of Columbia have enacted full bans on private ownership of big cats, though all of those exempt federally-licensed exhibitors. Given the risks I have already outlined, this kind of regulatory patchwork is simply unacceptable and could be dangerous. I believe that the Big Cats and Public Safety Protection Act will help ensure that lions, tigers, and other potentially dangerous big cats do not threaten public safety, harm global conservation efforts, or end up living in squalid conditions where they are subject to mistreatment and cruelty. A number of organizations are supportive of this bill, including the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Humane Society of the United States, Born Free USA, Big Cat Rescue, the Animal Welfare Institute, and the World Wildlife Foundation. I would like to recognize Senators Lieberman, Sanders, and Blumenthal as original cosponsors of this bill. I look forward to continued progress in enhancing the protection and conservation of wild big cats and in increasing public safety from the dangers of these untamed animals.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, the deaths of Ambassador Stevens and his team are heartbreaking. It is easy for a lot of people to forget that our diplomats are on the frontlines of the world's most dangerous places and they are there trying to make the world a safer and better place at great risk to themselves and their families. Chris Stevens was all that and more. He was a foreign service professional down to his toes, a guy who had served on the Foreign Relations Committee and embraced tough odds and tough assignments overseas. He had the guts and grit to serve as our envoy during the rebellion, and his presence there reminded Libyans that America stood with them for freedom in the face of violence. He was continuing that noble work as Ambassador with enormous skill. He was an important part of the work we are doing in Libya, and we will not let this deplorable violence turn back the progress he helped make possible. Let's remember that Libyans fought to protect the consulate and rescue the Americans inside, and that Libyans took Chris to a hospital in a desperate and potentially dangerous attempt to save his life. Indeed, the best way to honor his memory and that of the four American public servants who perished in Benghazi is to continue their work. The United States must continue to support the aspirations of the people of Libya for political reform based on democratic and human rights and the development of an inclusive government that ensures freedom, opportunity, and justice for the people of Libya. This is what Chris Stevens would have wanted. The violence in Cairo and Benghazi is unacceptable and unjustifiable. The stupidity of one filmmaker, no matter how offensive, is not now, and never, a rationale for violence. A despicable act like this hurts us all--Americans and peaceful people who aspire to build their own democracy. I commend President Obama for committing to bring the perpetrators of this attack to justice, and I am confident that this is precisely what the United States Government will do. This is one of those moments when Americans must unite as Americans. It is exactly the wrong time to throw political punches. It is a time to restore calm and proceed wisely.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I want to say a few words about the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. I am pleased to report that the Foreign Relations Committee approved this Treaty on July 26, the 22nd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. I am also pleased that, like the ADA, the Disabilities Convention has strong bipartisan backing. This treaty is personal to so many of us. I am deeply grateful to our committee members for their thoughtful input on the treaty and the resolution of advice consent, and to Senator McCain and former Majority Leader Dole, who are as deeply committed to this cause as Senator Kennedy was to the original Americans with Disabilities Act. Passing this treaty isn't just the right thing to do. It is also the smart thing to do. It will extend essential protections to millions of disabled Americans, including our disabled service men and women and veterans, when they travel, study, work, and live abroad. In addition to enshrining the principles of the ADA on the international level, the convention will provide us with a critical tool as we advocate for the adoption of its standards globally standards to which all of us should aspire. By joining, we put ourselves in a stronger position to advance the goals of equality of opportunity, independent living, economic self-sufficiency, and full participation for individuals with disabilities. The Disabilities Convention is a reflection of our values as a nation. It is who we are from the Civil Rights Act to the Voting Rights Act to the ADA. We saw how America responded to horrifying civil rights images--our country met collectively to right a wrong at home and break the back of Jim Crow. Now is the time to step up and meet collectively to help make it right for the millions of Americans with disabilities when they are overseas and for the hundreds of millions of disabled individuals throughout the world. This is one of those moments the Senate was intended to live up to-- and it calls on all of us to provide leadership and find the common ground. The winners of this treaty will not be defined by party or ideology. The winners will be the American people. I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to ensure that the Senate approves the Disabilities Convention during the 112th Congress.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, a number of us have spoken with increasing concern--I think probably most Senators have come to the floor in the course of the last months to express their alarm about the politics that surround big issues in our country that demand action and not partisanship, not acrimony, but which we continue to simply find a way to avoid. We have been artists in the politics of avoidance here in Washington over the course of too long a period now. The debt and the fiscal cliff are obviously perfect examples of where, despite all of the warnings and all of the expert advice we get, Congress is fundamentally stuck in political cement of our own mixing. No one will credibly deny here the existence of the fiscal cliff, the crisis of our budget, the tax system, and so forth. So that, at least as an issue that is avoided, gets a credible amount of words being thrown at it. But there is another issue that, in many ways, is just as serious because of its implications for all that we do on this planet, but which doesn't any longer elicit that kind of concern or expressions of alarm on both sides of the aisle, or from that many Senators. The two words that have described this particular issue over a long period of time now have actually become somewhat words of almost skepticism in many quarters in America, or a kind of shrug, where people say: I don't know what I can do about it. It is not something I ought to worry about. Somebody else will take care of it, or maybe it is not real. Those words are ``climate change.'' Climate change, over the last few years, has regrettably lost credibility in the eyes and ears of the American people because of a concerted campaign of disinformation, a concerted campaign to brand the concept as somehow slightly outside of the mainstream of American political thinking. I have to say it has been a remarkably effective campaign. You can't sit here and say it hasn't worked. Every opportunity to cast a pall on facts with some kind of cockamamie theory has been taken advantage of, and a lot of money has been spent in this process of disinformation and discrediting. People used to joke years and years ago about those who argued that the Earth was flat. For a long period of time, people argued that the Earth was flat, even though the evidence of astronomers and explorers evidenced that it was in fact quite the opposite. So we have, in effect, with respect to climate change in America today what is fundamentally a ``flat Earth caucus''--a bunch of people, some in the U.S. Congress itself, who still argue against all of the science, all of the evidence, that somehow we don't know enough about climate change or that the evidence isn't sufficient or that it is a hoax. We have Members of the Senate who argue it is a hoax. But that is all they do. They make the argument it is a hoax, but they don't present--and they can't--any real, hard, scientific, peer-reviewed evidence to the effect that it is in fact a hoax. The reason they can't is there are 6,000- plus peer-reviewed studies, which is the way science has always been done in America. If you are a scientist and you are a researcher, you do your science and research, and then your analysis is put to the test by your peers in those particular disciplines. They pass on the methodology, the pedagogy by which you arrived at your conclusions. We have more than 6,000 of those kinds of properly peer-reviewed analyses of the science of climate change, and the other side of the ledger has not one--not one, zero--peer-reviewed analysis that says human beings aren't doing this to the atmosphere and that humans are not contributing or the main cause of what is happening in terms of the warming of the surface of the Earth. What has happened is that in America we all know it. We are seeing it in campaigns because of Citizens United. You have these unfathomable amounts of money being thrown into the political system--millionaires and billionaires who plunk down millions of dollars--a $10 million or $20 million check at a whack--and then what is happening is people buy their facts. They create their facts out of whole cloth. As we all have been reminded so many times in the last year, certainly, because of this new debate we are having in America--as our colleague, with whom I was privileged to serve here, Pat Moynihan, reminded us again and again, everyone is entitled to their own opinion in America, but you are not entitled to your own facts. But in fact, in American politics today, that is not true. Apparently, you are, because you can go out and buy them. You can buy some scientist to whom you give some appropriate amount of funds, and he does a study with a particular conclusion that has to be found, and they produce a whole bunch of hurly-burly to surround it and suggest that those are, in fact, facts. The result of this is that over the last year and a half or 2 years, we have had this concerted assault on reason, an assault on science. This isn't the first time in the history of humankind we have been through these things. Galileo was put on trial for his findings and, as we all know, there have been countless periods of time--that is why we went through an Age of Enlightenment, Age of Reason, as people challenged these old precepts that weren't based on fact but were sort of raw belief and/or political interests in some cases, or religious interests in some cases. A handful of Senators here, including Senator Boxer, Senator Whitehouse, Senator Sanders, Senator Lautenberg, the occupant of the chair, and Senator Franken have recently spoken out about this very process by which an incredibly important, legitimate issue of concern to all Americans--to everybody in the world--is being completely sidelined because of the status quo interests of powerful corporations and other interests in America that don't want to change, or some of whom find political advantage in somehow buying into the theory discrediting it. This has not been an issue on which there is a profile of courage by some in the U.S. Congress who are prepared to stand up and say what they know is true, but what has become far more convenient to avoid. I believe the situation we face is as dangerous as any of the sort of real crises that we talk about. Today we had a hearing in the Foreign Relations Committee on the subject of Syria. We all know what is happening with respect to Iran and nuclear weapons, and even the possibility of a war. This issue actually is of as significant a level of importance because it affects life itself on the planet, because it affects ecosystems on which the oceans and land depend for the relationship of the warmth of our Earth and the amount of moisture there is and all of the interactions that occur as a consequence of our climate. It involves our health because of policies that we do or don't choose to pursue with respect to pollution in the air. Pollution didn't used to be a question mark in American politics. We fought that fight in the 1960s and 1970s. Rachel Carson started this enormous movement for reasonableness when she warned Americans they were living next to toxic wells and water that had been polluted by companies that put mercury or other poisons into the Earth, which went down into the water supply, and people got cancer and died. America decided in the early 1970s--with the first Earth Day in 1970 itself, and the actions that Congress took after that in response to the American people--everybody decided we didn't want that pollution in the air. We actually passed legislation in 1972, 1973, and 1974 that created the EPA. America didn't even have an Environmental Protection Agency until Americans said we want to be protected, and the people in Congress responded to that. We passed the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Marine Mammal Protection, Coastal Zone Management, and all of these came about because of an awareness among the American people because they wanted to make a different set of choices or have their politicians do so on their behalf. Now, suddenly, there is an assault on the EPA, the Clean Air Act and, all of a sudden, pollution doesn't matter. That is what we are talking about. Greenhouse gases are, in fact, a pollutant. The particulates that come with that have the same effect on human beings in terms of their breathing, their lungs, the input in some of their food and water, which ultimately impacts cancer, emphysema, and other diseases that come as a consequence of the quality of air we breathe. Yet we have this whole notion now that somehow we have gone too far, that we have done enough, or that the job has been done and we can go home, when, in fact, it is exactly the opposite. With respect to pollution, there are choices, and with respect to health, the single greatest cause of young Americans going to the hospital in the summertime and costing billions of dollars to the American people is environmentally induced asthma. That environmentally induced asthma comes about as a consequence of the ingredients that go into the air. All of this is related. In addition, there is not one person in the Senate who doesn't know that we are still more dependent than we want to be on foreign oil. We are better than we were, and we have made improvements, but we are still more dependent than we want to be on foreign oil. We could be doing better with respect to that if we pursued an intelligent energy policy. We still don't have an energy policy after the years we have been talking about doing it in the Senate and elsewhere. Why is that important to climate change? Because energy policy is the solution to the problem of climate change. If you have an effective energy policy, then you are dealing not only with your independence issues, but with the sources of carbon and other greenhouse gases that are causing the problem today. Twenty years ago this year, I was privileged to go with the Senator from New Jersey, Senator Lautenberg, Senator John Chafee, Senator Al Gore, Senator Wirth, and others, down to Rio, where we took part in the first Earth Summit, which President George Herbert Walker Bush took seriously. To the great credit of George H. W. Bush, he not only sent a delegation, he personally went down there and spoke about the issue. He helped to embrace a forward- leaning idea. I think 160-some nations signed onto an agreement to try to restrain greenhouse gases. That was back in 1992. It was incredible. Here we are, 20 years later, and we could not even get the time for the Senate to send a delegation down there, let alone enough people who thought it was important and of interest. The Earth summit, 20 years later, came and went without any major step forward or progress, and the procrastination continues. Mr. President, today I remember the debate when we came back from Kyoto, in 1998 or so, and we had a debate in the Senate about whether the United States should take part in the Kyoto Treaty. We all know now, as a matter of long history, that we didn't because it was viewed as being too unilateral. In fact, everybody had the question of, what about China? We can't possibly sign up for this because China will not do it, and they will go racing ahead of us and continue to grow their economy at the expense of the United States. Well, Mr. President, guess what. Today China is the leading clean energy producer in the world. China. The United States of America invented the technologies 50 years ago--of solar and wind, renewable energy technologies such as turbines, the transmission, and so forth, and photovoltaics. About 4 years ago, China had about 9 percent of the market. That was 4 years ago. Two years ago, China had 40 percent of the market. Today China has over 70 percent of the global solar market, and the United States, which invented the technology, doesn't have one company in the top 10 solar panel producers, solar energy producers in the world. You know what is happening. Ninety-five percent of what China produces it exports to other countries, including the United States. So here we are, we give up our lead, and we don't get the jobs. Everybody is screaming about jobs. The energy market is a $6 trillion market with about 6 billion users. Just to put that in perspective, the market that created the great wealth of the 1990s in the United States was in fact a $1 trillion market with about 1 billion users. That was the technology market. We saw it with personal computers and with the rest of the telephone communications technology of the 1990s. We didn't even have an Internet in the United States until about 1995 or 1996 when that began to be commercialized. Yet in that short span of time we created more wealth in America than we had ever created at any time in America's history. We created 23 million new jobs because we led in that new industry. Here we are today staring at the potential of this extraordinary industry--the energy market--and we are just sitting on our hands while other countries take it and run with it and grow their economies. We are sitting around saying: Where are the jobs? It is an insult. It is an insult to our intelligence. It is an insult to every American's aspirations about where they would like to see our country go. And the fact is it is not just China, but India, Mexico, Brazil, South Korea, and countless other countries have taken greater advantage of this than the United States. One of the principal reasons we have trouble getting that market moving is we refuse to put a real price on the price of carbon. Carbon has a price. Everything we are doing to our country and to our communities today as a result of pollution is a price we are going to pay. But that price is not subsumed into the price of products, the price of doing business or anything else because we just avoid it altogether. A lot of people here continue, unfortunately, to avoid the science and just not deal with the reality of what is happening. But 2 days ago, Mr. President, in the New York Times, there was a very important op-ed that appeared, written by a well-known climate skeptic Dr. Richard Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley. He has written many times about how he did not believe the science was adequate or had produced it. Let me read his words. This is Dr. Muller: Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in the previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause. That is what this former climate skeptic has said. Bottom line: We need to be armed with the facts, not with empty rhetoric. That is exactly what Dr. Muller set out to do. Let me quote him again: We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data collection selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions. Now, obviously, we all know the future has a hard way of humbling people who try to predict it too precisely, but I have to say, when the science is screaming pretty consistently over a period of 20 years--and not just screaming at us to say it is coming back correctly but that it is coming back with faster results in greater amounts than the scientists predicted--as a matter of human precaution that ought to be an alarm bell and people ought to take note. Here again is what Dr. Muller says: What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. And then he says ominously: But if China continues its rapid economic growth-- And I say, as a matter of parentheses, who doesn't believe China isn't going to do everything in its power to continue its growth path and do what it is doing? So he says: But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds 1 new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years. Less than 20 years, folks. In North Carolina recently State Senators actually voted not to do any planning for the potential of sea level rise, even though scientists today tell us the sea level is rising. Ask insurance companies about what they are thinking in terms of their potential exposure and liability as we look down the road with respect to the disasters that could come as a consequence of these changes. So the plain fact is we have all of the evidence--and I am not going to go through all of it right now, but it is there for colleagues to analyze--countless studies of what is happening in terms of the movement of forests--literally, movement--as it migrates, and species that have left Yellowstone National Park and migrated north. Talk to the park rangers. Talk to the folks in Canada and in Colorado and Montana and other places about the millions of acres of pine trees that have been destroyed by the pine bark beetle that now doesn't die off because it doesn't get as cold as it used to. Talk to people in Canada and in the Northern United States who used to skate on ponds that used to freeze over but that don't freeze over anymore. There are hundreds of examples. Talk to the Audubon Society. Ask them about the reports from their members about certain plants and shrubs and trees that don't grow in the same places they used to. There is a 100-mile swath in the United States now where there has been a migration of things that grow and don't grow. This is going to have a profound impact on agriculture in our country as we go forward if it continues. And I would just share with my colleagues why that is true beyond any scientific doubt. The first scientist who actually wrote something about global climate change was a Swedish scientist by the name of Arrhenius, and he wrote around the turn of the 19th century--1890 or something, I don't remember the year. But he is the guy who first said there was this relationship to the gases trapped in the atmosphere and this thing called the greenhouse effect. In fact, science has now determined to a certainty the reason we can breathe on Earth today, the reason it is warm enough for us to live, the reason life itself exists on Earth is because there is a greenhouse effect. And it is called a greenhouse effect because it behaves just like a greenhouse. The light comes down from the Sun at a very direct angle on many things on Earth and is reflected back from things such as the ice and snow and off roofs and parking lots and other things. But in the ocean and in certain other dark spots it is subsumed into that mass, and it goes back much more opaque than it comes down in its directness. The reason, therefore, for the greenhouse gas is that it doesn't escape. It doesn't break out of the thin veneer of the atmosphere that contains the gases that create the greenhouse effect, which actually creates an average temperature globally of about 57 degrees Fahrenheit. That is why life can exist; we have a greenhouse effect. And it stands to absolute high school, if not elementary-middle school logic, if a certain amount of gases are contained, and there has always been balance to some degree, and you add to that massively and thicken the amount that is there, less heat is going to escape and we wind up augmenting that effect of the greenhouse. Scientists tell us now--and I am not a scientist, but I learned how to listen to them and at least read the science and try to think about it--that in order to keep the temperature of the Earth somewhere near where it is today or within the permissible range of change, we have to keep our greenhouse gases at--originally, they said--450 parts per million. As they then noticed the damage and did more calculation, they came and said: No, 350 parts per million. Why is this important? Because today, as we are here assembled in the Senate, we are now at 397 parts per million. We are above where they say you have to hold it. And worse, without doing anything--and we are not doing anything--we are only adding amounts; we are moving at a rate that will take it up to 500 or 600 parts per million. If that happens, we will be at a tipping point with respect to the amount of temperature change--5 to 7 degrees--and nobody can predict with certainty what happens, except that we know the ice already melting in Greenland and in the Arctic will melt faster and disappear. As more water is exposed, that dark water subsumes more of the heat, and the heat creates greater, more rapid melting. And that is exactly what scientists are seeing in the Arctic and Antarctic today, where whole blocks of ice the size of the State of Rhode Island have broken off and dropped into the sea and floated south to melt. There are dozens of other examples of what is happening. I said I wouldn't go into all of them today. I would just say to my colleagues, please read and challenge the science and talk to the people who are the peer reviewers of these analyses because we have a responsibility here, to future generations and to all of us, to try to get this right. And in the balance of right and wrong, I don't understand the judgment some people are making. We know this is a $6 trillion market. We know that if we were to price carbon, the marketplace would move rapidly toward the kinds of technologies and new job creation that would respond to that pricing and the United States could become a seller of these technologies and a builder of these new energy capacities in various parts of the world. Astonishingly, the United States of America doesn't even have an energy grid. The east coast has an energy grid, the west coast has an energy grid, Texas has its own energy grid, and from Chicago out to the Dakotas, there is sort of an energy grid. But the entire center of the United States is just a great big gaping hole where we don't have any connected energy transmission capacity, and the result is that we can't produce renewable energy down in the four corners of the Southwest--in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and so forth--and sell it to Minnesota in the wintertime or to New England, where we pay a very high price for energy. We can't send energy from one part to the other in the United States of America. It is an insult. We need to build a national energy grid, and in the building of that grid, there are countless jobs to be created for Americans and countless technologies to be developed. For every $1 billion we spend on infrastructure, we put 27,000 to 35,000 people to work. If we passed our infrastructure bank effort here in the Senate, for $10 billion of American taxpayer leverage, we could have $650 billion to $700 billion of infrastructure investment paid for by Chinese investment, by Arab Emirates investment. It wouldn't cost the American taxpayers a dime to be building America and putting people to work. We are not doing it, and we are not even building the energy grid of our Nation. I must say to my colleagues, the avoidance here of responsibility for a whole host of choices we ought to be making--and obviously, yes, it begins with the deficit and the debt, and we can deal with those issues. There isn't a person in the Senate who doesn't understand what the magic formula is going to be to do that. But everybody wants to wait until the end of the election. I got it. But this issue has been waiting and waiting for 20 years now while other countries are stealing our opportunities to be able to be in the marketplace and winning. Nothing screams at us more than the need to have an energy policy for our country that begins to address the realities of climate change, and nothing screams at us more than to tell the truth to the American people about climate change, to stop having it be an unusable word in American politics and not to allow it to become a source of attack and ridicule with nonfacts and a bunch of cockamamie theories that have no foundation in science or in the kind of analysis that does this institution justice. I hope over the course of the next months we can have this fight because nothing less than our economic future--which is, in the end, our greatest strength for our military, for our security, for all of our objectives--that is what is at stake in this effort. I hope we will finally wind up doing what is right.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, what is the parliamentary situation?

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, for the past 47 years, the Older Americans Act, OAA, has provided a wide array of services to improve the lives of older Americans, family caregivers, and persons with disabilities. Through the Act, millions of Americans receive critical home and community-based services including, home-delivered meal programs, transportation, adult day care, legal assistance and health promotion programs. The National Aging Network delivers these vital services to local communities through the Administration on Aging, State Units on Aging, SUAs, and over 600 Area Agencies on Aging, AAAs. The aging network supports a number of health, prevention and wellness programs for older adults, such as, chronic disease self- management programs, alcohol and substance abuse reduction, smoking cessation, weight loss and control, and health screenings. Despite this focus on health promotion, currently, there is no definition of care coordination included in the Older Americans Act. In fact, the unique coordination needed for an older adult with multiple chronic conditions is absent from the definition of the OAA case manager role. The inclusion of care coordination in the OAA is necessary to prepare the aging network for their role in linking medical care to community long-term services and supports. The Affordable Care Act is transforming the health care delivery system through medical home demonstration, Accountable Care Organizations, and the Partnership for Patient-Care Transitions. But to be truly successful, these reforms will require the coordination of care between state and federal health care programs and the aging network. Today, I am introducing the Care Coordination for Older Americans Act, a bill that would integrate care coordination in the long-term services and supports system. My legislation would include a definition of care coordination in the declaration of objectives of the Older Americans Act and would require the aging network to develop and implement a care coordination plan to address the needs of older individuals with multiple chronic illnesses. I would like to thank a number of aging organizations who have been integral to the development of this legislation and who have endorsed it today, including: Aging Services of California, the American Geriatrics Society, the American Society on Aging, the Benjamin Rose Institute on Aging, the Center for Medicare Advocacy, the Consumer Coalition for Quality Health Care, the Easter Seals, The Gerontological Society of America, LeadingAge, the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging, n4a, the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys, the National Association of Nutrition and Aging Services Programs, the National Association of the Professional Geriatric Care Managers, the National Center on Caregiving, the Family Caregiver Alliance, PHI Quality Care through Quality Jobs, the Social Work Leadership Institute / New York Academy of Medicine, and the University of Illinois College of Nursing Institute for Health Care Innovation. In addition, the National Coalition for Care Coordination was pivotal in their assistance developing a definition of care coordination which adequately addresses the needs of the aging network. Since being enacted in 1965, the OAA has evolved over time to meet the ever-changing needs of our aging population. As we work to reauthorize this successful program that has allowed millions of seniors to remain independent in their homes and communities, we should incorporate new initiatives that reflect the current challenges facing seniors, such as the lack of care coordination between health programs and community long-term services and supports. For all of these reasons, I urge my colleagues to cosponsor this important legislation and to support its inclusion in the reauthorization of the OAA.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, for the past 47 years, the Older Americans Act, OAA, has provided a wide array of services to improve the lives of older Americans, family caregivers, and persons with disabilities. Through the Act, millions of Americans receive critical home and community-based services including, home-delivered meal programs, transportation, adult day care, legal assistance and health promotion programs. The National Aging Network delivers these vital services to local communities through the Administration on Aging, State Units on Aging, SUAs, and over 600 Area Agencies on Aging, AAAs. The aging network supports a number of health, prevention and wellness programs for older adults, such as, chronic disease self- management programs, alcohol and substance abuse reduction, smoking cessation, weight loss and control, and health screenings. Despite this focus on health promotion, currently, there is no definition of care coordination included in the Older Americans Act. In fact, the unique coordination needed for an older adult with multiple chronic conditions is absent from the definition of the OAA case manager role. The inclusion of care coordination in the OAA is necessary to prepare the aging network for their role in linking medical care to community long-term services and supports. The Affordable Care Act is transforming the health care delivery system through medical home demonstration, Accountable Care Organizations, and the Partnership for Patient-Care Transitions. But to be truly successful, these reforms will require the coordination of care between state and federal health care programs and the aging network. Today, I am introducing the Care Coordination for Older Americans Act, a bill that would integrate care coordination in the long-term services and supports system. My legislation would include a definition of care coordination in the declaration of objectives of the Older Americans Act and would require the aging network to develop and implement a care coordination plan to address the needs of older individuals with multiple chronic illnesses. I would like to thank a number of aging organizations who have been integral to the development of this legislation and who have endorsed it today, including: Aging Services of California, the American Geriatrics Society, the American Society on Aging, the Benjamin Rose Institute on Aging, the Center for Medicare Advocacy, the Consumer Coalition for Quality Health Care, the Easter Seals, The Gerontological Society of America, LeadingAge, the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging, n4a, the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys, the National Association of Nutrition and Aging Services Programs, the National Association of the Professional Geriatric Care Managers, the National Center on Caregiving, the Family Caregiver Alliance, PHI Quality Care through Quality Jobs, the Social Work Leadership Institute / New York Academy of Medicine, and the University of Illinois College of Nursing Institute for Health Care Innovation. In addition, the National Coalition for Care Coordination was pivotal in their assistance developing a definition of care coordination which adequately addresses the needs of the aging network. Since being enacted in 1965, the OAA has evolved over time to meet the ever-changing needs of our aging population. As we work to reauthorize this successful program that has allowed millions of seniors to remain independent in their homes and communities, we should incorporate new initiatives that reflect the current challenges facing seniors, such as the lack of care coordination between health programs and community long-term services and supports. For all of these reasons, I urge my colleagues to cosponsor this important legislation and to support its inclusion in the reauthorization of the OAA.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, for the Committee on Foreign Relations I report favorably the following nomination lists which were printed in the RECORDS on the dates indicated, and ask unanimous consent, to save the expense of reprinting on the Executive Calendar that these nominations lie at the Secretary's desk for the information of Senators.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, today I can finally congratulate everyone at Massachusetts General Hospital, MGH, on a special and well- deserved distinction long in the making: MGH has been named America's Best Hospital by U.S. News & World Report. I say ``finally'' because I have been patiently keeping my promise not to publicly share the news now these last 6 days since Dr. Slavin called me to pass along the great news in advance. Now he has confirmation that in a Washington, DC, full of leaks, there is at least one U.S. Senator who still knows how to keep a secret. Today's public announcement confirms what all of us in Massachusetts have always known--that if you need to find first-rate care for a loved one with a serious and complicated condition, then you go to the Massachusetts General Hospital. It comes as no surprise to us that this revered Massachusetts institution would hold the honor of best hospital in the Nation. Today's announcement is one two centuries in the making. It started with the dream of Rev. John Bartlett, who in 1810 wanted to establish a state-of-the-art medical facility for the physically and mentally ill which would train the Nation's finest doctors. That dream was carried by Drs. James Jackson and John Collins Warren, who advocated in the Massachusetts Legislature for a charter and collected donations as small as 25 cents and as large as $20,000 to make the dream a reality. Finally, in 1821, the institution currently known as Mass General opened its doors to patients and became the first teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. Since then, MGH has been providing cutting-edge care to patients from all over the world. It was the home to many firsts: the first public demonstration of surgical anesthesia, the identification of appendicitis, the establishment of the first medical social service, and the first replantation of a severed arm by a surgical team. But more than firsts, Mass General has provided a place of hope for all those who needed help. It is the employees of MGH who have made this possible from generation to generation. I have seen on my visits to the hospital that it is the people--the nurses, doctors, orderlies, administrators, security guards, and medical students--who make MGH the Nation's best. I know firsthand of MGH's exceptional work particularly well from two people whose insights mean the world to me: my wife Teresa, who has been a patient at MGH as she was treated for breast cancer, and through my daughter Vanessa, who has made MGH her home as a doctor. Both have shared story after story not just about first-rate care but about deeply caring doctors and nurses and skilled professionals who always put patients first. That is the heart of MGH, and it is no secret that without team members who are constantly looking for the next breakthrough in medicine and a better way to care for patients, tomorrow's innovations would not be possible. It is even more of a testament to the power of MGH's work that they have become the Nation's best hospital in a State with near universal health coverage. We now have the best health care coverage rate in the Nation with 98.1 percent of residents having health insurance, including 99.8 percent of all children. We must continue to raise the bar as we implement the Affordable Care Act and provide this guarantee of coverage nationwide. MGH should serve as a model to all hospitals across the country that you can provide universal coverage while still providing the highest quality care to your patients. I know MGH will remain at the top of this list for years to come because they have proven that covering more patients and providing quality outcomes are not mutually exclusive goals. There is much celebrating to be done in Boston, but there is still much more work to be done to improve the health of all Americans. I am convinced that MGH and our other great institutions in Massachusetts will continue to meet the challenge by setting the standard for delivering the highest quality health care. I congratulate Dr. Peter Slavin, Dr. David Torchiana, and everyone who works at MGH for their efforts in making this hospital the best in the Nation and, I believe, the best in the world.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Senators are permitted to speak on the previously agreed- upon time?

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I appreciate the opportunity to say a few words about the DISCLOSE Act, which we are debating on the floor of the Senate. I have been involved in this issue of campaign finance reform since I first entered politics, when I first became involved in the political discourse of our country in the late 1960s and early 1970s--a long time ago now. With 27 years as a Member of the Senate, I have seen this debate over money in American politics. I have seen it endure its highs and also its lows. Looking back in history, I can remember back in 1990 when we summoned 59 votes in the Senate--mostly Democrats, which will tell you a lot about this issue, and 4 Republicans, including Senators Cohen of Maine; Jeffords of Vermont; McCain of Arizona, who is still here and fighting on this issue; and Senator Pressler from South Dakota. We passed a restraint on spending in American politics, a balanced bill which would have, in fact, required disclosure and limitations on spending, with a certain ability of people to be able to be held harmless if people were millionaires and spent extraordinary amounts of money. It made the playing field in America fair, and it gave the best opportunity for the American citizen--about whom this entire exercise is supposed to be focused--an opportunity to know they were not going to be bombarded with unbelievable amounts of money that distort the American political debate. We thought we had a chance, but unfortunately that bill was vetoed by the President. It is not a coincidence that only four Republicans supported that bill. It is not a coincidence today, as we come to the floor of the Senate, that maybe no Republican or very few--very few, I think is a fair way to say it--will be willing to vote to disclose where our money comes from. We are not even here seeking a limitation on the amount of spending. We ought to be, but we are not. We are here simply trying to get the American people the right to know who is giving the money, who is paying these millions of dollars in order to affect the debate in America and, in most cases, I will tell everyone, frankly, to distort the debate. I believe the amount of money in American politics today is stealing America's democracy. It is robbing Americans of the right to have the kind of representation and the kind of discussion Americans deserve. When I was first here back in 1985, we were working with people such as Bill Bradley from New Jersey and David Boren from Oklahoma and Joe Biden, now the Vice President, obviously, and George Mitchell, the former majority leader and Senator from Maine, all of whom were dedicated to trying to take the big money out of politics and replace it with a public match for Senate and House races. Fundamentally, the status quo won. The status quo stopped us, and the status quo is winning today. In response to the soft money scandals--maybe people have forgotten we had our scandals in the 1990s--we finally passed the McCain-Feingold bill, modest as it was. All it did was put a ban on soft money, the soft money, which is the big amounts of money that get poured into the political system. That ban had the unintended consequence of pushing everybody to look for the biggest loophole they could find, and they found a loophole. The 527 groups, as we have come to know them, came out and the debate was again taken away from the candidates and given to outside groups that had huge amounts of money. A lot of Americans are not aware of that. A candidate could be running and have one thing he or she wants to actually say, but outside groups can come in with enormous amounts of money and completely flood the ability of a candidate to control the message of that particular campaign and certainly have a profound impact on it. Never did we imagine then, however, that with one decision, the Supreme Court would tilt the voice of our democracy and our discourse so heavily in favor of large unaccountable interests at the expense of the average American. That, my friends, is what happened when the Supreme Court made the Citizens United decision, which is certainly the worst decision in 100 years, if not more. What we are talking about today is a system that is simply broken. It is as fundamentally broken as the campaign system in our country has ever been. I worry personally, deeply, about what it has done to our ability to govern in the public interest and what it does today to threaten the ability of this institution to function. In explaining why she is leaving the Senate, our Republican colleague Senator Snowe wrote: This body is not living up to what the Founding Fathers envisioned. She spoke of our Founding Fathers' vision for the Senate, where we could reach consensus in an orderly manner. There is nothing orderly and there is no consensus. Does anyone believe we can make that kind of Senate occur today, given the kind of campaign finance system we have, where all our time--or a huge amount of our time is a fairer way to say it--is spent raising money? I have heard the majority leader and the minority leader complain they can't have Senators here Mondays, Fridays, and other periods of time because everybody is governed by the campaign schedule. We now have secret donors who blow candidates out of the water with on-air distortions that are simply mind-boggling. I lived through many of those distortions in 2004, when I ran for President, so I know what I am talking about when I talk about the power of the lie with a lot of money put behind it. I don't think anybody here believes the amount of money in the system today doesn't have the ability to drown out the voices of people who get into public service in order to get things done but who don't have that kind of money and don't have access to that kind of money. Frankly, the fundamental reason why there is such a disparity between the numbers of Democrats who want to have a fair playing field and the number of Republicans who vote against campaign finance reform is, obviously, they have a lot more money. Corporations have a lot more money, big billionaires who don't want to be taxed in a fair way in America have a lot more money to throw at the system. So we have one guy out in Las Vegas who can put millions of dollars behind a candidate for President and keep a candidacy alive when normally it would have died long ago. The only life it had was the money. That is what happens today. That is not what the Founding Fathers intended for this institution. Ours is a system where billions of dollars can be spent by any millionaire or billionaire or the largest corporations in the world to distort our democracy, diminish the voices of candidates, pollute our airwaves with spending whatever and wherever, and the average American doesn't even get to know where the money is coming from. They have the ability in the United States of America to do it secretly--secretly. It is secret money. The sources are unspecified and the American people don't know who is behind it. I think it is an insult to the freedom every Senator extols the virtues of all the time in this Senate. It is an insult to the notion regarding our liberty and our equality and our fairness. It violates the rules of honorable discourse and debate, and it is a threat to every single public servant running for office in this Nation because it means their ideas can be drowned by the dollars. I got an e-mail the other day from somebody in another country who e- mailed me and said: You guys are beginning to look like the oligarchies of the world, where the amounts of money buy anything they want. The increased influence of special interest money, big money in our politics is robbing the average citizen of their ability to be able to set the agenda. The agenda is set by the money because the money is what runs the campaigns. As a result of the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United, all any CEO or billionaire has to do is turn over billions of dollars to somebody who goes out and runs a media campaign. Senator McCain, as we all know, feels passionately about this issue. He recently said: ``I think there will be scandals associated with the worst decision of the United States Supreme Court in the 21st century.'' I agree with Senator McCain. There already are scandals, but not everybody sees them. But I will tell you this, a lot of Senators know exactly what they are. This imbalance we have will result in escalating media wars, where candidates are reduced to mere proxies in the process. Somewhere, at some time, those winning candidates are going to be asked to pay up on some special interest need or to tow the line on an agenda that is set by a kind of new terror that enters into our politics. All one has to do is think about the trajectory we are on today. Will Rogers once said that ``politics has gotten so expensive that it takes a lot of money to even get beat with.'' That has never been more true. Will Rogers would be stunned by the amount of money in politics today. In 2008, a record total of $5.2 billion was spent in Presidential, Senate, and House races. That broke the 2004 record the year I ran of $4.1 billion, and that broke the 2000 record of $3.1 billion. In other words, every single year more and more money. But now, in 2010, in the first campaign after Citizens United, there was a fourfold increase in the expenditures from super PACs and other outside groups compared to 2006--fourfold increase--in a 2-year period of time. Anonymous spending--anonymous spending--rose from 1 percent of the outside spending to 44 percent in a 2-year period of time. That is what we get when the Supreme Court of the United States rules in a 5-to-4 decision--one vote--that corporations and big interests have the same rights to speech as individuals. I mean it is stupefying to think about it. I remember from law school that a corporation was a fictitious entity--a fictitious entity--created to provide a veil of protection for the people who form it in order to permit commerce in America. Nobody ever created a corporation with the notion it would have the same rights as a person. Corporations don't get married. They don't have kids. They don't cry. Sometimes, I suppose, when Wall Street falls apart, a few people may. But the notion that somehow corporations can have the same rights of people is an insult to the drafters of the Constitution of our country and the corollary that somehow they, therefore, get to spend the same amount of money in an election cycle as an individual. As a result, we are now seeing a spending blitz by shadowy groups that is projected to reach billions of dollars--money that is impossible to trace to its source, money that is kept in shadows, away from the average American's ability even to ask who is paying the bills for those ads, who is behind those ads, whose interests do those ads represent? The sums of money we are talking about will mean little to the corporations compared to what they may get in return, and that is what this is all about: blocking legislation, blocking a regulation, preventing a change in the tax law that takes away a preference that has no relationship to today's economy. There are hundreds of examples, and I have seen them through the years, where money drives the agenda of the Congress and of our politics, way in excess of what it ought to be when we measure it against the real concerns of the average family trying to make ends meet or find a job in America. Today, we will vote on a bill--a vote that ought to go unopposed by any Member of this institution who swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States--and this vote could go a long way toward making the fight between the public interest and corporate interest, if not fair, at least transparent. The American people are smart and, given that opportunity, will begin to make some judgments about exactly what is at stake. The DISCLOSE Act is not an act to amend the Constitution. It doesn't even overturn the decision of the Supreme Court that equated the right of corporations to people, nor does it constitute campaign finance reform. It is none of those things. Those would be structural solutions. I, frankly, am for them. I think we ought to do them. I think we need a constitutional amendment at this point in order to rectify what the Supreme Court has had difficulty discerning. But all the DISCLOSE Act would do is shed light on who is giving money-- transparency. This bill ought to receive unanimous support. It is an effort to shine the disinfectant of sunlight on corporations and faceless organizations trying to buy and bully their way into influence in Washington through campaigns that are run against the Members who disagree with them. All we need to do is look at the amount of money that has been spent against some of our colleagues who are running this year--millions of dollars dumped in anonymously in these States to try to affect those races. In short, the DISCLOSE Act requires corporations, organizations, and special interest groups to disclose their political advertising just like a candidate for office does. That is all it requires. What could be more normal in America, what could be more American than allowing the American people to know who is trying to speak to them? I don't think it is radical, and I don't think it is prohibitive. It simply removes the fallacy that Americans are voluntarily somehow organizing to pursue some public interest. That is a farce. That is not what is happening in these instances. The truth is that Americans aren't organizing or mobilizing to bring you the vast percentage of the advertisements that are seen on TV. The truth is that corporate special interest money is being compiled and targeted to pursue a special interest and send a loud televised message to those who disagree with them that they are going to be punished and tempered. And not only is it going to tip elections, it is going to cripple the legislative process. When the Citizens United decision was handed down, the voices that were seeking corporate largess said at that time that it is not going to have any impact. They said we need not worry about funneling new funds to candidates. But the truth is that Karl Rove has admitted that based on the Citizens United decision, he formed two new groups to influence the 2010 elections with $52 million worth of ads bankrolled anonymously by special interests. And now that the Supreme Court has opened that door to these anonymous ads, similar groups are already planning to spend approximately $300 million on the election this fall. So whether or not you agree with the message those ads and organizations are sending, at a minimum you ought to support the idea that these messages should be sent openly and that those who send them ought to be held accountable. As I have said before, this ought to be something every U.S. Senator supports. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, I have the privilege of trying to press our interests in many different parts of the world, and I meet with people in various parts of the world who look back at us and ask a lot of questions of us about our democracy. Increasingly, people are asking whether the United States of America can deliver. Increasingly, people are looking at us incredulously and questioning our political system because we go to the brink over a default on the debt ceiling or because we can't get a budget passed because we don't do the fundamental business. And one of the most profound reasons we don't do that--and I have seen it change here--is that the power of the money, the power to influence the election has a profound impact on what colleagues are prepared to take up, what they are prepared to vote on, and how they are prepared to vote. It is a dollarocracy that is beginning to call the shots, and the American people know it. That is why they are so disappointed in what is happening--or not happening--in Washington, DC. That is why the ratings for the U.S. Congress are so low--because it doesn't produce, it can't produce, it won't produce. And the money almost guarantees that. This is not a new fight in our country. Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, fought this fight in the early 1900s, and he took on the great malefactors of wealth, he took on the concentration of power, and he was the great trust buster. It was an extraordinary period of time in America confronting power. Back in 1910, in Osawatomie, KS, Teddy Roosevelt said: The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. He urged his listeners again and again to demand an especially national restraint upon unfair money-getting, as he called it, and the absence of that restraint, he noted, has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. What Teddy Roosevelt said in 1910 is perhaps even more true today. The reason is that during the 1990s and subsequently, we have created greater wealth in America than during the period when we did not have an income tax. People today are wealthier, comparatively, than the Pierponts, the Morgans, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Mellons, and all of those famous names of the 1900s who helped build this country. Today, the wealth far exceeds that wealth, and the disparity between the average American and the wealthy has grown wider and wider than at any other time in American history. While the average American family sees their income getting squeezed and going down, the upper 1 percent has seen 10, 20, 30 times increases in their income. And that is what is playing out in the American political system today in this Citizens United decision. All we ask today--although we ought to be asking for more. We know we can't get it now, but at least we ought to be able to get the ability of the American people to know who is putting the money into the system, who is trying to affect these votes, who is trying to set the agenda, whose interests are really at stake. That is what is at stake in this vote today, and I hope all our colleagues will vote for the right to disclose those funds to the American people, who have an inalienable right to know exactly from where they are coming.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, what is the parliamentary situation?

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I rise today along with my colleagues from Florida and Maryland, Senator Rubio and Senator Cardin, to introduce the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review Act of 2012. This legislation demonstrates Congress's commitment to strengthening the accountability and effectiveness of our foreign aid programs. With the United States facing critical foreign policy and development priorities worldwide, it is vital that we update our foreign aid programs to reflect the new challenges of the 21st century. The first-ever quadrennial review on diplomacy and development provided an important roadmap for increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of our diplomatic and development agencies. I applaud Secretary Clinton for her leadership in bringing this valuable planning tool to the State Department. The purpose of our bill is straightforward: In keeping with the practice of undertaking quadrennial reviews by various departments, including the Department of Defense, it creates the statutory basis for conducting periodically scheduled reviews to guide the mission of the State Department and USAID. The Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review Act will strengthen our diplomacy and development efforts in several key ways. Let me cite just a few specifically: First, this bill clarifies the measures by which we assess and evaluate our diplomacy and development efforts. Developing clear metrics will further the effective and results-oriented diplomacy and development efforts that I view as essential for protecting and advancing our national security interests. Second, this bill will focus our diplomacy and development efforts in the most effective ways possible, getting the biggest bang for our scarce foreign assistance dollars. Third, it will help ensure that Congress and the Administration, working together, can set clear priorities for diplomacy and development. As we face multiple crises and major challenges, setting priorities will be absolutely critical to our shared success going forward. We must continue to foster inclusive and sustainable economic growth and vibrant civil societies. We must also focus on areas where we have comparative strengths, including public health, humanitarian aid and food security. Fourth, this bill will put our diplomacy and development efforts on a sustainable path. It streamlines the process for working with the Department of Defense and it will help us bring all the tools of the United States government to bear in meeting the complex challenges of this new century. Finally, we all know that we need to strengthen our professional diplomatic expertise and capacity, target our investments and untie the hands of our aid workers. The QDDR process and our bill provides the Secretary and President with a comprehensive and analytically sound basis for doing just that. Returning diplomacy and development to their rightful place cannot be achieved through words alone. This legislation translates words into deeds. And if that helps promote U.S. national security interests and keeps us safe, as I believe it will, then it's time and effort well spent.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I rise today along with my colleagues from Florida and Maryland, Senator Rubio and Senator Cardin, to introduce the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review Act of 2012. This legislation demonstrates Congress's commitment to strengthening the accountability and effectiveness of our foreign aid programs. With the United States facing critical foreign policy and development priorities worldwide, it is vital that we update our foreign aid programs to reflect the new challenges of the 21st century. The first-ever quadrennial review on diplomacy and development provided an important roadmap for increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of our diplomatic and development agencies. I applaud Secretary Clinton for her leadership in bringing this valuable planning tool to the State Department. The purpose of our bill is straightforward: In keeping with the practice of undertaking quadrennial reviews by various departments, including the Department of Defense, it creates the statutory basis for conducting periodically scheduled reviews to guide the mission of the State Department and USAID. The Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review Act will strengthen our diplomacy and development efforts in several key ways. Let me cite just a few specifically: First, this bill clarifies the measures by which we assess and evaluate our diplomacy and development efforts. Developing clear metrics will further the effective and results-oriented diplomacy and development efforts that I view as essential for protecting and advancing our national security interests. Second, this bill will focus our diplomacy and development efforts in the most effective ways possible, getting the biggest bang for our scarce foreign assistance dollars. Third, it will help ensure that Congress and the Administration, working together, can set clear priorities for diplomacy and development. As we face multiple crises and major challenges, setting priorities will be absolutely critical to our shared success going forward. We must continue to foster inclusive and sustainable economic growth and vibrant civil societies. We must also focus on areas where we have comparative strengths, including public health, humanitarian aid and food security. Fourth, this bill will put our diplomacy and development efforts on a sustainable path. It streamlines the process for working with the Department of Defense and it will help us bring all the tools of the United States government to bear in meeting the complex challenges of this new century. Finally, we all know that we need to strengthen our professional diplomatic expertise and capacity, target our investments and untie the hands of our aid workers. The QDDR process and our bill provides the Secretary and President with a comprehensive and analytically sound basis for doing just that. Returning diplomacy and development to their rightful place cannot be achieved through words alone. This legislation translates words into deeds. And if that helps promote U.S. national security interests and keeps us safe, as I believe it will, then it's time and effort well spent.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Madam President, I talked about this phenomenon yesterday on the Senate floor, and today we have even more evidence of what I was talking about: a reckless assault on our environment given new life by the resolution before the Senate today. We are being asked to sacrifice the health of men, women, and children, all for the sake of the coal industry, a move that makes people sicker, denying Americans their right to a healthy environment to live in and raise their children. No one who cares about the health of our citizens, the health of our economy, and the health of our planet should support this resolution. They should be outraged that we are even having this kind of debate. The Congressional Review Act resolution before us would eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency's mercury and air toxics standards, or MATS, for powerplants. Let's be clear what that means. It means the EPA would be prevented from adopting meaningful replacement standards to protect Americans from mercury and some 80 other toxic air pollutants that cause cancer and other health hazards. Let me repeat. These pollutants are known to cause cancer and other health hazards. The science is unequivocal and has been for years mercury is a known neurotoxin that can have a devastating effect on the brain and nervous system of a developing child, reducing IQ and impairing the ability to learn. We know the effects of mercury, and we know its source. Coal and oil- based powerplants constitute the largest manmade source of mercury emissions in the United States--they are responsible for half of the mercury emissions in America. They also emit more than 75 percent of the acid gas emissions and 25 percent of toxic metals lead, arsenic, chromium, nickel. We are talking about some really toxic pollution that is known or suspected to cause cancer and cardiovascular disease, damage to the eyes, skin, and lungs. It can even kill. Under EPA's MATS, utilities will be regulated for mercury and these other toxics for the first time in our Nation's history. These standards are more than a decade overdue, so it is way past time to end the free ride the polluters have been enjoying. Now, I understand my colleagues are peddling the message that the EPA is waging a ``war on coal.'' But they are just trying to distract us from the facts, and the fact is the EPA is simply doing its job and following the law. It is no more complicated than that. There is no conspiracy and no secret agenda. Their job is to protect Americans, and that is exactly what they are doing. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate emissions of mercury and other hazardous air pollutants. The EPA employs a process that requires the use of ``maximum achievable control technology.'' In other words, the standards are feasible, they are based on what industry leaders are already doing. EPA estimates more than half of coal-fired units have equipment installed that can help meet the standards. Roughly 55 percent of our electricity is from nuclear, natural gas, and renewable energy sources, and they are not subject to the rule's provisions. And for those that need more time to comply, EPA allows them up to 4 years. It is beyond reasonable. And this is hardly a ``war on coal.'' MATS will reduce mercury emissions from powerplants by more than 90 percent, acid gases by 88 percent, and reduce emissions of more than 80 air toxics. It will also significantly reduce particulate matter, or PM, emissions that can trigger asthma attacks and damage the lungs. In fact, the combined health benefits are staggering. Beginning in 2016, EPA estimates that the standard would prevent each year 11,000 premature deaths, 4,700 heart attacks, 130,000 asthma attacks, 5,700 hospital and ER visits, and 540,000 missed work and school days. Let me bring these numbers a little closer to home. EPA estimates MATS would prevent 130 premature deaths each year and up to $1.1 billion in health benefits in 2016. In total, annual estimated benefits are $37 to $90 billion compared to compliance costs of $9.6 billion. That is an amazing return on investment--for every dollar spent, we will realize $3 to $6 in health benefits. As a member of the Senate, it is my responsibility to make sure that the children of Massachusetts begin life with a fair shot, and it is my duty to protect the most susceptible, including the 128,000 kids and 531,000 adults with asthma in my home State. To put this issue in focus, one of my constituents, the mother of an asthmatic girl, has said: ``Any person who would say that EPA should be eliminated or its ability to regulate reduced should have to sit in the emergency room holding the hand of a child who can't breathe.'' Some Senators argue that the EPA standard is a job killer. Not true. The fact is it will create 46,000 short-term construction jobs and 8,000 long-term jobs in the utility sector to help build, install, and then operate emissions control equipment. Some Senators say the rule requires too much, too fast. Not true. Look, the rule has been more than a decade in the making. Any shrewd businessperson would see the writing on the wall and develop their business plan accordingly. And many utility companies already have acted accordingly. Some Senators say it costs too much to comply and will shut down powerplants, that these rules combined with others will threaten the reliability of the energy grid and dramatically increasing energy costs for consumers. Not true. Numerous reports from EPA, DOE, and CRS state otherwise. According to CRS, ``almost all of the capacity reductions (from the rule) will occur in areas that have substantial reserve margins. . . The final rule includes provisions aimed at providing additional time for compliance if it is needed to install pollution controls or add new capacity to ensure reliability in specific areas. As a result, it is unlikely that electric reliability will be harmed by the rule.'' And in terms of the rule's actual impact on the economy, it is likely to be extremely limited. The retail price of electricity is on average estimated to increase about 3 percent, mainly due to the increase in demand for natural gas. This seems a small price to pay for the massive health and economic benefits I have already highlighted. We should understand that if we pass this CRA today, we are not guaranteed a do-over. The CRA explicitly prevents EPA from developing a rule to regulate mercury and air toxics from powerplants that is ``substantially the same'' as the invalidated rule. Translation: It would be nearly impossible for EPA to develop another rule to regulate these pollutants. Industry would have you believe otherwise so that you can vote to pass the CRA with a clear conscience. It is a disingenuous effort, and I sincerely hope that my colleagues will see through it. Mr. President, it is tragic that polluters want to deny a right as basic as clean, healthy air. And it is tragic that anyone, especially a member of the Senate, would refuse to protect even children and the unborn from poisons. I urge the Senate to turn back this political assault on our environment and support standards that will do so much good for so many Americans. Anything else would be turning our backs on the people we are here to serve.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, there is much to counter that, but we do not have the time to do it. But I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. KERRY. I call up amendment No. 2454, my amendment together with Senator Lugar.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, the Kerry-Lugar amendment is a side-by-side amendment, frankly, which will counter the amendment of the Senator from Arizona, Mr. Kyl. We all join in abhorring the conduct of the Government of North Korea. Nobody contests that. The question here is whether we want to have a complete prohibition on any humanitarian assistance, without the possibility of a Presidential waiver in the event that the President, as a matter of national policy, as a matter of our humanitarian policy, decides that something has changed in North Korea or there is behavior that has been altered by North Korea, as in Burma. If we don't have a Presidential waiver, the Kyl amendment permanently locks in--until there is other congressional action--a complete prohibition on any humanitarian assistance to the people--not the government but the people, the children and families of North Korea. Ronald Reagan said very clearly that ``a hungry child knows no politics.'' I believe we ought to uphold that principle and have the Presidential waiver in this particular case.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, there is an important distinction here. If you are going to provide humanitarian assistance in some circumstance, and the administration made good on its promise to do that, it is hard to separate it from the events as they are going forward that you do not control. No matter who is President, the Senate should not tie the hands of any President with respect to this policy. Ronald Reagan said it best when he said very clearly that ``a hungry child knows no politics.'' That was Ronald Reagan's policy. That is the policy of churches all across our country. The fact is that if the Kyl amendment were to pass, you will have tied the hands of any President on a sensitive national security issue where the President deserves that kind of flexibility. Without a national interest waiver, you lock into place a prohibition in North Korea. What happens if suddenly you had a change, as in Burma? You would be locked in and unable to respond to it.

Mr. KERRY. You would take away the option of the President. In the case of Burma or other places, the President has shown the flexibility. The President ought to have the flexibility here. I hope we will not have a total prohibition on humanitarian assistance.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I would ask I be notified when I have consumed about 25 minutes.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, 20 years ago this month, a Republican President of the United States helped bring together all of the world's largest economies in Rio, in Brazil, to confront the issue of global climate change. The President was unequivocal about the mission. George Herbert Walker Bush said simply: The United States fully intends to be the world's preeminent leader in protecting the global environment. We have been that for many years. We will remain so. We believe that environment and development . . . can and should go hand in hand. A growing economy creates the resources necessary for environmental protection, and environmental protection makes growth sustainable over the long term. When he was asked about his own target for subsequent meetings of the global stakeholders, President Bush could not have been more clear. He said the United States ``will be there with specific plans, prepared to share, but more important, that others who have signed these documents ought to have specific plans. So I think this is a leadership role. We are challenging them to come forward. We will be there. I think the Third World and others are entitled to know that the commitments made are going to be commitments kept.'' That was the President of the United States speaking on behalf of our Nation and indeed the aspirations of the world 20 years ago. How dramatic and sad it is that 20 years later, shockingly we find ourselves in a strange and dangerous place on this issue, a place this former President probably would not even recognize. Thomas Paine actually described today's situation very well. As America fought for its independence, he said: ``It is an affront to treat falsehood with complaisance.'' Yet when it comes to the challenge of climate change, the falsehood of today's naysayers is only matched by the complacency indifference of our political system. It is well past time that we actually heed Thomas Paine's admonition and reaffirm the commitment first made by President George Herbert Walker Bush. As a matter of conscience and common sense, we should fight today's insidious conspiracy of silence on climate change, a silence that empowers misinformation and mythology to grow where science and truth should prevail. It is a conspiracy that has not just installed but demonized any constructive effort to put America in a position to lead the world on this issue, as President Bush promised we would, and as Americans have a right to expect we will. The danger we face could not be more real. In the United States, a calculated campaign of disinformation has steadily beaten back the consensus momentum for action on climate change and replaced it with timidity by proponents in the face of millions of dollars of phony, contrived talking points, illogical and wholly unscientific propositions, and a general scorn for the truth wrapped in false threats about job loss and tax increases. Yet today the naysayers escape all accountability to the truth. The media hardly murmurs when a candidate for President of the United States, in 2012, can walk away from previously held positions and blithely announce that the evidence is not yet there about the impact of greenhouse gasses on climate. The truth is scientists have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses trap heat in our atmosphere. With the right amount of those gasses, the Earth is a hospitable place for us to live. It is, indeed, the greenhouse effect that makes life possible on Earth. But if too much is added, which is what we are doing now at a record pace, temperatures inevitably rise to record-breaking levels. It is not rocket science. Every major national science academy in the world has reported that global warming is real. It is nothing less than shocking when people in a position of authority can just stand up and say, without documentation, without accepted scientific research, without peer- reviewed analysis, just stand up and say: Oh, there is not enough evidence, and they say it because it suits their political purposes to serve some interest that does not want to change the status quo. Facts that beg for an unprecedented public response are met with unsubstantiated, even totally contradicted denial. Those who deny the facts have never, ever met their de minimus responsibility to provide some scientific answer to what, if not human behavior, is causing the increase in greenhouse gas particulates and how, if not by curbing greenhouse gases, we will address this crisis. In fact, when one measures the effect of taking action versus not taking action, the naysayers' case is even more confounding. Just think about it. If the proponents of action were somehow incorrect, contrary to all that science declares, but, nevertheless, if they were incorrect and we proceeded to reduce carbon and other gases released in the atmosphere, what is the worst that would happen? Well, under that scenario the worst would be more jobs as we move to the new energy economy, the opening of a whole new $6 trillion energy market with a more sustainable policy, a healthier population because of cleaner air and reduced pollution, reduced expenditures on health care because of environmentally induced disease, an improved outlook for the oceans and the ecosystems that are affected by pollution falling to the Earth and into the sea, and surely greater security for the United States because of less dependence on foreign sources of energy and a stronger economy. That is the worst that would occur if the proponents were wrong. But what if the naysayers are, in fact, wrong, as all the science says they are? What if because of their ignorance we fail to take the action we should? What is the worst then? The worst then is sheer, utter disaster for the planet and for all who inhabit it. So whose ``worst'' would most thinking people rather endure? The level of dissembling--of outright falsifying of information, of greedy appeal to fear tactics that has stalled meaningful action now for 20 years--is hard to wrap one's mind around. It is so far removed from legitimate analysis that it confounds for its devilishly simple appeal to the lowest common denominator of disinformation. In the face of a massive and growing body of scientific evidence that says catastrophic climate change is knocking at our door, the naysayers just happily tell us: Climate change does not exist. In the face of melting glaciers and ice caps in the Arctic, Greenland, and Antarctica, they say we need to ``warm up to the truth.'' And in the face of animals disappearing at alarming rates, species being destroyed, they would have us adopt an ostrich policy and just bury our heads in the sand and pretend it can go away. Just last week, a group of State senators in North Carolina passed a bill that bans planning for rising sea levels when creating rules for housing developments and infrastructure in coastal communities. Jeffress Williams is the lead author of the U.S. National Climate Assessment Report. Ask him what he thinks about his legislation, and he will tell you it is ``not based on sound science.'' That is an understatement. But somehow the State senators who voted for this bill know better. Al Gore spoke of the ``assault on reason.'' Well, exhibit A is staring us in the face: coalitions of politicians and special interests that peddle science fiction over scientific fact, a paid-for, multimillion-dollar effort that twists and turns the evidence until it is gnarled beyond recognition, and tidal waves of cash that back a status quo of recklessness and inaction over responsibility and change. In short, we are living through a story of disgraceful denial, backpedaling, and delay that has brought us perilously close to a climate change catastrophe. Nothing underscores this Orwellian twist of logic more than the facts surrounding the now well negatively branded cap and trade program. Cap and trade was a Republican-inspired idea during the debate over ozone and the Montreal Protocol in the 1980s. It was actually inspired by conservatives looking for the least command and control, the least government-regulated way to meet pollution standards. It was implemented and it worked, and it is still working. But, lo and behold, when the strategists for the political right decided to make it a target because Democrats were leading the charge to address climate change, suddenly this free market mechanism was transformed into ``cap and tax'' and ``job killing tax.'' And guess who. Coal. Coal, the leading carbon polluter was leading the funding for those efforts. What is worse, we have all stood by and let it happen. We have treated falsehood with complacence and allowed a conspiracy of silence on climate change to infiltrate our politics. Believe me, we have had our chances to act in these last years. But every time we get close to achieving something big for our country, small-minded appeals to the politics of the moment block the way. The conspiracy of silence that now characterizes Washington's handling of the climate issue is, in fact, dangerous. Climate change is one of two or three of the most serious threats that our country now faces, if not, in some people's minds, the most serious. The silence that has enveloped the once robust debate is staggering for its irresponsibility. The cost of inaction gets more and more expensive the longer we wait, and the longer we wait, the less likely we are to avoid the worst and to leave future generations with a sustainable planet. In many cases what we are talking about is vast sums of money funneled into gas-guzzling industries and coal-fired powerplants. We are talking about pollution--pollution on a wide scale, the kind of dirty, thick suffocating smog that poisons our rivers, advances chronic disease like asthma, lung cancer, and creates billions in hospital costs and lost economic opportunity. It is the same pollution that Rachel Carson warned us about in ``Silent Spring'' when she said: Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal? Well, today we do live in a world where there is an absurdity in the air, and it has complacence written all over it. Fish are dying in water polluted with pesticides. Roadless forests are being threatened by indiscriminate drilling. Industrial chemicals are sweeping into all of us. Young children are born with a burden of chemicals unprecedented in their amount. The burning of fossil fuels has overloaded our ecosystems with nitrogen and ravaged our plant life. Just go out and look at the forests and look at the change in the topography of our country. Bottom line: We have substituted fantasy for reason, sheer whimsy for proven epidemiology, and it is wreaking havoc on our environment. You do not have to take my word for it. I am confident a lot of our colleagues will not. But you can see it across the planet with your eyes. Ice caps are melting; seas are rising; deserts are expanding; storms are more frequent, more violent, more destructive; pollution, famine, natural disasters, killing millions of people every year. These are changes that many experts thought were still years down the line, but climate change is now radically altering our planet at a rate much faster than the scientists or even the pessimists expected. All you need to do is look out your window. We just had the warmest March on record for the contiguous United States. The naysayers will tell us that one hot year does not prove global warming. But just look at this chart which charts the acceleration of warming in the United States after 1970. This is not an anomaly. It is a giant step in the wrong direction, and 2010 was the hottest year on record. The last decade was the hottest decade since we have started recording the weather. April, May, and June of this year are already continuing the trend. For the first time in memory, the Augusta National azaleas bloomed and wilted before the first golfers teed off at this year's Masters. At the Boston Marathon, temperatures hit 89 degrees in April, more than 30 degrees higher than the average. People talk about official jackets and gloves and coffee? Who are you kidding? They are talking about hats and sunscreen and Gatorade and medical tents that were filled with heat- exhausted runners starting at mile 10 of the 26-mile course from Hopkinton into Boston. I have been working to connect the dots on this issue for a long time. In 1988, 24 years ago, on an already hot June day, Al Gore and I took part in the first hearings on climate change in the Senate with Jim Hansen, who testified then that the threat was real, that climate change was already happening in our country--24 years ago. Four years later, we joined a delegation of Senators to attend the first Earth Summit in Rio, where we worked with 171 other nations to put into place a voluntary framework on climate change and greenhouse gas reductions. Back in 1992, we all came together for a simple reason: We accepted the science. President George H.W. Bush personally traveled to the climate change talks in Rio to help plant the seeds of this new beginning. We knew the road ahead would be long, but we also knew this was a watershed moment; that it created the grassroots momentum that made people sit up and start to listen and understand the damage we were doing to the environment. Sit up and listen they did. The principles that came out of Rio transformed into a mandatory requirement under the Kyoto Protocol. Each of the developed nations accepted its own target goal. The European Union reduction would be 8 percent and Japan's would be 6 percent and so on. We were thinking big back then, and our goal was to reach a total decrease in global emissions of 5.2 percent below the 1990 levels and reach it by 2010. Well, 2010 has come and gone and so, too, have the targets. We all know the story: Global political leadership was distracted or absent. International negotiations in Buenos Aires and The Hague turned tense. The less-developed nations saw the targets and timetables for greenhouse gas reductions as a Western market conspiracy. Then there were trumped up, industry-funded so-called studies that challenged the scientific assertions for climate change scenarios. Looking back, it is not hard to understand why the final agreement got sidetracked in the Senate. After all, the developing countries were excluded from the treaty's reduction targets, even though it had already become clear by then that China and India were significant enough as industrial powers that to exempt them entirely would be a mistake. Nations left out were deemed capable of undoing all the reductions that would have been achieved by the developed nations. It is no wonder people were reluctant, no wonder American companies were understandably reluctant to put themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Many in Congress had not yet digested the science of climate change, even though we knew climate scientists were already studying the phenomenon of greenhouse gases. The question is not whether the Kyoto treaty had flaws; the question is whether we got the fundamentals right. I believe the evidence is overwhelming, beyond any reasonable doubt, that we did. As I remind my colleagues, the view from 2012 is a whole lot different from 1992. Countries such as China, South Africa, Brazil, and South Korea have now made far-reaching choices to reshape their economies and move forward in a new and very different global area. Take China. China is already outspending the United States three to one on public clean energy projects. In the last year alone, China accounted for almost one- fifth of the renewable energy investments, with the United States and Germany trailing behind. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy, said it best: For centuries, America has led the world in innovation. Today, that leadership is at risk. Our indifference to climate change is putting America's economy and leadership, with respect to economics and the future of energy policy, at risk. So the United States is now the laggard. We are missing out on achieving sustained economic growth by securing enduring competitive advantage through innovation. The facts speak for themselves. Today's energy economy is a $6 trillion market, with 4 billion users worldwide, growing to 9 billion in the next 40 years. By comparison, the market that made people so wealthy in 1990s in America and created 23 million new jobs and lifted everybody was a $1 trillion market with only 1 billion users. This is $6 trillion with 4 billion users today. The fact is it is projected to grow to a $2.3 trillion market in the year 2020. America needs to get into this. We need to get our skin in the game or we are going to miss the market of the future--if not miss the future itself. We would be delusional to believe China, given the evidence, or any of our other competitors are going to sit on the sidelines and let this market opportunity fall through the cracks. They are not doing it now and they will not do it in the future. Only the United States is sitting there with an indifference toward these alternatives and the renewable possibilities. I realize some will argue we cannot afford to address climate change in these tough economic times. Frankly, nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could be more self-defeating. We will recover from this slowdown. When we do, we need to emerge as the world leader in the new energy economy. That will be a crucial part of restoring America as a nation in a way that honors the hard work and innovation and measures prosperity in those terms. Anyone who worries whether this is the right moment to tackle climate change should understand we can't afford not to do this now at the risk of our economic future. It is now that the most critical trends and facts actually all point in the wrong direction. The CO2 emissions that caused climate change grew at a rate four times faster in the first decade of this new century than in the 1990s. Several years ago, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a series of projections for global initiatives. Based on the likely projections of energy and land-use patterns, today our emissions have actually moved beyond--this chart shows the emissions are going up from the 1960s all the way through to 2010. Today, we have moved beyond the worst-case scenarios that were predicted by all the modeling that was done by the IPCC. Meanwhile, our oceans and forests, which act as the natural repositories of CO2, are losing their ability to absorb more carbon dioxide. This means the effects of climate change are being felt even more powerfully than expected, faster than was expected. The plain fact is there isn't a nation on the planet that has escaped the steady onslaught of climate change. When the desert is creeping into east Africa and ever more scarce resources push farmers and herders into deadly conflict, that is a matter of shared security for all of us. When the people of the Maldives are forced to abandon a place they have called home for hundreds of years, it is a stain on our collective conscience and a moral challenge to each of us. When our own grandchildren risk growing up in a world we can't recognize and don't want to, in the long shadow of a global failure to cooperate, then, clearly, urgently, profoundly, we need to do better. Frankly, those who look for any excuse to continue challenging the science have a fundamental responsibility they have never fulfilled: Prove us wrong or stand down. Show with some science how this theory, in fact, is not being borne out. Prove that the pollution we put into the atmosphere is not having the harmful effects we know it is and that the science says it is. Tell us where the gases go and what they do if they don't do what the scientists are telling us they do. Pony up one single cogent, legitimate, scholarly analysis. Prove that the ocean isn't actually rising. Prove that the icecaps aren't melting or that deserts aren't expanding. Prove, above all, that human beings don't have anything to do with it. I will tell you here right now, they cannot do it. They have not done it and they can't do it. There are over 6,000 peer-reviewed articles, all of which document clearly, irrefutably the ways in which mankind is contributing to this problem. Sure, we know the naysayers have their bought studies that don't stand up to scientific review and a few scientists who trade in doubt and misdirection about things such as Sun spots and clouds. But there is not a single credible scientist who can argue and withstand the peer review that climate change isn't happening. In fact, even the naysayers are starting to come around, in their judgment. Just this year, a well-known climate skeptic, Dr. Richard Mueller, released a series of reports that were funded in part by the Koch brothers. Dr. Mueller thought his results were going to show something different than all the other climate studies, and what he found was not what the Koch brothers sent him looking for. Here is what Dr. Mueller, in his own words, said: You should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer. Bottom line: His studies found exactly what all the other credible climate studies have been telling us for decades--that global warming is real. If we just step out and look around for a moment, we can see the effects everywhere: floods, droughts, pathogens, disease, species and habitat loss, sea level rise, storm surges that threaten our cities and coastlines. No continent is escaping unscathed: increasing ground instability in permafrost regions, increasing avalanches in mountainous zones, warmer and drier conditions in the Sahelian region of Africa leading to a shorter growing season, and coral bleaching events in the Great Barrier Reef. All these are attributed to this change in climate. I wish to take a moment to bear down on the science, the cold, hard, stubborn facts that ought to guide us in addressing this challenge. It is detailed, to some degree, but it is the very detail that detractors can never address or refute. It is important to see the detail in its cumulative force. Unlike the naysayers, I am going to give point by point to some of the falsehoods and lay out a summary of the critical evidence that ought to lead America and the world to action. Here is what the science is telling us: Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased by nearly 40 percent in the industrial era, from 280 parts per million to over 393 parts per million in the atmosphere. Before long, we are likely to see a global average of concentration at 400 parts per million and more. Within the last few months, monitoring stations in the Arctic region, for the first time, reported average concentrations of CO2 at 400 parts per million. Because of the remote nature of those monitors, they generally reflect long-term trends as opposed to marginal fluctuations in direct emissions near population centers. As atmospheric scientist Pieter Tans, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration points out: The northern sites in our monitoring network tell us what is coming soon to the globe as a whole. . . . We will likely see global average CO2 concentrations reach 400 ppm about 2016 [4 years from now]. Why is this important? This is important because scientists have told us that anything above 450 parts per million--a warming of 2 degrees Celsius--could lead to severe, widespread, and irreversible harm to human life on this planet. When concentrations of other greenhouse gases, such as methane and black carbon, are factored into the equation, the analysis suggests that stabilizing concentrations around 400 parts per million of equivalent carbon dioxide would give us about an 80-percent chance of avoiding a 2-degree Fahrenheit increase above the present average global temperatures. Considering what a 2-degree Fahrenheit increase would mean, scientists obviously are urging us not to take the risk. James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has done the math. His analysis shows that we need to be shooting for a stabilization level of 350 parts per million in order to increase our chances of avoiding the 2-degree Fahrenheit increase. We have already exceeded that. So we are going to have to find a way to actually go backward in order to be able to prevent what scientists are telling us could create huge damage. Even if we slam on the brakes now, science tells us we could be headed for a global temperature increase of 2 to 4 degrees by the century's end and greater warming after that. Let me share what some of the ``postcards from the edge,'' if you will, look like when you examine what is happening to our air, our health, and our environment. Warming temperatures, first of all. The first 10 years of this century were the warmest decade on record. And 2010 was tied with 2005 as the hottest year ever recorded. NOAA has reported that 2011 was the second warmest summer on record, just .1 degrees Fahrenheit below the 1936 record, and the U.S. Climate Extreme Index--a measure of the area of the country experiencing extreme conditions--was nearly four times the average. Last year many Northeastern States experienced their wettest summers, especially those States caught in Hurricane Irene's destructive path. Meanwhile, persistent heat and below-average precipitation across the Southern United States created recordbreaking droughts in Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, and these were of greater intensity than the 1930s famous Dust Bowl. Texas endured the country's hottest summer ever recorded for any State, at an average temperature of 86.8 degrees. What is shocking is that the evidence of the rate of this transformation is happening faster and to a greater degree than the scientists predicted. So one would think reasonable people would say: Wait a minute, they predicted this, but we are getting this way up here, and everyone would sort of stop and take stock of what is happening. According to the new climate report from NOAA, the lower 48 States elbowed their way into the record books this spring with ``the warmest March, third warmest April, second warmest May . . . the first time that all three months during the spring season ranked among the 10 warmest since records began in 1895.'' In fact, the average temperature this spring was so far off the charts that the lower 48 States beat out the old 1910 record by a full 2 degrees Fahrenheit. Inland, worsening conditions are going to create persistent drought in the Southwest and significantly increase western wildlife burn area. That is critical. We have already seen the damage done to millions of acres of forest because of the pine bark beetles, which actually live longer because it doesn't get cold and therefore they do not die in the normal cycle. But in recent years, due to warmer winters, pine beetle populations have exploded, devastating these once majestic forests. It is also having an impact on our health. As average temperatures rise, we can expect to see more extreme heat waves during our summers, and, as we know from history, that impacts people with heart problems and asthma, the elderly, the very young, and the homeless. In the United States, Chicago is projected to have 25 percent more frequent heat wave days by the end of the century. In Los Angeles, we could see as much as a four- to eightfold increase. Climate change may also heighten the risk of infectious diseases, particularly diseases found in warm areas and spread by mosquitoes and other insects, such as malaria, dengue fever, and yellow fever. In some places, climate change is already altering the pattern of disease. In the Kenyan Highlands, for example, it is now one of the major drivers of malaria epidemics. It is not just the health costs that are sounding the alarm. As many have seen with their own eyes, the Arctic is among one of the most startling places to witness the adverse effects of global climate change. Great sheets of ice have been breaking off of glaciers--sheets of ice the size of the State of Rhode Island. Marine mammals are now struggling to survive. Where there used to be only frozen landscapes, there is now open water. Every new report that is public suggests the situation is getting grimmer in the Arctic. Last year the multi-country Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program released a new assessment of the impact of climate change in the Arctic. It found that the period from 2005 to 2010 was the warmest ever recorded. According to AMAP researchers, the changes in icemelt over the past 10 years ``are dramatic and represent an obvious departure from the long-term patterns.'' Their conclusion is startling. They expect the Arctic Ocean to be nearly ice-free within this century, likely in the next 30 to 40 years. Think about that for a second. Within our children's lifetimes, one of Earth's polar icecaps will be completely gone. Average annual temperatures in the Arctic have increased at approximately twice the rate of average global temperatures. Within a generation, maybe two, kids will grow up learning geography on maps and globes that show simply an empty blue expanse on top of the world, no longer the white one to which we have grown accustomed. In terms of impact, all of us who have been following this issue understand that the melting of the Arctic is at least partly mitigated by the fact that the ice is already floating, so the displacement in the ocean as it melts is not that significant. But what if there is an ice melt from the glaciers, as we are now seeing not only in the Arctic but we are seeing in Greenland and in Antarctica and across North America, South America, and Africa--when you realize that all over the globe, glaciers and icecaps are losing volume--that means other day-to- day, practical problems for our communities. This is a photograph of the glaciers that exist out in the western part of our country, or used to. That was 1909, and this is 2004-- almost gone. Here is another vision of National Glacier Park, where it has almost disappeared. It is obvious for all to see the degree to which the glaciers are disappearing. Many people may not also realize that a lot of communities in the United States rely on annual glacial melt for municipal water supplies and for hydropower. So as this disappears, the energy sourcing and water sourcing for the United States disappears with it. Just ask Washington State, where glacial melt water provides 1.8 trillion liters of water every summer, or talk to the folks in Alaska, where glacier melt plays a key role in the circulation of the Gulf of Alaska, which is important to maintaining the valuable fisheries--the halibut and salmon--that reside in this body of water. All these impacts are interconnected. Again, the skeptics say: Hey, there are a couple of glaciers that are actually expanding. Yes, there are some glaciers that are responding to unusual and unique local conditions and increasing in snow and ice accumulation, but the overwhelming evidence, when we look at the vast majority, shows that most of America's glaciers are shrinking. Over the last four decades of the 20th century, North American glaciers have lost 108 cubic miles of ice. That is enough ice, translated into water, to inundate California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado with 1 foot of water if it happened all at the same time. In 1850 there were approximately 150 glaciers in what is now Glacier National Park. Today, due to warmer temperatures, there are only 25 named glaciers remaining, and some models predict that the park's glaciers could disappear in just a few decades. But trust your own eyes, if you prefer. The photographs here depict glacial melt over various time periods in Glacier National Park, Montana, and Holgate Glacier and Icy Bay, Alaska. As you'll see, the effects are just staggering. We all remember Wordsworth's lines about ``the Lake that was shining clear among the hoary mountains.'' Well, these mountains are no longer hoary, and soon, lakes will reflect not snow-covered peaks, but naked ridges and sun-splashed steeps. To make matters worse, temperatures are likely to increase exponentially in the next coming years. Because the environment is a closed system, the more conditions change, the faster they change because each change has an impact on some other interconnected component of the environment. As the ice and permafrost melt, methane plumes from under the surface that have been trapped for hundreds of thousands of years are now emerging. During a survey last summer in the east Siberian Arctic seas, a team of scientists encountered a high density of methane plumes, some more than 1 kilometer across. They were emitting methane into the atmosphere at concentrations up to 100 times higher than normal. There are people who have stood by these methane plumes, lit a match, and they light on fire. The fact is, over a period of 100 years, methane has a warming potential roughly 25 times greater than CO2. So we may become the victims not just of the climate change itself but of a vicious kind of feedback and feedback cycles in the climate system. Cycles associated with less cloud cover, changes in aerosols, peatlands, soils, and Arctic ice cover all can lead to accelerated climate change. One study estimated that thawing permafrost may turn the Arctic from a carbon sink--that is to say a place that gathers and stores carbon--into a carbon source by the mid-2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by the end of the century. What does that mean? One hundred billion tons of carbon is about equal to the amount of CO2 that would be released worldwide from 10 years of burning fossil fuels. So that is the future we are looking at if we don't respond. Here is another postcard from the edge, Mr. President. North Carolina doesn't think they need to worry about the sea level rise, but take a look at the evidence. Our best studies predict a higher sea level rise than previously projected. With the melting of the west Antarctic ice sheet alone, global sea levels could rise by as much as 3.26 meters in the coming years, and the Pacific and Atlantic coasts could be in for a 25-percent increase above the average level by the century's end. In all, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet has the potential to raise global sea levels by about 7 meters, and the ice sheets of Antarctica have the potential to contribute to 60 meters of sea level rise. Now, when people say, ``Well, global--it may not melt,'' there are Senators who have traveled to Greenland, who have stood on the ice sheet and looked down into it, into a hole 100-feet deep, and seen a massive, torrential river running underneath the ice out to the sea as the ice is melting. Some scientists are even worried about the effects of that river under the ice. Could it act as a slide, where actually whole chunks of ice break off and slide down on this watery base on which the ice is sitting? Think about what this all means. As the New York Times reported in March, some 3.7 million Americans living within a few feet of high tide are at risk from the rising sea. So all of you state senators out there, listen up: the effects of climate change will spare no one--from Tampa to Asheville, from Sausalito to Staten Island, all coastal communities are vulnerable. NOAA's Benjamin Strauss, coauthor of a smart new study on topographic vulnerability, said the following: Sea level rise is like an invisible tsunami, building force while we do almost nothing. . . . We have a closing window of time to prevent the worst by preparing for higher seas. I think that is exactly right, and that is why city officials in Boston are currently actively planning for how to manage 100-year floods that are now arriving every 20 years. We don't have 100-year floods anymore, we have them every so often--every 5 years or 20 years. In the face of a global sea level rise of 3 to 6 feet by the end of the century, there will be massive amounts of flooding. So we ought to pass legislation at the State level to plan, not to ban the planning. It is easy politics to ban it, but it is not smart politics, and it certainly isn't courageous leadership. Just ask those living in Tuvalu and the low-lying nation of Kiribati. Think they could use some advance planning to deal with the ``king'' tides that may soon drown out life on their shores? You bet. But instead of learning from them, we've succumbed to the siren call of short-term interests. One resident of Tuvalu poignantly asked: ``What will happen to us in ten years' time?'' I wish I could delay her fears. I wish I could tell her that the climate change would only be limited to occasional sea level rise, and that--naturally, surely--the king tides would recede. But the truth is much more harrowing. We also have raging floods and water scarcity--a dichotomy--in various parts of the world. From Veracruz to Songkhla Province in Thailand, floods are devastating crops and stealing away opportunities for millions. In my travels, I have seen children orphaned by raging flood waters, families deprived of basic necessities, such as food, clean drinking water, and medicine. I have also seen the ways in which climate change has interacted with conflicts, food insecurity, and water scarcity. People are fighting and killing each other over water scarcity in various parts of the world. In Darfur and in South Sudan, there are tensions over arable lands. Think of drought in Syria and its impact on farmers in southern Dara'a. Think of water scarcity in Yemen--and the list goes on. These are the invisible tsunamis Benjamin Strauss spoke of, and they develop slowly and quietly and determinately, and they devastate communities just as surely as they should kindle our sense of urgency about the cost of inaction. In addition, although I am not going to go into the details now, there is major decimation of animal life and plant life and species life as a consequence of this interconnectedness. In addition, forests are under siege from drought and experiencing more fires and more die- off as a consequence of insect infestation because it doesn't get cold enough anymore to maintain the previous cycles of those insects dying off. So the fact is that unmitigated climate change is creating enormous economic dislocations already, and it is only going to get worse if we don't act. Professor Frank Akerman, a prominent economist at Tufts University, found that inaction in the face of climate change could cost the American economy more than 3.6 percent of GDP--``or $3.8 trillion--annually by the end of the century. And he is not alone. Harvard economist Joseph Aldy estimates that if temperatures push past the 2 degrees mark, up to 2 to 4 percent of world GDP would be lost.