Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, we rise to highlight two mercury- specific provisions--the creation of a mercury inventory and expansion of the export ban to certain mercury compounds--in the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act that the Senate will approve tonight. These provisions are sections of the Mercury Use Reduction Act that we introduced in the 112th Congress with the late Senator Frank Lautenberg, after whom this legislation is named, and with then-Senator John Kerry. Senator Leahy and Senator Merkley have been longtime partners in these efforts. Senator Leahy was a leader in the Senate's consideration of a resolution of disapproval concerning the Bush administration's mercury rule. I yield to Senator Leahy. Mr. Leahy. Mr. President, I thank Senator Whitehouse. His leadership in this area has been paramount. Under the mercury inventory provision, the EPA will be required to prepare an inventory of mercury supply, use, and trade in the United States every 3 years. Despite an EPA commitment in 2006 to collect this data, there is not yet any good data on mercury supply and uses in the United States. This lack of data has impacted our ability to reduce health risks from mercury exposure and would compromise our ability to comply with the Minamata Convention of Mercury, which will come into force next year and to which the U.S. Government has agreed to become a party. When preparing the inventory, EPA shall identify the remaining manufacturing and product uses in the United States and recommend revisions to federal laws or regulations for addressing the remaining uses. The term ``revisions'' in this provision includes both new laws or regulations or modifications to existing law. To provide the data needed to compile the inventory, companies producing or importing mercury or mercury compounds or using mercury or mercury compounds will be required to report on this activity under a rule to be issued by the Administrator. To minimize any reporting burden, EPA must coordinate its reporting with State mercury product reporting requirements through the Interstate Mercury Education and Reduction Clearinghouse, IMERC. In addition, the provision excludes waste management activities already reported under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, RCRA, from this reporting, unless the waste management activity produces mercury via retorts or other treatment operations. A company engaged in both waste generation or management and mercury manufacture or use must report on the mercury manufacture and use activity, since that data would not be provided under the RCRA reporting. I yield to Senator Merkley.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as the song said, it has been a long, strange trip getting here, and it has had its share of near-death experiences, as Senator Udall is intimately aware of. I was involved with Senator Merkley and Senator Booker in one of those near-death experiences. If this was a rocket with stages, one of the major stages was the Merkley-Booker-Whitehouse effort in the committee. I just wanted to say it was the first time the three of us worked together as a triumvirate. They were wonderful to work with. They were truly a pleasure. We had a lot on our plates. We made about a dozen major changes in the bill. I want to take just a moment to thank Emily Enderle on my staff, who was terrific through all of the negotiations and renegotiations and counternegotiations in that stage. But this was obviously a rocket that had many more stages than that one. I thank Chairman Inhofe and his staff for their persistence through all of this. Ranking Member Boxer was relentless in trying to make this bill as strong as she could make it through every single stage, and it is marked by that persistence. Senator Vitter and Senator Udall forged the original notion that this compromise could be made to happen, and they have seen it through, so I congratulate them. The House had a rather different view of how this bill should look. Between Senator Inhofe, Senator Udall, Representative Pallone, and Representative Upton, they were able to work out a bicameral as well as a bipartisan compromise that we all could agree to. There are a lot of thanks involved, but I close by offering a particular thank-you to my friend Senator Udall. In Greek mythology there is a Titan, Prometheus, who brought fire to humankind. His penalty for bringing fire to humankind was to be strapped to the rock by chains and have Zeus send an eagle to eat his liver every single day. It is an image of persisting through pain. I do have to say Senator Vitter may have had his issues on his side--I do not know how that looked--but I can promise on our side Tom Udall persisted through months and months of pain, always with the view that this bill could come to the place where this day could happen. There are times when legislation is legislation, and there are times when legislation has a human story behind it. This is a human story of courage, foresight, persistence, patience, and willingness to absorb a considerable number of slings and arrows on the way to a day when slings and arrows are finally put down and everybody can shake hands and agree we have, I think, a terrific victory. While there is much credit in many places, my heart in this is with Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I will yield the time.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am really grateful to the junior Senator from Delaware for inviting me to his home State and for joining me here today for my ``Time to Wake Up'' speech No. 139. Senator Coons and I spent a terrific day touring the Delaware shore. You can say whatever you want about us, but on that day we were the two wettest Members of the U.S. Senate. I can assure you of that. This is Capitol Hill Ocean Week, and Wednesday is World Oceans Day, so it is a good time to consider the effects of global climate change in our oceans. The oceans have absorbed one-third of all carbon dioxide produced since the industrial revolution and over 90 percent of the excess heat that has resulted. That means that by laws of both physics and chemistry, the oceans are warming, rising, and acidifying. Rhode Island is the Ocean State, but give Delaware credit. From the last report in 2013, it generated around $1 billion and over 23,000 jobs from the ocean based in tourism, recreation, shipping, and fishing. Like Rhode Island, Delaware sees its sea level rise at a rate of 3\1/3\ millimeters per year along the Delaware shore, 13 inches up over the last 100 years. Delawareans care about this issue. Over a quarter have reported personally experiencing the effects of sea level rise, two-thirds worry about the effects of sea level rise, and over 75 percent called on the State to take immediate action to combat climate change and sea level rise. I did enjoy our visit in South Wilmington, and I enjoyed the visit to Port Mahon, where the roads had to be built up with riffraff to protect against sea level rise. But the real prize and the prime reason I went was Port Mahon's avian connection. Among the sandpipers, ruddy turnstones, and gulls we saw on the shore was a bird called the rufa red knot. Red knots stand out from other shore birds on the beach not only for their colorful burnt orange plumage but also for the amazing story that accompanies their arrival in Delaware each spring. This is a story to love, and I guess you would have to say a bird to admire. They have only about a 20-inch wingspan at full growth, and the body is only about the size of a teacup, but each spring these red knots undertake an epic 9,000-plus mile voyage from Tierra del Fuego on the southern tip of South America up to the Canadian Arctic. After spending the summer nesting in the Arctic, they make the return trip south to winter in the Southern Hemisphere. This little bird has one of the longest animal migrations of any species on Earth. How does Delaware come into this? Well, the red knots fly straight from Brazil to Delaware Bay. As you can imagine, when they get there, they are hungry. They have lost as much as half their weight. We were told they start to ingest their own organs toward the end. Delaware Bay is the largest horseshoe crab spawning area in the world. Each May, horseshoe crabs lay millions of eggs. Nearly 2 million horseshoe crabs were counted in Delaware Bay in 2015, and a female can lay up to 90,000 eggs per spawning season. Do the math. That is a lot of eggs. The red knots come here timed just so by mother nature to bulk up on the nutritious horseshoe crab eggs to replenish their wasted bodies from the long flight to Delaware Bay and to fuel up for the 2,000 further miles of journey to the Canadian Arctic. I wanted to see this before it ends. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has listed the red knot as threatened under the Endangered Species Act because ``successful annual migration and breeding of red knots is highly dependent on the timing of departures and arrivals to coincide with favorable food and weather conditions in the spring and fall migratory stopover areas and on the Arctic breeding grounds.'' Climate change can bollix up that timing. We are already seeing that in a different subspecies of red knots that migrate north along the West African coast. A study published in the journal Science last month found that the earlier melt of Arctic snow is accelerating the timeline for the hatching of insects in spring, leading to smaller birds. The chicks, being less strong, begin to weaken and can't feed as successfully, and it cascades through an array of further difficulties. You actually have to love this unassuming and astounding little bird, but its survival relies on a cascade of nature's events to line up just right. Nature throws a long bomb from Tierra del Fuego, where these birds start, and off they go. Months later they arrive in Delaware Bay timed to this 450 million-year-old creature, the horseshoe crab, emerging from Delaware Bay to spawn. If one environmental event comes too early or too late or if one food source becomes too limited, the species could collapse. We got ahead of that in the 1990s when horseshoe crabs became rare because they were overfished. As their numbers went down, the red knot fell in accord. If the changes we are so recklessly putting in motion on the planet disturb nature's fateful planning, the red knot could pay a sad price. Some people may snicker and say: There he goes again. Now he is on the Senate floor talking about some stupid bird. But I say this: When one sees the voyage that this bird has to make, a little shore bird used to running along the shore making this epic voyage every year--one of them has been measured, because of a tag on its ankle, to have flown the distance from here to the moon and halfway back in its life--if one can't see the hand of God in that creature, I weep for their soul. So I thank my colleague from Delaware for his staff and the experts he brought along to help us learn about this. Like Rhode Island, Delaware has been proactive in planning for the risks that we face in a warmer and wetter future. I yield the floor to the distinguished junior Senator from Delaware.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Were we, indeed, the two wettest Senators that day?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am back with my increasingly scuffed and battered ``Time to Wake Up'' sign now for the 138th time to urge that we stop sleepwalking through history. Climate change, as we know, is already harming our oceans and our farms, our health and our communities. Yet here in the Senate we continue to just stand idly by as carbon pollution piles up in the atmosphere, driving unprecedented changes in our States. I urge us again to wake up and to act with urgency. Just 3 years ago the monitoring station atop Hawaii's Mauna Loa measured a significant milestone--400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This chart of the data from Mauna Loa illustrates the negligible march upwards of our carbon levels. And it is not just at this one spot in the Pacific. The World Meteorological Organization maintains a global atmosphere watch network of atmospheric monitoring stations that spans 100 countries, including stations high in the Alps, Andes, Himalayas, as well as in the Arctic and Antarctic. Earlier this month, the Cape Grim Station--perhaps aptly named--in remote northwestern Tasmania saw its first measurement above 400 parts per million. A few days later, Casey Station in Antarctica measured carbon dioxide concentrations above 400 parts per million. What is significant about 400 parts per million? The Earth has existed in a range between 170 and 300 parts per million of carbon dioxide for at least the last 800,000 years--probably millions of years but at least the last 800,000 years. Homo sapiens as a species have only been around for about 200,000 years, so 800,000 really goes back a ways. Primitive farming began only about 20,000 years ago. Before that, we were just hunter-gatherers. So 800,000 in that context is a long, safe, comfortable run for this planet that has been very good to humankind in that carbon concentration window of 170 to 300. Since the Industrial Revolution, when the great carbon dump began, we have completely blown out of that range. At the bottom of this chart is 300. What is also apparent in this chart is the breathing, if you will, of the planet. The sawtooth effect of this line comes from carbon dioxide levels changing as spring triggers the collective inhale of trees and other plant life in the Northern Hemisphere. This is another version of the same data. The line at the border between the white and the lavender is the carbon data for the year 2011--between 388 and 393 parts per million, going up and then going back down and then going up as the Earth inhales and exhales the carbon dioxide. In 2012, this was the line, up above 2011. In 2013, this was the line. In 2014, this was the line. In 2015--it is hard to see, but it is right here where my finger is tracing and then onward from here. And this is 2016 to date, and then the data stops. It is going to continue. That shelf is just the data ending because of the time of year we are in. So every single year we see the carbon dioxide levels marching up and up and up. Dr. Ralph Keeling is director of the Mauna Loa CO2 Program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a sort of hero among scientists. He has said that he doubts carbon dioxide levels at Mauna Loa will ever again dip below 400 parts per million. As our carbon pollution accumulates, we can actually measure the change in the amount of energy trapped by the atmosphere from the Sun. NOAA calls this the ``Annual Greenhouse Gas Index,'' and the latest edition shows that in just the past 25 years, our carbon emissions have increased the heat-trapping capacity of our atmosphere by 50 percent above preindustrial levels. That is our doing. The director of NOAA's Global Monitoring Division, Dr. Jim Butler, said: ``We're dialing up Earth's thermostat in a way that will lock more heat into the ocean and atmosphere for thousands of years.'' Last week the Washington Post reported that both NOAA and NASA found April 2016 to have been the warmest April ever recorded. What is remarkable is that April was the 12th consecutive month in a row in which that month was the warmest ever recorded for that month. That is a full year's worth of months that topped every previous such month for temperature, and it is the longest streak ever in NOAA's 137-year temperature record. One thing we know about all of this excess heat is that the oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of it. You think things are weird now with the weather, imagine if the oceans had not absorbed more than 90 percent of that excess heat. That is a measurement, not a theory. Unless we are going to repeal the laws of physics, we know that when water warms from absorbing that 90-plus percent of the heat energy, it expands. That is the law of thermal expansion. As a result, sea levels around the world are measurably rising because oceans are warming and expanding, as well as because of ice sheets and glaciers melting. Sea level rise is a serious matter for my constituents and for all coastal communities. We measure approximately 10 inches of sea level rise at Naval Station Newport, RI, since the 1930s. Higher sea levels erode our shoreline. They push saltwater up into our marshes. Worst of all, from our human perspective, the big storms that get launched in this weather come riding ashore on higher seas, and they inflict more damage and worse flooding in our homes. A couple of years ago, I visited South Florida with our friend Senator Nelson. In parts of Miami and Fort Lauderdale, sea water continues to flood streets and homes at high tide on perfectly calm and sunny days. It is not rain. These flooding events are occurring because sea level is rising. A study published in February by Climate Central determined climate change was to blame for approximately three-quarters of the coastal floods recorded in the United States between 2005 and 2014, most of which were high-tide floods. The blue is the natural floods they experienced and the red is the flooding that was driven by climate change. Dr. Ben Strauss, who led this analysis, said: ``[T]his is really the first placing of human fingerprints on coastal floods, and thousands of them.'' And the body of science revealing those human fingerprints from climate change is growing. In the past, I have said that climate change ``loads the dice'' for extreme weather, but it is hard to link a particular event to climate change. That is beginning to change as the science continues to develop and the evidence continues to pile up. In March, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report outlining a rigorous science-based system for attributing extreme weather events to climate change with statistical confidence. In other words, scientists are now able to assess how the risk of an extreme weather event has changed since these heat-trapping greenhouse gases have altered our climate. Certain kinds of extreme events are relatively straightforward to assess and attribute heat waves, heavy rains, certain types of drought. Other kinds of extreme events, such as tornadoes, wildfires, and the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, are more complicated to dissect. For example, heat waves are expected to become more common, more intense, and longer lasting because of the increase in heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. An analysis of an extreme heat wave last May in Australia found it was made 23 times more likely to have happened because of climate change. When the odds in favor have become so great, it is fair to say, according to one scientist associated with that report, that ``some episodes of extreme heat would have been virtually impossible without climate change.'' The attribution to specific events is closing in. Dr. Heidi Cullen, chief scientist at Climate Central and a contributor to the National Academies report, has said: The days of saying no single weather event can be linked to climate change are over. For many extreme weather events, the link is now strong. Australian researchers have determined that the ocean warming that led to widespread and devastating coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef in March was made not 23 times more likely but 175 times more likely by human-caused climate change. Average water temperatures in the Coral Sea are up about 1.5 degrees Celsius since 1900. We measure that. And about one-half of that 1.5 degrees is due to natural variability, and 1 whole degree of it is from greenhouse gas emissions. David Kline, a coral reef scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has said: ``We've had evidence before'' that ``human- induced climate change is behind the increase in severity and frequency of bleaching events. But this is the smoking gun.'' By the way, a bleaching event on a coral reef is like a heart attack in a human. The reef may survive it, but it will take a long time to recover, and very often the reef simply dies. With all of that happening, here we are in this Chamber, sitting on our hands, helpless. We have a responsibility, not only to the voters of today but to the generations who will follow us and inherit the world as we leave it to them. Here is how Professor of Oceanography, Dr. Laura Faye Tenenbaum, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, describes her predicament: As a college professor who lectures on climate change, I will have to find a way to look into those 70 sets of eyes that have learned all semester long to trust me and somehow explain to those students, my students--who still believe in their young minds that success mostly depends on good grades and hard work, who believe in fairness, evenhandedness and opportunity--how much we as people have altered our environment, and that they will end up facing the consequences of our inability to act. Where do we look for leadership? Not to one of the leading Presidential contenders. This character says he is just ``not a great believer in man-made climate change.'' So there. Like the science cares what his opinion is. All the science? The decades of research by thousands of scientists across the globe, the pride of the scientific profession? It is a ``hoax,'' he said, a ``con job,'' ``pseudoscience,'' and ``BS.'' I guess in that latter characterization, he can claim some real expertise. To my Republican colleagues, I have to ask: Is that really the line that we want to have about this problem? Is this your guy? Are you going to stand by him on this stuff? But wait, it actually gets better. Yesterday POLITICO reported the New York billionaire is also applying for permission to build a seawall. He is a wall-building kind of guy, and he wants to build a seawall to protect his seaside golf resort. What does he want to protect his golf resort from with a wall--rapist Mexicans coming across the border? No. What he wants to defend his seaside golf resort from with a wall is ``global warming and its effects.'' Remember the sea level rise I talked about? That is correct. That is what he said. Climate change is a hoax when his political interests dictate, but then it is real and a threat when his economic interests are involved. Throughout the discussion of climate change, how often we see this--say one thing, do another. I have to close by reminding my colleagues that my home State of Rhode Island is the Ocean State. We cannot fail to take climate change seriously. If this is uncomfortable for my colleagues, I apologize, but I don't care. I have obligations to my State that I must discharge. We in Rhode Island are going to stand with America's leading research institutions and scientists, we are going to stand with our national security experts, we are going to stand with the great American corporations such as Apple, Google, Mars, and National Grid, we are going to stand with President Obama, and we are going to stand with Pope Francis to do everything we can to face this climate challenge head-on. I hope that soon one day it will be time when we can all wake up and stand together. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I thank the chairman for giving me this time at the end of the day and congratulate her on the progress that has been made with my senior Senator, Jack Reed, on this bill. This is the 137th time that I have addressed this body, asking us to wake up to the threat of climate change. While we sleepwalk, our atmosphere and oceans continue to suffer the damage caused by carbon pollution. As we do nothing, more and more Americans demand action. Look at the new findings from Yale and George Mason Universities. Despite years of industry climate denial propaganda, 75 percent of all registered voters--88 percent of Democrats, 78 percent of Independents, and 61 percent of Republicans--support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant; 74 percent of registered voters--88 percent of Democrats, 74 percent of Independents, and 56 percent of Republicans--say corporations and industry should do more to address global warming, and 68 percent of all registered voters--86 percent of Democrats, 66 percent of Independents, and 47 percent even of Republicans--believe fossil fuel companies should be required to pay a carbon tax and the money should be used to reduce other taxes, such as income taxes, by an equal amount. So why does this Chamber sit idly by and not even have that conversation? Take the fossil fuel industry. For years Big Oil and its allies funded outright denial of man-made climate change. Now they have shifted strategies, from denial to dissembling--saying one thing but doing another. Take ExxonMobil. In 2007, the oil giant committed to stop funding the front groups that promote science denial. Here is what they said: ``In 2008, we will discontinue contributions to several public policy research groups whose positions on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.'' This sounds like a step toward responsible corporate behavior. A casual reader might believe that ExxonMobil would in fact stop funding groups with anti-scientific climate positions. One might think that, but one would be wrong. According to publicly available company documents, in 2014, ExxonMobil funded several organizations that promote climate science disinformation, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, which peddled legislation to State legislatures that include a finding that human-induced global warming ``may lead to . . . possibly beneficial climactic changes''; the Hoover Institution, whose senior fellow is not a climate scientist, argued that climate data since 1880 supports a conclusion that it would take as long as long as 500 years to reach 4 degrees centigrade of global warming; the Manhattan Institute of Policy Research, where a senior fellow writing about climate change said: ``The science is not settled, not by a long shot. . . . Furthermore, even if we accept that carbon dioxide is bad, it's not clear exactly what we should do about it''; the so-called National Black Chamber of Commerce, whose President and CEO, Harry Alford, played the debunked denier card, that ``there has been no global warming detected for the last 18 years. That is over 216 months in a row that there has been no detected global warming.'' By the way, NASA just reported that April was the hottest April ever recorded, just like every one of the past 7 months was the hottest ever recorded for that month. Let's not forget our friends at the Pacific Legal Foundation, whose senior attorney attacked EPA's authority to even regulate CO2, in part, because it is a ``ubiquitous natural substance essential to life on Earth.'' Saying one thing and doing another--ExxonMobil is publicly saying it is separated from the climate denial outfits, but it is still subsidizing their work to undermine public understanding of climate change. This doesn't even count whatever they may be doing behind the dark money curtain that wretched Citizens United decision gave them. The hypocrisy turns even worse in fossil fuel industry lobbying. An ExxonMobil executive recently stated: ``When governments are considering policy options, ExxonMobil believes a revenue-neutral carbon tax is the most effective way to manage carbon emissions.'' I have a revenue-neutral carbon tax bill, along with Senator Schatz, and I can assure this body that ExxonMobil is not lobbying in support of it. Every Member of Congress knows that all the massive political infrastructure of the fossil fuel industry is adamantly opposed to any meaningful action. Shell Oil issued a report just last week that states: ``Economy-wide carbon pricing--whether through carbon trading, carbon taxes or mandated carbon-emissions standards--provides an efficient and cost- effective way of aligning incentives and motivating action across the economy to reduce carbon emissions.'' Top executives of six large European oil and gas companies, including Shell, BP and Statoil, issued a joint letter calling on governments ``to introduce carbon pricing systems where they do not yet exist at the national or regional levels. . . . [W]e and our senior staff will seek to engage and share our companies' perspectives on the role of carbon pricing in several important settings,'' which includes ``in our meetings with Ministers and government representatives.'' I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the letter at the conclusion of my remarks. The question is, Has any Member of the Senate ever seen Shell or BP or Statoil or any other oil and gas company or any of their lobbying entities even once lobby Members of Congress on carbon pricing--other than, of course, to say, hell, no. My bill with Senator Schatz, the American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act, provides a market-based, revenue-neutral carbon fee--just like these companies say they support. It is built on principles espoused by leading Republican economists and by Republican former officeholders. Despite the industry's claims, I have seen exactly zero evidence that any of these companies--or their sizable trade associations--are using any of their lobbying muscle to advance carbon pricing legislation. Instead, ExxonMobil and Shell and the trade associations that represent them continue to pump millions of dollars into political machinery designed to lobby against any action on climate change. They say one thing, but they do another. This chart from the nonprofit research organization InfluenceMap shows the streams of money flowing from ExxonMobil and from Shell, as well as from the American Petroleum Institute, the Western States Petroleum Association, and even the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association. In 2015 alone, ExxonMobil spent $27 million, Shell spent $22 million, and the American Petroleum Institute spent $65 million on obstructive climate lobbying. This money deluge includes advertising and public relations, direct lobbying in Congress and at statehouses, and political contributions and electioneering. They say one thing but do another--to the tune of $100 million a year. As late as 2014, ExxonMobil gave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce $1 million for the chamber to propagate its climate message, delivered loud and clear not only here in Congress but in the courts, of absolute intransigence against any serious climate action. The U.S. Chamber is powerful, and in Congress we all see everywhere around us its implacable hostility against serious climate legislation. The gap between ExxonMobil's stated support for a revenue-neutral carbon tax and its lobbying activities in Congress against any such thing is why Representative Ted Lieu of California and I recently asked the American Geophysical Union, a topnotch scientific society, to reexamine its financial support from ExxonMobil. The American Geophysical Union is made up of honest scientists. In their world, they likely expect that when people say something, it is true. Sadly, in Congress we don't enjoy the same experience. The good-hearted folks at the American Geophysical Union appear to have been taken in by ExxonMobil's false claims of support for a carbon price. Since we actually see the fossil fuel industry's lobbying presence, we wanted to correct any false impression. What we see in Congress is that their lobbying efforts are 100 percent opposed to any action on Climate. . . . Whatever position AGU chooses to take, you should not take it based on self-serving representations by ExxonMobil. POLITICO reported that in November ExxonMobil sent executives to Capitol Hill to try and convince congressional critics that ExxonMobil is a conscientious corporation that supports ``sound climate policy.'' Who did they think they were kidding? Do they think we don't know how they lobby? We are the targets of their lobbying. We know how they lobby. Unsurprisingly, the ExxonMobil executives left DC ``empty-handed . . . after refusing to directly answer questions about whether [ExxonMobil] had suppressed internal research that underscored the threat of climate change while publicly sowing doubt about climate science.'' Given the fossil fuel industry's massive conflict of interest on carbon pollution, there is every reason for them to play a double game: trying to buy a little credibility for themselves with their public comments, while at the same time using all their lobbying muscle to crush any threat of bipartisan action on the carbon pricing they claim to espouse. Sadly, in this double game they play, the fossil fuel industry has essentially no corporate opposition in Congress. Across the private sector, there are great corporate leaders on climate change, but from what I see, corporate climate lobbying from the good guys nets to zero. The good guys have given up the field and let the fossil fuel industry to have its way with Congress unopposed, and the result is predictable: Many good Members of Congress are frozen in place, often against their better judgment. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an article I recently wrote for Harvard Business Review explaining this reality.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, it is time not just for us to wake up but for the good guys to show up. Fossil fuel folks for years outright denied climate change and happily funded their array of denial front groups. That failed the tests of truth and decency, but at least it was consistent. This new hypocrisy, to say one thing and do another, is playing with fire. First, it poses a legal risk. It is never good to say things you can't truthfully say under oath, which may be one reason we see such histrionics from the climate denial front groups about investigations where fossil fuel executives may have to tell the truth under oath. Second, it is a real reputation risk, especially among younger consumers who aren't going to love an industry that lies. It is hard to say that you are not lying when what you are saying and what you are doing are opposite. It is time for the fossil fuel industry to end this new double game. Either put your money where your mouth is and start working with Congress to enact a price on carbon, as you say you wish, or go back to your climate denial and your creepy front groups and see how that works out for you, but saying one thing while you are doing the exact opposite is just not sustainable. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, with that clarification, I must regrettably object to the unanimous consent request propounded by the junior Senator from Pennsylvania. But I do hope very much that we can find a way to work toward getting these judges confirmed. These are judges who came out of the Judiciary Committee, which is a fairly contentious committee, unanimously. They are district judges. If we can't move them, then I suggest the Senate is really not working the way it ought to, and I very much hope we can get to a place where we can move them all.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, let me add to what the distinguished Senator from Pennsylvania has said by noting first that the impasse to which he refers is created by his own leadership, which refused to bring up judges that have come out of the Judiciary Committee unanimously. There is a problem here. It is one that can be solved within the Republican caucus. We can't very much help with that, but we hope that a solution comes. The second point is that the question here should not be viewed only as to whether the President is being treated fairly but that there are vacancies on Federal courts, and it is our responsibility to provide advice and consent. We have a duty of fairness to the constituents who have empty seats in courtrooms, and we have a duty of fairness to the candidates--the nominees--who have put their lives on hold with the expectation that they would be treated fairly by the Senate. That is our job--to treat nominees fairly and to see to our constituents' needs. It is not just a question of numbers and who is President. I yield the floor. I appreciate the persistence of both colleagues from Pennsylvania, and I am sure we will continue to do this until we make some headway.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, parliamentary question. I am not sure whether the majority leader's objection was to Senator Toomey's unanimous consent request or to my attempt to modify it. If it was to the former, we are moot, and this conversation has concluded. If not, then I will object if I cannot get the regular order for the judges ahead.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, reserving the right to object. On the Executive Calendar, there is a queue of judges who have come out of the Judiciary Committee and are ready for floor action. By my count, along that queue, the two Pennsylvania judges my distinguished colleague refers to are Nos. 9 and 10; Senator Jack Reed's and my Rhode Island judge is No. 8. We would very much like to enter into an agreement where these judges start to be moved in regular order--as we often say we like around here--through the queue, as is the tradition in the Senate, so we can get them all cleared. The senior Senator from Pennsylvania, Mr. Casey, as the junior Senator mentioned, came here to move a larger block. I would not object to this request if it were amended to include all 10 of those judges on the Executive Calendar, down to and including the two Pennsylvania judges to whom my distinguished colleague refers. That would be Calendar Nos. 307, 357, 358, 359, 362, 363, 364, the all-important 459 from Rhode Island, and 460 and 461. So if the Senator from Pennsylvania would amend his unanimous consent request to accommodate that, then I would not object.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, today I rise for the 136th time in my series of speeches on the continuing threat of global climate change. Real science--the peer-reviewed kind--continues to prove the established connection between carbon pollution and the startling changes we see in our climate and oceans, changes that are so profound that we will leave to our children and grandchildren a world very different from the one we knew growing up. Nonetheless, powerful fossil fuel interests still willfully spread disinformation about climate science. There are obvious similarities between the fossil fuel industry's denial of its products' climate effects and the tobacco industry's denial of its products' health effects. These similarities are sufficient that a proper inquiry should be made about pursuing a civil lawsuit like the one the Justice Department brought and won against Big Tobacco. I have made that suggestion and, wow, did that set off an outburst. The rightwing climate denial outfits and the fossil fuel industry mouthpieces went into high gear. I think there were about 100 spontaneous reactions to my Washington Post op-ed and to a related question that I asked Attorney General Lynch. This outburst was interesting. There was usually only a degree or two of separation between the outlets and mouthpieces engaged in this outburst and the fossil fuel industry. Most of the arguments were the same, with the same telling falsehoods, omissions, and oversights. Among these misstatements, various outlets said that the aim of any such investigation would be to ``silence climate dissidents'' and squelch ``independent thought''; indeed, that such an inquiry would be ``an affront to the scientific method.'' Any investigation of fraud would be an attack on science. Well, maybe if most of your science is fraud, you see things that way, but the charge is just not true in any ordinary sense of the words involved. And the language was nearly hysterical. I was the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada and mighty ExxonMobil was lonely Galileo; the State attorneys general were involved in a ``Soviet-style investigation'' and ``gangster government.'' Oh, it was big talk indeed. It does raise this question: If the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the other fossil fuel industry mouthpieces were such resolute guardians of the scientific method, where were they when actual peer- reviewed climate scientists were investigated and harassed and bullied for doing their jobs? We took a look, and here is what you see from the mouthpieces: possible civil investigation of the fossil fuel industry, massive indignation, actual investigations of legitimate climate scientists, silent equanimity. Here is some of the history. This February, the chairman of the House Science Committee issued a government subpoena to NOAA Administrator Kathy Sullivan, seeking to investigate NOAA scientists' deliberative materials. And this was not the first time. The chairman issued a previous government subpoena against NOAA scientists after the journal Science published a NOAA report debunking the fossil-fuel-funded climate deniers' contention that global warming had paused. So the junior Senator from Rhode Island mentions a possible inquiry into fossil fuel industry fraud, and industry mouthpieces go ape. The committee chairman actually issues subpoenas against scientists and not a peep. In 2005, the former chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee thought to investigate the personal emails of a climate scientist after he published a study showing the rapid increase in global temperatures. This investigative effort was so rank that even fellow Republicans objected. Sherwood Boehlert, then a Republican Congressman from New York, expressed his ``strenuous objections'' to the chairman's ``misguided and illegitimate investigation.'' Even with that public warning of a misguided and illegitimate investigation against scientists, there was not a peep from the mouthpieces. In 2010, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli of Virginia launched an investigation against a University of Virginia faculty member--a climate scientist, of course. The Attorney General served the University of Virginia with a series of civil investigative demands to produce documents related to the work of the offending UVA faculty member. Well, to its credit, UVA refused, and won a multiyear legal battle with the Attorney General that went all the way to the Virginia Supreme Court. Again, attorneys general consider investigating the fossil fuel industry, and all the mouthpieces go ape. An actual attorney general harasses an actual climate scientist to the point where the university has to send its lawyers to defend him, and from the mouthpieces, there was not a peep through all those years of litigation. In 2011, as the Cuccinelli investigation was underway, an oil industry front group called the American Tradition Institute, which is now known as the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, doubled down and sought identical materials from UVA through a Freedom of Information Act request. Again, UVA objected, and in 2014 the Supreme Court of Virginia unanimously threw that out, too, based on--and I quote the Supreme Court of Virginia--``the concept of academic freedom and the interest in protecting research.'' So you suggest an investigation of the industry, and the denial apparatus goes ape. But here an industry front group actually went out to investigate climate scientists in a way that caused the Supreme Court of Virginia to call in the concept of academic freedom against them. And they are still at it. Despite the UVA loss in court, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute has since filed FOIA requests against scientists at NASA, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the University of Delaware, and the University of Arizona. That is some double standard. In 2009, a hacker stole more than 1,000 emails and 3,000 other documents from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia in Britain who were working on a United Nations report on climate change. Naturally, the climate denial apparatus went to work to select passages from the emails to assert that the climate scientists manipulated data. This turned out after multiple--yes--investigations to be false. Six official investigations ensued, clearing everyone of any wrongdoing: a three-part Penn State University investigation, two separate reviews commissioned by the University of East Anglia, a United Kingdom Parliamentary report, an investigation by the NOAA inspector general's office, and an investigation by the National Science Foundation's inspector general's office. Throughout all of these investigations of the climate scientists, was there a peep of concern out of these mouthpieces about investigative intrusion on science? Nope. Here in this Chamber, a Senator, then the ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee, our senior Senator from Oklahoma, publicly called for a criminal investigation into American and British scientists who had worked on the U.N. report or had communications with the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit. The Senator claimed that scientific data ``was contrived and fabricated'' and that ``in an attempt to conceal the manipulation of climate data, information disclosure laws may have been violated.'' He even named 17 key players in the controversy, including--wouldn't you know it--that UVA scientist who had been the subject of harassment by the attorney general. His staff report suggested that the scientists violated fundamental ethical principles and ``may have violated Federal law.'' He called scientists at the Climate Research Unit ``scientists who commit crimes.'' Wow. There you go--a Senator calling for criminal investigation of actual climate scientists. That must have set these mouthpieces squawking about the intrusion of investigation into science; right? Well, actually, no. Again, there was not a peep of concern. Mr. President, climate science constantly finds itself in the crosshairs of a climate denial apparatus that has an ugly side. InsideClimate News reports climate scientists often face death threats, vituperation, claims of fraud, and other forms of intimidation. And science is starting to look at that denial apparatus. Sound, peer- reviewed academic work shows how a carefully built apparatus of disinformation has been misleading the public and policymakers about the risks of carbon. That is scientific work. Sound, peer-reviewed academic scientific work shows how disinformation campaigns, funded by fossil fuel interests, have sowed doubt about climate science and have been effective in shaping American public opinion. A recent study by 16 scientists, including John Cook of the University of Queensland, Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University, and Peter Doran of Louisiana State University, examined the discrepancy between what the public thinks and what scientists know about climate change, and they found ``the consensus that humans are causing recent global warming is shared by 90-100 percent of publishing climate scientists.'' Why the gap in public recognition from what the scientists know? Because of a persistent effort ``manufacturing doubt about the scientific consensus on climate change.'' Part of the work of this denial apparatus has been to harass and investigate climate scientists over and over and over again. So when these mouthpieces with one or two degrees of separation from the fossil fuel industry have an outburst about the sanctity of science from any investigation, well, that deserves an eyebrow. And when the only time their concern for scientific integrity appears is when an investigation might look at the fossil fuel industry, but they are quiet as mice whenever actual climate scientists are being investigated, well, that merits further skepticism. There are a lot of reasons why the scientific integrity argument doesn't apply to a fraud investigation of the fossil fuel industry and its front groups. Actually, there are too many reasons for me to go into here and now in the allotted time. But here is the bottom line. No. 1, the argument is a phony, designed to protect from investigation an industry that may well have engaged in deliberate fraud on a massive scale. No. 2, the clamor is phony, whipped up a hundredfold but through industry mouthpieces. And, No. 3, the sincerity is completely phony because the mouthpieces have had nothing to say for years, when real climate scientists were actually investigated. They only swung into action when the possibility emerged that the fossil fuel industry may have to face investigation for fraud. There is a wooden cross in faraway Antarctica memorializing the Scott expedition to the South Pole. It is carved with the closing line from Alfred Lord Tennyson's ``Ulysses'': ``To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.'' To the real physicists, chemists, oceanographers, meteorologists, geologists, and climatologists actually engaged in climate science, let me say, you embody this spirit of discovery and perseverance. The real scientists have not shrunk in the face of fossil fuel threats, investigations, and intimidation. The fossil fuel campaign of denial has not stymied the flow of new climate research nor dimmed the fervor with which the real climate scientists pursue and share their knowledge. These men and women--hardworking and often unsung--deserve our praise, and, after some of the nonsense they have been put through, they probably also deserve an apology. But right now they must be looking on in wonderment--and, I hope, with some wry humor--at the sudden outburst of newfound concern from fossil fuel mouthpieces for the so-called sanctity of the scientific process. Of all the people to make that claim, this crew has the least business making it. I yield the floor.

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

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Chuck Canterbury, president of the National Fraternal Order of Police, explains it this way: ``When we are able to expose the link between shell companies and drug trafficking, corruption, organized crime, and terrorist finance, the law enforcement community is better able to keep America safe from these illegal activities and keep the proceeds of these crimes out of the U.S. financial system.'' Of all places, the United States should not be a safe haven for criminals, foreign or domestic, to hide their illegal assets. We could take a simple major step in fighting money laundering, financial fraud, and terrorist financing by passing this bill. I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to cosponsor it and to help us get it passed. I thank the Chair. I appreciate the extra time. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here today to highlight law enforcement legislation that would help crack down on human trafficking, terrorism financing, money laundering, Medicare fraud, the narcotics trade, tax evasion, public corruption, and a litany of other crimes in the United States and around the world. These crimes all involve money, and the United States has become a favorite destination for criminals looking to hide it. Earlier this month, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the first of the so-called Panama papers, a leak of 11.5 million confidential documents from a Panama-based law firm that sets up shell corporations and tax shelters for wealthy clients. The documents we have seen so far show that, along with the Caribbean islands you might expect, several American States are popular places to form shell corporations. Our friend Senator Kent Conrad, who used to be chairman of the Budget Committee, was fond of using this floor chart showing what is called the Ugland House building in the Cayman Islands. This little building claims to be the place from which an astonishing 18,000 companies do business. As unimaginable as it may be to have 18,000 companies claiming to be doing business out of that one little building, I am sorry to say that there is a building just a 2-hour drive from the U.S. Capitol Building that serves as the official address for a quarter of a million companies, many of them shell corporations. A shell corporation is a company that serves no economic purpose and doesn't conduct any real business. Shell corporations exist primarily to hold legal title to bank accounts, real estate, or other assets, often obscuring the true human owners. While people can form shell corporations in just about any country, many American States make it especially easy to do so, perhaps even easier than getting a library card. You may actually need to go down to a library to sign up for a library card, but you can form a shell corporation with a few clicks of a mouse and payment of a small fee. There is another reason that the United States has become so popular for shell corporations. Currently, none--zero--of the 50 American States require the disclosure of the beneficial owners--the real human beings who own the companies. Instead, corporate records can identify the owner as just another faceless shell corporation, or the owner could be identified as a professional agent paid to sign the needed forms and never speak of them again or a lawyer who refuses to disclose who his client is under attorney-client privilege. Behind this easy-to- establish veil of secrecy, criminals can and do use these shell corporations to open bank accounts, transfer funds, and even to hide the ownership of expensive assets. This building shown here is at 650 Fifth Avenue in New York City. The Iranian Government used a string of generic businesses to obscure its ownership of this Fifth Avenue skyscraper. Profits from this enterprise helped fund Iran-backed terrorism for decades, until a U.S. Government investigation finally uncovered the scheme in 2008. How could a state sponsor of terrorism own a piece of the New York City skyline and profit from owning that piece of the New York City skyline for so long without anyone knowing? Let's look at how Iran used anonymous shell corporations to hide its involvement. On paper, 650 Fifth Avenue was owned by a partnership of the Alavi Foundation, a New York-based charity, and the Assa Corporation, a New York shell company. Assa Corporation was, in turn, owned by yet another shell company, Assa Company, Limited, and formed in the Isle of Jersey, a notorious banking center and tax shelter. The Isle of Jersey company was in turn owned by individuals representing Bank Melli, the Iranian Government's financial arm, and there is the connection to Iran. So to the public, that building--worth about half a billion dollars-- was owned by a charity and a faceless shell company. Because there is no requirement in the United States that States keep track of the real owners of a company formed under State law, New York State only knew that the Assa Corporation was owned by another shell corporation. Ultimately, investigators were able to connect those dots and tie Iran to the structure from a clue in the corporate records kept on the Isle of Jersey. How is that for irony? A notorious tax shelter actually had better ownership records than we have in the United States. Once Iran's investment and involvement was uncovered, the Department of Justice moved to seize and sell the building and to distribute the proceeds of that sale to American victims of Iranian-backed terror. After years of legal appeals, the victims look close to receiving this compensation. Of course, Iran isn't the only criminal enterprise hiding behind American shell companies. Other recently uncovered examples of enterprises hiding behind American shell companies include a Mexican drug cartel using an Oklahoma corporation to launder money through a horse farm, a crime syndicate setting up a web of corporations in eight States as part of a $100 million Medicare fraud scheme, and a human trafficking ring based in Moldova that hides their crimes behind anonymous corporations in Kansas, Missouri, and Ohio. According to the Rhode Island State Police, corporate secrecy in my own State has complicated their investigations into real estate fraud, illegal prescription drug distribution, and sales tax evasion. In January, just months before the Panama Papers hit the headlines, ``60 Minutes'' aired a segment showing just how easy it can be for criminals to hide money in the United States. The program featured an investigator with the anticorruption organization Global Witness. That investigator pretended to represent a corrupt African leader, and ``60 Minutes'' brought a hidden camera along into his meetings with lawyers in New York. The investigator, presenting himself as representing the corrupt African leader, made clear that his client wanted help using suspicious funds to buy a mansion, a jet, and a yacht in the United States and to hide his ownership of these assets. Of the 16 lawyers who met with the undercover investigator, only 1 turned him away. It seems the others were comfortable helping a corrupt foreign official hide money in opaque American shell corporations. While the underlying criminal schemes may be colorful and complex, the answer to this shell corporation problem is simple and straightforward. The Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement Assistance Act would direct States to require applicants forming corporations and limited liability companies to include basic information about the actual human beings who own the company. The States would maintain and periodically update this information, and it would be available to law enforcement officers who present valid court-ordered subpoenas or search warrants. It is simple. Have each State keep track of who actually owns companies they charter and ensure that information is available for Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies through proper processes. Transparency in business ownership is not a novel idea. Every member of the European Union will be transparent by 2017. The United Kingdom and the Netherlands have even announced plans to make their corporate ownership registries available to the public. With the light of corporate transparency about to shine on criminal assets hidden in Europe, their shell corporations will not be effective for these purposes. So that money will be looking for new dark homes. America should take swift action to make sure these assets don't find new hidden homes in opaque American shell corporations. We are supposed to be an example to the world, not the place where the world's corrupt and the world's criminals hide their cash and their assets. The Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement Assistance Act enjoys broad support from the national law enforcement community, including the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, the Fraternal Order of Police, the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, and the U.S. Marshals Service Association, as well as the Rhode Island State Police. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be able to finish my statement.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, today is the 135th time I have come to give voice to the issue that I feel will most significantly define this generation of leadership in the United States and, frankly, around the globe. I know that there are many people in Washington who would prefer to ignore what our carbon emissions are doing to our oceans and to our climate, but we disregard nature's warnings at our peril. The changes to our environment, fueled by our carbon pollution, are far-reaching--from the coastlines to the prairies, from mountain tops to deep oceans, from pole to pole. As a terrestrial species, we naturally pay more attention to what is happening on land, such as increasing average global temperatures and upheavals in extreme weather. We don't so much see what is happening in our oceans. Every year we emit into the Earth's thin atmosphere tens of gigatons of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels--nearly 36 gigatons of carbon dioxide in 2014. Not all of that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere. Our oceans--the Earth's oceans--absorb approximately one- third of all our carbon pollution. That means they have absorbed roughly 600 gigatons in our industrial era. For the record, a gigaton is a billion tons--not a thousand tons, not a million tons, but a billion tons--and 600 billion tons of carbon dioxide have gone into our oceans. We know what that does. All that carbon dioxide in the oceans changes the ocean's very chemistry, and it makes ocean water more acidic. The chemical reaction, carbon dioxide reacting with water to form carbonic acid, is simple. You can replicate it in a middle school science lab, but its effects in the oceans are profound. According to research published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the rate of change in ocean acidity is already faster than at any time in the past 50 million years on Earth. We are rapidly spiraling into unknown territory. By way of context, the human species has been around on Earth for about 200,000 years. The human species started farming and herding, went from hunting and gathering to the basics of socialized human life less than 20,000 years ago. We are doing something to our planet now that has no precedent for 50 million years. This line shows the increasing CO2 in the atmosphere in parts per million. This line shows the absorption of the CO2 by the ocean, and this line shows the pH change in the oceans as a result. I would point out that pH is actually measured on a logarithmic scale. So if you were to adjust this to the standard percentage-type display of information, you would see this falling much more steeply. This is a very conservative way of showing what is happening to our oceans. The logarithmic scale is a multiple, not just a steady line. So as you move down the pH numbers, you are actually creating much more massive effects in the ocean. People have measured this drop in ocean pH from climate change. This is not a theory. You can go out and measure it with equipment that is not very different, again, from what a middle school with an aquarium would use to measure pH in the aquarium. People measure something else in our oceans also. They measure the rise in ocean temperature. For decades, the oceans have absorbed over 90 percent of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gas emissions. The heat that comes in, that gets trapped in our thin atmosphere when the Sun's warmth gets trapped by these greenhouse gasses, lands in a variety of places. The Antarctic ice sheet gets two- tenths of a percent of the heat. The Greenland ice sheet gets two- tenths of a percent of the heat. Arctic sea ice gets eight-tenths of a percent of the heat. Glaciers and icecaps take up nine-tenths of a percent of the heat. All of our continents together, the land mass of the Earth, take up 2.1 percent of the added heat from climate change. The atmosphere, that thin membrane that allows us to live and breathe on this planet, has taken up 2.3 percent of the heat. All the rest of it, 93 percent, has been taken up by the oceans. They are our refrigerant. They are our cooler. They are the air conditioner for the planet. But when you take up that much, things begin to change, and ocean heat is ramping up. A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change found that in the last 20 years--actually, less than 20, from 1997 to now, to be exact--the oceans absorbed the same amount of heat energy just in that 20-year period as they had in the previous 130 years. That is a dramatic increase in heat uptake by the oceans. It is our human activity, specifically our unfettered burning of fossil fuels, that has made our oceans both warmer overall and more acidic. One result of this is the calamity now taking place in the world's coral reefs. A healthy coral reef is one of the most productive and diverse ecosystems on Earth. It is an engine for the propagation of life. Coral depends on a symbiotic relationship with tiny, photosynthetic algae called zooxanthellae. They live in the surface tissue of the coral. Within a limited range of temperature, pH, salinity, and water clarity, this symbiosis can thrive, and it gives us reefs all over the world--these engines of life in the ocean. Living coral has evolved for millions of years to maintain its symbiosis within that range. We are now measurably--not theoretically but measurably--altering the ocean in ways too fast for coral to adapt. Push corals out of their comfort range for very long, and the corals get stressed and they evict their algae. This process is what is known as coral bleaching. Because corals get most of their food out of that symbiotic relationship with these algae, if the algae can't be reabsorbed quickly, the corals die. Coral bleaching sounds benign, but it is like cardiac arrest for a reef. There is a good chance it dies and, even if it doesn't, it is a long recovery. We are currently in the middle of a massive bleaching of the world's coral reefs--cardiac arrest at a global scale. Dr. Mark Eakin of NOAA's Coral Reef Watch Program says of this coral cataclysm: ``It very well may be the worst period of coral bleaching we have seen.'' And when he says ``we have seen,'' he means that which we have ever seen in the human record. Worldwide, coral has already declined by approximately 40 percent. Closer to home, across the Caribbean and the Florida Keys, two key coral species have declined by an astonishing 98 percent in the last four decades. In my lifetime, I have seen once-radiant underwater ecosystems teeming with life become barren fields of white skeletons reaching into an empty ocean. One of my climate trips took me down to Monroe County, FL, where I met Mayor Sylvia Murphy, the Republican mayor of Monroe County, home to the famous Florida Keys. I asked her how the reefs were off the Keys. ``Beautiful,'' she said, ``unless you were here 15 years ago.'' Australia's Great Barrier Reef is the largest coral ecosystem on Earth. It is one of the seven wonders of the natural world. Severe bleaching is now hitting ``between 60 and 100 percent of corals'' on the Great Barrier Reef, according to Dr. Terry Hughes of James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. Professor Hughes tweeted out a map of the current devastation, writing in the text: ``I showed the results of aerial survey of bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef to my students, and then we wept.'' As with many other effects of climate change, it can be difficult to convey the magnitude of events when they aren't taking place in front of our terrestrial human faces. In his 2010 TED talk, one of the great marine scientists we have, leading coral ecologist Dr. Jeremy Jackson, tried to bring this coral bleaching calamity a little closer to home. He put it like this: Imagine you go camping in July somewhere in Europe or North America, and you wake up the next morning, and you look around you, and you see that 80 percent of the trees, as far as you can see, have dropped their leaves and are standing there naked. And you come home, and you discover that 80 percent of all the trees in North America and in Europe have dropped their leaves. Remember, this is his example from July. And then you read in the paper a few weeks later, ``Oh, by the way, a quarter of those trees died.'' Well, that's what happened in the Indian Ocean during the 1998 El Nino, an area vastly greater than the size of North America and Europe, when 80 percent of all the corals bleached and a quarter of them died. Jeremy came to speak to our caucus recently. He told us that every ocean ecosystem he studied in his career is gone, as he first found it, changed dramatically from his first visit. Coral reefs are one of the first places that truly irreversible effects of climate change seem to be manifesting themselves--the proverbial canary dying in the coal mine of our carbon-ridden planet. To say the ocean we knew in our childhood is already gone is not doomsaying or pessimism, it is a grimly realistic assessment of where we stand, sadly. In the Senate, there will likely be snickering about this. Some will say: Who gives a damn about coral reefs? If it can't be monetized by a corporation, the hell with it, is too often our motto here. Well, God made these glories. God made them on our planet. In some cases, they have been growing for tens of thousands of years. We are wrecking them in a single generation, and if that doesn't mean something to us, a long look in the mirror might be in order. Even those who can only see this tragedy through their monetizer goggles ought to know that a decline in healthy coral reefs is a huge blow to us all. According to an article last month in The Atlantic, coral reefs are home to 25 percent of the world's fish biodiversity. Reefs are incubators for ocean life, support systems for fisheries we depend on, tourist attractions for divers and snorkelers who fill local communities with their visiting and their spending, and they are coastal protection for coastal infrastructure and homes against storm waves. It is not nice to fool with Mother Nature. As Pope Francis warned, ``God always forgives; mankind sometimes forgives; nature never forgives. You slap her and she will slap you back.'' As he says, we are sinning with our actions against nature, and nature will not forget. We just don't have that right. We are making a mark on the Earth in this generation that will not go away. If mankind lasts 10,000 years, well, 10,000 years from now they will see and know the mark of this generation on our planet, and they will justly inquire: How could we have been such fools? How could we, in this generation, have been such greedy, reckless, self-infatuated fools? In 1954, the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb over the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The explosion vaporized everything on three islands, raised water temperatures to as much as 55,000 degrees, and left a crater over a mile wide and 240 feet deep. More than 60 years have gone by and scientists observe the corals in this part of the Pacific flourishing again. If you give it a chance, life finds a way. Dr. Zoe Richards, one of the scientists involved in the study, said: ``The healthy condition of the coral at Bikini Atoll today is proof of their resilience and ability to bounce back from massive disturbances, that is, if the reef is left undisturbed and there are healthy nearby reefs to source the recovery.'' So that is the caveat. Reefs can recover but not if we continue to stack the deck oceanwide against them by pumping so much heat and carbon pollution into the oceans. Senator Schatz of Hawaii--not coincidently another ocean State-- introduced, along with me, the American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act last year to address climate change with a market-based solution built on principles espoused by leading Republican economists. We went to Republicans--former Cabinet officials, former Members of Congress, economists, think tanks--and we said: How should we do this? If you don't like the President's plan, if you don't like the regulatory way, what is your way? Virtually every single person on the Republican side who has thought this problem through to a solution has come to the same place, a revenue-neutral carbon fee with an appropriate border adjustment. So that is what we wrote. When you are ready, we are here. We did it your way. As a Senator, John F. Kennedy once said: Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past--let us accept our own responsibility for the future. This is particularly true for our oceans. As one Florida mayor put it: ``The ocean is not Republican, and it's not Democratic . . . it's a nonpartisan ocean,'' and that nonpartisan ocean is screaming warnings at us that we ought to heed in nonpartisan fashion. We have a clear scientific understanding of the problem, and we have a moral obligation to act. Time is not on our side. We need to pay attention to the evidence. We need to accept the reality of our predicament as it is communicated to us by the laws and signs of nature--God's signals to us on this Earth. That is what healthy coral looks like under the water. Here it is bleached out and dying. It is our ocean. It is our responsibility. I urge this body to wake up and lead. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am on the floor I guess just a few moments ahead of the ranking member of our Senate Foreign Relations Committee, my friend Ben Cardin, who is on his way but has authorized me to proceed with a few remarks on the topic that he and I, and perhaps others, would like to address, which is tomorrow's signing in New York of the Paris climate agreement. Over 160 nations around the world are going to be participating in signing that agreement that will move many of them immediately into their program of compliance and signify for others a statement of intention to join. I think it is the largest international agreement, in terms of the number of countries involved, ever, certainly the biggest one I can think of. So it is very significant in that respect. One other thing about Paris that I think was also very significant is what took place in America's corporate sector in support of a strong Paris Agreement. The President and groups like Ceres, with particular leadership from companies like Unilever, got together and created a remarkable American corporate coalition with more than 150 companies, including ones like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, Ford and GM, Nike, and VF industries, General Mills, Cargill, Apple, Google--a terrific coalition; kind of the who's who of corporate America. They got together to urge the countries of the world to be bold in Paris, to have it be a strong agreement, and to show their support for an international program to address climate change, which I think is terrific. The distinguished junior Senator from Louisiana is presiding, and I can't think off the top of my head what Louisiana-based companies are part of that coalition, but certainly companies that are based in virtually every State we represent in the Senate--major companies: Walmart, for instance, out of Arkansas; Coca-Cola, out of Georgia; VF industries, out of North Carolina; some of our biggest electric utilities; the bulk of the property casualty insurance and reinsurance industry. It is very significant that America's corporate community came so strongly together. I hope very much that is a message that not only resonated in Paris but that will resonate in Congress as well because I would bet that every single one of us have a significant home State corporation that has signed that pledge, and some of us will have many significant home State corporations that will have signed that pledge. So when you have gotten to the point where the leadership of America's corporate community has signed on to the fact that something needs to be done and that America ought to lead--that is our role in the world--that will begin more and more to have an effect in this body to counter some of the nonsense and mischief that a very small slice in the fossil fuel industry has been propagating at the expense of the broader American corporate community, which, by and large, has been pretty outstanding on this. Let me also mention one other thing that has happened just this afternoon, which I am very encouraged by; that is, an amendment that has been filed by 10 Senators--bipartisan, 5 and 5. It is the Graham- Whitehouse amendment. The cosponsors on the Republican side are Senators Graham, Kirk, Ayotte, Collins, and Portman. On the Democratic side, they are Whitehouse, Merkley, Schatz, Markey, and Brown. The amendment reads: Climate change is real, and human activity contributes to climate change. Climate change is already affecting the American people and poses an increasing risk to our health, security, economy, and infrastructure. Over 180 nations, including China, India, and Brazil, have made commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change, creating opportunities for American workers and innovative private industry benefits from global clean energy markets. Therefore, it is the sense of the Senate that the United States should be a world leader in addressing climate change; that Congress is best positioned to address policies that leave a prosperous economy and healthy environment for future generations; that Congress has a responsibility to take actions that reduce emissions and combat climate change; and, finally, that Congress should support research and development to bolster clean energy technology. In that latter regard, let me note the Mission Innovation Initiative that has come out of Secretary Moniz's Department of Energy and out of a significant group of major investors around the world. The deal basically is that countries involved will try to double our clean energy R&D, and in return these major investors from around the world, led by Bill Gates, will set up a significant fund that will take the emerging technologies that early R&D can discover and bring them through the various early investment stages of what investors and startup folks call the valleys of death on the way to becoming a sustainable company so those technologies can be brought forward on an accelerated basis. So when you look at Paris, you not only see this enormous array of nations coming together in a common cause, you see right behind it virtually the entirety of the leadership of America's corporate sector coming right in with it and saying: This is what we want. This is what we encourage. We want it to be strong. You have the biggest investors in the world, most of them coming together and saying: We are going to have your back with investment into new types of clean energy funding. And then you have the governments of the world not only signing up for--not all of them but the ones participating in Mission Innovation-- signing up, in addition to the treaty, for this commitment to increase R&D and press innovation in this space forward. So for all those reasons and more, tomorrow is a good news day for our country. It is a good news day for progress and innovation, it is a good news day for the enormous array of American corporate leaders who have supported and cheered on this particular occasion, and I think it is an occasion for pride on the part of the United States of America that the signing will be taking place in the United States in New York, that Secretary Kerry will be attending, that the Chinese leader will be attending, and that people from all around the world will be there not only recognizing the need to do this but recognizing America's leadership in getting us to this place. I will close with a personal note of appreciation for a gentleman named Todd Stern. Todd was the climate negotiator for the Department of State for many years, and some of those were rather bleak years in which the United States was not showing leadership. So Todd had to hang in there and endure that frustration and keep his candle of faith burning until the day came when we finally began to kick in at last. His role was very important in getting us prepared for and through the Paris Agreement. He is retiring and has served his country well. So I will close with a word of good will for that particular public servant who has done right by his duty and done right by his country. With that, I yield the floor, and with any luck, we can await the arrival of Senator Cardin in due course. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I am on the floor with my colleague Senator Portman to join him in urging the House to take prompt action on the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which passed with such a stunning bipartisan vote in the Senate. As Senator Portman has pointed out, years of careful preparation went into the drafting of this bill. There were five separate national hearings held in Washington with people from all over the country. This is a very polished and carefully developed piece of legislative work that has the support not only of the addiction and recovery community but of the law enforcement community and many others. Senator Portman has been very diligent about coming to the floor to press for action from the House of Representatives. My view is that since the House of Representatives is under Republican control, they are more likely to be attentive to the urgings of a Republican Senator--particularly one who has served in the House of Representatives--than they are to me. But I want to make sure the record is clear that I fully support rapid passage of this bill, whether it is something that is close enough that we can quickly get it through conference or whether it is our bill, to which they are free to add things as they wish over time, but can get to the President now--the reason I think it is important that it get to the President now is we are in the appropriations process. The appropriators for these accounts need to know what they are appropriating to. So time is of the essence, not just because of the lives that are being lost day-to-day and month-to-month out there but also because our appropriators need to know. I urge my colleagues in the House of Representatives, Democrats and Republicans alike, to listen to the distinguished Senator from Ohio. Let's try to get this done. With that, I yield to Senator Portman with my thanks and appreciation.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here for the 134th time to urge the Senate to wake up to the growing threat of global climate change. I am afraid my chart here is getting a little bit beat up after all of these speeches. I hope we can begin to make progress. But we continue here in this body to be besieged by persistent and meretricious denial. Of course, the polluters want us to do nothing. They are so happy to offload to everybody else the costs of the harm from fossil fuels: the cost of heat waves, the cost of sea level rise, the cost of ocean acidification, the cost of dying forests, and the rest of it. They are running a very profitable ``we keep the profits, you bear the costs'' racket. They spend rivers of money on lobbying and on politics and on a complex PR machine that fills the airwaves with sound bites of cooked-up, paid-for doubt about climate change. I believe the worst of them actually know better, but they do it any way. In this turbulence, the Wall Street Journal editorial page regularly sides with the rightwing climate denial operations. So, naturally, they have challenged my call for an appropriate inquiry into whether the fossil fuel industry's decades long and purposeful campaign of misinformation has run afoul of Federal civil racketeering laws. Now, it is very hard for them to argue that the fossil fuel industry should be exempt from fraud laws. It is very hard for them to argue that the tobacco lawsuit years ago was ill funded, although certainly they tried right up until the government won the case. So they turn, instead, to invention. The Wall Street Journal repeatedly and falsely has accused me of seeking to punish anyone who rejects the scientific evidence of climate change. That is, of course, a crock. I never said anything close to that, but that does not stop them. In fact, this line of counterattacks fits the Journal's playbook for defending polluting industries. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page has a record on acid rain, on the ozone layer, and now on climate change. There is a pattern. They deny the science, they question the motives of those who call for change, and they exaggerate the costs of taking action. At all costs, they protect the polluting industry. When the Journal is wrong, as they have repeatedly been proven to be, they keep at it, over and over. In the 1970s, scientists first warned that chlorofluorocarbons could erode the ozone layer of the Earth's stratosphere, and that would increase human exposure to cancer-causing ultraviolet rays. The Wall Street Journal editorial page doggedly fought back against the science, questioning it, and attacking any regulation of the CFCs. In at least eight editorials between 1976 and 1992, the Wall Street Journal proclaimed that the connection between CFCs and ozone depletion ``is only a theory and will remain only that until further efforts are made to test its validity in the atmosphere itself.'' They called the scientific evidence ``scanty'' and ``premature,'' suggested that the ozone layer ``may even be increasing,'' insinuated that ``it is simply not clear to us that real science drives policy in this area,'' and warned of ``a dramatic increase in air-conditioning and refrigeration costs,'' with ``some $1.52 billion in foregone profits and product- change expenses'' as well as 8,700 jobs lost. Those are all actual quotes from the ed page. Well, back then Americans listened to the science. Congress acted, the ozone layer and the public's health were protected, and the economy prospered. All those terrible costs that the Journal predicted, according to the EPA's 1999 progress report, ``Every dollar invested in ozone protection provide[d] $20 of societal health benefits in the United States''--$1 spent, $20 saved. When scientists began reporting that acid rain was falling across our Northeastern States, out came the Wall Street Journal again saying the ``data are not conclusive and more studies are needed''; arguing that ``nature, not industry, is the primary source of acid rain''; claiming ``the scientific case for acid rain is dying''; and charging that ``politics, not nature, is the primary force driving the theory's biggest boosters.'' Again, those are all actual quotes, even as President Reagan's own scientific panel said that inaction would risk ``irreversible damage,'' which brings us to the Wall Street Journal on climate change. In June 1993, they claimed ``growing evidence that global warming just isn't happening.'' September 1999, they reported that ``serious scientists'' call global warming ``one of the greatest hoaxes of all time.'' June 2005, they asserted that the link between fossil fuels and global warming had ``become even more doubtful.'' February 2010, they said: ``We think the science is still disputable.'' June 2011, they called global warming a ``fad-scare.'' December 2011, an editorial said that the global warming debate requires ``more definitive evidence.'' As recently as last January, the page called extreme weather ``business as usual,'' while still erroneously clinging to the ``hiatus'' argument. Just this week they published an editorial that any link people have talked about between climate change and national security threats-- something we hear from our armed services, from our intelligence services--that all is ``silliness,'' to use the word of the author they quoted. The polluter playbook also produced the usual Journal warnings about costs, that ``a high CO2 tax would reduce world GDP a staggering 12.9 percent in 2100--the equivalent of $40 trillion a year,'' making ``the world poorer than it otherwise would be''; about motivations, that this was all really motivated by what they called ``political actors'' seeking to gain economic control; and about the science, claiming that ``global service temperatures have remained essentially flat.'' This is my particular favorite. A December 2009 Wall Street Journal claimed that climate scientists were suspect because they ``have been on the receiving end of climate change-related funding,'' the Journal continues ``so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.'' Set aside their suggestion that funding is why priests believe in God. Look at what they are saying about scientific funding. If the Wall Street Journal can make it a conflict of interest for scientists to be on the receiving end of scientific funding related to their field of inquiry, that covers virtually all science. That would make virtually all science not discovered by accident a conflict of interest. That is a great trick, because if science itself is a conflict of interest, that neatly moots the real conflict of interest of the masquerade talk-show science produced by the polluting industry's PR machinery. And there is such machinery, according to numerous investigative books, journalists' reporting, and academic studies. Look at the academic work of Professor Robert Brulle of Drexel University, Professor Riley Dunlap of Oklahoma State University, and Justin Farrell of Yale University, among others. Look at the investigative works of Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their book ``Merchants of Doubt'' or David Michaels' book ``Doubt is their Product'' and Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner's book ``Deceit and Denial.'' Look at Jeff Nesbit's new book ``Poison Tea.'' Look at the journalistic work of Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song, David Hasemyer, and John Cushman, Jr., in InsideClimate News, which is evidently now shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize looking at what ExxonMobil knew about climate change versus the things that it chose to tell the public. Look at the parallel probe by the Energy and Environment Fellowship Project at the Columbia Journalism School, published in the Los Angeles Times, which brings us to the Journal's question: ``Why even raise the possibility of RICO suits--and suggest it to the Justice Department--if Mr. Whitehouse's goal isn't to punish those who disagree with him on climate?'' One reason is that a RICO suit was won by the U.S. Department of Justice under the Clinton and Bush administrations against the tobacco industry. So there is this little matter of this being the law. The Journal never seems to mention the fact that the government won the civil case against the tobacco industry. Before the RICO lawsuit was won by the Department of Justice, the Wall Street Journal editorial page had worked it over pretty well, calling it ``abuse,'' ``hypocrisy,'' and ``a shakedown.'' So I understand that they don't like that fact, but it is now a fact that the Department won that case. A second reason is that if there is indeed a core of deliberate fraud at the heart of the climate denial enterprise, no industry should be too big to dodge the legal consequences. Most of the writers I mentioned noted themselves similarities between the tobacco fraud scheme and the climate denial operation--as has Sharon Eubanks, the lawyer who won the tobacco lawsuit for the Department of Justice--and, so it seems, have now more than a dozen State attorneys general who are looking at Big Oil and coal for misleading statements, which leads me to my last point. Note the breadth of the Wall Street Journal editorial page's language that I want to ``punish those who disagree with [me] on climate,'' but that is just false. As the RICO case itself shows--the tobacco RICO case that is the model we would like to have the Department look at-- people who disagree with me on climate change would no more be the targets of such an investigation than smokers or people who disagreed with the Surgeon General about tobacco's dangers were targets of the tobacco case. Those folks may very well have been victims of the tobacco industry's fraud. They may be the dupes. For the record, fraud investigations focus on those who lie, knowing that they are lying, intending to fool others and doing it for gain, for money. Even fossil fuel companies should not be too big to answer for that conduct if it were proven in court. Why would the Wall Street Journal editorial page and other rightwing editorialists be trying to saddle me with an argument I am not making? Well, one obvious reason would be because they don't have a good response to the one I am making. Let's say, if they were operating as a shill for the industry here and emitting industry propaganda, they would be providing their industry clients a very valuable service of misdirection. Like squid ink released to create a helpful distraction, an imaginary argument to quarrel with gives them an advantage. As I said, it is going to be tough to convince people that the fossil industry should be too big to sue, no matter what they did or that it should deserve different rules under the law than the tobacco industry. If you are going to lose those arguments, you have to make another one, and they invented that I want to jail people--including contrarian scientists and skeptics. This is not rational argument. This is not the kind of rational, fact-based argument that a court would demand. It is defensive behavior on behalf of a creature that feels itself threatened and desperately wants to avoid that fair courtroom forum, a forum where the evidence matters, where the truth is required, and where the industry doesn't get to put in the fix. Everybody should know I take climate change very seriously. Rhode Island is the Ocean State. Just this week we had major news stories in our statewide paper about drowning sea coast marshes, endangered historic buildings, and ocean fisheries in upheaval, all from climate change. This is the first one. ``Drowning marshes: Buying time against the tide, they pour sand in an uphill fight.'' As the climate warms, causing the ice caps to melt, currents to slow and ocean waters to expand, sea levels are rising at a rate that could eventually wipe out many of Rhode Island's salt marshes. Just days later: ``Newport sees the firsthand threat of climate change.'' But the confluence of rising seas and more extreme storms caused by climate change could present an insurmountable challenge for those trying to protect this and thousands of other historical structures near the coast. Then, finally: ``Is commercial fishing sustainable? An industry at crossroads.'' John Bullard, regional administrator with NOAA's Northeast Regional Office, said that he believes commercial fishing can be sustainable but a number of issues, including climate change, need attention for that to happen. I represent a State whose fishing industry depends on doing something about climate change, whose historic buildings are at risk of being flooded and lost by the insurmountable problem of climate change, and whose salt marshes, which are very important to our State, are rising at a rate that could eventually wipe them out. Am I supposed to ignore that? Am I supposed to ignore this? It is not going to happen. I am proud to stand with our leading research institutions and scientists around the country, our national security experts, corporations such as Apple, Google, Mars, and National Grid. I am proud to stand with President Obama and Pope Francis, who both agree about the seriousness of climate change. If the polluter machine wants to score more ink, so be it. I cannot stop them, but I am not going anywhere. My State is in the crosshairs. This is one of those fights worth having. I yield the floor.