Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am thrilled and delighted to follow my outstanding colleague from Maryland coming here to talk about climate change. That is the topic that brings me to the floor today as well. Those of us who are from coastal States not only have the experience of worse flooding in our coastal communities and those coastal communities getting new conversations with their municipal bond folks about what the flooding risk means for their bond ratings, but we are also looking at projections like Maryland is of what happens if we don't act, and the very maps of our State will change. When historians look back at why the United States failed so badly to take on climate change, they will, of course, focus on the political efforts of the world's largest oil companies: Exxon, Chevron, BP, and Shell. They will note the obstructive role of leading trade associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the American Petroleum Institute. They will chronicle the network of phony front groups set up by Big Oil, Big Coal, and the Koch brothers to sow doubt of the science and fear of climate action. Big Oil, the Kochs, the trade associations, the front groups all will deserve plenty of blame. Their climate denial apparatus and their capture of the modern Republican Party is a direct and deliberate cause of America's failure. There are other less heralded but equally bad actors. I come to the floor today to discuss one of them. Future historians of ``anii Trumpi,'' take note of Marathon Petroleum. Marathon Petroleum is the largest oil refiner in the United States. It refines oil into gasoline, other fuels, and lubricants. It owns pipelines and gas stations. Its 4,000 Speedway locations and almost 8,000 independent gas stations selling Marathon-branded fuels reach across the country. It is No. 31 on the Fortune 500 list of U.S. companies, and it has almost $100 billion in annual revenue. This is a big company with a big stake in blocking climate action. What does Marathon want? Well, its annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission makes one thing very clear: Marathon sees laws and regulations that reduce carbon pollution as a threat. One threat Marathon specifically cites in its annual report is fuel economy or CAFE standards. Why? Marathon's 2018 annual report reads: ``Higher CAFE standards for cars and light trucks have the potential to reduce demand for our transportation fuels.'' It is as simple as that. Fuel- efficient cars burn less gas, and that is bad for a big refiner. Well, in 2012, automakers and the State of California and the previous administration got together, and they agreed to significantly better fuel economy standards. That was a good deal for almost everyone. Consumers were estimated to save more than $1.7 trillion in reduced fuel costs--up to $8,000 per vehicle for vehicles purchased in 2025. The air would be cleaner. Carbon emissions from cars and light trucks would be cut in half by 2025, and automakers would have a competitive spur to keep pace with new vehicle technologies being developed in Europe and China--win, win, win, win. Well, in 2017, these automakers came back into the Trump administration and asked the Trump administration to revisit the fuel economy standards. It looks, from everything I have seen, like the auto industry primarily wanted technical changes to make the standards easier to meet. I have found no evidence that the auto industry asked the administration to totally freeze the standards or that they asked the administration then to revoke California's authority to set its own standards under the Clean Air Act. When automakers asked the administration for these changes, someone else was watching. The oil industry sensed opportunity. The standards may have been good for consumers, the auto industry, States, our global climate, but that $1.7 trillion in reduced fuel costs that consumers would save would come directly out of oil industry revenues. So the oil industry sprang into action to hijack the rulemaking process. The oil industry demanded weakening of the standards to the max; i.e., a freeze, and it even demanded revocation of California's longstanding authority to set its own standards, leading more than a dozen other States, including my home State of Rhode Island. We follow the California standard. An administration marbled through with fossil fuel lobbyists and attorneys heard the oil industry call. It must have been a strange experience for the automakers. One minute they are asking for technical changes to a regulation they had agreed to; the next minute the whole process has been run off with by a completely other industry. Marathon was the ring leader. I obtained an electronic draft of a letter to the Deputy Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration urging her to weaken the fuel economy standards. The metadata of the letter was still in the letter because I got it electronically. According to the metadata in this document, it was written by a Marathon Petroleum inhouse lobbyist. Marathon then shopped this letter around to Members of the House of Representatives to convince them to send letters backing the weakened standards that they wanted. We got those House letters, and we ran them through plagiarism software against the Marathon lobbyists' draft. Here is what we got. When we compared the Marathon letter with the letter sent by Members of Pennsylvania's congressional delegation, it was an 80-percent match. The red here is all the language that is identical. Members from Indiana and West Virginia sent similar letters also with text lifted directly from the Marathon lobbyists' draft. If you want to give this political stunt a name, you could call it a Pruitt, after Scott Pruitt, who distinguished himself for the Trump EPA Administrator's position by copying a Devon Energy text onto his own official letterhead as attorney general of his State and sending it on as if it were his letter. Back to Marathon. Pulling a Pruitt with these Congressmen was not enough. We know from Marathon's own reports that it directly lobbied on the standards, and we know that its trade association, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, AFPM, also lobbied on the standards. We know AFPM also launched a campaign on social media urging people to support a freeze. Marathon is a member of a front group that is called the American Legislative Exchange Council, also known as ALEC. This front group pushes the agenda of the Koch brothers' apparatus in State legislatures. It is the tool for the Koch brothers to try to work their will in State legislatures. ALEC passed a resolution in favor of weakening the standards and revoking California's State authority. We know that senior executives from Marathon met personally with EPA leadership and with senior officials in the White House to push for weakening the standards and revoking California's authority. There is a lot we don't know. We don't know which front groups Marathon and other oil companies fund because neither of them disclose their donations or their donors. We don't know how many other groups were deployed in this effort. We don't know the extent to which Marathon coordinated its campaign with the trade association and the front groups, so we can't assess whether this lobbying effort violated the front groups' 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. We don't know what role Marathon or its front groups had in the mysterious antitrust letter that came popping out of DOJ shortly after the automakers negotiated separately with California. When the automakers realized that their negotiations--the process they were involved with--had been hijacked by Marathon and that they were just passengers on the Marathon train at this point, they bailed. When they knew the conversation was bogus, they bailed. They negotiated directly with California, and they came up with their own deal with California. That, obviously, really ticked off the oil guys who thought they had this thing all scoped. Apparently, it even ticked off the President--all the way up to President Trump. The next thing you know comes this truly bizarre letter out of DOJ that appears to ignore basic tenets of antitrust law, like when you are negotiating with a State government, it is not an antitrust violation. It appears also to violate DOJ's own very elaborate antitrust investigation procedures. So who pulled those strings? We don't know. More broadly, if Marathon and other fossil fuel companies are purposefully paying a web of phony front groups and trade associations to spread deliberate, known disinformation about climate change in order to obstruct climate action in Congress, does that not warrant congressional investigation? Might it not, in fact, be fraud? It was fraud when the tobacco industry did it. Over the past 2 weeks, two different subcommittees of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform held hearings that examined how the fossil fuel industry deploys front groups and trade associations to spread disinformation about climate change and block legislative action. Yesterday the Senate Democrats' Special Committee on the Climate Crisis held our hearing on how dark money front groups hide the industry's role in climate denial and legislative obstruction. Fat chance we will have Senate committees investigate this masquerade in a Chamber under Republican control, but for our friends in the House, the time is ripe for congressional oversight. Follow the money and the facts wherever they lead. Let the subpoenas fly. Congressmen Henry Waxman led a successful investigation of lies and deceit from a corrupting industry, Big Tobacco, and that precedent served our country well. It served the American public well. It ended up likely saving lives. So we go back to Marathon again. Marathon's shareholders are interesting, too, in all of this. Last month, 200 major investors who had $6.5 trillion in assets under management, sent a letter to 47 U.S. companies, including Marathon, urging that the companies' lobbying align with the Paris Agreement's goal of global average temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius and warning the companies that lobbying against that goal is an investment risk. The letter went to Marathon, but, interestingly, none of Marathon's biggest investors--BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and J.P. Morgan Asset Management--signed the letter. Collectively, these four investors own, roughly, 25 percent of Marathon. BlackRock lists climate risk as one of its engagement priorities in 2019, so it says. BlackRock published a report this year that by 2060, 58 percent of U.S. metro areas will see annual average climate-related losses of at least 1 percent of GDP, with some projected to lose a staggering 15 percent of GDP. JPMorgan's CEO, Jamie Dimon, has said: ``Business must play a leadership role in creating solutions that protect the environment and grow the economy.'' So it was interesting yesterday, in our Senate select committee hearing, to have a witness put up this slide. This slide shows the positions on climate change, regulation, and the legislation of a number of companies. It is a spectrum. Green is supporting climate regulation and legislation. Opposition is red. We were talking about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has been identified as one of the two worst climate obstructors in America as a trade association. The U.S. Chamber and the National Association of Manufacturers take the prize. We were looking at how strange that is because their memberships don't have the positions they take. So we are going to continue to explore why it is that the board members of the National Association of Manufacturers and the board members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce appear to have let their organizations be run away with by the fossil fuel industry as well. Here is what was notable. On this graph, this is where the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is--one of the worst climate obstructors. Yet look who is worse. In fact, look at who is the worst of all of them-- Marathon. What do you know? You have these four investors who own 25 percent of this company that is on the worst side of this spectrum. They claim to care about solving the climate problem. Yet they are 25- percent owners in the most opposed of all of these entities to the solution to the climate crisis they claim to seek. They have to get their act together. It is not fair to be JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and say that business must play a leadership role in creating solutions that protect the environment and grow the economy and then to be part of the 25-percent largest shareholders of the company that is the worst of this. You have to line this up, guys. You can't say one thing to the public and then do the opposite through the companies you own. The stakes here are high. There are credible warnings of a carbon asset bubble and of crashes in coastal property values, but BlackRock hasn't introduced a single climate-related shareholder resolution since 2001. In 2018, BlackRock and Vanguard--two of these big Marathon owners--voted in favor of only 10 and 12 percent of climate-related shareholder resolutions. They say they are good at this--BlackRock 10 percent, Vanguard 12 percent. The other ones, they didn't support. In 2017, at Marathon--the worst--BlackRock voted against a shareholder proposal for Marathon to test its business operations against the 2- degree Celsius threshold that BlackRock claimed to target and support. By the way, if BlackRock had voted its shares for this proposal, it would have passed. Just this month, Marathon finally published a report that examines its own prospects in a carbon-contained world. In one scenario, demand for petroleum-based liquids plummets 26 percent by 2040. With the demand for vehicle fuels--Marathon's primary market--it falls even more steeply. If Marathon estimates the market for its main product could shrink by one-third or more, first, you can understand why it got in there to manipulate the auto fuel efficiency standard process. You can also understand why it is that economists and sovereign banks are issuing these warnings about a carbon bubble. We will get serious about climate change. We must. We have no choice. The costs of inaction are, as Donald Trump once said, catastrophic. Eventually, all of the fossil fuel money and bullying in the world will not stave off action in the face of mounting climate calamities. This should be obvious to everyone and certainly to sophisticated investors with supposedly good climate policies like BlackRock and JPMorgan. So why aren't they pushing Marathon to adapt to a low-carbon economy? Why are they happy to own 25 percent of that--of the worst? That is what they want to own? It doesn't have to be this way. Look at DSM, a Dutch multinational, with roughly $10 billion in revenues and over 23,000 employees around the world, including many here in the United States. DSM began as a coal mining company over a century ago. Its leaders realized coal mining in the Netherlands would someday end, so they reinvented the company. When the last mine closed in the 1970s, DSM had diversified. It is, today, a vibrant producer of nutritional additives for food, of pharmaceuticals, and of high-tech materials for electronics, automobiles, and construction. By contrast, Murray Coal, which is an American coal mining company that did not diversify, filed for bankruptcy this week. To the fossil fuel industry, I say that you ought to begin adapting now. You can't ignore what is coming at you. You owe it to your shareholders, and you owe it to your employees. By God, you owe it to your children. To BlackRock and the other big investors, this means you have to pay attention too. You say you are for climate action. Show that you mean it. Demand change at Marathon and at other fossil fuel companies that you own. Start with mandating that these companies disclose their climate obstruction funding. There is no excuse for that to be secret. If they will not do it, Congress, let's investigate. We have slept through this mess long enough--in a state of induced narcolepsy. We have sleepwalked for far too long. It is time we woke up. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise today to remember our colleague and friend, Kay Hagan. The daughter of a World War II veteran, with many other members of our Armed Forces in her family, Kay made service to others a cornerstone of her life. Indeed, she wove that commitment through her extraordinary career in business and public office. There was Kay's devotion to her community and family. She served as a church elder and Sunday school teacher at her Presbyterian congregation. Even while rising through the ranks to become an executive at the North Carolina National Bank, she was active in local politics, running county operations for two Gubernatorial campaigns. And, in the midst of it all, she and her husband Chip made it to the Girl Scout meetings and school events for their three children. There was Kay's outstanding career in North Carolina State politics. For a decade, she served in the North Carolina Senate. She earned the gavel on the senate budget committee. She championed financial literacy in elementary and secondary education. Her success landed her on North Carolina's most effective lawmakers list three times. Then there was Kay's service in this body. She championed fair pay for women, expanding access to healthcare, improving public education, and nurturing small businesses, which she recognized as the lifeblood of North Carolina's economy. In the Senate, she honored her family's long record of military service as a member of the Armed Services Committee. She chaired the vitally important Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee, which confronts issues such as terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and drug trafficking. She fought to ensure that funding battles in Washington never impede veterans' access to healthcare. She traveled abroad to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other military installations around the world to visit North Carolina troops. To Chip, Jeanette, Tilden, and Carrie, I am sorry for your loss. Kay left us too soon. She was a kind and gracious colleague and a good friend. She was a servant for good. In the words of John Ellerton's Hymn, read at President Franklin D. Roosevelt's funeral: Now the laborer's task is o'er; Now the battle day is past . . . Father, in Thy gracious keeping Leave we now thy servant sleeping. Rest in peace, Senator Hagan.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I am delighted to join my colleagues from Maryland and Delaware to support this resolution expressing disapproval of the Trump administration rescinding the Clean Power Plan and replacing it with its so-called affordable clean energy rule, which is a name fanciful enough to make George Orwell blush. The first thing to understand about the so-called affordable clean energy rule is that it is a do-nothing rule, exactly as the polluters wish. EPA admits its own rule would do virtually zero to reduce carbon pollution. It requires zero emissions reductions at natural gas-fired powerplants, and it would allow coal-fired powerplants to make minor efficiency improvements and then run for longer hours. That could actually lead to an increase in carbon pollution. This rule is designed to fool people into thinking that the Trump administration is obeying the Clean Air Act, but no one should be fooled. From the get-go, the Trump administration made clear it didn't care about cutting carbon pollution, fighting climate change, or protecting the environment or public health. It cared about obeying the fossil fuel industry, not the law. Within weeks of taking office, Trump's swampy Cabinet rolled out the red carpet for coal baron Bob Murray, who had an action plan for the administration. Here is Murray with Energy Secretary Perry, and look who is accompanying Murray at the meeting, our EPA Administrator, Andrew Wheeler, then Murray's lobbyist. It looks like a friendly meeting, and why wouldn't it be? Look at that, such a nice big hug. Isn't that sweet? Murray was the major financial backer of the Trump administration, and this was his payback time. Individuals associated with Murray Energy were the largest source of donations to Donald Trump's Presidential campaign, and Murray himself chipped in a cool 300 grand for Trump's inaugural festivities. Murray was also one of the largest donors to election spending groups associated with disgraced EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, under whose tenure this botched ACE rule began. So what was the first item on Bob Murray's action plan? To get rid of the Clean Power Plan. Bob Murray wasn't the only one who wanted to scrap the Clean Power Plan. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, two of the largest and most powerful trade associations in Washington, also asked the EPA to scrap the Clean Power Plan. That is no surprise. The independent watchdog group InfluenceMap found the chamber and NAM the two worst obstructers of climate action. They will not reveal their donors, but I believe they took lots of money from the fossil fuel industry and became its mouthpiece. They got paid, and this was the play. The chamber and NAM were also aligned with shadowy fossil fuel industry front groups like the so-called Utility Air Regulatory Group and the American Council for Clean Coal Electricity--more Orwellian names. These groups also asked the EPA to scrap the Clean Power Plan and replace it with this toothless rule. Is that unsavory enough? It gets worse. Guess who represented UARG, that Utility Air Regulatory Group. It was none other than fossil fuel industry stooge Bill Wehrum, who helped orchestrate a web of front groups, like UARG, which obscured and multiplied the influence of Wehrum's polluter clients--clients responsible for massive carbon pollution. Naturally, Trump put this guy in as head of EPA's Air Office. Before Wehrum headed for the exits this summer, Murray's man Wheeler praised Wehrum for ``tremendous progress'' in repealing climate regulations. Pruitt to Wheeler to Wehrum--this is rank fossil fuel crookedness in plain view. Several of us submitted comments laying out the financial and professional connections between the Trump officials who developed this bogus rule and the fossil fuel industry that asked for it. Those comments are posted online and in the Federal Register. I urge you to have a look. Also available online is a report I did with Senator Carper detailing Wehrum's industry ties and conflicts of interest. Median.com/@senwhitehouse will link you to all of this. The crony capture of EPA is not the only problem with the rule. The industry is so greedy and its hacks are so clumsy that they don't bother to align the rule with the scientific and economic evidence. In court, Agency actions will be found to be arbitrary and capricious--and therefore invalid--if they are not the product of reasoned decision making. In this case, it is clear that the EPA ignored the science, ignored the economics, and produced exactly what the fossil fuel industry told it to do: a do-nothing rule that took good care of the coal and natural gas industries. What does the science tell us? According to the world's best scientific report, if we reduce carbon pollution by roughly half by around 2030 and reach net zero emissions sometime around the middle of the century, we stand a chance to hold the global average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Our own best scientists warn that if we don't limit carbon pollution, we will be hit with economic losses in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year by the end of the century. Legions of economists, investment banks, asset managers, central banks, credit rating agencies, and other experts warn of serious economic risks from climate upheaval. Here is a summary of just some of these warnings, which I have delivered to every colleague in the Senate. That, too, can be found on that Medium page. Pruitt, Wehrum, and Wheeler ignored all of this for their do-nothing rule. The only voice that mattered was the polluter industry that they came from and will go back to in an oil-greased revolving door. This ACE rule is the exact opposite of reasoned decision making. But that was never the point. The fix was in. Even a bogus rule that courts throw out buys this crooked and corrupting industry time--time to keep polluting, time to burn through reserves, and time to use its political muscle to fend off action here in the Senate. If you are in the fiddling business and fiddle for money, fiddling while Rome burns is a fine economic proposition for you. The Supreme Court has ruled that greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The EPA has found that greenhouse gases from powerplants endanger human health and welfare. Those determinations mean the EPA must limit carbon pollution, consistent with the law. This masquerade of a rule fails to do this, so it must be replaced with something effective, as a matter of law. I ask colleagues to think carefully about their vote on this resolution. Do you want to endorse this record of obvious industry capture? Do you want to side with this corrupting industry over your own constituents' health and safety? Do you want to go on record ignoring all the warnings from the Bank of England, from Freddie Mac, from Nobel Prize-winning economists, and from hundreds of our own government's most knowledgeable experts? The fossil fuel industry--its voice full of money, as F. Scott Fitzgerald might say--has drowned out the voices of everyone else for too long here. But you can't shout down the laws of physics. You can't shout down the laws of biology, chemistry, and economics. Those laws will have their way, and we have been well warned. So, please, let's turn the corner to a brighter day where decency rules, not industry political thuggery; a brighter day where facts and science matter more than dark money and paid-for denial; and a brighter day where we don't give our grandchildren daily cause for shame. It is time to wake up, and this vote is a chance to do so. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the vote be extended until 4:30 p.m.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here for my 254th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech. In the time I have been giving these speeches, I have watched the shifting trajectory of climate denial. First, climate change was a hoax. Then, there wasn't enough science. Then, the science is still uncertain. Then, solving this problem would hurt our economy. Then, innovation will magically save us, and now there is a new entrant in the climate denial lexicon: China. ``China isn't doing enough on carbon emissions,'' goes the argument. So we shouldn't do anything at all. It is a talking point you hear all the time from the fossil fuel industry and its array of front groups working to block climate action here in Congress. Now, China has done plenty to complain about. China has stolen our intellectual property, manipulated its currency, jailed its political dissenters, set unfair labor rules, and more. I have been front and center with those complaints about China. Yet, before we offer up China as the latest ``climate denial lite'' excuse for doing nothing, let's take a look at what China is really up to. For starters, China is still a party to the Paris climate accord, and China's President doesn't say stuff like ``wind turbines cause cancer.'' OK--a low bar, I concede. Our President recently tweeted: Which country has the largest carbon emission reduction? AMERICA! Who has dumped the most carbon into the air? CHINA! Actually, that is not quite true. We have still dumped more CO2 into the air than China because we have been at it longer, and we still dump a lot more than China per capita, but China's 1 billion people do put out more carbon pollution than our 300 million. They overtook us as the world's top national emitter in 2007. Last year, China accounted for about 28 percent of global CO2 emissions, and the U.S. accounted for 15 percent. Cumulatively, China accounts for 13 percent of emissions, and the U.S. accounts for 25 percent, which is about twice as much. Americans' per capita carbon emissions are among the highest in the world. The average Chinese citizen--China is here--accounts for less than half the per capita emissions of the average American. We actually don't have lots to brag about on our emissions, but that is not where it looks the worst for us. Forget the past. Look to the future at climate action. That is where China is blowing us out of the water. As the Trump administration slavishly fronts for fossil fuel--and is even turning the agencies of our government over to this corrupting industry--China is leaning in hard on a green energy future. China is resetting its economy for a clean energy future. China began implementing a national cap-and-trade system--a price on carbon--for its power sector in 2018, which will go into full force across the country next year. Several provinces already run cap and trade locally. This year, China is launching a mandatory renewables quota, requiring that 35 percent of its electricity be renewable by 2030, and its energy plan seeks 50 percent of total electric power generation from nonfossil sources by 2030. China is also investing to dominate clean energy manufacturing and technology. In 2017, nearly half of the world's new renewable energy investment took place in China--triple the investment made in the United States. China leads the world in renewable power deployment with there being more than twice as much capacity as in any other nation. Almost 30 percent of the world's renewable power capacity right now is in China, including the most solar, the most wind, and the most hydro. China dominates the global deployment of solar panels. It has several times greater installed solar generation capacity than the United States. In fact, we virtually lost solar panel manufacturing to China. On this graph, China is the yellow, and it shows China outdoing all of the other countries in total capacity. We are here compared to China there, and the gray is the general category for the rest of the world. China is even bigger than the rest of the world, not counting the United States, Japan, Germany, and India. So that is China's lead in total renewable electricity deployment, with more than double the installed capacity of the United States and nearly a third of the total global renewable electricity capacity. Here is the world's total. There is China at 404. Then you actually have to scale down the graphic to get over here to the United States at 180-- 180 to 404. If you count nuclear power as clean energy, there is China. China currently has the world's largest nuclear power construction program. It has 37 nuclear reactors in operation, 20 under construction, 40 in planning, and proposals for an additional 100. Next generation nuclear technologies originally designed in the United States are among those Chinese proposals. If all of those reactors are built, China will end up with twice the U.S. nuclear fleet. In the transportation sector, we feel pretty good in the United States. We all see Teslas driving around, and Chevy has its terrific Bolt. There are emerging EV manufacturers, like Rivian, that are proposing extremely cool vehicles. Again, there is China--far out front in building electric vehicles and in deploying the infrastructure needed to run electric vehicles. China now requires that 10 percent of vehicles sold be electric or plug-in hybrids. This quota increases to 12 percent in 2020. By the end of 2018, 45 percent of all of the electric cars on the planet were in China. Last year, China manufactured nearly half of all of the electric vehicles that have been manufactured in the world. In other areas, it is China, China, China. China dominates global markets for electric buses and two-wheelers. Exxon fabulously predicted to its shareholders that there would be zero electric buses by 2040; China is already operating 400,000. High-tech batteries will power transportation and balance the electric grid of the future. China is planning for three times as much battery manufacturing capacity as the rest of the world combined. Carbon capture will grow as an industry as soon as it has a business model, which, by the way, carbon pricing, including China's cap-and- trade plan, will provide them. On carbon pricing, there is China, with 20 carbon capture projects under construction or in development--more than in any other nation. Of course, it is not all good news on climate out of China, not by any stretch. The Chinese continue to build more coal-fired powerplants than any other country, not just in China but around the world. However, the difficult truth for us is that China's progress on climate change is real, and it is way more than ours. China is not doing this to be nice. It is doing this to outdo us economically and politically. If we keep kicking our own renewable industries in the teeth here in America just to please Trump's coal industry donors while China invests in these new technologies, we will be making a losing bet. China's one- party government has put economic growth above all else. Chinese scientists see the same data that ours do. Chinese economists see the same economic risks that ours do. Chinese businesses see the same threats and opportunities for their workers and their supply chains that ours do. Chinese cities see the same threat from sea level rise that ours do. Yet the Chinese Government has chosen a smarter path because it is not under the thumb of the fossil fuel industry. The Chinese are acting out of self-interest. They are acting on climate because they want their country and their economy to succeed. They want to own these industries of the future. Rather than compete, we are now helping them win--all to make some grubby political donors happy. The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate reports that strong climate action could deliver at least $26 trillion in economic benefits worldwide through 2030 compared with business as usual--a $26 trillion relative benefit. Over that period, these actions would generate over 65 million new low-carbon jobs globally and avoid over 700,000 premature deaths from air pollution, by the way. Whoever acts swiftly will get the biggest share of these riches. Last year, Stanford's economists found that keeping global warming to 1.5-degrees Celsius as opposed to the riskier 2-degree safety limit would likely save more than $20 trillion in economic damages around the world by the end of this century--$20 trillion. The world power that positions itself to reap the economic benefits of a carbon-neutral technology and that helps lead the world away from runaway climate calamities will garner tremendous economic, strategic, and diplomatic advantage. In particular, China recognizes the diplomatic advantage to acting on climate as the United States withdraws from its traditional position of international leadership. The last century has been called the American century. We are fast handing over the next century to become the Chinese century. We are doing it to ourselves, and we are doing it for the worst of all possible reasons--to cater to and kowtow to a corrupt industry. Making sure that the next century is the American century, as well, is as good a reason as any for us to wake up and act on climate. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, today I wish to celebrate a milestone for Rhode Island's oldest Black church. In August, the Congdon Street Baptist Church on the East Side of Providence celebrated its bicentennial. From its inception at the nearby African Union meetinghouse and schoolhouse in 1819, Congdon Street Baptist Church has been a centerpiece of spiritual and community life for generations of African Americans in Providence. The Congdon Street Baptist Church has weathered racial injustices to flourish as a place for worship and education. Its founding members left the First Baptist Church in America, where they were made to worship in a segregated space. They formed their own congregation in Providence so that people of color could worship in dignity and secure a fitting education for their children. Fulfilling that mission did not come without adversity. The original church was demolished in the 1860s at the behest of White neighbors. Unbowed, the congregation rebuilt. The new church, completed in 1875, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In the 1960s, the church served as a sanctuary for Rhode Islanders involved in the civil rights movement. Today, education and empowerment remain hallmarks of the church community. Rhode Island was founded on the principles of religious freedom and tolerance. I am proud to have Congdon Street Baptist Church as a cornerstone of that tradition, and I wish the congregation centuries of peaceful worship to come.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. We are here tonight when we should not be, because the epidemic, the pageant of gun violence in this country should have been addressed by us by now. We have not acted. We have not acted in large part because we are engaged in a bizarre, self-inflicted political experiment in this country in which we allow big special interests to use secret money in elections to manipulate our politics. This ought to be easy. There have been 293 mass shootings since January 1, 2019--this year alone. These tragedies have galvanized the American public in support of sensible restrictions on guns, and the amount of agreement among the American public is astounding. Eighty-six percent of Americans support implementing what we call red flag laws that allow a judge to remove guns from someone who is determined to be a danger to himself or others. You could barely get 86 percent of the Senate to agree on the day of the week. Additionally, 89 percent support expanding Federal background checks to cover private sales and to close the gun show loophole, 86 percent support an assault weapons ban, and 70 percent support a ban on large-capacity magazines. These are large, popular majorities, and in a functional democracy, we would listen to them, we would hear them, we would honor them, and we would respond to this bloodshed. Why we have not done that takes us on a sordid crawl through the sewers of modern politics inhabited by the National Rifle Association. The National Rifle Association spent $30 million supporting President Trump. No wonder they can undo all of our work with a simple phone call to the Oval Office. But it is much worse than that. Reports emerged last year that the NRA accepted money from foreign sources, including Russian banker and Putin ally Aleksandr Torshin, and spent that money in politics in America. Senator Wyden sent letters to the NRA and to the Treasury Department about these reports. The NRA responded maintaining that it properly segregates any foreign donations so that they are not used for political purposes. Fat chance of that, with money being fungible. I joined Senator Wyden on a followup letter renewing the request following the arrest of Maria Butina, an evident NRA go-between. The IRS, under President Trump, took no action against the NRA in response to these allegations. In August, the Federal Election Commission deadlocked 2 to 2 on whether to investigate this matter at all. The FEC is so locked up on this now that they wouldn't even investigate. FEC Commissioner Weintraub in desperation wrote: Some allegations are too serious to ignore. Too serious to simply take [the NRA's] denials at face value. Too serious to play games with. Yet in this matter, my colleagues ran their usual evidence-blocking play and the Commission's attorneys placed too much faith in the few facts [the NRA] put before us. So we can't even look into the extent of Russian interference in our politics through the NRA. It goes on. Last fall, the Campaign Legal Center and Giffords Center filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission alleging that the NRA was evading the anti-coordination rules of our election between the Trump campaign and with various Republican Senate campaigns. The complaints allege that the NRA and the campaigns coordinated spending through a GOP media consulting firm. What had the media consulting firm done? It had set up a series of shell corporations through which the campaigns paid. We have all used media consulting firms in getting to the Senate. Which of those media consulting firms set up shell corporations? In fact, these shell corporations--these supposedly separate companies--shared staff, office space, and other resources, so that the firm coordinated the ad buys between the NRA and the campaigns. Once again, the FEC did nothing, so the Campaign Legal Center had to sue the Federal Election Commission in district court. The NRA's political spending has more than quintupled since the Supreme Court--I should say more specifically, since five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court--allowed unlimited, anonymous money into our political system--from $10 million in 2010, the year of the Citizens United decision, to about $55 million in the 2016 election. The NRA now spends unlimited amounts of dark money on political ads. They can come after people. They can threaten people. They can make promises to people. That is why 86 percent, 89 percent of the U.S. public gets ignored around here. When Representative Raskin and I wrote the NRA and the consultants about this coordination scheme, guess what the supposedly independent groups did? They wrote back to us in the same letter from the same lawyer--some independence. Of course, we are still waiting on the FEC to take any action at all. By way of a visitor's guide to the sewer of modern politics inhabited by the NRA, I ask unanimous consent that a September 17 article from The Trace titled ``Guide to Every Known Investigation of the NRA'' be appended to my remarks as an exhibit. I will close where I began. There have been 293 mass shootings since January 1 of this year, and the American public has an extraordinarily common voice for red flag laws, for expanding Federal background checks, closing the gun show loophole, banning assault weapons, and banning large-capacity magazines, and we don't listen to the popular will here because of the menace that the NRA has become in our politics--the anti-Democratic menace that the NRA has become.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here today on the Senate floor for ``Time to Wake Up'' speech No. 253. If you felt like the heat this summer was particularly brutal, you were not imagining things. July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to NOAA. The Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization noted, ``July has rewritten climate history, with dozens of new temperature records at [the] local, national and global level.'' NOAA says 2019 is on track to tie for the second hottest year on record. Overall, the past 5 years are expected to take the title of the hottest 5-year period in recorded human history. This rapid heating of our Earth is wreaking havoc on our environment and public health. Here is a list from NOAA that you can find on their website, Selected Significant Climate Anomalies and Events, July 2019, all around the globe. In 1 day--1 day--the Greenland ice sheet lost 12\1/2\ billion tons of ice, melted into the sea. Throughout the world, from France to India, to the Arctic Circle, temperature records shattered. On July 4, the people of Anchorage, AK, experienced their first ever 90-degree day. At one point in July, excessive heat warnings asked nearly 170 million Americans to avoid the outdoors and take shelter in air conditioning, where available. According to Deke Arndt, head of climate monitoring for NOAA, these record heat waves are, and I quote him, ``almost entirely due to climate change.'' Jack Williams, a professor with the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin, told NBC news the ``[h]eat waves of today are going to be the normal events of tomorrow.'' Where there is heat, there is apt to be fire. In the United States, wildfires rage on a remarkable scale. According to a new report by the major data analytics company CoreLogic, over 8.7 million acres burned in the United States in 2018. That is about the land area of the 75 largest cities in the United States combined. This summer, the Arctic experienced a record-setting wildfire season. Places that have not traditionally burned in parts of northern Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and Siberia were engulfed in flames visible from space. In this map, the North Pole is about here. This looks down at Alaska here and Russia here, the Siberian Arctic. As you can see, fires were everywhere. Guillermo Rein of Imperial College London told Wired: Arctic fires are rare, but they're not unprecedented. What is unprecedented is the number of fires that are happening. Never before have satellites around the planet seen this level of activity. As of August 28, fires cut across more than 6 million acres of Siberian forest and 2.5 million acres of Alaskan tundra and forested land. These forests aren't just scarring the Arctic landscape; they are also releasing tons more of carbon dioxide, causing more climate change. Researchers estimate the Arctic fires have released more than 180 million tons of CO2. For comparison, my home State of Rhode Island was responsible for around 9.75 million tons of carbon dioxide through our fossil fuel combustion in 2016--roughly 20 times as much, just from these fires. NASA scientists are also tracing soot from these fires. The soot absorbs sunlight and warms the atmosphere; and when the soot settles and covers Arctic ice, it absorbs more sunlight and speeds up the melting and the warming. Once these forces are set in motion, the vicious cycle of warmer temperatures, wildfires, ice melt, and then ever warmer temperature is hard to break. Far from the Arctic, fires rage in another iconic ecosystem: the Amazon. So far this year, the Amazon region has seen over 40,000 fires. Unlike the Arctic, our changing climate is less to blame for the devastation than humans. Again, natural forest fires in the Amazon are rare, but warmer and dryer conditions under climate change do make the fires larger and longer lasting than in the past. The true culprit in Brazil is manmade deforestation, accelerating under the new Brazilian President. Enforcement against illegal logging and clearing has declined. In the first 6 months of this year, over 1,300 square miles of Amazon forest were destroyed in Brazil, sometimes at a rate of more than three football fields' worth of forest per minute. The journal Science Advances warns that deforestation in the Amazon is close to a threshold beyond which the rainforest will undergo irreversible changes. Without the healthy forests of the Amazon, the world will lose one of its most important terrestrial carbon sinks-- areas that naturally absorb carbon from our atmosphere. The Amazon captures about 5 percent of annual global carbon dioxide emissions. A 2015 study published in Nature shows that the amount of carbon dioxide the Amazon absorbs is already falling, has fallen since the 1990s by nearly one-third. In Brazil, the air has gotten so thick with smoke that in Porto Velho, a city in the upper Amazon basin, over 400 children landed in a local hospital with respiratory problems in the first 3 weeks of August. Public health officials and resources are overwhelmed. A pediatrician in Porto Velho said: ``Every year we have some fires and issues with smoke, but this was the worst year of them all.'' The tragedy in Brazil is reminiscent of forests burned in Southeast Asia to make way for palm oil plantations. Sumatra, Borneo, and parts of Malaysia saw over 70 percent of their peat forest lost to manmade deforestation. In Indonesia, nearly 106,000 acres burned in just the first 5 months of this year. I am from the Ocean State. Wildfires, of course, don't burn in the ocean, but unprecedented heat waves are surging through our seas, laying waste to coral reefs in much the way wildfires ravage forests. The harm to the Amazon rainforests and to the Arctic steppes from wildfire finds an aquatic echo in the death of the Great Barrier Reef and reefs all over the world from climate-driven, unprecedented ocean heat waves. Our willful blindness to these obvious calamities playing out on God's Earth, which are largely due to malign influence from the fossil fuel industry and its great armada of front groups it uses to do its dirty business, needs to stop. The willful blindness has to come to an end. From the Equator to the Arctic, an Earth aflame will have life-or- death consequences for generations to come. Even our news media are turning their collective backs. In late August, as these fires raged, Media Matters chronicled that not one-- not one--of the five influential Sunday news shows covered them. They are basically political gossip shows. Indeed, Media Matters showed cable news devoted to wildfires in the Amazon only 7 percent of the time they devoted to the Notre Dame Cathedral fire. In other speeches, I pointed out how the royal baby has swamped climate coverage in our pathetic media. Whether in Indonesia or Brazilian rain forests or Arctic tundra, the costs of the corporate greed and paid-for political ignorance that are stopping us from acting are on full display. Our planet suffers as a consequence. We avert our eyes in the pursuit of cheap fossil fuel. But nothing comes without a cost, and our debt is coming due. Pope Francis drove home this point in a recent Sunday address, saying: ``We have caused a climate emergency that gravely threatens nature and life itself, including our own.'' Our world is on fire. I am sorry to quarrel with Billy Joel, but this time, we did start the fire. If that can't get the attention of my colleagues in Congress, I do not know what can. We must wake up. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for up to 25 minutes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as the Presiding Officer knows, I have often spoken about how climate change is affecting Rhode Island. Rising sea levels will remake my State's map. Warming seas are shifting our traditional fisheries away from Rhode Island. A hotter climate creates public health risks for Rhode Islanders. And the list goes on. In the Senate, I have also tried to learn how climate change is affecting other States. The Presiding Officer was courteous about joining me in Louisiana when I made a trip to his State. I have been doing a fair amount of traveling, and last month I visited Wyoming to hear about climate change in the Cowboy State. That was the 17th State I visited on these climate trips. Here is a little background on Wyoming. It is big. It is a lot bigger than Rhode Island. It is almost 400 miles wide by almost 300 miles north to south. Although it has some lovely lakes, Wyoming ain't coastal. Its lowest point is more than 3,000 feet above sea level-- three times higher than Rhode Island's highest point, Jerimoth Hill-- and its highest point, Gannett Peak, is almost 14,000 feet. Wyomingites have a reputation for being conservative skeptics about climate change, but polling data shows that even in Wyoming, 60 percent of people think climate change is happening, 43 percent think humans are driving it, 69 percent say they support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and 68 percent think their schools should teach about global warming. My trip began in Teton County, which I was repeatedly told is the liberal part of the State. Teton County is home to Jackson Hole and Grand Teton National Park, as well as a large chunk of America's legendary Yellowstone National Park. From Jackson, I went up to visit Yellowstone and then came back down over Togwotee Pass and down here to Dubois and then around on to Lake of the Woods, to the Wind River Indian Reservation, to Lander, to Pinedale, and back to Jackson. In Teton County, I met with local elected officials from Jackson, from the Teton County council, and from the Wyoming Legislature. I learned that roughly two-thirds of Wyoming's revenues come from mineral extraction--mostly coal, oil, and natural gas. With all this fossil fuel money pouring into its coffers, Wyoming has no State income tax, sales tax of 4 percent, and one of the lowest effective property tax rates in the Nation. Indeed, I was told that Wyomingites get around $9 in services for every $1 they pay in taxes. It is a sweet deal. And fossil fuel picks up the rest of the tab. There are problems with this political-economic model, however-- problems that folks in Wyoming repeatedly pointed out to me. First, it exposes Wyoming heavily to boom/bust cycles. Three coal companies have gone bankrupt just this year. It will also expose Wyoming to the devastating bust coming if, as predicted, fossil fuel assets crash. Almost all of Wyoming's eggs are in one fossil fuel basket. Moreover, a political-economic model based on fossil fuel harms Wyoming's other economic driver: outdoor recreation--skiing and snowboarding, river rafting, backpacking, hiking, rock climbing, and fly fishing. Wyoming has abundant outdoor recreation. During my trip, I heard how lucky I was to enjoy clear and smokeless skies in August and that this August was like August of times gone by. The new normal across the West is hotter, dryer summers driven by climate change, and that makes massive forest fires, filling the skies with smoke for weeks and months on end. We enjoyed clear skies. In addition to the threat to life and property, wildfires harm Wyoming's tourism and outdoor recreation economies. Obviously, fewer people visit when iconic landscapes are obscured or when places they want to explore are at risk of fire. A representative from the Fremont County lodging tax board told me that fires can shut down roads to the national parks and forests, cutting hotels and motels off from the attractions to draw people there. At the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, I sat down with over a dozen business leaders from the outdoor recreation industry who told me that outdoor recreation generates $5.6 billion in Wyoming and supports 50,000 jobs--actually more jobs than the fossil fuel industry. For the winter sports business, climate change is an existential threat, shortening ski seasons, worsening snow cover, and affecting these beautiful landscapes. For this industry, this problem is deadly serious, and the industry is struggling to learn how to get the political attention that the fossil fuel industry enjoys. In Lander, I met with leaders from the renowned National Outdoor Leadership School, NOLS. NOLS draws people from around the world to learn about the outdoors, develop leadership skills, and study mountaineering and outdoor survival. It is the largest nongovernment employer in Fremont County. The president of NOLS told me: ``Without question, the number one risk the school faces is climate change.'' For instance, the risk of wildfire is up dramatically and along with it, property insurance rates. Climate change has disrupted NOLS's schedule at its outdoor campuses around the world, as wildfires, melting glaciers and permafrost, and upended stream flows make it difficult, impossible, or dangerous to access these course sites. For people who love these places, this hurts the heart as much as it hurts the pocketbook. In Jackson, I met winter sports athletes from the group Protect Our Winters. These are amazing athletes who spoke about their passion for snow sports and magnificent mountain landscapes. They also spoke of climate change threatening the future of the sports they love. I listened to Lynsey Dyer deliver a wonderful presentation to a packed house in Jackson about how climate change is altering alpine environments. She is summoning the same inner strength that allows her to ski death-defying drops. I will tell you, look at the film of some of what she skis off of, and it will stun you. She is using that inner strength to build national support for climate action. In Pinedale I heard how climate change threatens Wyoming's cold water fisheries. The Upper Green River and its tributaries are some of the most storied trout streams in the world, drawing in a big fishing business. I spent an afternoon with a fly fishing guy and a representative from Wyoming Trout Unlimited. They told me how higher temperatures and lower water flows, both caused by climate change, harm Wyoming's iconic trout, which need cold water with plenty of oxygen. I also visited local scientists who study climate change. Dr. Michael Tercek and Dr. Andy Ray gave me a tour of Yellowstone National Park to show me how climate change is already changing the park's ecosystem, with vaster changes expected ahead. Dr. Tercek is an ecologist who has worked in Yellowstone for over two decades. Dr. Ray's specialty is amphibians, which may not be as iconic as Yellowstone's bison but are on the frontlines of climate change. The scientists told me that just over the last 70 years, the average annual temperature in the greater Yellowstone area has risen by 2 degrees Fahrenheit. In parts of the region, there are now 60 fewer days a year with below-freezing temperatures than there were just 30 years ago. Summers are drier, and in winter there is less snowpack, meaning less snowmelt and less water in the spring and early summer. You can already see changes in the park. Take cheatgrass. Cheatgrass is an invasive species whose roots don't hold the soil as well as the native sage brush. As temperatures warm, cheatgrass spreads to higher and higher elevations, supplanting the sage brush. The result is this: large gullies carved in hillsides as rain and snowmelt wash away the soil. Consider Dr. Ray's amphibians. We visited several small ponds and tarns that dot the Yellowstone landscape. As temperatures warm and precipitation declines, water levels in many ponds fall, reducing habitat for these amphibians and making them more vulnerable to predators. In this photo, you can see a line here along the edge of this pond. Most of the rocks here are gray. They are gray because they are covered by lichen that turns them that color. But if you look just above these grasses here, you will see rocks that are nearly pink in color. These are rocks that were submerged until recently, and the lichen hasn't yet had time to colonize--clear evidence that the water level at this pond has fallen rapidly. We climbed up into some dead forests to look at what bark beetles are doing to the Rocky Mountains' conifers. Here is a photo I took of a branch from a tree killed by bark beetles. The beetles bore through the bark, and then their larvae eat the thin cambium layer between the bark and the wood of the tree trunk. This ultimately girdles and kills the tree. You can see in this photo the marks left by the bark beetles. This J-shaped mark you see here is particularly characteristic of bark beetles. This chart shows how beetle kill spreads through forests once winter temperatures began warming. You see these temperature climbs here from 1980 forward, and you see a matching climb in beetle-killed trees in Colorado and Wyoming. Hotter, drier summers also stress the trees, making them more vulnerable to infestation. Once they are dead, they become wildfire tinder. Bark beetles might seem like esoteric little creatures until you see the damage they have done throughout the Mountain West. Everywhere there is red on this map there is kill by bark beetles. Bark beetles have killed enough acres of western forest to cover the entire State of Wyoming and then some. You can see a lot of this kill is in Wyoming. On the road from Yellowstone to Dubois, you cross Togwatee Pass, between the Absaroka and Wind River mountain ranges. You traverse miles and miles that look like this--dead trees as far as the eye can see, killed by beetle infestation. In the Wind River Indian Reservation, I met a man named Jim Pogue. He said they call these gray, dead forests ``doghair forests.'' Here is a landscape dramatically altered by climate change. This forest died in less than a decade. Before I met Dr. Tercek, I read an article in which he was quoted as saying: ``By the time my daughter is an old woman, the climate will be as different for her as the last ice age seems to us.'' I didn't fully grasp what he meant until I met another scientist studying climate change in Wyoming, the University of Wyoming's Bryan Shuman. Dr. Shuman took me up to one of his research sites--the Lake of the Woods--high in the foothills of the Wind River Range. At this lake and others, Dr. Shuman extracts sediment cores and conducts radar scans of the lake bottom and then reconstructs the climate of the region 10,000 years back to the last ice age. During the last ice age, global average temperatures were 3.5 degrees colder than our preindustrial average. The 3.5 degrees colder temperatures resulted in a radically different landscape in Wyoming. Massive glaciers spread across the Wind River Range. On this map, you can see just how much territory these vast glaciers covered. That legend shows 10 kilometers. So that is essentially the whole Wind River Range. The 3.5 degrees change in temperature created a huge effect. I say that because the Earth is predicted to warm at least 3.5 degrees by the end of the century if we don't cut carbon emissions. So think about it for a minute. In a little bit more than 100 years, the temperature on Earth will have changed as much as it did in the 10,000 years from the end of the last ice age. From 10,000 years ago to the beginning of the Industrial Age, there was a change of 3.5 degrees, and in the following 100 years, we are expecting another 3.5 degrees. Instead of climate change driving forward at 1 mile an hour, it started driving forward, thanks to fossil fuel emissions, at 100 miles an hour. This shows how dishonest the smug statement is that the climate is always changing. Not like this, it is not. When you know that 3.5 degrees Celsius is the difference between being covered in ice and having the forest and sage brush steppe ecosystems there now, you can see that another 3.5 degrees of warming will cause massive changes. Dr. Tercek was not exaggerating. When his daughter is an old woman at the end of the century, the climate will have changed as much as it changed since the last ice age, and our climate then will seem as foreign to her as the ice age seems to us. There are still glaciers--some--in the Wind River Range. They were tiny compared to the ice age glaciers that once dominated northwestern Wyoming, but they are the largest glaciers in the Rocky Mountains. For the last several summers, a team of professors and students from Central Wyoming College have studied these glaciers. Their work is featured in an Emmy-winning documentary produced by PBS Wyoming called ``Glaciers of the Winds.'' It is actually available on YouTube, and I highly recommend it. Again, it is called ``Glaciers of the Winds.'' I visited around their campfire the night before the Central Wyoming College team set off on a 20-plus mile expedition up to the base of Dinwoody Glacier. The students are measuring the size of the glaciers to determine how quickly they are melting. They will analyze water quality, and they will search for archeological artifacts to better understand how Native peoples lived up in this alpine environment. The archeology team told me that based on artifacts they have unearthed, they believe that early Native peoples worshipped the glaciers. A spiritual reverence for glaciers began to make a little more sense to me when I visited the Wind River Indian Reservation. The land to the east of the reservation is deathly arid. Agriculture depends on irrigation, and irrigation depends on glaciers. Leaders of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribal councils said that after the winter snow melts away, their irrigation depends entirely on the glaciers, which hold water back as ice and release it through the long summer as meltwater--key after annual snows have melted away. They told me that ``once the glaciers are gone, our main resource for life will be gone.'' I won't pretend I met no climate skeptics in Wyoming. An innkeeper at a motel told me that climate change was a ``goddamned hoax'' and for sure wasn't happening in Wyoming. Many of the student scientists at Central Wyoming College recounted difficulty explaining their interest in climate change to family and friends. They called it having ``the conversation.'' I also met with an employee at the Jim Bridger coal-fired powerplant. She made a strong case that climate solutions must protect workers. I couldn't agree more. Wyoming has lost three coal companies to bankruptcy just this year. One of the great lies of the rotten, crooked climate denial operation is that reducing carbon emissions is bad for the economy and bad for jobs, when, in fact, the opposite is true. Another great lie is that the industry cares much about its workers. Carbon pricing would give an economic reason for carbon removal, which in turn could help keep some plants operating a little longer and ease the workers' transition. But, no, like we saw when coal companies looted miners' pensions, took care of the CEOs, and ducked into bankruptcy, the climate denial path is a dead-end for workers. In spite of some Wyomingites' skepticism, my trip underscored how attitudes are changing even in the reddest parts of the country. Over and over again, Wyomingites told me that they cherish the stunning landscapes around them. They live in Wyoming to be able to hunt and fish and explore these amazing places. As climate change bears down on Wyoming's wild places, even current skeptics will come to accept that we must fight climate change to protect things they love. The younger generation already gets it. I won't forget the fire-lit, passionate faces of the Central Wyoming College students, nor the determination and drive of Lynsey Dyer and the winter sports athletes, nor a young instructor at NOLS who gave an impassioned argument for climate action. With powerful and knowledgeable voices like these speaking, with an economy so vulnerable and no plan B, and with such risk to Wyoming's natural wonders, I am hopeful that voters in Wyoming and across the country will start to send a clear message that we must take action to reduce carbon emissions and soon--it is the smart, prudent, and economically best course--and to ask the people whom they elect: Listen, let's do this. If you won't lead, at least get out of the way. Help us protect what we love while there is still time. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, today I wish to honor the career of one of Rhode Island's ocean and coastal experts, Dr. Bruce Corliss. Dr. Corliss has served as dean of the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography since 2012. In March, Dean Corliss announced he would be leaving URI GSO early next year. Dean Corliss started at URI GSO as a graduate student. He completed both his M.A. and Ph.D. in oceanography at URI. He then completed postdoctoral work at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and served as a scientist at WHOI until joining Duke University as a professor in 1984, ultimately becoming director of the Duke University/University of North Carolina Oceanographic Consortium. Dr. Corliss served as chief scientist on more than a dozen oceanographic research cruises and has published over 60 research papers. In 2012, Dr. Corliss heard the call of the Ocean State and returned to his alma mater as dean. Under his leadership, URI GSO expanded its oceanographic and coastal research programs and is currently revitalizing its Narragansett campus; NOAA selected the university to lead a multi-university Ocean Exploration Cooperative Institute; and last summer, URI GSO was awarded a new NSF research vessel, to be named the R/V Resolution. The vessel will replace the R/V Endeavor, which URI GSO has operated for 40 years. Dean Corliss will leave URI GSO having reaffirmed its place as one of the world's preeminent ocean research institutions. His work will be reflected in the new research vessel on GSO's docks, in new buildings and labs that will house the next generation of marine researchers, and in new depths of understanding we will reach through the Ocean Exploration Cooperative Institute. Dean Corliss has been a friend and an ally in the fight to protect and preserve our oceans and coasts. URI GSO has greatly benefited from his scientific expertise, leadership, and support for ocean research. On behalf of the Ocean State, I recognize and salute him on an impressive career and a lasting legacy at the University of Rhode Island.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I thank the distinguished Senator from West Virginia for her work on the highway bill that we voted out of the Environment and Public Works Committee today and on our industrial emissions bill and on carbon capture. It has been a terrific working relationship.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent to speak for an additional 5 minutes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank the Presiding Officer. I appreciate that courtesy. Blocking action on climate has been the central focus of the Chamber's campaign spending. It ran this ad in Pennsylvania in 2016. Two moms watch their children on a playground. One comments on how much energy the children have. The other says: Oh, don't say that. The candidate wants to tax that energy. The ad gets even weirder when a faceless woman arrives in a car and steps out toward the children. Alarmed, one of the mothers yells the ad's punch line: ``Run, Jimmy. Run.'' Classy stuff. I wonder who the Chamber was fronting for. So how does the Chamber's anti-climate crusade square with its big corporate members? It has members like Coke and Pepsi, which have good internal climate policies and websites that are full of commitments to reduce corporate carbon footprints, and they have signed letters on climate action. Pepsi signed the Ceres BICEP Climate Declaration. Coke plans to reduce CO2 emissions by 25 percent. It says it ``will work to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions across its value chain, making comprehensive carbon footprint reductions across its manufacturing processes, packaging formats, delivery fleet, refrigeration equipment and ingredient sourcing.'' Yet both Coke and Pepsi fund the Chamber of Commerce, and they fund the American Beverage Association, which, in turn, runs more money to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The end result? Two companies that are actively reducing their carbon emissions and that enthusiastically support good climate policy have the position in Congress, via their funding of the Chamber, of opposing climate action here in Washington-- the place where it really counts. Verizon has reduced its carbon intensity by 28 percent since 2016, and its CEO has publicly stated Verizon's commitment to combat climate change. Yet Verizon, too, funds the Chamber's obstruction. Then there is Google with its motto: ``Don't be evil.'' Google is warning its investors that climate change threatens its systems. It says that it is vulnerable to damage or interruption from natural disasters and to the effects of climate change, such as sea level rise, drought, flooding, wildfires, and increased storm severity. Google has signed pledges to fight climate change; yet Google, too, funds the Chamber's anti-climate crusade. Coke, Pepsi, Verizon, and Google are just four examples among many. These companies say they support climate action but fund one of climate action's worst opponents. Why does the Chamber put these members in this position? The best explanation I have is that the fossil fuel industry is secretly calling the shots at the Chamber; that is, it is secretly funding the Chamber. That would explain the Chamber's refusal to disclose its funders. I think this is a governance issue now for these companies, particularly for those members who serve on the Chamber's board. Board members of nonprofit organizations have a common law duty of care. Not knowing who is funding your organization looks like a breach of that duty of care. The Chamber's member companies need to ask themselves: Do we know who is funding the Chamber? Do we know how much each donor is giving? Do those donations explain the Chamber's years of obstruction? The Chamber holds itself out as a business association. Another question: Why is it accepting money from nonbusinesses? In 2012 and 2014, the Chamber took at least $5.5 million from front groups that have been backed by the Koch brothers. In 2014, it took $5.25 million from a front group that was affiliated with Karl Rove. Did the Chamber's board members know this? Did they exercise the proper duty of care? Do they know what nonbusiness money is funding the Chamber these days? Do they know what percentage of the Chamber's funding comes secretly from fossil fuel interests? I don't think the Chamber's board members know the answers to any of these questions. Here is a question for the general counsel of these board member corporations: Should they know or are you going to go with willful ignorance? Good luck with that. The bottom line is simple. Chamber board members with good climate policies are supporting one of the worst climate obstructors in America. Indeed, they are writing big checks to do so. This, I believe, is not just a moral problem but a governance problem. If these companies aren't asking these tough questions and if they are not pushing the Chamber to be transparent about its funding sources, they are answerable. Until this mess gets sorted out, in spite of all of corporate America's efforts to reduce emissions, its funding of the ``U.S. Chamber of Carbon'' means that corporate America is doing more harm than good for our climate. Again, I thank the distinguished Senator from Oklahoma for his courtesy in allowing me the extra time. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, may I propose to my wonderful colleague, the Senator from Massachusetts, that the Good Lord forbid that I have to get to 500 such speeches before we solve this problem.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I would note that if we look back to 2009, there are some very important signs of optimism. On the legislative side, Senator Markey--then-Representative Markey with his colleague Representative Waxman--successfully ushered, with significant industry and popular support, a serious climate bill through the House of Representatives, proving that it can be done, proving that real climate legislation can pass in this body. In that same year, in 2009, a gentleman named Donald Trump--the same Donald Trump who is President now at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue in the White House--took out an advertisement in the New York Times, and in his advertisement, Donald Trump and his children--Donald, Eric, and Ivanka--as well as the Trump Organization, all said that the science of climate change was incontrovertible. They further said that if we did not act, the consequences of climate change would be catastrophic and irreversible. So we have the living experience of legislation passing, led by then- Representative Markey and Representative Waxman, and all we need, really, is to bring back that 2009 Donald Trump. Come on back, buddy. We want you because you were right in 2009. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, let me first thank my friend Senator Schatz for his incredibly kind remarks. He is an outstanding colleague. We work together extremely well. He brings a good cop ``aloha'' sensibility to a conversation, whereas I tend to lean more toward the bad cop, and he has a remarkable vision for how this can be solved. I am incredibly honored that he is here. For the 250th week that the Senate has been in session, I rise to call this Chamber to wake up to the threat of climate change. In April of 2012, I delivered the first of these speeches. I began: ``I know that many in Washington would prefer to ignore this issue, but nature keeps sending us messages--messages we ignore at our peril.'' It was a cry of frustration--frustration that the Supreme Court's infamous Citizens United decision had killed the bipartisan work that I saw here on climate for 3 years; frustration that the fossil fuel industry's death grip had tightened around this Chamber, preventing action; frustration that our Democratic administration had abandoned leadership on climate change and would barely even talk about it. It has been a run, and here I am, still at it, 7 years on. Some things have changed; some things have not. Let's start with what has not changed. What has not changed is the scientific certainty about what is happening in our atmosphere and oceans. Scientists have understood that burning fossil fuels has caused our planet to heat up since the days when Abraham Lincoln was riding around Washington, DC, in his top hat. This is not new news. Nearly four decades ago, Exxon's own scientists reported to Exxon management that there is ``little doubt'' that atmospheric CO2 concentrations were increasing due to fossil fuel burning. They said back in 1982 that the resulting greenhouse effect ``would warm the Earth's surface, causing changes in climate affecting atmospheric and ocean temperatures, rainfall patterns, soil moisture, and . . . potentially melting the polar ice caps.'' There was no legitimate debate over the science when I started in 2012, and there is no legitimate debate over the science today. Indeed, the science has only strengthened. With each passing year, as Senator Merkley said, we rely less on complicated climate models and on scientific forecasts and, unfortunately, more on straightforward, realtime measurement of the changes. Today, we observe with our own eyes what recently was predicted: glacial collapse and retreat, sea level rise, arctic warming, and increasingly extreme weather. Another constant since 2012 is the fossil fuel industry's remorseless campaign, A, to block climate change and, B, to do this while hiding its hands behind front groups. I have delivered dozens of these speeches about the dozens of climate denial front groups. Indeed, we have had whole groups of Senators come to the floor to talk about the web of denial that the fossil fuel industry has constructed to propagate fake science, to hide that it is the fossil fuel industry pulling these strings, and to push its muscle and weight around Congress. Mostly, it is funded by Big Oil and the Koch brothers. They set these groups up, and they set them loose to sow false doubt about real climate science and to obstruct, obstruct, obstruct here in Washington. They have spent--at a minimum--hundreds of millions of dollars on this anti-climate campaign. With that money, they have talked up some seriously ridiculous notions, such as carbon pollution is good for us all because carbon is plant food. They have taken out billboards comparing climate scientists to the Unabomber. It is false and ugly stuff powered by hidden money. Oil giants still spend huge amounts to infect America's corporate lobbying with their obstruction message. InfluenceMap reckons the biggest anti-climate lobbying force in Washington is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a trade group that purports to represent typical patriotic American businesses. It should, more properly, be called the ``U.S. Chamber of Carbon.'' There it is at the rock bottom, side by side with the National Association of Manufacturers, in a statistical tie for worst obstructor of climate action in America. Why wouldn't Big Oil go to all this trouble? They are defending a $650 billion per year subsidy in the United States alone, according to the International Monetary Fund. So it is logical, but it is still shameful. There is a vast majority of American companies that have a different view and that want to see climate action. Yet in Congress, that vast majority is a silent majority. When I say ``silent,'' I mean they are not showing up in Congress--not to push back, not to correct the record, not even to seek serious climate legislation. Corporate America was AWOL in Congress in 2012, and they are AWOL in Congress now. Corporate America's silence was deafening then, and it is deafening still today. So what has changed since that first speech 7-plus years ago? First of all, the economics of renewable energy changed in a big way. In 2012, wind and solar weren't cost-competitive with fossil fuels. Storage and electric vehicles were nowhere. That year, the average cost of solar was over $200 per megawatt hour. Today, it is one-quarter of that. The cost of wind power is down, and offshore wind is emerging. Battery storage now competes on price with gas-fired, peak-demand plants in many areas. Automakers around the world are making more and more electric vehicles, driving costs down and performance up for consumers. Even with that massive subsidy for fossil fuel, renewables are starting to win on price. Another new area is that we are starting to capture carbon. This little cube that I have in my hand is CO2 that was pulled out of the air by direct air capture technology and can be turned into tiles, blocks, bricks. There it is. It is the beginning of a new era of carbon capture. The group that did this is competing in Wyoming this summer for the XPRIZE for carbon capture. Another big thing that has changed since 2012 is that economists, central bankers, Wall Street bankers, real estate professionals, and asset managers are all recognizing the major risks that climate change poses to the global economy. It is not free to ignore it, and the costs could come in the form of crashes. Back in 2012, these economic warnings--these crash warnings--were uncommon. Today, they are coming from everywhere. Freddie Mac predicts that rising sea levels will prompt a crash in coastal property values greater than the housing crash that caused the 2008 financial crisis. First Street has shown how sea level rises already are affecting coastal real estate values up and down the east coast. It found that rising seas have already resulted in $16 billion in lost property values in coastal homes from Maine to Mississippi. Moody's warns that climate risk could trigger downgrades in coastal communities' bond ratings. Just last week, the mayor of Honolulu testified at Senator Schatz's Climate Committee's first hearing that the credit rating agencies are already grilling him about this. BlackRock has estimated that some coastal communities face annual average losses of up to 15 percent of GDP from climate change by the end of the century. Heads up, Florida. Coastal property is not the only financial risk. The Bank of England, Bank of France, Bank of Canada, San Francisco Fed, and European Central Bank--along with many top-tier, peer-reviewed economic papers--are all warning of systemic economic risk. That is central banker speak for something that poses a risk to the entire economy, all from stranded fossil fuel assets called the carbon asset bubble. One other thing I have spent a lot of time on is oceans--the heating, the acidification, the lost and shifting fisheries, the collapse in coral and expanding dead zones, and, of course, the rising sea levels. Our terrestrial species needs to pay a lot more attention to the seas. There has been a real shift in attention in these intervening years. Then you have Standard & Poor's, Moody's, Citigroup, and more economists warning that the costs of climate change will not be measured in the hundreds of billions or even in the trillions but will be measured in the tens of trillions of dollars. That is a penalty worth avoiding and worth the attention in the Senate. So here I am, 7-plus years later, giving my 250th speech. Somewhere between persistent, tiresome, and, I suppose, foolhardy is where you will find me. I never thought I would still be at it well into 2019, but the fossil fuel industry, with all of its wretched dark money, is still calling the shots in Congress while the rest of corporate America still sits on its hands. The U.S. Senate still is not seriously considering any legislation to reduce carbon pollution, and I am still frustrated, but I am optimistic because the denial wall is cracking. Bankers and asset managers and financial titans recognize the massive economic risks of a fossil fuel-based economy and see the huge economic potential of a low-carbon economy. They now see real business incentive to push back on the fossil fuel denial apparatus. They now see real business peril in allowing the fossil fuel denial apparatus to rule. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at the end of my remarks the ``Economists' Statement on Carbon Dividends'' that was published in the Wall Street Journal, which illustrates that exact point. I am also optimistic because people are talking about climate change again, and colleagues are talking about climate change. Americans everywhere are talking about climate change. Most Republicans want action on climate change. Voters are engaged on climate change, and more than anyone else, young people especially are engaged. From young hero Greta Thunberg to kids all across this country, to the young plaintiffs in the Juliana suit, young people are engaged. Any politician who wants a long career had better care about what young people think. Any political party that wants to matter in a decade had better care. Over in the House, it is starting to show. A few Republicans have actually introduced legislation to put a price on carbon emissions. Even President Trump--the guy who handed over the keys to his administration to the fossil fuel industry--feels the need now to talk about the environment. As empty as that talk is, the pressure he feels is progress. The fact that he feels he has to talk about it is progress. As for me, I can't wait to stop giving these speeches. These speeches chronicle the continued failure of this body and the continued failure of our country to grapple with an evident climate crisis, and these speeches chronicle the fake science and the political mischief and muscle that the fossil fuel industry has used to debauch our American democracy. Marking that sordid history is important, but I want it to be history. When the dark days of denial and obstruction are past, these speeches will no longer be necessary. I particularly thank my colleague from Hawaii, Senator Schatz; my colleague from Oregon, Senator Merkley; my colleague from Massachusetts, Senator Markey; and other colleagues who have been incredible friends and allies in this fight, like Senator Heinrich of New Mexico and Senator Warren of Massachusetts. I thank my colleagues for being here today and for being such extraordinary partners and teammates. We are a band of brothers and sisters in this cause, and our band is growing. As more and more Americans, from kitchen tables to corporate cocktail parties, come to terms with the real scope of the problem and the danger this failure presents, not only am I proud of my colleagues who are with me already, but I am very hopeful my colleagues across the aisle will also soon become great partners. Until then, I conclude for the 250th time by saying it is time to wake up.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. This is 250.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I yield the floor.