Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senators Leahy, Klobuchar, King, and Tester be recognized in the next 40 minutes or so for a colloquy with me.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, it was 1986, a third of a century ago. Six U.S. Senators wrote a letter to the Office of Technology Assessment, the office then charged with providing technical and scientific advice to Congress. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that their letter be printed in the Record.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank Senator Tester. I will turn to the Rhode Islander who was in that early bipartisan effort to understand and address climate change. Senator John Chafee's history of service to his State and country was remarkable. He saw bloody combat in World War II on Guadalcanal and Okinawa with the 1st Marine Division. He went back as a Marine rifle company commander during the Korean war with Dog Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. He served in Rhode Island's legislature and as our Governor. In 1969, he was appointed Secretary of the Navy. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976 and chaired the Environment and Public Works Committee from 1995 until his death in 1999. In the small Rhode Island world, he was also my father's college roommate and lifelong friend. The environment was an abiding passion for this man, and his devotion showed in his work in the Senate. His legacy includes the Superfund Program, the Oil Pollution Act, and the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, and his legacy is his early recognition that climate change, driven by carbon pollution, caused by fossil fuels, poses an existential threat to humanity and the planet we call home. At the 1986 hearing that led to this bipartisan letter, Chafee declared: This is not a matter of Chicken Little telling us the sky is falling. The scientific evidence . . . is telling us we have a problem; a serious problem. This is 1986, and the Republican chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee is saying that the scientific evidence is telling us we have a serious problem. He went on to say: Scientists have characterized our treatment of the greenhouse effect as a global experiment. It strikes me as a form of planetary Russian roulette. . . . By not making policy choices today, by sticking to a ``wait and see'' approach . . . [b]y allowing these gases to continue to build in the atmosphere, this generation may be committing all of us to severe economic and environmental disruption without ever having decided that the value of ``business as usual'' is worth the risks. Those who believe that these are problems to be dealt with by future generations are misleading themselves. Senator John Chafee, 1986. I yield now to the distinguished ranking member of the Appropriations Committee and honorary Senator pro tempore, Patrick Leahy, here on behalf of the State of Vermont.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. These six U.S. Senators were troubled by testimony they had heard about climate change in three separate hearings of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee. They wrote: The testimony convincingly portrayed a fundamentally altered planet, with shifts in ocean circulation and climate zones; altered precipitation and storm patterns; more frequent and extreme weather events such as droughts, monsoons, and lowland floods. Individually and collectively, these changes bring about others, ranging from disruption of forest, crop, and ocean productivity to shifts in populations. Witnesses before the Committee testified that the Earth is now committed to a substantial greenhouse warming, projected to be about 2 degrees Centigrade, as well as an ozone layer depletion. Well, that was quite a prediction. Who were these six Senators? Quentin Burdick, Democrat from North Dakota; Max Baucus, Democrat from Montana; George Mitchell, Democrat from Maine; Robert Stafford, Republican from Vermont, the chairman then of the committee; Dave Durenberger, Republican of Minnesota; and Rhode Island's Republican Senator, John Chafee. You cannot help but be struck that the prediction back then by these six Senators is now our reality. Everything they predicted is happening. The scientists they listened to had it right. Global temperatures have already risen by around 1 degree Celsius, and we are headed to over 2 degrees Celsius of global warming by the end of the century. Their grim predictions, which we now live with as fact, motivated these six Senators to ask the Office of Technology Assessment for policy options that ``could lead to the stabilization and minimization of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.'' Why did they want these policy options? They wanted to learn about policy options because, as they continued in their letter: Congress must soon begin to weigh the alternatives facing the United States and other nations. . . . Due to the likelihood that legislation will be considered by the Committee early in the next Congress, it would be most helpful if this analysis could be undertaken without delay. ``Without delay.'' Since then, Republicans have demolished the Office of Technology Assessment; that office no longer exists. Republicans have relentlessly blockaded legislation to address carbon emissions and have trafficked in phony climate denial, all while accepting hundreds of millions of dollars of political contributions from the fossil fuel industry. Today, five of those six States are represented again, having a reunion on the Senate floor. I see Senator Tester from Montana here. I will yield to him now. We will also be joined by Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Angus King of Maine. I yield to Jon Tester of Montana, taking the position of his predecessor, Max Baucus--whom, by one of the weird coincidences of the Senate, I just passed coming out of the trolley. Senator Tester, the floor is yours.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. It goes the other way. Sometimes it seems that our friends on the other side of the aisle think that the only people who are watching this conversation are fossil fuel industry lobbyists and CEOs and electioneers. So we are going through, shortly, a truly preposterous exercise on the floor of the Senate, which is that a party that has brought up no significant legislation in the time that Leader McConnell has had the floor is now going to bring its first measure related to climate for a floor vote, and it is something they intend to vote against. It is something they intend to vote against. When you bring a measure to the floor that it is your intention to vote against, that is not legislating. Something else is going on. Now I think this was a very clever stunt. We don't know quite where it was cooked up, but we have observed that the Wall Street Journal editorial page is a relentless mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry, having published climate denial articles literally within the last year. The Wall Street Journal editorial page called for this stunt vote, and it was less than 24 hours before the Republicans in the Senate jumped up, scampered out, and did exactly what they were told to do by the fossil fuel industry's mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I am sure there were champagne corks banging into the ceilings of the boardrooms for ExxonMobil, Americans for Prosperity, and the Koch Industries as all of these fossil fuel executives and lobbyists cheered this stunt. But in the Senate, we actually have a larger audience than just fossil fuel donors; the country is watching and the world is watching, and what they are seeing right now is, frankly, an embarrassment. It is not just this stunt that reflects a broken Senate; it is a much larger problem of a Senate that cannot deal with the climate change issue in a bipartisan fashion. I would state that when I got here in 2007, the Senate could deal with climate change in a bipartisan fashion. In 2008, the Senate could deal with climate change in a bipartisan fashion. In 2009, the Senate could deal with climate change in a bipartisan fashion. The reason I know that is because I was here then, and I saw as many as five bipartisan efforts to deal with climate change during that period, with different Republican and Democratic Senators. Then along came the Citizens United decision in January 2010, and from that moment after, it was like watching a patient drop dead in the emergency room. The heartbeat of activity on climate change just flatlined on the Republican side of this Chamber. I think the fossil fuel industry--I know the fossil fuel industry asked for that decision from the Supreme Court and the five Republican Justices. I think they anticipated what the decision was going to be, and they immediately went to work to squelch and crush any dissent from their orthodoxy on that side of the aisle. The result has been that there has been no significant piece of climate legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to deal with this problem since Citizens United that any of our colleagues now will cosponsor or support. It has just been silent, and it is a dramatic failure in this greatest deliberative body. I will state, as others have stated, as Ranking Member Carper and Senator Markey have said, that the science on this is now beyond dispute. The science on this is irrefutable. If we fail to deal with this problem, the consequences will be catastrophic and irreversible. ``Irrefutable science.'' ``Catastrophic and irreversible consequences.'' I am actually quoting somebody when I say that. Do you know whom I am quoting? I am quoting from 2009 Donald Trump--Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, and the Trump Organization signed this full-page advertisement in the New York Times in 2009. ``If we fail to act now,'' they said, ``it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.'' So as much as the fossil fuel-funded mockery in which the Republican Party has engaged, challenges these facts, even the Trumps knew this a decade ago. In trying to describe the Green New Deal, one might describe it as something that, if you invested in it, would ``drive state-of-the-art technologies that will spur economic growth, create new energy jobs, and increase our energy security all while reducing the harmful emissions that are putting our planet at risk.'' That is a pretty good capsule of the Green New Deal. Guess what Donald Trump and his family said in the same advertisement. Investing in a Clean Energy Economy will drive state-of- the-art technologies that will spur economic growth, create new energy jobs, and increase our energy security all while reducing the harmful emissions that are putting our planet at risk. All you have to do is listen to the 2009 Donald Trump to understand that the science of climate change was then irrefutable and it is even stronger now and that the consequences of our failure to act and our obedience, our adherence to fossil fuel-funded propaganda and orthodoxy will lead to consequences that are catastrophic and irreversible--said a decade ago. We have had 10 more years of unrestricted emissions since then. Just the basic tenets of the Green New Deal are ``a clean energy economy [that] will drive state-of-the-art technologies that will spur economic growth, create new energy jobs, and increase our energy security.'' With the words of Donald Trump, I rest my case and yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I am honored to follow the distinguished ranking member on our Environment and Public Works Committee and one of the coauthors of the Waxman-Markey bill--the one significant piece of climate legislation that has passed a House of Congress--and to add my voice.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Gladly.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, this year marks the 160th year that the Church of St. Michael the Archangel has served the people of South Providence and the larger Rhode Island community. Rhode Island's earliest values are of inclusion, acceptance, and respect for difference. The founder of our State, Roger Williams, went off into an unknown wilderness and established a land in which tolerance and religious openness were the new standard. In keeping with these founding principles, the community of St. Michael's has been a place of welcome since its inception. Generations of immigrants built this country; yet too often, those who come seeking the American dream are met with discrimination. Originally serving Irish and Western European immigrant populations often pushed to the margins of society, St. Michael's has expanded to incorporate the Providence of today, a multicultural, multilingual community. Faith compels work toward fairness and justice for all living beings, regardless of nationality or social status. St. Michael's has fostered a vibrant community of people who are answering that call. The people of St. Michael's have partnered with nonprofit groups and other faith organizations to carry out meaningful advocacy work and provide direct services to those in need. It has been a privilege to know and work alongside church leaders like Sister Mary Reilly, Father Ray Malm, and the late Sister Ann Keefe. Their tireless advocacy and spirit of service have been manifested through the good works of numerous community organizations including Sophia Academy, Providence CityArts, AIDS Care Ocean State, and the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence. These groups have made rich and diverse contributions to the character of Rhode Island. The immigrant spirit of perseverance is shared in the moral fiber of this country. In Rhode Island, St. Michael's church has been a symbol of refuge and hope for 160 years. They have made our State and the city of Providence better through their dedication to public life. I applaud the work of St. Michael's and its pastor, Father Robert Perron, and I congratulate the venerated parish on 160 years of service.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, let me start by thanking Leader Schumer for his incredible remarks this morning. There is a surge of energy around this issue. He has represented that surge of energy very well. He challenged the other side of the aisle to bring it on. Let me sign up right now as the proud member of the ``bring it on'' caucus. Bring it on. We are looking forward to this conversation on our side. It is clear that the people of America want action. The polling is immensely strong on this issue. It is clear that the people of America see this issue in their daily lives. This is not academic theory any longer. They see the wildfires. They see the droughts. They see the floods. They see the sea level rise. They see the fish moving about. This is in their lives now, and the polling shows that. A vast majority of Americans say they are--and this is the word in the poll--``worried'' about climate change. The world has reported they see this as the No. 1 issue facing the world's security. Against that backdrop of an active, engaged, and knowledgeable American population and a world that is looking for the United States to lead, the city on the hill, what--what--do we get from the Republican majority in the Senate? We get a bill, a measure brought to the floor--the first time, as Leader Schumer pointed out, that the Republican-controlled majority has brought any meaningful legislation related to climate change to the floor--that they intend to vote against. Who brings a bill to the floor that you intend to vote against? How is that possibly sincere or serious, and what is your alternative? If you don't like the Green New Deal, what is your plan? Where is there one? The fact is, since the Citizens United decision and since the fossil fuel industry powered up its political efforts, there is now no Republican Senator in the Senate who has cosponsored any serious bill to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions. They stay away from this issue like the plague. The world has changed around us. The 2020 election has already begun, in many respects. Voters are alert to this. A Democratic House is ready to produce real legislation, meaningful legislation. With any luck-- actually on the House side, somewhat bipartisan legislation, and here in the Senate, the blockade continues, and the only measure brought to the floor is a trick vote that its sponsors will actually vote against. That is a pathetic statement of where our friends on the other side are on this. I hope this actually turns into a breakthrough moment in which there are some serious conversations on the other side to say this is not tenable; this is ridiculous; we are going to be embarrassed by this; but on our side, we say bring it on. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I came here this afternoon to give my customary weekly climate speech urging that it is time to wake up here, and I was planning to speak about a legal brief that a number of scientists, led by Robert Brulle and Naomi Oreskes, filed in the Ninth Circuit detailing the long history of the oil industry knowing about climate change, doing its own research to confirm what it knows about climate change, telling the public something they knew was false, and yet taking what they knew to be true and using it in their own internal planning. But something even better than that came up, so I come here to react to the--well, for starters, the Wall Street Journal editorial calling for a vote on the Green New Deal. Let's go back a bit as to what the Wall Street Journal editorial page has been up to for the last, say, 20 years on climate change. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has been a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry's climate denial. The messages of the fossil fuel industry are echoed and amplified through the Wall Street Journal editorial page. All the way up until 2011, if I recall correctly, they were simply denying that this was a problem. They constantly behave like what I would call the one-eyed accountant--looking only at the costs of responding to climate change, never the costs of climate change. On this subject, for those who may be interested, I would actually like to incorporate by reference two previous climate speeches I gave on this completely bogus effort that has been maintained by the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The first was my speech of April 19, 2016, and then I went back at them again on July 24, 2018. They have been making it up for a very long time, and sure enough, up comes this latest in which just yesterday, February 12, they said: Let's have a vote in Congress on the Green New Deal as soon as possible. Then they went on with a lot of their usual one-eyed accountant stuff, never looking at the costs of climate change, only looking at the costs of preventing those harms, and they concluded: ``Let's not hesitate. Take the Green New Deal resolution and put it to a vote forthwith.'' Along the way, they went into some of their usual canards about renewables, saying that ``solar costs remain about 20 percent higher than natural gas while offshore wind is two-thirds more expensive'' without subsidies--well, unless you look at the subsidy for fossil fuel, which of course they don't, and the subsidy for fossil fuel has been quantified by the International Monetary Fund at $700 billion per year--$700 billion per year in the United States--propping up the fossil fuel industry. By contrast, the little tiny tax adjustments that we get for solar and wind, which the fossil fuel industry is always pushing back against, are nothing. There is a monster of a subsidy in the energy space, and it is the fossil fuel subsidy, but will the dear old Wall Street Journal editorial page ever admit that? Not a chance. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks. That came out in the Wall Street Journal that morning. Then Leader McConnell went out here to the Ohio Clock for his midday press conference, and guess what he said: I've noted with great interest the Green New Deal, and we're going to be voting on that in the Senate. That'll give everybody an opportunity to go on record and see how they feel about the Green New Deal. I am in the habit of pointing out here how the string-pulling takes place and how the fossil fuel industry directs certain things and the mouthpieces say certain things and then we behave certain ways, but this may be the land speed record for a response. The Wall Street Journal says it wants a congressional vote, and that very day the vote gets announced. It is almost funny, if the topic weren't so serious. The whole idea that this is the Republican response to climate change is really classic. It is really classic. Since the Citizens United decision, which powered up the fossil fuel industry to have real bullying dominance in Congress--at least over the Republican Party--no Senator here today has been on any bill to meaningfully reduce carbon dioxide emissions. It is never a topic. Nobody wants to talk about it. It is like the unwelcome, embarrassing guest at the dinner party: Oh, my gosh. Climate change. No, we can't possibly talk about that. Never mind that NASA--which, by the way, RIP, Opportunity. The Opportunity has been driving around on the surface of Mars for 15 years, sending back information to us about that planet. NASA scientists built that thing, sent it to Mars, landed it safely on Mars, and has been driving it around for 15 years. My God, what a project that was. What a brilliant thing. So when NASA scientists say, ``Oh, and by the way, climate change is serious. You ought to listen,'' and we don't, that behavior is hard to explain. When we are listening to the flacks of the fossil fuel industry and not the scientists of NASA-- and, by the way, 13 or 14 Federal Agencies in the latest report that came out under the Trump administration--we are way past there being any serious factual or scientific dispute here. There are just political demands by the industry with the biggest conflict of interest ever that we can't bring this up. For pretty much 10 years, since Citizens United, nobody has brought up a serious piece of legislation to limit carbon dioxide emissions on the Republican side. Not one. Zero. Now, the majority leader is going to break this streak and bring up the first carbon-related bill. It is actually not a real bill. It is a resolution, but he is going to bring it up with the intention of voting against it. I kid you not. The majority leader has announced the intention of bringing up a resolution with the intention of voting against it. Who does that and why? Who had that brainstorm and where? We will never understand this until we understand better how the anonymous dark money stuff flows around Washington. We need to clean that up. We need to pass the DISCLOSE Act. We need to make sure people know who is behind spending, who is behind advertising. We have to do all of that, but in the meantime, you do get these amazing moments in which the Wall Street Journal says--the editorial page, by the way. I think their correspondents, their reporters, are totally legitimate, and they do terrific work. It is the editorial page that is the problem child here. So the Wall Street Journal editorial page says we need to have a vote on the Green New Deal. It takes less than a day for the majority leader to say we are going to have a vote on the Green New Deal, and he is calling up the first piece of climate legislation they have ever called up in the majority here, and they are calling it up to vote against it. Isn't it finally time to have a real conversation about this? Isn't it finally time for there to be a Republican proposal? It has been nearly 10 years since Citizens United. I get it. The fossil fuel industry has enormous sway, but there comes a time when you even have to tell the biggest influencers in Congress that your day is over. It is time for us to treat with the facts and to work in a bipartisan fashion and to do what the people sent us here to do, which is to legislate. So where is the Republican proposal? Where is the Republican plan? There isn't one. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Nihil. Nitchevo. They are going to call this up. They are going to call this up for a vote. I can hardly wait for this discussion. Bring it on, please.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. With that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I guess I am here to follow my friend Senator Graham and bring the opposing view regarding Mr. Barr. I offer my appreciation to the chairman, as he leaves, for the way that he conducted the hearing. I know that he offered his appreciation to the ranking member, but the hearing, I thought, was well handled. Everybody had a chance to ask their questions and say their things, and I think the comments that the chairman made afterward about trying to bring the committee together were well received on my side. There are a number of problems, however, that I have with this nominee. Many of them relate to continuing problems in the Department. One, in particular, I warned Mr. Barr about in a letter that I sent to him beforehand in order to make sure that he wasn't surprised by the question and so that I could get a proper, thoughtful answer. The problem is that the Department, for purposes of recusal analysis and for purposes of conflict analysis, takes a look at what people's different financial entanglements are and who they worked for before. It is a fairly standard process, but there is a big gaping hole in it. The big gaping hole in the process is that when it was set up originally at the beginning of the Obama administration, the Supreme Court hadn't yet decided Citizens United, so the flood of unlimited special interest money that poured into our politics, which quickly became unlimited, special interest dark money, was not then a problem. Also, you didn't see a lot of Democrats who had a lot of engagement with dark money coming to high office, but with the Trump administration that all changed, and we now have an Acting Attorney General, Mr. Whitaker, who was paid $1.2 million through a group called FACT. Basically, FACT is a front group. It does no business. It has no product. It provides no service. It basically just pays Mr. Whitaker to go on talk shows and criticize Democrats. There are very few employees. The only employee I am aware of, other than, perhaps, clerical people, was actually Whitaker himself, so one would like to know why he was paid that money and who paid him in order to do proper recusal and conflict checks. But here is what is interesting: The money that came in to pay him through FACT, before it got to FACT, had been laundered through another group called Donors Trust. Donors Trust is another group that does no business, has no service, creates no product, manufactures nothing. Its purpose for existence is to strip the identities off of big donors-- ordinarily it seems big Republican special interest donors--so that the money they then give goes anonymously to groups that pretend they are not fossil fuel funded, for instance, because the identity of the fossil fuel donor has been stripped clean, or they are not the tool of the Koch brothers because the Koch brothers' identity has been stripped clean. It is a device for misleading and confusing people. When you consider how much of that $1 million went through to Mr. Whitaker in salary, the idea that he doesn't know who was paying him when so much of FACT's money came through that one donation is really improbable. He was questioned on this in the House the other day. I don't think he was truthful. I think he does know, and I hope--hope--that the House will pursue with subpoenas finding out who the donor was so that we actually know, because I think he does. Obviously, the donor does. So what we have now is a situation where the Acting Attorney General of the United States potentially has a $1 million conflict of interest that I believe the Acting Attorney General knows about, that the donor with whom he has a conflict of interest obviously knows about, that has been hidden from the rest of us through laundering through Donors Trust, and that is not an environment that is conducive to proper recusal and proper conflict-of-interest assessment. It is very poor practice, and if it weren't for the fact that dark money is so important to big Republican donor interests, I think people would readily clear this up. If the shoe were on the other foot, my colleagues on the other side would have steam coming out of their ears to get to the bottom of this. But because what is likely to be revealed is a big Republican donor, suddenly there is this massive disinterest. Mr. Barr proposed himself as the person who is going to come to this office to defend the Department of Justice, to put the institutional interests of the Department of Justice first, to protect it from the vagaries of the Trump administration. Yet when he was asked about this, he completely fell down. He offered no sensible or reasonable assurances, so that concerned me a little bit. I then went on to ask him, since the Department of Justice has a National Security Division, which oversees counterintelligence work, and since the Department of Justice contains the FBI, which does the counterintelligence investigations to protect our country, I asked him this: In a counterintelligence investigation, in operating to protect our country in this counterintelligence function, what should the Department of Justice know about business or other entanglements of senior officials with foreign interests and powers? The very heart of counterintelligence is to look at American officials and see what their vulnerabilities might be to influence or control or manipulation by foreign interests and powers. That is the goal of doing counterintelligence in the first place. So what evidence do you need to be able to do that? Obviously, it would be helpful to know what business or other interests with foreign powers senior officials have so that you can make that assessment, so you can follow whatever leads that might produce, that may give you understanding of things that otherwise seem inexplicable. It is obvious evidence to support the FBI's counterintelligence function. Rather than give a straight answer and say ``Yes, this is obvious evidence, and obviously we will do our counterintelligence function better when we know when senior officials have foreign business entanglements,'' again he completely fell down in his answer and started quarrelling about what Senators have to declare and wouldn't give a straight answer. Well, there is an obvious reason he wouldn't give a straight answer. The obvious reason he would not give a straight answer is that the President who appointed him has significant-- although we don't understand them well yet--significant business entanglements that we don't know about. We need to find out what his business entanglements are, and it is really hard to assess some of his behavior without knowing who is on the other side of his foreign business relationships and how much money is involved and how much is at risk for him. That is pretty elementary stuff. If you are the person who is telling yourself, as the Attorney General, who is going to come in and be the institutionalist and defend the prerogatives of the Department, defend the procedures and protocols of the Department against a President who respects none of that and who has those very entanglements, to then come in and say ``You know what, I am not going to be interested in any of that; I am, instead, going to ask counterquestions back to you about other different officials''--the inability to get a straight answer to that question signals a great deal to me about when, in a pinch, he has to choose between defending the Department and protecting the political interests of the President, which way he is going to go. I gave him that choice in that question. I gave him that choice in that question, and he very clearly came down on the side of protecting the political interests of the President. If you can't get through a hearing question without flipping away from the interests of the Department and protecting the President, good luck when the pressure is really on. He lost enormous credibility with me in his inability to answer those questions. It is really hard to determine recusal for conflict of interest if you don't know who paid $1 million to a senior Department official, and it is really hard to determine counterintelligence issues if you don't know what foreign entanglements senior officials have. Those are statements I would hope would be so obvious as to be indisputable. Yet this candidate foundered on both of them. The other issue is the question of Executive power. Again, you would think that the Senate would be interested in standing up for the prerogatives of the legislative body since we are the legislative body and we have a very long and proud tradition. From that perspective, as a Senator and legislator, I look ahead, and I see constitutional battles. There are a lot of constitutional battles that I see coming. The first is going to be, if the President, when he gets or after he gets the budget measure that we have agreed to here-- hopefully, we have agreed to here; I think it is done--if he decides that he is going to declare a national emergency and start moving money around between accounts in order to build his, as I affectionately refer to it, ``big dumb wall,'' that is a constitutional problem, and article I of the Constitution says it is the legislature that has the power to appropriate and spend funds. So if a President is going to use his own unilateral declaration of a national emergency to say to Congress ``Sorry, your power of the purse is not actually all that real; it is the power of advice to me, and as soon as I declare a national emergency, I can spend your money where I want,'' that violates the separation of powers. That is a constitutional battle, and one can see it coming. Executive privilege is a constant constitutional battle between Congress and the executive branch. Congress wants information; Congress seeks information; Congress needs information to perform its constitutional oversight function. But certain narrow communications within the executive branch are protected from Congress's right to do that in order to protect certain conversations and freedoms directly around the President of the United States as he has conversations. That is the general understanding of how executive privilege works. Well, this administration has a very different understanding of how executive privilege works. They think that you get to come into a Senate hearing and not answer a question because some day maybe somebody else might exert executive privilege as to what you have said. But there is no deadline ever; there is no check ever; there is no day of reckoning ever. They just assert it, and because we have not enforced our powers here, they have gotten away with it. So executive privilege has grown into a swamp of executive obstruction of congressional oversight. We have to bring executive privilege back to its true base and its true roots, and as we try to do that, guess what. That is going to be another battle between the legislative and executive branches--another constitutional battle. The question of whether or not the President can be indicted by a grand jury is another constitutional battle we have coming, very likely. We will have to see what the special counsel and the other Department of Justice investigations into this President and the people around him reveal, but they could very well reveal sufficient evidence to justify an indictment of anyone else who is not the President. Within the Department of Justice there is a group called the Office of Legal Counsel, which is kind of the legal advisor to the Department of Justice. The Office of Legal Counsel has decided that a Department of Justice cannot indict a sitting President. Here is the problem with that. The Office of Legal Counsel isn't elected by anybody. They are career people. They tend to be hypersmart, but their purpose in life in opining on the separation-of-powers questions is to describe the maximum possible credible scope of Executive power. They represent the executive branch, and when they are making these separation-of-powers decisions, they always veer to the maximum greatest Executive power that they can justify. That does not mean that a court would agree with them. That does not mean that a court would agree with them. Ever since Marbury v. Madison, it has been the constitutional power of the courts, particularly the Supreme Court, to say what the law is. The question of whether a President can be indicted is a question of what the law is regarding the indictment of a President. So that question ought to be decided in a court, but as the Office of Legal Counsel is never going to let a case go forward, then how is the Department ever going to get that opinion that it has tested in court to get a real answer under the constitutional system? Well, they probably will not. It is going to be difficult. We are going to have to try to find a way, if they do assert that, to get that proposition tested in a court instead of relying on the opinion of a group of lawyers within an executive branch Agency as to the relative powers of the courts and the executive branch. The question of interference with these investigations by the President and the independence of those investigations also raises a variety of constitutional questions. I have to say the top line of Mr. Barr on all of these issues was fantastic. I was kind of mentally cheering when he said some of the things he said about how he was going to keep his hands off, how he respected Mueller, how this was no witch hunt, how he was going to make sure it had full scope, how he was going to try to get the maximum transparency about the final report that he could--all of which was fine--and then we went into the weeds a little bit. As the old saying goes, the devil is in the details. The question was serious enough that I raised it in the committee after the hearing because I was unsatisfied with his responses. Chairman Graham was kind enough to acknowledge that those were pretty darn good questions, and I should get an answer to them. He said he would try to get an answer for me, and maybe we would get on the phone together to get Barr those answers. That did not come to pass. Instead, I wrote Mr. Barr a letter, asking him to clarify his answers. I got back a letter that provided no clarification at all. So I have given him quite a few chances to try to answer these questions. I haven't gotten a straight answer back, which makes me a little bit worried. Here is the problem--there are actually two problems. At the end of the day, whenever the Mueller report is concluded, that report can be provided to Congress, but there is considerable flexibility and considerable discretion within the Department of Justice and the Attorney General's office as to how much to give. I will interrupt because I see the distinguished majority leader here. I yield the floor to the distinguished majority leader.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Thank you, Leader. Madam President, as I was wrapping up, I was pointing out that at some point there is likely to be a report that comes out of the special counsel's investigation, and there will be some material in that report that is properly stripped out of it before it is provided to the public. The two things I concede are proper to strip out of it are classified national security information that could reveal sources and methods of our intelligence operations, and the second is private and personal information, particularly related to witnesses, that is not necessary to the public's understanding of the report--people's phone numbers, or email addresses, or other private information. Those are very clearly appropriate to redact from the report. There are two other ways in which the Department of Justice could go into the Mueller report and just gouge great tranches of material out. One would be if an assertion by the President was made of executive privilege and if, without any contest or without any formative review or court review, the Attorney General simply agreed with the assertion of executive privilege by the President. We have seen these extreme, almost wild, unlimited assertions of executive privilege by members of the Trump administration. There has never been any discipline or proper process about it. There has never been any enforcement. So it is a wide-open field for mischief if the President decides that big chunks of the Mueller report shouldn't be disclosed to the public because he asserts executive privilege. Then Attorney General Barr says: Good enough for me. I am not going to let any of that go to the public or to Congress. That, to me, is a problem. That door is wide open, and it is the reason I have my opposition to this particular nominee. There is a longstanding tradition at the Department of Justice that when you are undertaking a criminal investigation and you develop, in the course of that investigation, derogatory information about people-- particularly about uncharged people--you don't get to just spill that out into the public record. The bad deed that was done by Jim Comey was to violate that Department rule and disclose derogatory investigative information about an uncharged person--specifically, Mrs. Clinton. That violated longstanding procedures and principles in the Department and kicked up a lot of criticism, including by me right at the time and since and also by Attorney General Barr. He stands, I think, in the best traditions of the Department to condemn the release of derogatory investigative information about an uncharged person. The rule as a prosecutor is, if you are going to say it, save your pleadings. Charge the guy. Put it in the indictment. Put it in the criminal information. Then defense can fairly react. Then you are accountable to the court for what you are saying, and then there is some discipline to it, but you don't get to describe unrelated or uncharged conduct that just happens to be derogatory. That actually continues on through the whole criminal case. You are not supposed to do it at any point. If you have something to say about the evidence in the case, you plead it in a pleading before the court; otherwise, you keep your mouth shut, and you stand on your pleadings. The problem comes when that rule gets applied in this case, and here is the circumstance: The Mueller report comes down, and it is full of derogatory information about the President and the people around him. But because the Office of Legal Counsel, as I described earlier, has decided that you can't charge a sitting President with a crime, now that President is an uncharged person--not because there wasn't an indictment to be brought against him, not because he didn't engage in criminal conduct, not because the government wouldn't ordinarily prosecute that case to the full extent of the law, but simply because of this little policy at the Office of Legal Counsel that you can't indict a sitting President--one that has never been tested in court and one that I think will fare badly in court if you look at the precedence of Nixon and Clinton and others. So now, with the President an uncharged person, do you then call in this doctrine and say: Hey, all derogatory investigative information about this uncharged person is now no longer amenable to disclosure to Congress or the public. It is a complicated situation, but it is easy to get there, and once you are there, the answer ought to be ``Well, obviously no,'' but I couldn't get that answer. I couldn't get a straight answer. Over and over again, despite the terrific top-line assertions Mr. Barr made, when you drilled down into the weeds, you couldn't get a straight answer, and when you tried, very often it was an easy answer to give, and you couldn't get that easy, straight answer. In those cases, it was a choice between the policies and the protocols and the propriety of the Department of Justice versus the political interests of the President's. If I can't get a good answer to a simple hearing question that properly puts the weight where it belongs to support the protocols and the procedures and the propriety of the Department of Justice, then when it is not so public and when the pressure is really on and when hard decisions have to be made, it is impossible for me to believe that he won't lean toward yielding to the President rather than defending and honoring the Department. That, for me, is enough reason to oppose this nomination. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, judging by the deafening silence of Senate Republicans, you would think there was no conservative support in this country for even the most measured response to climate change. However, many prominent Republicans are actually clamoring for climate action. They are just not doing it here in Mammon Hall. See, for example, the January 16 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal is not exactly a progressive lefty rag. The opening line of the Wall Street Journal op-ed is: ``Global climate change is a serious problem calling for immediate national action.'' I agree. The op-ed is signed by 27 winners of the Nobel Prize in economics, four former Federal Reserve Chairs, 12 past Chairs of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, and two former Treasury Secretaries. Many were appointed by Republican Presidents. Let's look at what this bipartisan group of experts and economists is proposing. Here is the first policy recommendation: A carbon tax offers the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary. By correcting a well-known market failure, a carbon tax will send a powerful price signal that harnesses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future. Again, I agree. We must make the price of fossil energy reflect the costs of carbon pollution. That is Econ 101. We have to do it if we are to reduce emissions as much and as quickly as we need to. This is why Senator Schatz and I introduced the American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act to put a price on carbon. It is not just academic economists and policymakers who recognize that putting a price on carbon pollution is the most efficient way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Business executives agree. Few firms are more capitalist and fiercer than the legendary Goldman Sachs. Consider this from Bob Litterman, the former head of risk management at Goldman Sachs, writing recently in the New York Times: [F]or society at large, and the government in particular, the most important and urgent action required is to minimize future warming by creating appropriate global incentives to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. Economists generally agree that rather than regulate behavior, it is more effective to allow individuals to choose their actions, as long as the prices appropriately reflect the costs-- Again, back to Econ 101-- including the risks posed by climate change. To date, prices of energy have not reflected the risk of future climate changes. This is a stupid mistake. . . . That is not very complicated economic jargon. This is the former head of risk management for one of the smartest and most capitalist firms the planet has ever seen saying that what we are engaged in now is a ``stupid mistake.'' Again, I agree. Republicans typically support free market solutions, and this is a free market solution. Yet, still, there remains that deafening silence from the other side of the aisle here in the Senate. Here is the second recommendation from the economists' op-ed in the Wall Street Journal: A carbon tax should increase every year until emissions reductions goals are met and be revenue neutral to avoid debates over the size of government. A consistently rising carbon price will encourage technological innovation and large-scale infrastructure development. These are two things we want--innovation and infrastructure. So again, I agree. As to revenue neutral, the carbon pricing system Senator Schatz and I proposed is revenue neutral. Every penny goes back into the pockets of Americans--none is designed to make more or bigger government. As to innovation, a carbon fee levels the playing field so that polluters have to compete in the market on even terms with nonpolluters. Competition on a level playing field will incentivize innovation in renewable energy, innovation in energy efficiency, innovation in resilient infrastructure, and innovation in low-carbon manufacturing and transportation. This is not a novel concept. Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus showed as far back as 1992 ``that a low tax on carbon, set to rise slowly, over time, could be enough to keep emissions at reasonable levels, saving us from climate change at little, if any, cost. The tax would promote innovations in new forms of power generation, and, eventually, a widespread adoption of clean-energy technologies.'' The latest Republican claim is that innovation is the solution to climate change. Fine, but you are not going to get adequate innovation on the tilted playing field that the fossil fuel industry protects. Carbon pricing uses market forces to drive innovation. What else do the economists recommend? A border carbon adjustment system should be established. This system would enhance the competitiveness of American firms that are more energy-efficient than their global competitors. It would also create an incentive for other nations to adopt similar carbon pricing. Again, I agree. A border carbon adjustment system means that products from countries without a carbon price are subject to a harmonizing tariff so that they don't have an unfair advantage over domestic products. This protects American manufacturers, and, in turn, American jobs. It motivates other countries to help solve this global problem. People who say we need a global solution must look to a carbon price because it is the most efficient global solution. That is why the Whitehouse-Schatz bill includes just such a border adjustment system. By the way, we filed this bill three Congresses ago first. So we have been at this for a while. The economists' Wall Street Journal op-ed was just a few weeks ago. So we seem to have some convergence here. The economists continue: To maximize the fairness and political viability of a rising carbon tax, all the revenue should be returned directly to U.S. citizens through equal lump-sum rebates. The majority of American families, including the most vulnerable, will benefit financially-- Let me repeat that again-- will benefit financially by receiving more in ``carbon dividends'' than they pay in increased energy prices. The majority of our families, including the most vulnerable will benefit financially. As I already noted, the Whitehouse-Schatz plan returns all revenue to the American people. Carbon pricing is not a tax increase. Lower and middle-income households actually get more money back than they may pay in higher prices. More than two dozen Nobel Prize winners signed this Wall Street Journal op-ed. Their economic expertise is unimpeachable. We have at least one Nobel Laureate from almost every year since the late 1990s. There are only a few missing names, and many of those names actually have endorsed carbon pricing in other venues. You might say: OK, they are just a bunch of academics. They are all out of touch with political realities. Well, these were all chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. When you are advising the President of the United States, you generally adopt some sense of political reality. Note that this is a bipartisan list. It includes advisers to four Republican Presidents and two Democratic Presidents. When this group of people can agree on an economic policy, you better believe it is not some fringe idea, and these experts all say that carbon pricing is a practical solution to a very real and pressing problem. Here is yet another bipartisan list of signers on the Wall Street Journal op-ed: Fed chairs and Treasury Secretaries. We have top-level economic appointees from five different Republican Presidents, all saying that ``global climate change is a serious problem calling for immediate national action'' and all saying that setting a carbon price is the best action to take. They don't write very big checks. So they don't get heard from much around here, it seems. But let's think for a minute. What about this President? What about President Trump? What might he say? What might President Trump think about action on climate change? This is a full-page advertisement from the New York Times from 2009. Back in 2009, Donald Trump and his children and the Trump organization all signed this letter published in the New York Times. This letter urged then-President Obama to pursue what they called ``meaningful and effective measures to control climate change.'' It goes on: ``If we fail to act now''--this being 2009--``it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.'' ``Irrefutable,'' ``catastrophic,'' ``irreversible''--there is not much ambiguity there. Well, a decade has passed since this letter, and much has changed. Now Donald Trump mocks global warming, and the GOP in Congress has fled from taking any serious action on climate change--even on policies that are as mainstream and widely supported by appointees of Republicans as carbon pricing. How did this come to pass? Well, I was here. I saw it happen. The year after President Trump signed this letter, the Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United decision opened the floodgates to unlimited special-interest money--money from polluters into our politics--and that changed everything. In 2007, we had bipartisan climate bills. In 2008, we had bipartisan climate bills. In 2009, we had bipartisan climate bills. Bipartisanship was the theme of responding to the climate change problem for those years. By my recollection, we had five different bipartisan Senate climate bills kicking around. Then, in January 2010 comes the Citizens United decision. The fossil fuel industry pushed for it, asked for it, saw it coming, and took immediate advantage of it. Before you know it, there is that unlimited money, often unleashed through dark money channels, so you don't know who is behind it, and there are the threats and promises that necessarily accompany that power. Think about it. If you are given the power to spend unlimited money in politics, do you not necessarily also have the power to threaten to spend unlimited money in politics? Of course, you do. The two cannot be separated. So the unlimited spending, the anonymous dark money, and the threats and promises combined to shut down the Republican Party on this issue. It was like turning off the lights. From January 2010 forward, no Republican in this Chamber has been willing to get onto any serious piece of legislation to reduce carbon dioxide. Republican voters aren't there. Republican young voters are up in arms. Republican economic leaders aren't there. You can look across the Republican Party, and you find a strong and solid desire to address the climate problem, and you even have Republican leaders supporting a specific solution. It is just here where it stops. It is just here where political spending is so important that it has been able to overcome even the judgment of Nobel Prize-winning Republican appointees as to how to solve this. After he received his Nobel Prize just last October, William Nordhaus, Nobel Prize-winning economist, lamented: ``It's hard to be optimistic. . . . We're actually going backward in the United States, with the disastrous policies of the Trump administration.'' Where is 2009 Donald Trump? Where is the guy who signed this? I want that guy back. These economists of all political backgrounds know what is going on, and they know how to fix it. The American people know what is going on, and they want us to fix it. It is time for us to take action, and it is time for us to wake up. I yield the floor. 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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I am very happy to be joined by my colleague from New Hampshire, Senator Hassan. I ask unanimous consent that she be recognized to speak at the conclusion of my remarks.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, we are here to talk about the risks to our New England coastal communities from the climate changes coming our way. Despite the really dirty efforts of the fossil fuel industry to keep the truth at bay, the tide of public understanding is turning. A recent survey by Yale and George Mason Universities found that 73 percent of Americans now see global warming happening. That number is up 10 percentage points since 2015. Similarly, the percentage of Americans who consider global warming an important issue rose from 63 percent to 72 percent in the past 10 years. In just the past year, the number of Americans who say they are worried about global warming jumped from 61 to 69 percent. One author of this research explained the results to the New York Times this way: People are beginning to understand that climate change is here in the United States, here in my state, in my community, affecting the people and places I care about, and now. This isn't happening in 50 years, 100 years from now. Dr. Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University echoed these sentiments, saying: ``Today, nearly everyone can point to a way that they are personally witnessing and are being personally affected by the impacts of a changing climate in the places where they live.'' Perhaps nowhere is this more true than along our coasts, where manmade climate change is already flooding towns, driving fisheries away from traditional fishing grounds, and bringing ashore stronger storms riding on higher seas. Last Tuesday, I picked up my home State paper, the Providence Journal, and I saw this headline splashed across the front page regarding climate change: ``Washed Away. . . . Home values lost to rising sea levels.'' This is a study I have mentioned before. It was done by the First Street Foundation and researchers at Columbia University and looks at what escalating flood risk is doing to coastal housing markets. That study started in Florida--peer-reviewed work in Florida--and they took that methodology and have been working their way up the gulf coast and the New England coast since then. They just reached my State and Senator Hassan's State, and the report is not pleasant. They found that Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island lost a total of $403 million in expected property value between 2005 and 2017 due to increased tidal flooding risks. Just between 2005 and 2017, Rhode Island coastal properties lost nearly $45 million in expected value. The study called out these particular properties in Warren, RI, that lost over one-third of their value during that timeframe. Rhode Islanders in the town of Warwick lost over $4 million in home values due to the threat of climate change-driven sea level rise. Several studies warned how climate change will affect coastal property values. The First Street Foundation study is the first to demonstrate value loss that has already occurred, as the study itself says. A Columbia University researcher who worked on the First Street study said this: Each time we analyze a new state we see the same phenomenon. Increased tidal flooding leads to a loss in home value appreciation. As sea level rise accelerates, we expect the corresponding loss in relative home value to accelerate as well. That hits home indeed. The latest scientific evidence shows sea levels rising at a faster pace than expected. NOAA data shows that Greenland lost around 280 billion tons of ice per year from 2002 to 2016. A National Geographic article covering this study noted: ``The Greenland ice sheet is 10,000 feet thick in places and contains enough ice to raise sea levels 23 feet.'' Another study shows that the Antarctic ice sheet has lost around 252 billion tons of ice per year over the last 10 years. Again, according to National Geographic, full melting of the Antarctic ice sheet could mean nearly 187 feet of sea level rise. In Rhode Island, our Coastal Resources Management Council has been a longtime leader in modeling flooding and sea level rise risks for Rhode Island's coastal businesses, communities, and decision makers. Earlier this month, CRMC partnered with the University of Rhode Island to release a series of highly detailed risk maps for several coastal Rhode Island towns. These maps provide a damage assessment for individual structures due to flooding and storm waves for homes and businesses and critical infrastructure, like the Warren wastewater treatment plant, which is right there on the coast of Warren, RI; the facility will be almost totally wiped out. CRMC's maps turn these general risks facing our communities from a hazy sketch to a vivid, living-color, 3-D picture, and that picture is grim for these coastal communities. Rhode Island officials are currently preparing for a worst case scenario of more than 9 feet of sea level rise overtaking our 400 miles of coastline by the end of the century. This map is from Rhode Island's CRMC's interactive STORMTOOLS application, which overlays the sea level rise projections over our current topography. The blue all through here is currently land that is flooded when 10 feet of sea level rise come. This extra little rim of green on some of the edges is when you push it up to 12 feet. As we see all of the blue here, think of homes and businesses and properties that are owned by people and that are going to literally disappear into the ocean if we don't pay attention. These are the homes and businesses of my constituents. A 2017 report from the real estate database company Zillow identified over 4,800 homes in Rhode Island, valued at near $3 billion, that would be underwater by 2100, using an optimistic estimate of only 6 feet of sea level rise. In this snapshot from Upper Narragansett Bay, you can see some of Rhode Island's larger coastal communities stranded as a scattered series of new islands, a Rhode Island archipelago. Today's map of Rhode Island--the map that we have known since our founding--will become unrecognizable as Warwick Neck here breaks off to become its own island, Newport south of this map splits, and Bristol through here comes apart. A recent report from Climate Central and Zillow looked at new homes being built in risky coastal areas--ones expected to suffer from annual floods by 2050 under a moderate greenhouse gas emissions model--and they show Rhode Island has seen more growth in risk areas than in safe areas. Obviously, if emissions don't meet these moderate goals, things are going to get a good deal worse, and well before water actually overtakes your home, well before the water is coming through the front door will come the economic effects of rising oceans, and they will be big. In 2017, GAO reported that coastal areas face particularly high financial risks and that annual coastal property losses from sea level rise and increased storms will run into the billions of dollars every year in the short run and over $50 billion every year by late century. EPA has estimated ``$5.0 trillion in economic costs to coastal property from climate change through 2100''--$5 trillion, and that is the Rhode Island part of that. The Union of Concerned Scientists reports that sea level rise will double the number of coastal communities facing what they call ``chronic inundation and possible retreat''--meaning you are out of there--by 2035. The market is awakening to these risks. Moody's evaluates municipal bonds. It has begun evaluating the bonds of coastal communities with an eye to this flooding risk. Banks, mortgagors, insurance companies, and appraisers are starting to incorporate these risks into their work for coastal properties. A recent issue of the Appraisal Institute's Valuation magazine quoted Rhode Island appraiser Brad Hevenor, warning that homes that receive a 30-year mortgage this year ``might be completely different types of property [by the end of their mortgage] than they are today.'' Good luck getting a 30-year mortgage on a property that the bank believes will be ``completely different'' by the end of the mortgage. The coastal housing market is on the precipice of a dangerous financial cliff. First Street, Zillow, NOAA, GAO, EPA, Climate Central, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and others all make the same warning. Federal home mortgage giant Freddie Mac said it this way: ``The economic losses and social disruption may happen gradually, but they are likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the housing crisis and Great Recession.'' The editor of the insurance industry trade publication Risk & Insurance said this: ``Continually rising seas will damage coastal residential and commercial property values to the point that property owners will flee those markets in droves, thus precipitating a mortgage value collapse that could equal or exceed the mortgage crisis that rocked the global economy in 2008.'' These are serious warnings, and they are deadly serious warnings for our coastal States. Here in Congress, these warnings fall on deaf ears--ears plugged deaf by the fossil fuel industry's persistent mischief. We have to get serious about our duty to our constituents. Polling shows that millions of Americans want us to face up to this threat, to safeguard their coastal property, and to curb the carbon pollution that is distorting our Earth's climate and raising our Earth's oceans. It is seriously time for us to wake up. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I know you are not allowed to respond to me, but allow me to welcome you to the Chair as a new Member of the Senate. With a new year come a lot of changes. This month, a Democratic majority was sworn in to the House of Representatives. That new majority has heard the call from Americans to make tackling climate change one of our top priorities, and what a change that will make from the last Congress. Young voters who helped propel this change are urgently concerned about climate change. More than three-fourths of millennials agree on the need for climate action. Even a majority of Republican millennials agree on the need for action in face of our climate crisis. Indeed, a former Republican Congressman just wrote about climate change: ``My party will never earn the votes of millennials unless it gets serious about finding solutions.'' Of course, it is not just younger voters; polling shows that Americans of all ages and political stripes favor policy solutions that scientists and economists say are needed to tackle climate change. A recent survey of more than 10,000 registered voters showed that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that investing in renewable energy will create more jobs than investing in fossil fuel. Among Republicans-- here--52 percent of Republican voters think that focusing on renewables will create more jobs than fossil fuel--52 percent to 29 percent--and that is with the nonstop saturation, indoctrination of the Republican Party by the fossil fuel industry, with all of its propaganda and nonsense. Of course, the facts bear out that renewable energy will create more jobs. It is already happening. Over 3 million Americans are employed in the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries, compared to just over 1 million in fossil fuels. There is far more job growth in the renewable sector than in the declining, decrepit fossil fuel industry. Solid majorities of Americans say they want more emphasis on renewable energy. Seventy-one percent want more solar, 64 percent want more wind, and 56 percent want more hydropower. By contrast, only 40 percent want more natural gas, only 25 percent want more oil, and only 18 percent want more coal. Seventy-one percent want solar, and 18 percent want coal. I think the Trump administration would do well to pay attention to those numbers--if it were, indeed, about the numbers, anyway. So make the question harder. Go all in. Ask Americans about a full transition to a 100-percent renewable energy system, and most say that the transition to a 100-percent renewable energy system for America will be good for working families--better than continuing on our fossil fuel path. If you look at what Republicans say, by 2 to 1, Republican voters say that going to renewables will have a positive impact on working families, versus only 23.5 percent who say it will have a negative impact. The rest--``don't know'' or ``no impact either way.'' But the people who favor 100 percent renewables as a good thing for working families--even among Republican voters, it is 2 to 1 over fossil fuel. When Americans are told about a Green New Deal to reduce carbon pollution and create clean energy jobs by investing in infrastructure and renewable energy and efficient buildings and transportation systems, almost 70 percent are supportive, and that includes almost 60 percent of Republicans--20 percent strongly support, and 36.8 percent support. So even the Green New Deal is a winner among Republican voters. Ask about putting a price on carbon pollution. Why would you want to do that? Because right now, the costs of carbon pollution are put on the public. They are put on all of us. They are put on our constituents. Polluters get away with polluting for free, and the rest of us pay for the added drought and wildfire and storm damage costs. Well, more than 60 percent of registered voters support pricing carbon to reduce emissions. And if you look at Republicans, a majority of Republicans under the age of 45 also support a carbon price. This new polling matches other polling that is on its way out or recently out that shows solid support for pricing carbon and making polluters pay for the damage they are causing--which, by the way, is also economics 101, but never mind that. We are talking about polling today. A Monmouth University poll showed that 64 percent of Republicans now accept climate change as a problem, and a majority of Republicans support government action to combat climate change--a majority of Republicans. An ABC News poll showed that 81 percent of Americans support cutting greenhouse gas emissions, two-thirds supported a carbon tax, and 81 percent supported tax breaks for renewable power. These are big, strong, national majorities in favor of the kind of action we need and could do to stem the climate crisis. A poll for Yale and George Mason Universities showed that 70 percent of registered voters, including over half of Republicans, support reducing greenhouse gas emissions regardless of what other countries do. This poll also found majority support across both parties for U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement and overwhelming support for renewal energy among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. What is more, this poll found that almost three-quarters of registered voters, including a majority of Republicans, support setting strict limits on carbon pollution from coal-fired powerplants, and a majority of Republicans, Independents, and Democrats support imposing a revenue neutral carbon tax on fossil fuel companies. A majority of Republicans support imposing a revenue neutral carbon tax on fossil fuel companies. Well, I have had a bill with Senator Schatz in the last several Congresses to do just that--charge a fee on the polluters for their carbon emissions and then return all the revenue raised to the American people. Several bills on the House side also price carbon pollution, and a few even had Republican cosponsors. These bills went nowhere under Republican leadership, notwithstanding these numbers and notwithstanding public support. Why? Because the fossil fuel industry opposes them--so no hearings, no vote, no nothing. What did get a vote in the House last year under Republican leadership? A resolution condemning carbon pricing--condemning the carbon pricing that a majority of Republican voters support--backed, of course, by the fossil fuel industry. Virtually every expert, economist, and scientist who has studied the question says that putting a price on carbon pollution is not only the right thing to do morally and economically but is necessary to keep global temperatures from climbing 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial norms, as the scientific consensus makes clear we must do at a minimum--at a minimum. If we blow past 2 degrees, all bets are off, and the consequences of climate change may become irreversible. Even at 1.5 degrees, we are taking chances, but dozens of industry-backed front groups--this is hard to see, but this is the usual array of web-of-denial, phony-baloney front groups that have been supported, funded, and created by the fossil fuel industry so people don't think it is the fossil fuel industry committing this nonsense. They have groups with names such as ALEC, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, Heartland Institute, and Institute for Liberty. These groups clean up their propaganda for them. So here come these letters. These industry-backed front groups had one important thing going for them that the Nobel Prize-winning economists on the other side couldn't match, and that is big political money and the fossil fuel industry behind them. Groups behind this letter to Speaker Ryan received at least $54 million from Big Oil and the Koch brothers' political network--at least $54 million. We don't know for sure because of their clandestine, dark money funding network. Likely, it is far more. The minimum $54 million that the fossil fuel industry funded these groups with may likely be far more because so much of the fossil fuel industry's funding is obscured through dark money channels to hide their hand. What did they achieve? Well, they got a vote. Unlike the carbon pricing bills, they got a vote on the House floor. Speaker Ryan brought the fossil fuel-funded resolution to a vote, and with the Republican caucus largely a wholly owned subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry, the resolution passed. There is a whole case study in corruption here, as the Founding Fathers would define it, but the simple lesson for today's purposes: Money talks and big fossil fuel money commands. This situation stinks. The polls I just went through and others show what Americans want. Americans want jobs, Americans want clean air, Americans want a healthy climate, and Americans want to be safe from extreme weather, wildfires, and rising seas, and Americans know clean energy solutions will get them there. Americans are ready for bipartisan action, and before the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United came along, we had bipartisan action in the Senate on climate. We had lots of bipartisan action in the Senate on climate, but with Citizens United, unlimited money launched into our politics and things changed, and now the strings are pulled by Big Oil, Big Coal, and a couple of creepy fossil fuel industry billionaires. Special interest money has infected almost everything we do in Congress, and it is the flagrant fact of our nonresponse to the climate crisis. The warnings have been coming for decades--first from the scientists, then from the economists, now from practically everywhere. I went to the capital city of the Presiding Officer's State and was told there that the staffing requirements for police and fire were going to have to change because Phoenix, AZ, was becoming so hot that to get people to work outside, responding to emergencies, responding to fires and so forth, you had to build in a whole new staffing regime because it was so hard to work in the new levels of heat that the city of Phoenix is experiencing. You have to be able to rotate people much faster through crime scenes and through fire scenes and you had to have other people willing to stand by and cool them off after they were exposed to superheating. So it is everywhere now. If you live on the coast, it is sea level; if you live out West, it is wildfires, and it includes Republican voters and particularly younger Republican voters. Remember what the recently departed Republican Member of Congress said: ``My party will never earn the votes of millennials unless it gets serious about finding solutions.'' Well, clean energy is a solution. The fact of all this Republican voter support on the one hand is a sign of hope for the new year--of hope that elected Republicans will hear their voters and will take action and support the clean energy solutions that can avert the climate crisis. At the same time, the voters on the Republican side who are saying what they want are also being ignored. Therefore, these numbers are equally telling of the secretive political forces at work in Congress to bottle us up and to prevent what even Republican voters want. There is a rot in our politics, and our failure on climate change is a telling indicator of that rot. The whole world is watching. America is supposed to be ``a City upon a Hill,'' an example for the world. They don't stop looking when we are a bad example. We have to get serious about this. Time is running out. It is time to wake up, and it is time to clean up. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Ryan Edwards and Kim Binsted, AAAS fellows in my office, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of this Congress.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Thank you, Senator, and if I may congratulate the junior Senator from South Carolina on the spectacular win that Clemson had and also congratulate him about being so true to the spirit of civility he discussed and not trash-talking the other team involved. It was a truly splendid victory between two extraordinarily talented and capable teams, and I congratulate the Senator.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Gladly.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Thank you, Mr. President, and happy new year. The new 116th Congress brings new hope for the Senate to face up to the clear and present danger of climate change. The House of Representatives being in Democratic hands augments that hope. The Senate Republican majority has failed to address climate change. This is no accident. This is the Senate in the Citizens United era. I was here before Citizens United, and for years we saw Senate climate bipartisanship, before Citizens United. After Citizens United, what we see is immensely powerful climate-denying, dark-money front groups for the fossil fuel industry, all likely funded by fossil fuel interests, and we see no Republican Senator willing to cross them. The spending they do in politics--and the more silent threat of spending--is a blockade. It reeks. Here is a case study on how dark and unlimited money play in Senate elections. In 2016, in Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin, three Democratic Senate candidates stood a good early chance of winning Republican-held seats in 2016. All were solid, experienced candidates who had been Senators before. All were ahead in early polling. Then the big influencers came in hard, launching attack ads, in some cases, well more than 1 year before the election. It is a little like strafing the other side's planes while they are still on the airfield. The pile-on of so-called outside group spending against these three candidates came to almost $70 million. All three ultimately lost their races, and their losses meant Republicans kept majority control of this Chamber. Let's look at that $70 million that acquired the continued Republican majority control of this Chamber. Of that $70 million, only about $11 million came from donors and PACs that appear unconnected to the fossil fuel industry. At least two-thirds of that outside spending--more than $46 million--can be directly traced to groups that received significant funding from fossil energy, and $12 million, the remainder of that 70, came through dark money channels. In this day and age in America, powerful influencers can obscure their identities by running their political spending through these dark money channels so it is impossible for us to know whether or how much of this remaining $12 million was from polluter dollars--fossil fuel dollars. I strongly suspect all of it was. In any event, when one industry can deliver that kind of political artillery, the vast majority of a $70 million barrage against three specific candidates, that gives that industry remarkable political power with the side that is advantaged--climate action stopping political power, it would seem. As the mounting effects of climate change have grown ever more dire and the scientific understanding has grown ever more clear, what has the Senate done? Nothing. Let's look at what we learned and what we witnessed and what we failed to do in 2018. Mr. President, 2018 saw the release of two landmark climate science reports--one from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the effects of warming 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and the second, the Trump administration's own ``National Climate Assessment.'' Together, these reports delivered the starkest warning on climate change to date. Damage from climate change is already occurring. Economies are now at risk, and we are almost out of time to prevent the worst consequences. The IPCC report told us that accounting for the costs of carbon pollution by charging a price for carbon emissions is the ``central'' policy that will allow us to hold the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius or less. Even this dire endorsement was not enough to move a single Republican colleague to join a bill to establish a carbon fee. More telling was the spectacle of the Trump administration's ``National Climate Assessment.'' This report, written by 13 Federal Agencies, described the monumental damage the United States is facing from climate change, flatly contradicting the climate denial assertions of the President and his fossil fuel-flunky Cabinet. The administration tried to bury the report by releasing it on Black Friday during the Thanksgiving holiday. That cynical move happily backfired, with more than 140 newspapers around the country featuring the report's stark findings on front pages and Google searches for ``climate change'' hitting their highest level for the year. Tellingly, the fossil fuel industry and its bevy of stooges in the Trump administration did not contest the science in the report--an admission by inaction that they know their science denial campaign is phony. They know the real science is irrefutable. It is better to hide from it. Unfortunately, we witnessed the irrefutable contribution of climate change to the most devastating natural disasters of 2018. ``Irrefutable,'' by the way, is one way to describe climate science. Another way to describe it is ``incontrovertible.'' The description of climate science as ``incontrovertible'' was published in a New York Times full-page advertisement in 2009 that was signed by, among others, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization. How things change. Anyway, out West, wildfires in California broke records. The Mendocino Complex Fire in July and August was the largest in the State's recorded history. The Camp Fire--this photograph--was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history, killing 86 people. Scientists linked California's increasing wildfires to climate change, estimating the area burned by wildfires across the Western United States since 1984 at twice what would have burned without the human-driven changes. Michael Mann, the professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, told PBS recently: It's not rocket science. . . . You warm the planet, you're going to get more frequent and intense heat waves. You warm the soils, you dry them out, you get worse drought. You bring all that together, and those are all the ingredients for unprecedented wildfires. Mr. President, 2018 saw the east coast slammed by hurricanes that were supercharged by warming oceans. Hurricanes gain strength from heat energy in the oceans they pass over. Warmer oceans also evaporate more water up into the storms, generating more storm rainfall. So stronger and wetter storms then ride ashore on higher and warmer seas and push larger storm surges ahead of them. Hurricane Florence intensified over water 1 to 2 degrees Celsius above average and dumped record rainfall and flooding on the Carolinas. Preliminary analysis suggests that its rainfall was more than 50 percent higher due to climate change. When Hurricane Michael hit Florida, it passed over water 2 to 3 degrees Celsius warmer than average. Passing over that heat, its winds spun up by 80 miles per hour in just 48 hours, becoming the strongest storm ever to make an October landfall in the United States and almost completely flattening the town of Mexico Beach, FL. Scientists are increasingly able to identify the role of climate change in extreme weather. The American Meteorological Society reported in December that 15 extreme weather events in 2017 were made more likely due to human-caused climate change, including a devastating marine heat wave off the coast of Australia that would have been ``virtually impossible'' without human-induced warming. The report drew attention to the role of oceans in many of these extreme events. Jeff Rosenfeld, the Meteorological Society's editor-in-chief, said that ``the ocean is actively playing a role in the extremes that we're seeing'' and that ``we're seeing the oceans as a link in a chain of causes that ultimately tie human causes to extreme weather events on land.'' The changes occurring in the ocean are imposing an increasing threat to our coastal communities, from gulf communities in Louisiana to shoreline communities in Rhode Island. The Union of Concerned Scientists released a report last year finding that over 300,000 coastal homes, with a collective market value of over $130 billion, are at risk of chronic flooding by 2045. By the end of the century, 2.4 million homes, worth more than $1 trillion, are expected to be at risk. A 2018 report from Climate Central and Zillow found that thousands of homes continue to be built in risky coastal areas that are expected to suffer annual floods by 2050. Freddie Mac, the big U.S. housing corporation, has taken a look at this and warned of a coastal property values crash as those houses become uninsurable or unmortgageable to the next buyer. A second economic crash we face is a ``carbon bubble'' in fossil fuel companies. The ``carbon bubble'' collapse happens when fossil fuel reserves now on the books of fossil fuel companies turn out to be undevelopable ``stranded assets.'' Research published by economists in the journal Nature Climate Change estimated that in a world where we succeed in limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius, $12 trillion of financial value could vanish from balance sheets globally in the form of stranded fossil fuel assets. That is over 15 percent of global GDP, and that is why the Bank of England calls this a systemic risk--i.e., a risk to the entire global economy. Financial managers are waking up to these risks. At the recent U.N. climate summit in December, a group of 415 global investors, managing $32 trillion of investments--these are men and women who have been trusted with managing $32 trillion worth of investments--came together to warn that the world faces a financial crash worse than the 2008 crisis unless carbon emissions are urgently cut. The group called for the end of fossil fuel subsidies and the introduction of substantial prices on carbon emissions. They understand that to limit the worst climate risks, including economic catastrophes, we must cut carbon emissions immediately and substantially. But back home, the Trump administration--clearly and completely corrupted by the fossil fuel industry--has now taken more than 90 actions to weaken climate policies. Regrettably, after years of decline, U.S. carbon emissions grew 3.4 percent in 2018. Global carbon emissions also grew by 2.7 percent to reach a new carbon emissions record. If the Trump administration's 2018 regulatory actions read like a fossil fuel industry wish list, it is because they are. Just one example is the fuel economy rollback for automobiles. It is a perfect example. The new, weaker standards were pushed by--guess who--the largest oil refiner in the country, Marathon Petroleum. Marathon also distinguished itself as a top donor to ethically challenged EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt during his time in political office in Oklahoma. Marathon worked with the creepy Koch Brothers' network and oil industry lobby groups to run a stealth campaign, including a Facebook ad campaign using a phony front group called Energy4US that hid its oil industry origin. Fossil fuel energy companies claim to be cleaning up their act. They issue statements voicing support for carbon pricing. Look at what they do when the prospect of getting a carbon price on the books becomes real, as it did in Washington State's carbon fee ballot initiative. The campaign against the carbon fee outspent the campaign supporting it by 2 to 1, dumping more money into this ballot fight than any ballot initiative campaign in the State's history. And who funded the campaign against the initiative? Oil companies. BP, Phillips 66, and, of course, our friends Marathon Petroleum were the top spenders by far. Oil companies claim to support carbon pricing, but the giant trade associations they fund to go out and do their political work--the American Petroleum Institute, the so-called U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers--all oppose any proposals to reduce carbon pollution. The CEOs say one thing, and their political electioneering and lobbying apparatus is instructed to go out and do the exact opposite. Another telling aspect of the Washington State ballot initiative is who did not show up. Conspicuously absent are any of the good-guy corporations from the tech, financial, and food and beverage sectors that talk such a good game on climate change. That is telling because it matches what happens here in Congress. The good-guy corporations do not lift a political finger to advance climate legislation here in the Senate. In fact, these are the good guys. Set aside the fossil fuel pirates and what they are all up to through their front groups and their dark money and all the nonsense that they drive. These are the supposed good guys. In fact, they have a net negative presence here in the Senate on climate legislation because they do virtually nothing, and the trade associations they help to fund, like the Chamber of Commerce, lobby against climate action. So you have American corporations with good climate policies taking sustainability seriously within their corporate precincts. Then, those companies come to the Senate, and their positions, as they appear here in the Senate, are against the climate policies they claim to support because they work through these intermediary groups that have been co- opted by fossil fuel interests and because they don't show up themselves. In 2019, let's hope the good-guy American corporations get off the bench, clean up the acts of their trade groups, and get onto the field on the good side of the climate policy fight. Let me wrap up, through all of that gloom, with the good news for the new year and beyond. Record low prices for wind and solar projects are now cheaper than fossil fuels in many places. Battery costs are falling rapidly. Amazing electric vehicles keep coming to market. New carbon capture technologies emerge. Xcel Energy, a Colorado-based utility that serves over 3 million customers, has announced a commitment to reduce carbon emissions 80 percent by 2030 and to have zero carbon emissions by 2050, which shows that players in the energy industry know to make this transition. Out of the States, California has passed a law requiring 100-percent zero carbon electricity by 2045--100 percent. The Governors of New York and Washington States recently announced 100 percent zero carbon electricity goals. Hawaii has a law requiring 100 percent renewable electricity by 2045. On the same day in late December, the District of Columbia passed a bill requiring 100 percent renewable electricity by 2032, and nine Northeastern States--I am proud to say it includes my Rhode Island--committed to cap emissions from the transportation sector. Here in the Senate, we can expect the new Democratic House to send climate legislation our way. Whether my Republican colleagues like it or not and whether the fossil fuel industry likes it or not, this will be an issue in the 116th Congress. My new year's wish is that my Republican Senate colleagues will finally wake up to the damage that climate change is causing, to the looming threat that climate change presents, and will help us to pass bills addressing the huge climate risk that we face. This is not impossible. This is the way the Senate behaved until January of 2010. From when I was sworn in in 2007, through the rest of that year and through 2008 and 2009, we had bipartisan climate bills. We had bipartisan climate hearings. We had bipartisan climate negotiations. We had bipartisan climate discussions. It was possible to do that because the five Republican judges on the Supreme Court had not yet given the fossil fuel industry the massive, new political artillery they had given them in the Citizens United decision. Once the fossil fuel industry had that new artillery, the game changed, and it brought it to bear on our friends on the other side, and there has not been a single Republican Senator on a single serious carbon emissions bill since that moment. It shows what happens when you give a big special interest a massive, new piece of political weaponry. It doesn't mean it has to be this way. The good guys could show up and counterbalance the political hydraulics here of the fossil fuel industry's power. Our colleagues could say: Guys, we gave you a heck of a good run. For years, we did nothing, but it is time now. We have taken a look at where voters are. We have even taken a look at where Republican voters are. We have taken a look at where the science is, and we are going to do something. There are a lot of ways that we can go back to the bipartisan legislation, the bipartisan hearings, and the bipartisan conversations that characterized this issue before Citizens United. It has been too long that big polluter donors have had their way around here. They pay the fee, but our Nation pays the price. We have a responsibility here to protect future generations from an avoidable disaster of our own making. It is time for us to wake up and do our job. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am very grateful to the distinguished senior Senator from New Jersey for joining me again this week to bring attention to the challenges that climate change and rising seas pose for our coastal communities. Our States--New Jersey and Rhode Island--shared the unforgettable experience of Superstorm Sandy, which roared ashore on higher tides and warmer oceans. We know, in New Jersey and Rhode Island, how vulnerable we are. As sea levels rise and storms intensify, the National Flood Insurance Program should be one of our government's best tools to educate and prepare our communities for the changes that carbon pollution is driving to our coasts. But the program falls well short of this basic goal. Instead of tackling its shortfalls head-on, ahead of the next big storm, for instance, we are getting set to punt again on the Flood Insurance Program. My Ocean State, much smaller than New Jersey, has 400 miles of coastline threatened by sea level rise and storm surge flooding, so telling homeowners and coastal businesses that we will get to it eventually is not good enough. Our coastal risk is growing, not shrinking. A 2017 Zillow chart shows that over 4,800 homes in Rhode Island-- 4,800 families' homes--valued at nearly $3 billion would be under water by 2100, using an optimistic assessment of only 6 feet of sea level rise. Rhode Island's Coastal Resources Management Council is now planning for our State to see up to 9 to 12 feet of sea level rise by then. New Jersey, of course, has even more at risk with its bigger shoreline, with over $93 billion worth of property predicted to fall to rising seas. This problem does not wait until the year 2100. It hits earlier. It hits as soon as 30-year mortgages and insurance get hard to come by because banks and insurers foresee these risks, and that inhibits buyers, so prices fall--perhaps prices even crash, as Freddie Mac is predicting. Last year, GAO reported that coastal areas face particularly high financial risks and that annual coastal property losses from sea level rise and increased storms will run into the billions of dollars every year in the short run and over $50 billion every year by late century. GAO pointed to an EPA estimate of $5 trillion in economic costs to coastal property from climate change through 2100. Our coastal States can't laugh that off because it makes the oil industry uncomfortable to talk about climate change. Investors, creditors, appraisers--everybody who works coastal markets--is taking notice. Last December, the credit rating agency, Moody's, adopted indicators ``to assess the exposure and overall susceptibility of U.S. states to the physical effects of climate change.'' This is Moody's. Moody's looks particularly at coasts and at the share of a State's economic activity generated by its coastal communities. It counts the homes built on flood plains, and it counts the risk of extreme weather damage as a share of the local economy. The managing director at Moody's told the Chicago Tribune that Moody's would be taking these risks into consideration when evaluating the credit ratings of coastal municipalities and States. Property appraisers are also starting to incorporate these risks into their work. The Appraisal Institute's Valuation magazine quoted Rhode Island appraiser Brad Hevenor's warning that homes that receive a 30- year mortgage today ``might be completely different types of property [by the end of their mortgage] than they are today.'' He points out, as Senator Menendez pointed out, that FEMA flood maps are defective, backward-looking, and often insufficient at accurately predicting risk for communities and homeowners. My frustrations with FEMA's flood risk maps are no secret. They are notoriously inaccurate, incomplete, and outdated. The Agency's modeling is often based on inaccurate data and on methodology from the 1970s. It has proven particularly incapable of accurately capturing the different wave and dune dynamics that determine real flood risk along coasts during major storms. The Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council, a small State agency, has had to develop its own models to provide better risk information to coastal residents and communities than FEMA provides. The contrast between the State's work and FEMA's maps highlights just how costly and potentially life-threatening reliance on FEMA's maps can be. This map is FEMA's map relative to mean sea level for a 100-year storm hitting Charlestown, RI. Here is the code as to how much flooding to expect. The worst flooding for the homes that surround Ninigret Pond, along Rhode Island's southern coast, looks to be around 14 feet around this area here. This map shows the CRMC's prediction for the same area for the same storm. It projects that homes in this same area may see closer to 20 feet of floodwaters, which means FEMA's map is underestimating flood risk by 6 feet. It is not just errors in Rhode Island. Rice University and Texas A&M found that FEMA flood risk maps captured only about 25 percent of the actual damage from storms that hit Houston between 1999 and 2009--25 percent. According to the Houston Chronicle, more than half of homes damaged by Hurricane Harvey were not listed in any flood risk areas, meaning they were not required to have flood insurance or meet any flood risk mitigation building codes. Congress continues to fund these maps on the cheap, leaving Americans to bear the risk of antiquated models that don't reflect the changes that climate change is bringing to our coasts. Families are forced to endure the repeated damage and destruction of their homes, and taxpayers are made to pay the cost of over and over and over rebuilding the same building in the same place that is already washed away. After Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the Flood Insurance Program hit its $30 billion borrowing limit. We maxed out. So in October of 2017, Congress had to forgive $16 billion worth of debt to free up money to pay off claims for Harvey, Irma, and Maria. The program is currently at least $20 billion in debt, and claims from the 2018 hurricane season are still being processed. The Congressional Research Service, as of September 2018, found that the program had only $9.9 billion of remaining borrowing authority. It is time to get serious about reforming this broken system and reform it for a changing climate and for changing coasts--the things we know are coming at us. The current system often leaves homeowners no option but to rebuild the same building in the same place on the flooded property. CRS estimates that only about 2 percent of current NFIP-related properties are considered repetitive loss or severe repetitive loss properties--only 2 percent, but that 2 percent accounts for 16 percent of claims, $9 billion. Over the life of the NFIP, those repetitive loss or severe repetitive loss properties have totaled around 30 percent of all claims, about $17 billion. Insurance should allow homeowners to walk away from flood-torn structures and go find new, safer homes. Currently, only States or municipalities can use FEMA to arrange buyouts of flood-prone properties. FEMA then provides up to 75 percent of funding for the local government to buy the property at fair market value, and then it becomes open space. But the buyout process is cumbersome, it is bureaucratic, it is not in the hands of the homeowners, and it doesn't get much use. How many mayors and city councils want to buy out and turn to public use valuable property that is a part of their tax base and encourage folks, potentially, to leave? The flood program should work with communities to plan for cost- effective resiliency to flooding, whether it is elevating properties, moving homes, or retreating from rising seas. Homeowners should have these options. It is willful blindness to ignore this problem as seas continue to rise and storms become more unpredictable and ferocious, and it is even worse when you compound it with false and erroneous mapping so that the warnings to these families are wrong. Property owners and communities deserve proper warning about the flood risks they face, and they deserve alternatives to simply rebuilding the same building in the same place so that it can be flooded again and again and again, which the program now forces them to do. With so much at risk for American families, it is time to wake up and put in place a smart and reliable system once and for all. I yield the floor, with my gratitude to the distinguished senior Senator from New Jersey in joining me here today.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.