Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, a crash takes place in a system when conditions in that system reach a tipping point and the system rapidly destabilizes. Climate change promises a lot of tipping points in the Earth's natural systems--ocean acidification, for instance, reaching a tipping point where foundational species, such as the pteropod, have trouble forming their shells, and populations of those foundation species crash, taking down the trophic levels above them; polar warming, for instance, releasing trapped frozen methane from Arctic tundra and hyperaccelerating the greenhouse effect. At the more local level, seasonally linked species, reacting to changing seasons, can get out of phase with one another, so the feeder and its food source no longer overlap in time, and then they have a crash. In what Pope Francis has called ``the mysterious network of relations between things,'' climate change promises natural disruptions, large and small. Of course, the same kind of disruption can occur in economics. Because we are ignoring climate change, we are hurtling toward natural disruptions like the kinds I mentioned. On top of that, recent warnings indicate that we are also hurtling toward economic disruptions-- crashes, if you will--which we could avoid or moderate if we prepared. But since the fossil fuel overlords of the present Congress won't let that preparation happen, we need to expect these economic crashes. What are these economic crashes? The first one I will discuss is the effect of sea level rise on coastal real estate values. Sea level rise can hit you economically long before the ocean actually laps against your doorstep. When the prospect of coastal flooding begins to creep into the 30-year mortgage horizon or when the prospect of coastal flooding begins to darken property insurance horizons, there will be an effect. Long before your house is actually flooded, its value can crash if the house becomes uninsurable or if it becomes unmortgageable to the next buyer. Freddie Mac has described the effect of this property value crash on America's coastal regions as follows: ``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.'' Those of us who lived through the great recession of 2008 and forward know how serious that warning is. It is not just Freddie Mac; the insurance industry shares this exact concern. Here is what the editor of the trade publication Risk & Insurance had to say: ``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.'' So from government-backed housing corporations to private insurance industry representatives, the warning is clear. The leading edge of this predicted effect may already actually be upon us, as we have recently seen coastal property values begin to lag inland property values in a way that experts think may reflect this emerging coastal economic hazard. When talking about matching the damage done to the economy by the 2008 recession, that is a serious risk. The second economic crash we are warned of is the effect of a so- called carbon bubble--a carbon bubble in fossil fuel companies. This carbon bubble collapse happens when fossil fuel reserves now claimed as assets by the fossil fuel companies turn out to be not actually developable and thus become what are called stranded assets. A recent publication by economists in the journal Nature Climate Change has described the following estimated asset reductions in fossil fuel reserves: ``The magnitude of . . . stranded assets of fossil fuel companies (in a 2 degrees C economy) has been estimated to be around 82% of global coal reserves, 49% of global gas reserves, and 33% of global oil reserves.'' That would be 82 percent of global coal reserves gone, wiped off the balance sheets; 49 percent of global gas reserves gone; and 33 percent of global oil reserves gone. This asset collapse ahead would explain why fossil fuel companies have fought so hard against shareholders who sought honest reporting of this risk, and it could explain why such reports as have been produced look like exercises in ``cooking the books'' to avoid actually acknowledging a risk of this scale. More recently, a group of economic analysts published a separate review of what the bursting of this carbon bubble would look like for fossil fuel companies. The report's analysis is pretty stark. It estimates that a potential $12 trillion--$12 trillion--of financial value ``could vanish off their balance sheets globally in the form of stranded assets.'' The report notes that this is over 15 percent of global GDP. This economic report posits a market scenario in which lower cost producers unload their fossil fuel reserves while they still can into this collapsing market--``selling out'' their assets, in the language of the report--unloading their fossil fuel assets even at fire-sale prices to get what value they can while they still can. In this analysis, the report says, ``regions with higher marginal costs . . . lose almost their entire oil and gas industry (for example . . . the United States).'' In this environment in which there is a rapid crash in fossil fuel prices, as sellers saturate the market at whatever low price they can get to get some money for their reserves before they evaporate and get wiped off their balance sheets, the market moves rapidly and regions like ours--like the United States, with higher marginal costs--lose almost their entire oil and gas industry. Obviously, for the United States to rapidly lose almost its entire oil and gas industry would create a dramatic economic shock, spilling over into other industries and into the economy at large, making this what the authors of this report call a ``systemic'' economic risk. There is a recommended solution to avoid this shock in asset prices, and that is for the United States to begin decarbonizing, to invest more in renewables, and to broaden our national energy portfolio away from this asset collapse risk and into renewable energy. The paper concludes that ``an exposed country can mitigate the impact of stranding by divesting from fossil fuels as an insurance policy,'' and it goes on to say specifically about the United States of America that ``the United States is worse off if it continues to promote fossil fuel production and consumption than if it moves away from them.'' Let me revert to the earlier economic piece I mentioned because it concludes with very similar advice. I quote from the first article: If climate policies are implemented early on and in a stable and credible framework, market participants are able to smoothly anticipate the effects. In this case there would not be any large shock in asset prices and there would be no systemic risk. In contrast, in a scenario in which the implementation of climate policy is uncertain, delayed, and sudden . . . this might entail a systemic risk because price adjustments are abrupt and portfolio losses from the fossil- fuel sector and fossil-based utilities do not have time to be compensated by the increase in value of renewable-based utilities. Both economic analyses agree that transitioning to renewables is a hedge against this fossil fuel asset collapse risk, but this earlier paper also notes something else. It also notes that this transition to renewables, away from the asset collapse risk, need not be a painful transition. To quote the report, ``a transition to a low-carbon economy could also have net positive aggregate effects.'' On one side, you have the risk of a major fossil fuel asset collapse creating a sufficient economic shock for there to be systemic risk to the economy. On the other side, you have the prospect of net positive aggregate effects. Who in their right mind would not turn toward net positive aggregate effects? A large and sudden economic shock affecting 15 percent of global GDP and precipitating systemic economic risks will, of course, be very painful. This is stark advice. Whether we can actually heed this advice depends on the Congress of the United States being able to put the interests of the United States first over the interests of the fossil fuel industry. Given that Congress's fossil fuel industry overlords will likely object and given that we seem incapable in Congress of either seeing through their massive conflict of interest or ever telling them no, it is not presently likely that Congress will heed these warnings or take these precautions. After all, the warnings of natural crashes ahead have so far been completely ignored due to fossil fuel industry pressure. So why expect that we would heed the warnings of economic crashes ahead? In the days when war loomed over Europe but England would not prepare, Winston Churchill quoted a poem. The poem's image is of a train bound for destruction, rushing through the night, and the conductor is asleep at the controls. The poem begins: Who is in charge of the clattering train? The axles creak, and the couplings strain. Inside the train cars, the poem describes the occupants of the doomed train: Lull[ed into] confident drowsiness. But then comes the end: [T]he pace is hot, and the points are near, And Sleep hath deadened the driver's ear; And signals flash through the night in vain. Death is in charge of the clattering train! That is how the poem ends. Let us hope that we wake up before our collision, that the many warning signals nature is flashing at us do not flash through the night in vain, and that we do not hurtle into these foreseen collisions with our fossil fuel industry overlords having deadened the driver's ear with their money and their power. We have been lulled into confident drowsiness, and it is time to wake up. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, 30 years ago this month, Dr. James Hansen testified before the U.S. Congress on the need to address climate change--30 years ago this month. He was a top NASA climate scientist. On a hot summer day in June of 1988, before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Dr. Hansen testified that ``global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.'' He said, ``It is already happening now.'' Thirty years have passed since then--30 years of added science, 30 years of new science, 30 years of updated reports, and 30 years of mounting evidence of how right Hansen was. Yet, here we still are in Congress still willfully ignoring the unprecedented changes to the climate and the oceans--changes that threaten our planet and its rich array of plant and animal life, changes that put at risk homes, farms, forests, and coasts, changes that affect our very human health and well-being. These are not computer model projections of the distant future but changes we are seeing right before our very eyes now. Carbon-driven climate change is particularly acute in polar areas. Today, I want to focus on the melting and destabilization of the Antarctic polar ice cap. Rhode Island is a long way from Antarctica. Florida is a less long way from Antarctica--it is still a pretty long way--but we are coastal States. In Rhode Island, the sea level is already up 11 inches along our shores, and far more sea level rise, accelerating sea level rise, is expected. The coastal towns and cities in the Presiding Officer's State are seeing similar encroachments of the ocean into their territories. Here is how Antarctica is changing and what it means for our American shores. The Antarctic ice sheet spans the South Pole, extending almost 14 million square kilometers--roughly the size of the contiguous United States and Mexico combined. The Antarctic ice sheet is the largest single mass of frozen water on planet Earth, containing 30 million cubic kilometers of ice. If the Antarctic ice sheet were to melt completely, you could actually do fairly simple math as to what would happen to that water. Sea levels could rise 200 feet above current levels, engulfing coastal regions worldwide. This map shows Florida if we lose the West Antarctic ice sheet. As the map shows, it would inundate much of coastal and southern Florida, putting Miami and other cities completely underwater. It looks about the same here, if you lose the Greenland ice sheet, with there being similar damage and loss to Florida. Yet, here, if you lose the East Antarctic ice sheet, you more or less wipe out the entire State of Florida. You wipe out a few little islands here, a little nub below Georgia there, but essentially Florida is gone. Imagine the entire population of Florida having to migrate to other States with its State now being uninhabitable. It seems like a crazy notion, but Kentucky's climate planning documents have included the prospect of climate refugees having to flee to Kentucky from America's inundated coasts. So it matters to understand how Antarctic ice sheets work and how they differ from ice shelves. Ice sheets form on land when more snow accumulates in winter than melts during the summer. Over thousands of years, layers of snow pile up, growing thicker and denser as the weight of new layers compacts the layers below into ice. Over time, that ice flows downhill to the coasts and then ultimately out to sea as glaciers and then ice shelves. Floating ice shelves surround Antarctica. These shelves physically brace the land-based ice sheet, slowing down its flow into the sea. A rough balance emerges as new snowfall on the ice sheets and the slow flow of the ice balance the melting of the ice shelf around the periphery where the ice shelf meets the ocean. We are now witnessing what appears to be an unraveling of this equilibrium. Climate change is what is causing this massive destabilization. Since 1950, on the Antarctic Peninsula, the air has warmed 2.5 degrees Celsius. Warming ocean waters erode the West Antarctic ice sheets from below as the warming air melts them from above. Once the ice shelf melts back, you have the loss of the buttress effect, and the ice sheet on land can then accelerate, with that buttress effect diminished, more rapidly into the sea, causing a more rapid rise in sea level. The effect of this is actually measurable, and we measure it. Observations from the NASA and German Aerospace Center's twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites measure these losses to be around 125 gigatons of ice per year. What is a gigaton of ice? A gigaton is 1 billion tons. Meredith Nettles of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University described a gigaton-sized piece of ice this way: ``If you took the whole National Mall''--here we are in Washington--``and covered it up with ice to a height about four times as high as the [Washington] monument. . . . `' Imagine walking out onto the Capitol steps, looking out all the way down the National Mall to the Washington Monument and imagining that not only to the top of the Washington Monument but four times as high is a single, giant mass of ice--as she said, ``all the way down from the Capitol steps to the Lincoln Memorial'' and four times as high as the Washington Monument. Then imagine 125 times that--every year. The destabilization of the ice shelves is most dire in West Antarctica, where research shows the massive Thwaites Glacier retreating at 300 to 400 meters per year along a 125-mile segment. Larger than Pennsylvania, the Thwaites Glacier has discharged more than 100 gigatons of ice per year in recent years. That is the flood of 100 of those blocks that are four times the height of the Washington Monument and running from here all the way to the Lincoln Memorial 100 times every 3 days--another one into the ocean, piling up, piling up. If we lost the Thwaites Glacier, that alone would contribute several meters to global sea level rise. So far, in Rhode Island, remember, we are dealing with less than 1 foot of sea level rise that we have experienced--6 to 12 feet is predicted--but add this in and the situation of our coastal States become quite dire. These images were created with NASA satellite data. They show changes in Antarctic ice mass just since 2002. This data does not measure the floating ice shelves which are shown here in gray. On the ice sheets, dark orange and red colors indicate losses of ice sheet mass and light- blue shades indicate gains. Climate deniers focus on the gains in actually a fraudulent abuse of the data and the public's trust, but that is what they do; but, overall, during the past 15 years, the West Antarctic ice sheet experienced major ice mass loss. The darkest red, representing the biggest loss, is at the Thwaites Glacier. Of course, when glaciers melt, the seas rise. In April, a U.S. Geological Survey study, funded by the Pentagon, found that our military bases on low-elevation islands may become uninhabitable within mere decades. The recommendation is, we have to start planning to relocate them because they will no longer be useful. Just 2 weeks ago, our National Park Service released a report showing sea level rise damaging park sites like Jamestown and Assateague Island in Virginia and Jean Lafitte National Historical Park in Louisiana. NASA is concerned enough about this Antarctic ice situation that it is launching new satellites to monitor it. Fossil fuel industry front groups continue to deny and disparage the work of scientists at NOAA, NASA, and other Federal scientific agencies. The polluters have an obedient mouthpiece in the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which just last month ran climate denier Fred Singer denying that rising sea levels observed around the globe are the result of global warming, and of course saying it is not the result of carbon pollution or fossil fuels. The Journal page, of course, neglects to mention this denier's deep connections to the fossil fuel industry, the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute, the CATO Institute, and other climate denial front groups bankrolled by ExxonMobil and the oil industry and the Koch political apparatus. We even heard a Republican Congressman claim that erosion and rocks falling into the sea are what is driving sea level rise--anything but fossil fuel. He said, ``Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, because the bottom is moving up.'' It is laughable. Phil Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center and former adviser to the U.S. Global Change Research Program responded: ``On human time scales, those are miniscule effects.'' Once again, anything for the fossil fuel industry. Complete subservience to the fossil fuel industry seems to be the rule around Congress. About this sordid political equation, retired U.S. Navy RADM Dr. David Titley probably said it best. He said: The ice doesn't care. The ice doesn't care who is in the White House. It doesn't care which party controls your Congress. It doesn't care which party controls your Parliament. It just melts. Of course, in addition to the melt, a warming ocean expands, following the law of thermal expansion, and our coasts, as a result, face new and serious dangers. Republicans in Congress can continue to ignore all of the evidence, but that doesn't change what our carbon pollution does in the atmosphere and the oceans. Our carbon pollution will still trap heat in the atmosphere. It will still acidify the oceans. The laws of chemistry don't suspend because we can't pass sensible laws to solve this problem. The chemistry and the physics of these effects of our carbon pollution don't care what we do. The polar icecaps melting don't care that fossil fuel flunkies deny it. Denial of these facts doesn't protect our coasts and doesn't protect our coastal communities from looming danger. One day soon, we are going to have to wake up. Fossil fuel influence or no fossil fuel influence, we are going to have to wake up. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, the night spanning June 9 and 10 marks the anniversary of a key chapter in American history--one whose first shots spurred our Nation on toward independence from Britain, yet one that remains unfamiliar to most Americans today, which is why I come here each year to tell the tale of the Gaspee Raiders. I encourage my colleagues and all students of history to explore this chapter in more depth, in histories such as ``An Empire on the Edge'' by Nick Bunker or ``The Burning of Her Majesty's Schooner Gaspee: An Attack on Crown Rule Before the American Revolution'' by Steven Park. Here is the tale in brief form. It is 1772. Tensions between England and the Colonies have grown increasingly strained. Rhode Island is a seafaring, trading colony, without much regard for His Majesty's taxes. King George III stations the revenue cutter HMS Gaspee under the command of Lieutenant William Dudingston, in Rhode Island waters. The Gaspee's mission: to interdict smuggled goods and enforce the payment of the Crown's taxes. Lieutenant Dudingston was an arrogant sort, who quickly became infamous for destroying fishing vessels, seizing cargo, and flagging down ships only to harass, humiliate, and interrogate the colonial sailors. According to Gabriel Weis in his 1916 ``Guide to Newport, Rhode Island,'' ``This unprincipled ruffian had ruthlessly ravaged the Rhode Island coast for several months, destroying unoffending fishing vessels and confiscating everything he could lay hands on.'' Rhode Island seamen and traders chafed at the harsh tactics of Dudingston. A number of them delivered a petition seeking relief against the Gaspee to Rhode Island Chief Justice Stephen Hopkins, later a signer of the Declaration of Independence. On this occasion, Hopkins provided a legal opinion saying that British officers were obliged to present their orders and commission to Rhode Island's Governor before entering local waters, asserting a measure of colonial sovereignty. Dudingston, of course, refused such an impudent notion and threatened to hang any man who tried to oppose the Gaspee. His first mistake, in the winter of 1772, was to seize a sloop named ``Fortune,'' along with its cargo of rum and sugar, from Nathanael Greene, the wealthy son of a Quaker minister. As Daniel Harrington wrote in the Providence Journal last year, ``the patriotic fervor . . . sweeping the colonies [had] seemed to elude [Nathanael Greene] until Dudingston snagged his Fortune and ignited the righteous spirit of resentment that now consumed him.'' After first suing Dudingston for the return of his ship--and winning--Nathanael Greene would join the Revolutionary cause, ultimately commanding Rhode Island's army and then rising in General Washington's ranks to become the commander of the Southern Campaign of the Revolutionary War. During the war, General Cornwallis wrote to his wife: ``That damned Greene is more dangerous than Washington.'' Thank you very much, Lieutenant Dudingston, for igniting Nathanael Greene's righteous spirit. Dudingston's various provocations continued until they reached the breaking point on June 9, 1772, when he set his sights on the sailing vessel Hannah, traversing Narragansett Bay from Newport to Providence. The Gaspee ordered the Hannah to stop and allow a search. On board the Hannah, Captain Benjamin Lindsey refused and continued on his course to Providence, ignoring warning shots fired by the Gaspee. Knowing that his Hannah was lighter and had a shallower draft than the Gaspee, Lindsey raced up Narragansett Bay and over the shoals off Pawtuxet Cove. The heavier Gaspee kept up its chase of the Hannah but ran aground in the shallow waters off Namquid Point. The Gaspee was stuck fast on the shoal in a falling tide Captain Lindsey sailed on to Providence and, with the prominent merchant John Brown, later the founder of Brown University, rallied local patriots to a meeting at Sabin's Tavern, in what is now Providence's East Side. The Rhode Islanders gathered there made a fateful decision. The British Navy was the most powerful military force on the planet. The British Crown was the most powerful political force on the planet. The Rhode Islanders had managed to strand one of His Majesty's vessels, a symbol of their oppression, helpless in an outgoing tide. They resolved to attack. In the early moonless hours of June 10, several dozen men--perhaps benefiting somewhat from the refreshments of Sabin's Tavern--led by John Brown and Abraham Whipple, shoved off in longboats from Providence, with blackened faces and muffled oars, to row through 6 miles of dark waters for the Gaspee. As the boats surrounded the Gaspee, Whipple called out and demanded Lieutenant Dudingston surrender his ship. One witness later recounted his demand in this form--forgive me for the language involved, but it is historically correct. I am the sheriff of the county of Kent, God damn you. I have got a warrant to apprehend you, God damn you; so surrender, God damn you. Dudingston refused this polite offer and instead ordered his men to fire upon any men who attempted to board. The determined Rhode Islanders then forced their way aboard the Gaspee, and a struggle ensued. In the melee, Lieutenant Dudingston was shot in the groin and arm by musket balls. Gabriel Weis wrote: ``The attack on the `Gaspee' caused the first bloodshed in the struggle for American independence, and was the first resistance to the British Navy.'' Brown and Whipple's men soon overpowered the British crew and took control of the ship. Brown ordered one of his Rhode Islanders, a physician named John Mawney, to tend to Dudingston's wounds. He survived. They transported the captive Englishmen safely to shore and then returned to the abandoned Gaspee for one final act of defiance to the Crown and riddance to the ship: The Rhode Islanders set the Gaspee afire. Now, the Gaspee was a gunship, and gunships store gunpowder, and the gunpowder is kept below decks in a powder magazine. The Gaspee burned until--wham--its powder magazine exploded, blasting into the Rhode Island night what remained of His Majesty's meddlesome ship, her debris flying across the blast-lit waters of Narragansett Bay. Word quickly spread of the Rhode Islanders' daring raid. The news was spread through pulpits and pamphlets up and down the Colonies, stoking the flames of revolution. The furious King George offered huge rewards for the capture of the insolent rebels. A trial in England was announced, but in characteristic, impressive solidarity, not one Rhode Islander would step forward to identify a single one of the raiders. The royal threats broke vainly against the silent solidarity of the Rhode Islanders. The royal nooses hung empty. The story of the Gaspee is just one part of a daring Rhode Island resistance, stretching across the years and months before the Gaspee incident, into that explosive night on Narragansett Bay, and on throughout the Revolution. His Majesty's Navy had not heard the last of Abraham Whipple, for instance. In 1775, Abraham Whipple was in command of a small fleet facing off against the British frigate the HMS Rose. The captain of the British ship sent a menacing and accusatory note to Captain Whipple: From Captain Sir James Wallace of the Rose: You, Abraham Whipple, on the 10th of June 1772, burned His Majesty's vessel, the Gaspee, and I will hang you at the yard-arm.--James Wallace. To which note Whipple replied with acerbic brevity: To Sir James Wallace, Sir: Always catch a man before you hang him.--Abraham Whipple. By the way, Rhode Islander John Millar, two centuries later built a replica of the HMS Rose which obtained a starring role in the movie ``Master and Commander'' as Captain Aubrey's warship, the Surprise. Rhode Island is proud of our role in sparking our Revolution. We have made a tradition of celebrating the Gaspee incident with our annual Gaspee Days celebration and parade in Warwick, just ashore of where the Gaspee was led aground. This year, the Rhode Island State Archives is staging a new exhibit called ``Gaspee Raiders: Pirates or Patriots.'' King George was pretty clear about which, but we are pretty clear also about which. There, visitors can learn about the events of June 1772 and even experience the entire Gaspee Affair in virtual reality. Much of the world does not remember the burning of the Gaspee, but we do not forget. Beyond our State borders, most Americans think of other events as catalysts of the Revolutionary War. More than a year after the Gaspee incident, up in Massachusetts, some Boston worthies fortified their courage with strong drink and pushed tea bales off the deck of a British vessel. That is not bad--I guess it ruined the tea-- but, personally, I think it is more impressive more than a year earlier to have blown up the British ship and shot its captain, but, for whatever reason, the Boston Tea Party is the better known historical event. In fact, many of my colleagues, having heard me give this speech, tell me they never even heard this story. Maybe it is because Massachusetts had two of our first Presidents, the Adams' father and son, and they talked it up. Maybe after the war, Rhode Islanders just went home to their farms and boats and businesses while Massachusetts wrote the early history books. Whatever the reason, the seizing and burning and blowing up the Gaspee deserves a more prominent place in Revolutionary history. We are the State that first enshrined separation of church and State in the New World. Samuel Slater sparked America's Industrial Revolution with his mill in Pawtucket, and we drew first blood in the fight for American independence that night on Narragansett Bay. The Gaspee Affair is not a peculiar, drunken anomaly; it is part of a robust and early resistance by a proud colony, now a proud State. I thank the Presiding Officer. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, in this, my 20th speech about the climate changes and ocean changes being driven by fossil fuels, I would like to discuss America's largest oil company, ExxonMobil. For decades, ExxonMobil did everything in its power to deceive the American public about the existence and causes of climate change. I believe that full transparency would show ExxonMobil and its agents still obstructing efforts here in Washington to resolve the climate crisis, but I want to focus on one particular audience I believe Exxon has long misled--its shareholders. An Exxon CEO once went so far as to cite a bogus scientists petition to his shareholders--yes, that infamous ``petition'' cooked up by climate deniers that included cartoon characters and Spice Girls among the scientists. For decades, Exxon investors have filed resolutions at shareholder meetings starting back as far as 1990 urging ExxonMobil to address climate and sustainability issues. Exxon succeeded in quashing every single one of them--quashing more than 40 shareholder resolutions in total, year after year--until last year. At last year's meeting, big institutional investors like BlackRock threw their weight behind a resolution requiring Exxon to produce an annual report explaining how it will be affected by climate change and global efforts to protect us against climate change. Again, Exxon fiercely opposed this resolution, but this time Exxon lost. The resolution passed with 62 percent of the vote. That gave Exxon some serious questions to answer: As the world transitions to a low-carbon economy, how much oil and gas does Exxon think we will need? How might declining demand for oil and gas affect Exxon's operations and bottom line? Will it be economical to produce all of the reserves currently listed on Exxon's books? Most significantly, can we burn all Exxon's reserves and not damage the planet? Well, Exxon's inaugural climate risk report is out--I have been through it--and it looks to me like they are still playing hide the ball. It looks to me like a report that started with the conclusion that Exxon can develop all its reserves and then back-calculated the assumptions necessary to get to that conclusion. Let's have a look. Scientists tell us that we must limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius if we are to avoid catastrophic changes to the planet we inhabit. Many believe that to keep a margin of safety, we actually need to target 1.5 degrees. There is an article that just came out today headlined ``Limiting warming to 1.5 degree C would save majority of global species from climate change.'' To quote the article, it would ``avoid half the risks associated with warming of 2 degrees C.'' So there is a big difference of outcomes between 2 degrees Centigrade and 1.5 degrees Centigrade, and it will affect innumerable species on our planet. Well, in its report, Exxon doesn't address the 1.5 degrees scenario; it goes with 2 degrees. Exxon's report goes on to say that its roughly 20 billion oil- equivalent barrels of reserves ``face little risk'' from efforts to meet the 2 degrees scenario. Exxon also says it is ``confident'' about roughly 71 billion not-yet-proven oil-equivalent barrels that it reports to its shareholders as assets. It claims that no more than 5 percent of these unproven resources will be rendered uneconomical by measures to protect us against climate change. Exxon's report obviously gets to the result management wants: to tell shareholders that basically all its listed assets are recoverable. But look at the assumptions required to arrive at that conclusion beyond the 2-degree assumption. One assumption is huge amounts of carbon capture and sequestration, what is called CCS. CCS is technology where carbon emissions are contained at the site where the fossil fuel is burned and then captured and buried far underground. This prospect exists but barely exists now. Its future development is something that is projected by the International Energy Agency. This graphic shows the projection by the International Energy Agency of the various elements that will reduce carbon pollution in the future. The top one is efficiency gains, burning less because of better insulation and so forth, because motors become more efficient. This green one is all the contribution to carbon reduction of renewable energy. This bottom, dark-blue segment is what the International Energy Agency attributes to CCS, carbon capture and sequestration. For its report, ExxonMobil assumed deployment of CCS technology as much as five times greater by 2040--this year depicted right here--five times greater than the IEA's projection. If you take IEA's CCS projection and you quintuple it, you get carbon savings that exceed everything IEA projects from efficiency and renewables combined. That is quite an assumption. CCS is actually very expensive, and all it produces is carbon reduction. You still have to run the fossil fuel- burning powerplant to make the power, and then, on top of that, you add the carbon capture and sequestration technology that can add $1 billion to the price of the equipment. So here is Lazard's comparison of various kinds of energy costs. This bottom one is solar. Per megawatt hour, it runs $46 to $61--pretty efficient. This is onshore wind--$32 to $62 per megawatt hour produced. This is natural gas; it runs from $48 to $78. Then you add on $25, more or less, per megawatt hour for carbon capture and sequestration, and now you have a very expensive product--about $100 per megawatt hour compared to $46 to $61, for instance, for solar. If that is the case, it is a little surprising because you would think that renewables would do better than CCS because they come out far more cheaply. So how do you get to an assumption of a world in which CCS outcompetes renewables? It seems improbable, given the pricing, that CCS will roar ahead of renewables, let alone ahead of renewables and efficiency combined. If that were true, what a booming market CCS would be to invest in. So let's test Exxon's CCS assumption against Exxon's own investment behavior. If Exxon truly saw carbon capture and sequestration as the magic bullet to allow it to produce all its oil and gas reserves, you would expect that it would put its money where its mouth is, but Exxon barely even mentions CCS in its 2017 10-K filing for investors. There is one tiny mention right here under its ``Risk Factors'' section. Risk factors. If you look at Exxon's announced investments in the United States this year--$50 billion worth--it makes no mention of any new investments in carbon capture and sequestration. If Exxon really believed that CCS was going to boom like that, bigger than renewables, why not invest more? My hypothesis is that they don't believe that, that this was just an assumption backed into this report to make it look as if Exxon was going to be able to protect and use all of its reserves to get to the foreordained conclusion. Exxon's report omits another fact about CCS: that this developing technology will likely see most use with gas-fired powerplants, as my previous graphic showed. It likely cannot be used to capture Exxon's products' emissions in the transportation and chemical sectors. Power generation accounts for only about one-seventh of total demand for oil and gas, and that share is predicted to fall. Even if it doesn't fall, that still leaves six-sevenths where it is hard to see a carbon capture and sequestration offset. Exxon's report does not describe where exactly this massive deployment of carbon capture and sequestration will take place, but I can assure you it will not be on auto tailpipes. Let's move on from CCS. A second odd assumption in Exxon's report is the growth rate Exxon predicts for renewable energy. Exxon claims that renewables will grow only by 4.5 percent annually through 2040. Well, the IEA, the International Energy Agency, reports that in 2017--the year we just went through--renewable energy actually grew by 6.3 percent. Well, 6.3 percent is the actual, and they assume it will grow only at 4.5 percent. And that 6.3 percent occurred with massive global subsidies still giving huge advantages to fossil fuel. If you go down the street to Exxon's rival BP, BP predicts that renewables growth will average 6.5 percent annually through 2040. Exxon claims--although we who live here know it is not true--to support a price on carbon that would obviously lower fossil fuel's huge subsidy advantage, that would give renewables a fairer shot, and that would presumably accelerate renewables growth above the 2017 rate of 6.3 percent. Is Exxon's low-growth assumption realistic for renewable energy? Well, new solar and wind energy products are already becoming more economical than existing coal plants, as we just saw in Colorado. New solar and wind projects now compete on price with new natural gas plants, as a recent auction in Arizona showed. The cost trajectory for renewables continues steeply downward. This downward curve is the cost of centralized solar power, like those big arrays of mirrors that focus solar on a generator. This steeply downward curve is the downward curve of photovoltaic, the types of arrays that go out on their own in fields or on rooftops. This is the downward curve of offshore wind energy, and this is the downward curve of onshore wind energy. All of these renewable sources are on a steep downward trajectory. So why would growth slow? Here, again, Exxon made an assumption that does not seem plausible, but the assumption does help it arrive at its desired conclusion that it can develop essentially all its assets. Here is a third questionable Exxon assumption. Exxon predicts that the market for electric cars and trucks will grow slowly, if at all. Exxon assumes that by 2040 only 160 million out of roughly 2 billion cars--just 8 percent of the automobile fleet--will be electric vehicles. By contrast, the IEA predicts that roughly twice that many cars will be electric by 2040. Most other projections I have seen are even more bullish for electric vehicles, like this one from Bloomberg, which predicts well over 400 million electric vehicles by 2040. Indeed, just the new sales in these 4 years exceed the entire market prediction of electric vehicles for ExxonMobil. Stanford economist Tony Seba studies economic disruptions. He is fond of showing two photos of Fifth Avenue in New York City. In this photo, taken in 1900, you see the parade of traffic on Fifth Avenue. If you look, you will see that every single one of those vehicles is pulled by a horse, except one. There is one vehicle right here with an engine in it. It is 1900, and the entire street is filled with horse-drawn carriages, with just one vehicle in that street scene. Cut forward to 1913, and Fifth Avenue is again filled with vehicles, only this time it is hard to find a horse. There is a vehicle right here that looks as though it is a carriage, and there may be a horse behind this vehicle. But other than that, all of the vehicles that you see are gasoline powered. In just 13 years, the automotive world, the travel world changed, illustrating Dr. Seba's point that major economic disruptions can take place in remarkably little time. Think cell phone and landline, if you want a modern example. There is a lot of evidence that electric vehicles present just this sort of economic and technological disruption. Governments in major auto markets like France and the United Kingdom have announced the end of internal combustion vehicle sales by 2040. China, the world's largest car market, recently announced that by 2025, 20 percent of new cars sold there must run on alternative fuels, and it is on its way to an eventual total ban of the sale of gasoline- and diesel-powered cars. Japan, the world's fourth largest car market, now has more electric charging stations than gas stations. India, the fifth largest car market, has announced that by 2030, all new cars sold there must be electric or hybrid. Electric cars are cheaper to build, to operate, and to repair, and they can provide supercar performance in everyday vehicles. Moving on from regular automobiles and into the commercial fleet, Exxon makes the further assumption that no commercial transportation-- no buses, no trucks--will be electrified by 2040. Never mind that electric buses are already in use in China, Germany, France, the United States, and many other countries. Rhode Island's public transit agency is going out to bid for electric buses right now. An American manufacturer asserts that once electric buses get 10 percent market share, complete transition to electric becomes inevitable. Just last year, the city of Shenzhen in China replaced its entire fleet of more than 16,000 buses with electric ones. Almost 20 percent of buses across China are already electric. There are now almost 400,000 electric buses on the road worldwide. Tesla recently announced plans to produce 100,000 electric trucks per year by 2023. Well, maybe everyone else is wrong and Exxon is right, but it sure looks as though Exxon investors aren't getting the complete story from this report. It looks as though they are getting the assumptions that produce the answer that Exxon wants. Cars and commercial transportation account for more than 50 percent of the demand for oil and gas, so if Exxon fudged this assumption, that has big consequences for the conclusion Exxon reaches that all will be well with its reserves. Stack up all those assumptions--that 2 degrees is the right climate threshold, that CCS will boom and even impact gasoline markets, that renewable energy growth will slow rather than accelerate, and that electric vehicles will be a bust. It takes all of those assumptions piled together to get to Exxon's desired result. It looks and smells bogus. If you don't believe me, let me leave you with one last chart. Rystad Energy is an international energy consulting firm widely used and respected in the energy industry. 2C Energy is an American firm looking at how oil companies' resources and reserves fare as we face climate risks. Rystad and 2C worked together to develop this carbon consumption budget for various oil and gas and energy companies using, by the way, the more generous 2-degrees scenario for global warming. So we will spot them the 2 degrees, but it would obviously be different if it were only 1.5. This is ExxonMobil right here. The study shows that ExxonMobil, in their best case scenario--this upper scenario--is able to extract and burn only 82 percent of its oil and gas assets. The other 18 percent would be left unused or stranded--stranded assets. But wait. If you look at this scenario where methane leakage is allowed to continue from oil and gas drilling, which, by the way, is exactly what Exxon and others are encouraging Scott Pruitt to allow and where CCS technology is not significantly deployed, then this scenario here leaves 39 percent of Exxon's assets stranded. That is 39 percent of all assets stranded versus what Exxon claims, which is that 5 percent of unproven resources might be. By the way, again, that 39 percent stranding is based on 2 degrees of warming, not the more prudent 1.5 degrees, which would require less development of those resources. Well, Exxon's 2018 shareholder meeting comes up next week, and the investors who did such a great job with last year's climate resolution should take a look at this report and not be satisfied. There are some questions that need to be answered. Even a former senior Exxon executive has criticized Exxon's climate risk report as flawed and insufficiently detailed. In an op-ed for CNBC, the former executive, Bill Hafker, writes that ``oil and gas companies must take Paris climate targets seriously'' and says that investors should be dissatisfied with Exxon's climate risk report because it doesn't do this. If Exxon, in fact, started with the answer it wanted and worked backward to plug in whatever array of unlikely assumptions would get them that foreordained answer, well, then BlackRock and other institutional investors who forced this report should demand that Exxon do better. Earlier this year, BlackRock's CEO Larry Fink wrote to the CEOs of the companies in which BlackRock invests. He urged them to ``serve a social purpose.'' He urged them to ``make a positive contribution to society.'' Well, where the underlying issue is as vital as the stability of our climate and oceans and where the company involved is as immense as ExxonMobil, cooking the numbers not only harms investors, it is a full-on hazard to human society. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, National Police Week pays special honor to the law enforcement officers who have lost their lives in the line of duty for the safety and protection of our citizens and communities. I am proud to cosponsor the resolution designating National Police Week as we recognize the service and spirit of all the officers who diligently exhibit what Victor Hugo called ``conscience in the service of justice.'' I am especially grateful for the men and women of Rhode Island's local and State police who put their lives on the line every day to keep our families safe. As a former U.S. Attorney and State attorney general, I have worked closely with some of Rhode Island's finest police officers, and I believe they are among the best in the country. Supporting the vital mission of the police and fostering strong relationships between our communities and law enforcement was a top priority for me in those roles. Here in the Senate, I remain committed to supporting our brave law enforcement officers, their departments, and their families. I met this week with Colonel James J. Mendonca, chief of the Central Falls Police Department and president of the Rhode Island Police Chiefs Association. Under his leadership, the association is working to make Rhode Island a national leader in gun violence prevention, drunk driving awareness, and community engagement. Law enforcement officers are the guardians of our communities, often paying the ultimate price for our safety. As we recognize the service and sacrifice of the law enforcement community this National Police Week, I am particularly mindful of the names of some 50 officers from Rhode Island etched onto the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, including some Federal officers who died while on duty in Rhode Island. In the words of the old hymn: Now the laborer's task is o'er; Now the battle day is past . . . Father, in Thy gracious keeping Leave we now thy servant sleeping. In Rhode Island and across the United States, we remember and honor their vigilance, compassion, and valor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here today for my 206th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech. For colleagues who may be having a hard time keeping up with the ethical scandals swirling around Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, I thought today I would lay them out one by one. I think we all heard Donald Trump's pledge to drain the swamp and to put an end to government corruption. That hasn't exactly worked out; has it? Instead, swamp creatures abound, and Pruitt, a longtime enemy of the Agency he now runs and a longtime toady of the fossil fuel industry he is supposed to regulate, is absolutely wallowing in the swamp. Indeed, he is so swampy that he now faces more than a dozen Federal and State probes exploring how he has been advancing his own interests and those of his polluter donors. So let's take a look. Investigation No. 1 is travel expenses. Between March and May of 2017--just that short period--Mr. Pruitt spent 43 out of those 92 days traveling to his home State of Oklahoma. Pruitt appears to have conducted little or no official business on many of these trips. Yet taxpayers still picked up the tab. Last summer the EPA inspector general opened its inquiry into this use of official resources. That inquiry has actually since been expanded to examine the overall frequency, cost, and extent of the Administrator's travel. Over a 6-month period in 2017, Pruitt is estimated to have racked up nearly $200,000 in travel expenses. This includes a $7,000 business-class flight to Italy and $58,000 spent on military and charter flights. One set of flights to Oklahoma on a chartered private jet cost over $14,000 alone. Also under scrutiny is a 4-day trip that Mr. Pruitt, his staff, and his security detail took to Morocco in December. I hear it is lovely in Morocco in December, but it cost taxpayers more than $100,000 to indulge Mr. Pruitt. EPA first justified the trip by saying that Pruitt was there to promote the U.S. liquefied natural gas industry. That is actually not in EPA's mission--but never mind. Pruitt himself then testified before the House that he was there to negotiate part of a free-trade agreement. Again, that is not part of EPA's mission. Plus, there is no evidence that Pruitt even conferred with our Trade Representative. You would think that he might have picked up the phone to give himself just a little bit of cover if that was going to be his story. It was eventually reported that Pruitt's Morocco junket was largely arranged by a lobbyist friend who later was paid $40,000 a month--$40,000 a month--retroactively to January 1, to represent the Moroccan Government. Pruitt's frequent international travel plans are heavily influenced by lobbyists and rightwing donors. His trip to Rome appears to have been largely orchestrated by the head of the Federalist Society, and it included dinner at a five-star hotel with Cardinal George Pell, who has been under investigation for multiple allegations of child sexual assault. The cardinal is a climate denier. So maybe that makes it all OK for Pruitt. A planned trip to Australia was organized by a consultant and former lobbyist for foreign governments. Another planned trip to Israel appears to have been at least in part scheduled to allow him to promote a water purification company recommended by Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson. Reports say Pruitt actually gave his staff a bucket list of places he wanted to visit at public expense, and he told them to arrange pretexts for his travels. A lot of the cost of these trips is Pruitt's security detail. That takes us in to investigation Nos. 2, 3, and 4, which stem from Administrator Pruitt's over-the-top spending on security measures. The Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general and the House oversight committee are both investigating this spending, including almost $3 million that Pruitt has spent on his 24-hours-a-day, 7-days- a-week, 20-person security detail. This security phalanx accompanies him everywhere--on personal travel home to Oklahoma and on family trips to the Rose Bowl and Disneyland. Pruitt's security detachment is more than three times as large as previous EPA Administrators, none of whom had 24/7 protection. Many of the agents assigned to Pruitt's security team are pulled from EPA's enforcement arm, leaving fewer agents to actually investigate environmental crimes. But they do help him to get to fancy Washington restaurants fast, using lights and sirens to expedite Pruitt's travel to his dinner dates. Pruitt has also fortified his office. He installed a $43,000 cone-of- silence, supersecret phone booth. He had biometric locks installed on his office doors and had his office swept for bugs--a no-bid job, by the way, that went to a business partner of the guy who was then his top security agent. The Agency even explored spending $70,000 on a bulletproof desk for him. All he is missing is the secret decoder ring. The evidence that Pruitt cites to justify all of this security spending, including business-class and first-class plane tickets he claimed were required by security concerns, is remarkably thin. When he testified last month before House appropriators, Pruitt claimed that it was all justified by the Agency's inspector general. Well, on Monday, Senator Carper and I heard directly from the inspector general, and the story is not as Pruitt testified. Pruitt wanted 24/7 security starting on his first day as Administrator--not as a result of any threats and not because the inspector general told him that round-the-clock security was justified. The inspector general, in fact, never told him that. It is not the inspector general's job. It looks like Administrator Pruitt misled two House committees when he testified. Let's move on to investigation No. 5, which involves an inspector general inquiry into a possible violation of anti-lobbying rules. Once you are on the Federal payroll exerting the responsibilities of government, you are not supposed to engage in lobbying. During an April 2017 meeting with the National Mining Association, Pruitt encouraged the group to press President Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. The GAO is also looking into improper lobbying activity after he appeared in a lobbying organization's promotional video, opposing, by the way, the clean water rule. That GAO investigation is investigation No. 6. Investigation No. 7 concerns an inspector general probe into Pruitt's use of an obscure provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act to circumvent the usual civil service process to hire and promote staff. Pruitt used this loophole to hire lobbyists to oversee EPA functions and to award huge raises to a couple of favorite political aides from his Oklahoma days. He did this even after the White House had rejected those proposed pay increases. One of Pruitt's closest aides may not have even shown up to work for 3 months. Imagine that--not showing up to work for 3 months despite drawing a nearly $180,000 salary. That is great work, if you can get it. Incredibly--and I mean that literally--Pruitt testified to the House that he didn't know whether this senior aide was coming to work on not. You would think that after 3 months of not seeing this individual at work, you might have a clue. Well, the EPA inspector general can help the Administrator answer that question in the eighth investigation on the list. Now, every good swamp creature needs a swamp den, and Scott Pruitt found himself just the place, paying $50 a night for a luxury Capitol Hill condo co-owned by the wife of an energy lobbyist. Both the EPA's inspector general and the House oversight committee are investigating whether this below-market value housing arrangement constituted an illicit gift. If you have lost track, these are investigations Nos. 9 and 10. By the way, when the story broke about his swamp den, Pruitt denied that this lobbyist lobbied EPA. Well, it turns out that Federal lobbying disclosures and internal emails show that this lobbyist did in fact lobby EPA, even meeting with Pruitt himself on behalf of an industry client and also pushing Pruitt to name people favored by his client to EPA science advisory boards. That brings us to investigation No. 11. Pruitt has systemically tilted EPA's science advisory committees toward his industry donors, replacing academic scientists with industry-tied representatives. The GAO is examining the role that Pruitt's political appointees played in selecting industry-connected members to replace expert scientists on science advisory boards. Investigation No. 12 is unfolding back home in Oklahoma. The Oklahoma Bar Association is looking into charges that Pruitt lied when he told our Senate Environment and Public Works Committee during his confirmation hearing last year that he had not conducted business using private email addresses as Oklahoma's attorney general. Well, it turns out that it looks like he did. Just last night, news broke that the EPA inspector general is investigating Pruitt's use of private email accounts, including questions of whether the Agency is properly preserving records of the Administrator's private emails and including those records in responses to Freedom of Information Act searches. That makes the 13th investigation. So there you have it--a baker's dozen so far of investigations into Pruitt's conduct as EPA Administrator. Those are just the allegations that have ramped up to the level of an official investigation. There are scores of other scandals roiling the EPA. All you have to do is pick up a newspaper, and you will be bombarded by stories of Pruitt's truly swampy behavior. There are thousands of pages of communications between Scott Pruitt and industry when he was attorney general of Oklahoma that the current attorney general of Oklahoma is fighting to prevent the public from seeing. There are millions of dollars of political fundraising by Scott Pruitt from the fossil fuel industry that he has never told us about. If he has withheld disclosures that bear on his conflicts of interest, new investigations could result. While Scott Pruitt dodges full disclosure of all his swampy industry ties, he has let lobbyists and fossil fuel and chemical industry operatives infiltrate throughout the EPA. The Associated Press found that ``nearly half of the political appointees hired at the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump have strong industry ties.'' Pruitt rolled back an Obama rule controlling methane leaks after he met with oil executives at the Trump hotel in Washington. Pruitt halted environmental protections for an area in southwest Alaska just hours after meeting with the mining executives looking to dig a mine there. Pruitt's EPA protected an emissions rule loophole for a trucking company shortly after Pruitt met with the company's executives. It is government by ``I know a guy,'' with Pruitt as the polluters' guy. It is impossible not to notice the odor of self-dealing and corruption emanating from the Scott Pruitt EPA. When I talk about Pruitt with Rhode Islanders, they almost always ask me the same questions: How does he still have a job? Why hasn't the President fired this guy? One answer goes back to the President himself. When Pruitt's scandals started to snowball last month, oil and gas magnate Harold Hamm, a billionaire patron of Scott Pruitt's, lobbied President Trump to keep him on. Twenty-two polluter front groups, led by the infamous Heartland Institute, so-called, wrote a letter to President Trump lauding Pruitt's what they call ``positive record of reform unmatched by any of Pruitt's predecessors.'' Who is behind those 22 polluter front groups? Guess what. It is those climate denial champions, the Koch brothers, to the tune of at least $87 million in funding. The test in Trumptown is whether Harold Hamm and Charles and David Koch are happy. And they are. Polluters are free to pollute for free, and climate change gets scrubbed out of official communications. Big- spending polluters are happy, happy, happy, and that is why Scott Pruitt remains as EPA Administrator in the Trump swamp. It doesn't have to be this way. The words of Woodrow Wilson are still true today about legislative oversight. He said: It is the proper duty of a representative body to look diligently into every affair of government and to talk much about what it sees. It is meant to be the eyes and the voice, and to embody the wisdom and will of its constituents. Our constituents--my constituents, anyway--are not just the big polluters like Harold Hamm and the Koch brothers. The polluters may have billions to spend in politics, which they do, but they have very different interests than the millions of regular Americans who look to EPA to protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the climate we must inhabit. Where are the eyes and the voice in the present majority for these millions of Americans? Our silence in the face of this flagrant corruption is deafening. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as a young man, I lived with my father while he served as U.S. Ambassador to Laos. I came to know it as a heartbreakingly beautiful country, with lovely, kind people, into which our international contest with communism violently intruded. The goal of the U.S. in Laos at the time was to prevent North Vietnamese forces from using Laos as a supply line for attacks on South Vietnam, along what was known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and to prevent Laos itself from falling under Communist domination by the Pathet Lao forces. So began a covert war in Laos, funded by the CIA, in which at least 35,000 Lao and Hmong perished. The legendary Hmong military leader, General Vang Pao, operated out of a base at Long Tieng in the mountains of Laos. He told the New York Times in 2008, ``There were three missions that were very important that were given to us and to me. . . . One was stopping the flow of the North Vietnamese troops through the Ho Chi Minh Trail to go to the south through Laos. Second was to rescue any American pilots during the Vietnam war. Third, to protect the Americans that navigated the B-52s and the jets to bomb North Vietnam.'' After the war, thousands of displaced Hmong refugees were obliged to flee Laos. They fled into Thailand, to countries in Europe, and--in many cases--to the United States. My State of Rhode Island is proud to have had many settle and build their lives in our communities. The Hmong Veterans' Service Recognition Act passed into law this year, finally allowing naturalized Hmong- and Laotian-American veterans to be buried in U.S. national cemeteries. I am grateful to my fellow Rhode Islander Philip Smith of the Lao Veterans of America for his determined advocacy on behalf of Hmong and Lao veterans. Twenty-one years ago, the Clinton administration authorized a plaque to be placed at Arlington National Cemetery commemorating the valor of the Lao soldiers who aided American forces during the Vietnam war. It is a fitting honor for those brave combat veterans that they lie beside old comrades-in-arms, a way of keeping the promise inscribed on this memorial plaque, which pledges that the Hmong and Lao veterans' ``patriotic valor and loyalty in the defense of liberty and democracy will never be forgotten.'' After my father retired, he heard that local opposition had arisen to a proposed Lao temple not far from here in Virginia. He went with his military aide and CIA station chief from the Laos days to testify at the local hearing. The military aide was General Richard Trefry, then the commander of White House military operations, who in full military regalia testified that, without the courageous Lao resistance, led by Vang Pao out of the base at Long Tieng, there would be 1,000 more American names on the Vietnam War Memorial. It is with that sense of abiding gratitude that we remember the bravery of those Hmong troops and their dedication to fight for democracy and to protect the lives of so many young Americans at war in Southeast Asia.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, let me just say, as a personal matter, this is the first time I have seen you presiding in the Senate. It is a nice sight, and I welcome you. I am here today to talk about the eroding and perhaps even vanishing tradition that we refer to in the Senate as the blue slip. People don't necessarily know what a blue slip is, but there has been a tradition with respect to U.S. attorneys, local U.S. district judges, U.S. marshals, and the seats on the U.S. circuit courts of appeals that are by tradition associated with a particular State. With respect to all of those nominations, there has been a tradition that they require the approval of the home State Senators. The mechanism for that approval is called a blue slip, and there actually is a blue slip. The tradition in the Senate Judiciary Committee that was very rigorously enforced most recently by Chairman Leahy, when he was chairman, is that a nominee for one of those offices does not get a hearing and cannot proceed without the blue slip of the home State Senators. I commend the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein, on the great work she has done on the minority report she led that describes the history of the blue slip and the extent to which what we are doing today is a break with that tradition. What provokes this is the nomination of Michael Brennan to proceed without a blue slip having been returned by his home State Senator, Ms. Baldwin. Obviously this signals a disrespect to the local Senators with respect to the office for which they heretofore had a blue slip. It also represents a very significant shift of power in Washington from this body, from this Chamber, to the Oval Office, which is a little bit unusual. Politics come and politics go, but it is rare for a political body like the Senate to willingly and willfully emasculate itself to some degree and transfer all of that power down to the executive branch and to the Oval Office. I think there is a quite significant price to be paid for this choice. Representing Rhode Island, we are on the First Circuit Court of Appeals. There is one seat--we are not a very big State; we have just one seat--on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, more properly, that is denominated as the Rhode Island seat. It is now occupied by a terrific judge, the Honorable Rogeriee Thompson, whom Senator Reed and I had a very significant role in getting appointed to that position. Should she step down, that vacancy would ordinarily be seen as the Rhode Island seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and we would expect that we would be consulted and that our blue slips would be honored with respect to a nominee the President--whichever President--wished to push through. Without divulging too many confidences, I will say that there was some considerable back-and-forth with the Obama administration in order for Senator Reed and me to get the assurances we needed that judges we approved of would be appointed. What I can't figure out is how the tradition of circuit courts of appeals seats having an affiliation with a particular State survives this decision to stop honoring blue slips for circuit courts of appeals. Every single Senator in this Chamber represents a State that lays claim to a certain seat--or a certain number of seats for the big States--on our circuit courts of appeals, but the only thing that undergirds that is the blue slip. The notion that there is a Rhode Island seat on the First Circuit or a Texas seat on the Fifth Circuit or New York seats on the Second Circuit or California seats on the Ninth Circuit or an Alaska seat on the Ninth Circuit doesn't exist in the Constitution. It doesn't exist in law. It exists by virtue of traditions of the Senate, and the only tool that gives that tradition any teeth at all is the blue slip. So what happens if we, on a categorical basis, decide that circuit court of appeals nominees are no longer subject to the home State blue slip? (Mr. SULLIVAN assumed the Chair.) At that point, there is no method for assuring that there is any home State affiliation for that seat whatsoever. A future President could choose to put a New York judge, a Tennessee judge, or an Alaska judge into the so-called Rhode Island seat on the First Circuit. Contrarily, if a so-called Alaska seat on the Ninth Circuit opened up, a future President could put a Rhode Islander into that seat because the only mechanism preventing that from happening is the fact that we honor each other's blue slip. That is the only mechanism that protects this long tradition that the seats on the U.S. circuit courts of appeals are associated with particular home States. So in this mad rush to get circuit judges confirmed--a rush that has completely overwhelmed this body and that has just completely stampeded the tradition of the blue slip--one of the prices that we will pay is that there is no longer any mechanism to enforce that any seat on any circuit court of appeals in this country has any association with any State. I have been joined by my distinguished colleague from Massachusetts on the floor. Massachusetts is a bigger State than Rhode Island. Massachusetts has several seats that the Massachusetts delegation would claim as the Massachusetts seats on the First Circuit if and when an opening should occur in those seats. But with no blue slip, how does that stay a Massachusetts seat? How do we have any voice in this whatsoever if there is no blue slip? We could easily end up in a situation in which all of the circuit courts of appeals have essentially been nationalized. I think there are a great number of lawyers who would more than happily pull up stakes and travel to another location. The distinguished Presiding Officer from Alaska and I have had conversations about the enormous reach of the Ninth Circuit. That already takes quite a lot of traveling. For a lawyer to have the distinction of being able to be a U.S. court of appeals judge--let's say that I have to pull up stakes and move from Texas to Rhode Island--there are plenty of lawyers who would do that. I urge my colleagues--as we undo this blue slip--to think about where this road ends, because a few years from now, if there is a President of a different party and there are circuit court nominees who come up, our Republican colleagues who have supported the abandonment of the blue slip will have no objection and no complaint--no legitimate objection and no legitimate complaint--if seats that are nominally the Alaska seat, the Massachusetts seat, the Rhode Island seat on the circuit get simply given to somebody else. There is no mechanism to prevent that if we don't honor the blue slip. That entire tradition falls right behind the collapse of the blue slip for the circuit courts of appeals. Of course, it is a massive transfer of power from this body to the Oval Office, which is obviously fine with our Republican friends now, given the identity of the person who is in the Oval Office, but that is not forever. Changes like this are forever. So we need to think this through. I will close by saying this. Why is it that we would behave in such a peculiar way with respect to the institution that we love and serve, as to basically disable ourselves with respect to local control over circuit court of appeals nominees and transfer that entire power down to the Oval Office? Why would we do that? That is peculiar behavior. When you look to the heavens and you see peculiar behavior from heavenly bodies, you look for an explanation. One of the reasons we know that dark stars and black holes exist is because they create peculiar behavior in the heavenly bodies around them. What might be the dark star that is causing the peculiar behavior of the Senate in willfully disabling its own power and authority with respect to nominations for circuit courts of appeals? What could explain the otherwise inexplicable dismantling of our own tradition and our own authority in this area? I submit that there is a $17.9 million donation that was brought to bear on the nomination of Judge Garland--the obstruction of that nomination--and the subsequent nomination of Judge Gorsuch from one donor. One anonymous donor put nearly $18 million into an effort to manipulate that process. That is not what has gone wrong with the Courts of Appeals, but it is a signal of powerful political interests out there seeking control over judicial nominees. For what other reason would an individual donor anonymously spend nearly $18 million? That is just one donor. There is plenty of anonymous money flowing into operations that seek to get specific types of people into robes. My concern is that it is the power of special interests that is the dark star that is causing the Senate to undergo this deformation of its traditions--this relinquishment of our individual power as Senators and our group power as a branch of government. It is special interest power that is driving this. There are special interests, such as the gun lobby, that would like to be able to go into a court and know that they have a judge who is predisposed in their favor. There are special interests, such as anti-choice groups, that would like to go into court and know that they have a judge who is predisposed in their favor. The actual very dark money forces that are meddling in our politics are desperate to show up in court when the question of dark money is litigated and have a judge who they know is predisposed in their favor. There are business interests that seek to disable, diminish, and hobble courts and juries, and provide people home cooking arbitration alternatives to their constitutional right to go to court and to face a jury of their peers. They are very interested in seeing to it that when they appear in court on those issues, they have a judge who they believe is predisposed in their interests. I cannot think of another reason why the Senate, as an institution, after all this time, would unilaterally disable itself, would unilaterally emasculate itself with respect to the role of the selection of our circuit court of appeals nominees. I think this is a day that we will come to regret because that first step to get Judge Brennan confirmed may seem very attractive and appealing to a great many of my colleagues, but once you have crossed that Rubicon with that first step, there is no path that I can see that protects the right of individual Senators to assert an interest in a specific seat or a number of seats on the circuit courts of appeals. I think we have more or less taken an irrevocable step toward nationalizing the appointments of all circuit court of appeals nominees, and we will look back on this day and say: What fools we were. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, situated off the northeast corner of Australia lies one of the seven natural wonders of the world, a wonder that is visible from space--the Great Barrier Reef. Each year, around 2 million visitors come from around the globe to experience the Great Barrier Reef. They come to see hundreds of species of sharks, dolphins, fish, mollusks, whales, seabirds, and other marine life thriving in nearly 133,000 square miles of coral reef. Some of these coral structures are thought to date back as long as 25 million years. When Pope Francis spoke of the ``wonderworld of the seas,'' this is the kind of beauty and bounty he had in mind. It is difficult to imagine something so expansive and ancient threatened so profoundly by one of Earth's more recent inhabitants-- humans--but it is. The oceans are taking the brunt of our modern carelessness. They are warming, acidifying, and literally suffocating under our carbon dioxide emissions. They are fouled with our plastic garbage, and they are polluted with runoff from farming and storm water wash into the sea. I have come to the floor before to plead that my Senate colleagues heed the warnings of our oceans. Those warnings are loud and clear and measurable. They are measurable with thermometers, tide gauges, and simple pH tests, and they are chronicled by the testimony of fishermen and sailors. Today I wish to focus on that Great Barrier Reef. A healthy coral reef is one of the most productive engines of life on Earth. It is home to 25 percent of the world's fish biodiversity. The corals use calcium carbonate--a compound usually readily available in ocean water--to build their hard skeletons. These hard structures shelter the living coral polyps and undergird the entire ecosystem that depends on the reef. Without the corals, the whole thing collapses. The living corals have evolved a symbiotic relationship with tiny photosynthetic algae called zooxanthellae. The algae live in the surface tissue of the corals. It is the algae that provide the color that you see healthy corals display. The corals' metabolic waste is converted by the algae back into food and oxygen for the corals, and, in turn, corals shelter the algae. However, the range of pH, temperature, salinity, and water clarity within which this symbiotic magic takes place is fairly narrow. Get outside that comfort range, and the corals get stressed. When they are stressed enough, they begin to evict their algae. This is what is called ``coral bleaching.'' The corals whiten as they shed their colorful algae. Of course, without the algae, corals can't live for long. The algae can resettle, and the corals can recover, but if the algae don't resettle, the corals soon die. That is what is happening in huge swaths of the Great Barrier Reef, and here is why. As we have pumped massive quantities of waste CO2 into the atmosphere, dramatically raising the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, the oceans have absorbed approximately 30 percent of all of that excess carbon dioxide. We recently broke a dangerous new atmospheric record, exceeding a monthly average of 410 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for the first time in human history. For comparison, at the start of the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric carbon dioxide was around 280 parts per million. That is 280 not so long ago and 410 now, and 300 had been about the upper limit of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for as long as human beings have been on this planet. About a third of all of that added CO2 gets absorbed by the ocean, and it is absorbed with a chemical reaction that makes the ocean more acidic. That is why we talk about ocean acidification. At the same time that the oceans have been soaking up all of that excess CO2, they have also been soaking up heat--lots of heat--roughly 90 percent of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by these greenhouse gases. As a result of all of that heat, the oceans are warming as they get more acidic, more often knocking the corals out of the conditions they need for that symbiosis to thrive. We are only 1 year out from the massive bleaching that tore across the globe from 2014 to 2017. NOAA branded it ``the longest, most widespread, and possibly the most damaging coral bleaching event on record.'' This graphic shows how severe and pervasive the bleaching was. The light blue areas on the map, which you really don't see any of, represent the parts of the ocean that are under no stress. These are the continents. There is North America and South America. Over here is Australia. There is Asia. And the red parts are the oceans. The lighter red is ``Alert Level 1'' areas, where heat stress led to significant coral bleaching. The deeper red is ``Alert Level 2'' areas, which experienced not only widespread coral bleaching but also significant coral die-off. This white box right here marks the Great Barrier Reef. You can see that severe coral bleaching in the northern edges of the Great Barrier Reef, and this was new. According to NOAA, these are areas where bleaching had never occurred before. In 2016 scientists with the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies undertook extensive aerial and in- water surveys of the Great Barrier Reef to estimate the extent of the damage. Out of the over 900 individual reefs that were surveyed, only 7 percent of those reefs escaped bleaching, and 93 percent were hit. In the northern portion of the Great Barrier Reef, upwards of 80 percent of the corals were severely bleached. When the researchers returned, they found that up to two-thirds of those corals in the northern section had died. The central and southern sections fared better but still saw corals dying. A recent paper in Nature by Australian and NOAA researchers totaled the damage. The paper's lead author, Dr. Terry Hughes, told The Atlantic: ``On average, across the Great Barrier Reef, one in three corals died in nine months.'' In the northern section of the reef, researchers found that some species, such as staghorn and table corals, suffered what they called a ``catastrophic die-off.'' In total, about one-half of the northern range's corals died. Dr. Hughes went on to say the Great Barrier Reef ``has transformed into a completely new system that looks differently, and behaves differently, and functions differently.'' That is climate change. In an interview with Huffington Post, Dr. Hughes said the heat wave that caused the bleaching was so intense that some of the corals basically ``cooked'' and died quickly. Usually, if corals can't recover their algae after a bleaching event, they slowly starve to death. Some of the less resilient species crashed by up to 90 percent in the recent bleaching. Dr. Hughes made clear to the Atlantic that human-caused climate change was the driving force behind this coral bleaching. Indeed, the title of his nature article is, ``Global warming transforms coral reef assemblages.'' Dr. John Bruno from the University of North Carolina said that the loss of the Great Barrier Reef's corals is ``like clear-cutting a redwood forest.'' He went on: In 10 years, you're going to have a lot of stuff on the ground, but you're not going to have the old-growth forest back. Some of these corals were 10, 30 years old, but a lot of them were centuries old. In 100 years--if there is no more warming--they could return. In 100 years, they could return. Dr. Hughes and his colleagues, however, were less optimistic in their nature paper. They wrote: ``The most likely scenario, therefore, is that coral reefs throughout the tropics will continue to degrade over the current century until climate change stabilizes, allowing remnant populations to reorganize into novel, heat-tolerant reef assemblages.'' Remnant populations are all they expect to survive. Researchers are trying to understand the consequences of losing so much coral in our seas. Obviously, if you harm the corals, you harm the reef; if you harm the reef, you destabilize life throughout the reef, and that is bad for oceans. A recent paper in Global Change Biology found severe declines in the populations of the fish most connected with the corals hit hardest by the bleaching. So the cascade effect is already observed. The Great Barrier Reef even sounds different. A study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences compared the lively underwater cacophony of a vibrant Great Barrier Reef in 2012 with the quiet of bleached locations in 2016. The life that teems around a healthy reef decreased with the loss of the corals. There are actually some open-ocean species, like juvenile clownfish-- or the Nemos--that actually rely on sound coming off these reefs from all the life and all the feeding and all the activity and that actually use that sound to find reefs to go settle on. So this quiet of dying reefs makes their job of finding new homes harder. Climate change makes the heat waves that spur coral bleaching more intense and also more frequent, leaving corals less time to recover before the next heat wave hits, and we may see the more vulnerable corals fail to recover at all as the waters warm too much for them to survive. A study published earlier this year in Science looked at 100 tropical reefs and found that only 6 had avoided bleaching. Bleaching events that occurred in the past, once in a generation, now occur around every 6 years. As the Guardian summarized it, ``Repeated large-scale coral bleaching events are the new normal thanks to global warming.'' So what can we do about it? Scientists are working to better understand what makes certain corals more resilient and to try to use these lessons to protect more vulnerable species. But that research nibbles at the fringes of this global die-off. There is some localized work on things like sun shields to help protect shallow corals during peak heat. Senator McCain and I visited efforts to rebuild shattered coral reefs in Indonesia, but these tiny efforts can't offset the global onslaught of climate change unless we move fast to address the real problem. Australia announced last week that it would invest around $400 million in a patchwork of efforts to protect the Great Barrier Reef: increasing monitoring and enforcement, for instance; limiting pollution runoff from shore; trying to keep out certain invasive starfish; and trying to help restore lost corals. But the plan does not address the main culprit behind coral bleaching, and that culprit is climate change. Scientists noticed that omission, including the Australian Academy of Science, which pointed out the problem that the reef is ``highly vulnerable to climate change,'' and ``urge[d] the government to address the cause of the problem.'' The call of those scientists is a call that we, too, ought to heed. One of the great wonders of God's Earth is on its way to turning into a sandy relic because we are unwilling to say no to the fossil fuel industry. It is that simple. This coral die-off is one of innumerable consequences that our Earth is already warning us with. It is not the only signal; it is one of many. But nothing that can't be monetized for an industry seems to get our attention around here. Instead, it appears we will have to look future generations in the eye and tell them that there was once a Great Barrier Reef, that it was one of the wonders of the world, and that we let it die to keep the fossil fuel industry happy. It is time we woke up. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I thank Senator Durbin, who is a leader in our caucus, but also a very important leader on these issues. We are here this evening because a group of us now embark on a series of speeches on the Senate floor to shine some light into a network of phony front groups--a web of deceit conceived and bankrolled by the Koch brothers and other self-interested billionaires to advocate for very selfish and unpatriotic policies. This web of deceit has infiltrated and populated the Trump administration, and it is swamping the interests of everyday Americans. I will not dwell on its policies. The billionaires having to hide behind these front groups tells you all you need to know about their policies. There are plenty of billionaires these days, and a bunch of them do pretty good stuff, but there is an extremist subset trying to quietly remake America to their ideology, and they are behind the web of deceit. When an issue affects some hyperwealthy interest group, the web activates. In the Halls of Congress, on cable news, in opinion pages, on social media, the front groups will be everywhere, with fake news, bogus studies, and phony science. This is a well-studied phenomenon. Two speeches ago, I had a stack of books about this high here on the desk with authors who had written about it. There is also excellent academic research by Robert Brulle, Riley Dunlap, Nancy MacLean, David Rosner, Gerald Markowitz, Michael Mann, and many others who deserve credit for shining light into these front groups. The graphic behind us is actually a diagram from the work of Professor Brulle. To the uninitiated, it might appear that these are all actual, different groups and that they might actually represent-- who knows--thousands, maybe even millions of real people across America. That is the scheme. These front groups are designed to provide a simulacrum, a manufactured, artificial appearance of public support for ideologies and policies that actually just benefit the richest of the rich or the ``pollutingest'' of the polluters. Got a tax scam to sell? Call in the front groups who will parrot, falsely, that the middle class will benefit, when it is the billionaires and big corporations that actually make out like bandits. Want to block action on climate change and let fossil fuel companies keep polluting for no charge? Quick, activate those front groups to spread climate denial, the original fake news: Climate change isn't happening; or, OK, maybe it is, but we don't really know how human activity is the cause; or, OK, maybe it is, but who knows how bad it will really get. OK, really bad, but it is too hard, so let's leave it to some other generation. Never mind what the real scientists have to say. The web of deceit has fake scientists, and it doesn't matter to the web if their phony scientists are right or wrong. They couldn't care less. They just have to keep their fake scientists talking, make it seem like there may be a real question about the science--in essence, pollute the public's mind. While these phony front groups are out working their PR magic, connected lobbyists and electioneering groups stalk the Halls of Congress, ready to kneecap Republicans who might--like Bob Inglis did-- have the temerity to think about acting on climate. More generally, this web of deceit has infected the Republican Party with climate denial, all to help polluters pollute for free. That is part of the creepy billionaire ideology behind the web of deceit. Of course, a web like this has its stooges and quislings, and in the Trump administration they can get to high places. Imagine if you have been building this web of deceit for decades, and one day you get to plant your phony minions into real, high-level government positions. Oh, what wonderful legitimacy, and what would you not then do to defend your stooges? We just saw this web of deceit spring into action to defend fossil fuel stooge Scott Pruitt, our ethically challenged Environmental Protection Agency Administrator. You may have seen the steady stream of news about Pruitt's ethical lapses: huge bills for taxpayers for first-class flights and 24/7 security, even on family trips; a $43,000 Maxwell Smart secret phone booth; a jaunt to Morocco for the natural gas industry; a condo deal from a lobbyist with business before the EPA; massive raises to cronies from Oklahoma through a loophole in, of all things, the Safe Drinking Water Act. He even was caught firing or reassigning people who told him he could not sign up for perks like a private jet service at taxpayer expense. Talk about lights and sirens. This guy is a lights-and-sirens affront to any concept of decency in government service. As scandal after scandal piled up, pressure mounted to fire the scoundrel. Never fear, the web of deceit is here. Nearly two dozen phony industry front groups rode to the rescue, urging the President to keep Pruitt on. Here is the letter. As you can see, all these groups' logos are on it. They praise Pruitt for his work to help fossil fuel polluters pollute. They rejoice that his rollback of fuel economy standards will raise drivers' fuel costs. They applaud his getting rid of independent scientists and putting industry insiders on EPA advisory committees. It is actually the reporting of Pruitt's scandals, they write, that is the conspiracy. ``This whole ordeal is nothing more than an orchestrated political campaign,'' they write--``an orchestrated political campaign''--so says the polluters' orchestrated political campaign to save Pruitt's political hide. If you want to see something about orchestrated political campaigns, this is it. The web also went to war in the press and on social media for Pruitt. The so-called Heartland Institute defended Pruitt as ``the single most effective appointment of the president of the United States,'' and went after Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo on Twitter for breaking with Republican complicity by calling on Pruitt to resign. Another tool of this web is a front group called the Media Research Center. They are also on this letter. The Media Research Center's job, when stooges are caught stooging, is to go on the attack and accuse the journalists of bias. This Media Research Center has a website called NewsBusters devoted to attacking honest reporting that it doesn't like. In articles and on Twitter, it attacked ABC News and other networks for reporting on Pruitt's expensive first-class travel. Other groups on this letter also took to Twitter to defend their boy Pruitt, including the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, the American Energy Alliance, and the Conservative Partnership Institute. ``Orchestrated political campaign,'' indeed. When I saw this orchestrated ``protect Pruitt'' letter, it reminded me of this one, which I received in the summer of 2016. Back then, a group of us delivered speeches exposing this web of deceit's role in blocking action on climate change. We called it the web of denial because climate denial is the web's recipe for delay and inaction on carbon pollution. More than 20 organizations in the Koch brothers' network, with lengthy records of climate change denial, objected to being called out as Koch-linked climate change deniers. To challenge our assertion that they were an orchestrated bunch of front groups, they responded with this orchestrated letter from all the front groups. They went on to say it was ``tyranny'' that we would call out who actually pays them and what interests they actually front for. I can't wait to hear the caterwauling from them now. Why are these polluter-funded front groups so desperate to protect Pruitt? That question sort of answers itself, doesn't it? They do a good job of hiding. Unfortunately, our laws allow wealthy donors to funnel money through opaque brokers and anonymous shell companies. The dark money could be from the ultrawealthy, rightwing Mercer family, from the Koch brothers' empire, from ExxonMobil, from whomever--even a Russian oligarch. We get only occasional glimpses into these dark-money channels of influence in our political system, often through leaks or mistaken filings or extraordinary, painstaking research. It is not easy. For the 22 front groups that signed this recent letter, we have figured out one common denominator: the Koch brothers' empire. Let's go down the list. We will start with the Heartland Institute. We know that Heartland received at least $100,000 from foundations connected to the Koch brothers, and it received at least $7 million from DonorsTrust. But what is DonorsTrust? It has no business purpose. It is an identity- concealing device whose entire purpose is to launder donations to front groups so that you will not know their real backers. Journalists have learned, however, that the Koch brothers are among the largest, if not the largest, contributors to DonorsTrust. Back to our list--ALEC: Koch-connected foundations gave ALEC at least $600,000. Koch Industries is also a donor, but we don't know how much it has given. More secrecy. Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow: Wow, there is a good name. Who could possibly be against a constructive tomorrow? Certainly not the Kochs, whose foundations gave it at least $45,000. That will buy a signature on a letter, for sure. American Energy Alliance: Koch-connected organizations gave the American Energy Alliance at least $1.7 million. 60 Plus: Koch-backed organizations have given 60 Plus more than $42 million. This is interesting because 60 Plus is actually a front group that supposedly advocates for senior citizens. So its presence on this Pruitt letter is weird and telling. Idaho Freedom Foundation: It received at least $570,000 from the Koch-backed DonorsTrust. That Media Research Center I talked about received at least $1 million from DonorsTrust. Independence Institute: Koch-connected foundations gave the so-called Independence Institute more than $140,000 while Koch-backed DonorsTrust provided the group more than $2.5 million. Conservative Partnership Institute: This is a relatively new group, and we don't yet know who is funding it, but we do know it is staffed by folks from other Koch-backed groups. This web of deceit shares not only common funding but common personnel. American Commitment received at least $21 million from Koch- affiliated organizations. The Center for Security Policy received at least $1.9 million from Koch-backed DonorsTrust. Like 60 Plus, this Center for Security Policy doesn't usually work on environment or energy issues. It lists its research areas as ``Shariah, Defense, Homeland Security, Israel & the Middle East, Sovereignty, and National Security & New Media.'' Its presence on the Pruitt letter is also weird and telling. The Institute for Liberty received at least $1.8 million from Koch- affiliated organizations. Americans for Limited Government received at least $5.6 million from Koch groups. Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund: We don't know how much money this group received directly from Koch-affiliated organizations, but we do know that Tea Party Patriots was created by yet another front group called Freedom Works. We are getting into front groups within front groups here, folks, and Freedom Works received at least $12 million from Koch-affiliated foundations. Mountain States Legal Foundation received at least $90,000 from Koch- backed Donors Trust. Energy & Environment Legal Institute received at least $16,000 from Koch-affiliated foundations and at least $500,000 from Koch-backed DonorsTrust. This, by the way--Energy & Environmental Legal Institute-- is a particularly creepy group whose function--hold your breath--is actually to harass legitimate scientists. That is what they do. Georgia Public Policy Foundation received at least $125,000 from Koch-backed DonorsTrust. Mississippi Center for Public Policy received at least $500,000 from Koch-backed DonorsTrust. Carbon Sense Coalition: We don't know yet how much money this group received from Koch-affiliated organizations, but we do know that it works in close concert with many of the other front groups in the Koch- funded web of deceit. American Family Association received at least $50,000 from Koch- affiliated organizations. This beauty of an organization has been identified as an anti-LGBTQ hate group--hate group--by the Southern Poverty Law Center. But here it is, signing a letter boosting Trump's EPA Administrator. Weird, again--but telling. ConservativeHQ.com: We don't know how much money this website received from Koch-affiliated organizations, but its job is to provide favorable online coverage of the Kochs and the web of front groups. Climate Science Coalition of America: Its parent organization received at least $45,000 from Koch-affiliated organizations. If you do the math, that is actually a grand total of at least $87,281,000 received by these 22 front groups from Koch-affiliated organizations, and that is only the part that has leaked out through the screens of secrecy. Who knows how much dark money remains hidden behind those screens? Here is the point. This is a scam--so much money and so many front group tentacles. Once you see what is going on, you realize these front groups are just tentacles of the creepy billionaires, of giant polluting corporations, and of the other special interests that fund them. The tentacles don't represent America; they represent a bunch of polluters and billionaires. The pollution angle keeps rearing its ugly head in all of this--and guess what. Koch Industries is a very big polluter. In 2014, Koch Industries dumped more than 6.6 million pounds of toxic pollution into our waterways. That same year, Koch Industries spent almost $14 million in lobbying the Federal Government. One of Koch Industries' biggest targets has been the EPA's clean water rule--6.6 million pounds of toxic pollution into our waterways, millions in lobbying to target the clean water rule. Since the clean water rule protects our rivers and streams--sources of drinking water for millions of Americans--when Pruitt promised to repeal the clean water rule, that could mean big bucks for polluters like Koch Industries. Koch Industries has major holdings in the energy industry--refining gasoline and other petroleum products, operating pipelines, and manufacturing petrochemicals. So when Pruitt promised to repeal the Clean Power Plan and undo fuel economy standards, that could mean big bucks for Koch Industries. Protecting clean water, reducing carbon emissions, and saving consumers money at the pump may be good for the planet and may be good for the American people, but these things are not good for polluters. So queue the web of deceit for Scott Pruitt to write letters and bombard social media and the press with front group disinformation. If the public could see it is just a couple of billionaires and oil companies and coal barons who are defending Pruitt, the jig would be up--Americans could see the special interest motive. Yet add on this web of phony front groups and hide-the-special-interest funding in dark money channels, and it is money well spent if Koch Industries and companies like it can go right on polluting--polluted water, polluted air, climate change unchecked--some victory, but that is who they are. Americans need to get a good look at these phony front groups, so we will explain who these groups are, where they get their money, and how they have installed operatives throughout the Trump administration. Once upon a time, Donald Trump said he didn't want Koch money or anything else from them. It turns out dozens of Koch apparatchiks are running the Trump administration. The Kochs probably have more control in this administration than the Trumps. They are making the Trumps their chumps. As we spotlight this web of deceit, keep in mind this one simple truth: This is not democracy. This is the corruption of democracy. It is the corruption of democracy to benefit narrow special interests at everyone else's expense. It is the enemy of our vision of America as a shining city on a hill. We face a choice now in this country--to reclaim our destiny as that shining city on a hill that John Winthrop and Ronald Reagan spoke of or to sink into the corrupting ooze of special interest dark money, hidden influence, phony front groups, and fake news. History is watching. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 20 minutes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, when we think about climate change-- something we don't do much of in this body--we often think about rising global temperatures and heat waves, and we think of changing weather patterns, stronger storms, or sea level rise threatening coastal communities. We actually see these effects unfold across the United States and around the world as heat records fall, winters shrink, and waters creep ever higher along our coastlines. We also see the economic consequences of climate change. Just last year, the United States suffered a record 16 separate billion-dollar weather disasters, adding up to well over $300 billion in damages. Acidifying seawater has devastated shellfish harvests in the Pacific Northwest. Rhode Island fishermen struggle as their traditional catches move farther north and offshore. Insurers and bond rating agencies warn that coastal regions are becoming too risky to build homes and infrastructure. Among those various hazards, there is another hazard: the effects of climate change on public health. The Rhode Island Department of Health has produced this guide for Rhode Islanders to help them understand the health risks they face from climate change and to better learn how to protect themselves from what are often new risks. Perhaps the most obvious effect of climate change on public health is increased heat-related illness and mortality. This link has been well studied across the country, often cross-referencing temperature records and death certificates. Work has been done by a lot of places; one of them is Rhode Island's own Brown University. Here is the Rhode Island Health Department report. Over the last century, Rhode Island's average temperature has already increased by more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit, and temperatures are expected to keep on climbing due to climate change. Currently, Rhode Island sees on average only about 10 days of 90-plus degree temperatures. Starting in the next decade and running through the end of the century, the number of days that the heat index will hit at least 90 degrees will rise to between 13 and 44 days each summer. That is as much as 6 weeks in a summer of heat in the nineties. That increase of hot summer days caused by climate change puts many Rhode Islanders at risk, particularly those who don't have air conditioning, either because they can't afford it or because, right now, they don't need it. Heat waves are the leading cause of extreme weather-related deaths in the United States, causing an average of more than 600 deaths a year and thousands more hospitalizations. Rhode Island, even though we are in the Northeast, is not spared, and with climate change, it will only get worse. Hot days pose a health risk to many different groups of people, as shown here in Rhode Island's Department of Health report. Children, the elderly, people who work outdoors, athletes, the disabled, pregnant women, and folks who are on medications that reduce their bodies' ability to dissipate heat are just some of the many people who are especially at risk from heat waves. Because of the nature of their responsibilities, emergency responders are particularly vulnerable. When I visited Phoenix, AZ, I was told by their emergency response leadership that they are having to restructure the duty schedules to protect firefighters from being overcome, if they are out fighting fires or responding to an emergency in daytime temperatures, because they overheat. So you have to rotate them through much faster and add cooling and hydration teams to support the fire crews as they speed through their heightened rotations. An ER doc from the Lifespan health system in Rhode Island visited my office and told another story about an older woman who was treated for a heat-related illness. She had just been sitting outside on a hot day, in the Sun, enjoying herself. Perhaps she didn't feel the need to hydrate herself. Perhaps some routine medication that she was on made her more susceptible, but she was not aware of how quickly she was overheating. When her husband returned home from work, he found her lethargic and unable to move, with a body temperature of 107 degrees. Hotter temperatures are bad on their own because of the effects they have on people's bodies and because of the added deaths that they cause, but they also work to create more ozone. Ozone is dangerous. Ozone is dangerous for children. It is dangerous for the elderly. It is dangerous for anyone with asthma or other breathing-related difficulties. Again, from Rhode Island's health report, Rhode Island's asthma rates are 33 percent higher than national averages for adults and 40 percent higher for children. So asthma is pretty serious for us, and people go to the hospital for this. This is not just an inconvenience. In Rhode Island, we have heard air quality alerts on morning drive-time radio. You are going in to work and listening to the radio, and the announcer is saying, ``Kids, seniors, people with breathing difficulties, you need to stay indoors today.'' It is a sunny, perfect summer day, it seems. Ozone is not visible, but because it is there and because of what it does to lungs and to asthma, people in Rhode Island are told they can't go outdoors that day. That kind of bad day alert, because it is for ozone, is going to become more frequent as climate change warms up our climate and produces more ozone. It works this way. Our air in Rhode Island is polluted, primarily, by midwestern powerplants. Out in the Midwest, they run the emissions up supertall smokestacks. The pollution is then injected up into the atmosphere and is carried away on prevailing winds. Guess what. It bakes in the Sun, turns to ozone, and it lands on us--not them, us. It is their pollution, our lungs. Thanks a bunch, guys. Our air is also worsened by smoke from forest fires, even from as far away as Canada, and the warming climate, as the Presiding Officer knows, has created an extraordinary fire situation out West. Changing precipitation patterns have produced more fires, and that means more smoke in downwind States, and we are a downwind State. The result of all of this is that Rhode Island's air quality receives only a C from the American Lung Association. This poor grade is largely because of ozone, most of which comes from out of State. We end up with grade C air because of, primarily, out-of-State pollutants. This is not just some minor inconvenience. Across the country, air pollution--much of it made worse by climate change--is responsible for a staggering 200,000 premature deaths each year. Pollen is another problem. Shifting seasons produce a longer pollen season. Increased pollen levels, particularly with increased air pollution, kick in allergies, which takes us into another risk. The warmth of earlier springs and later falls also means that tick and mosquito season in Rhode Island lasts far longer than it used to, and that moves us to yet more health risks and diseases. Rhode Island already has the fourth highest rate of Lyme disease in the country. We have over 900 cases a year, and as temperatures increase, we are likely to see the number of ticks in Rhode Island increase, which would be expected to lead to even more cases of Lyme disease. In States not too far north of us, the tick situation has gotten so out of control that they are actually seeing moose calves die off because they are so swarmed with ticks. I am sorry. I know this is a little bit gross, but calves are dying when their bodies can't support both their own metabolism and feeding the ticks that have crawled up onto them in the thousands--in some cases, over 10,000 ticks. So we have to be concerned about this not just for ourselves but for the wildlife around us. Warmer temperatures also provide a longer breeding season for mosquitoes. More downpours--yet another result of climate change-- result in more standing water, which is habitat for mosquito larvae. Rhode Island has been up 76 percent in extreme downpours since 1950. That is the largest increase in extreme precipitation events out of all 50 States. Of course, these little critters, the mosquitoes, carry the West Nile virus, the Eastern equine encephalitis, and other illnesses we didn't used to see in our State. As if all of this were not bad enough, climate change is also worsening another natural hazard that threatens public health--harmful algae blooms. Algae naturally occur in lakes and oceans, but in certain conditions, algae populations can explode. These blooms, they call them--blooms of algae--can slime waterways and overwhelm ecosystems, eating up nutrients, and they can deplete oxygen in the water and in the oceans so completely that no other life can exist, so that other creatures--fish--actually suffocate in the water. Algae are often, therefore, the reason behind massive fish kills. Some kinds of algae even produce toxins. People can become sick from exposure to the contaminated, toxin-filled water and even from the air if you get enough surface turbulence and churning of waves that it aerates the toxins, and then it is inhaled. The toxins can get into our food chain. They end up in shellfish and seafood on our dinner plates. Depending on which toxin it is, the consequences for people, for pets, and for wildlife can range from rashes and skin irritation, to pretty severe neurological and gastrointestinal symptoms, to respiratory arrest, and even death. In 2016, New England was hit for the first time by a Pseudo-nitzschia bloom--a kind of algae that produces a toxin, domoic acid, which caused large swaths of Narragansett Bay to be closed to shellfishing. The Providence Journal reported: ``In the more than 15 years officials have tested for [domoic acid], Rhode Island . . . never had a bloom reaching dangerous levels.'' In March of 2017, Rhode Island was forced, once again, to institute emergency shellfish closures in Narragansett Bay-- stuff that did not used to happen before this--when algae produced dangerous levels of domoic acid. This may seem funny to my western colleagues, but people make their living doing this stuff, so it is not funny to us in Rhode Island when climate change is warming our oceans and creating these risks. Harmful algae blooms have also been advised for ponds in Portsmouth, Cranston, Greenville, and Tiverton. In all of these ways--from heat-related illnesses, to respiratory disease, to allergies, to tick- and mosquito-borne illnesses, to toxic algae blooms--climate change has serious and wide-ranging effects on public health. Rhode Island's Department of Health has done an excellent service with this report--in helping Rhode Islanders learn how to be aware and to protect themselves. It was supported, by the way, by a grant from the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in its Climate and Health Program. It was a small $10 million program, but it helped this project's report come to fruition in Rhode Island. We appreciate it. It is a wise investment to help prepare Americans for unfamiliar diseases that are being driven into our neighborhoods by a change in climate. As I conclude, I know that there are colleagues here who do not care to listen to environmental groups, but they might want to listen to the American Medical Association. The American Medical Association writes: ``Scientific surveys have shown clear evidence that our patients are facing adverse health effects associated with climate change.'' Colleagues might listen to the American Lung Association, which writes: ``Climate change seriously threatens our wellness--especially our lung health.'' Perhaps colleagues might consider the opinion of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which writes: ``Tackling climate change could be the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century.'' They write that because here is the problem: ``Climate change poses threats to human health, safety, and security, and children are at particularly high risk.'' We may disagree about a lot around here, but when the American Academy of Pediatrics is telling us that climate change poses serious threats to human health, safety, and security and that children are at particularly high risk, it is a very callous thing to pay no attention. It is time to wake up. Our constituents' health and well-being actually does hang in the balance, and this Rhode Island report shows it for our State at least. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to react to the President's selection of Andrew Wheeler to be the proposed No. 2 at the EPA. This is a selection that continues the Trump administration's essentially complete subservience to the fossil fuel industry in the entire environmental arena. I have described Scott Pruitt, Rick Perry, and Ryan Zinke, who is over at Interior, as the three stooges of the fossil fuel industry, and I reiterate that today. Scott Pruitt, in addition to being one of those stooges, also has some of the most extraordinary displays of unethical and self-serving political acts of anybody I have ever seen. I can only imagine what this floor would look like if an Obama appointee had engaged in those kinds of behaviors. In all of those seats, we would have had Republicans shouting and jumping up and down in their being infuriated by that misconduct. Yet, because it is Pruitt, because it is Trump, and because the fossil fuel industry is getting everything it wants out of this guy, the silence is deafening. But that doesn't change the underlying fact that the American people are owed folks in high office who take their public duty seriously. There is very little chance that Mr. Wheeler is going to take his public duties seriously as No. 2 at the EPA. It is not like it is with the No. 1 at the EPA, where there is a stopgap who is going to defend us. This is a very dangerous duo. Scott Pruitt is a complete flunky of the fossil fuel industry--largely disgraced but still hanging on there and his only claim to fame being that he will do anything the fossil fuel industry tells him to do. That is why he is hanging on. Now coal lobbyist Wheeler is coming on to be his No. 2. That is a dangerous combination to lead our Environmental Protection Agency. There was an interesting series of photographs that actually got the photographer fired in this administration for having released these photographs. There was a little meeting over at the Energy Department with Secretary Perry and Bob Murray, who is the head of Murray Energy. He is a coal baron, and he, obviously, has one interest in mind, which is to sell more coal, burn more coal, and to heck with the rest of you, more or less. This was Mr. Murray as he arrived at the Department of Energy, up in the Secretary's conference room. The bald gentleman is Mr. Murray. The man whose head is obscured behind him in this torrid hug is our Energy Secretary. So you knew things were going to go well for Mr. Murray at this meeting after that nice, cozy reception that he got. Then the photographer went on and took this picture, which is of Murray Energy Corporation's recommendations to the Honorable Richard Perry as to what he should do about the environment. I will spend some more time on that memo in just a moment. After long delays, we were actually able to get our hands on it. They delayed and they fiddled and they faddled and wouldn't confirm that they had it. When the photograph showed that they had it, they said: OK. We will give it to you when we give our FOIA requests. Great. Thanks a bunch. So much for congressional oversight. I hope that if the now majority is ever in the minority in the Senate, that it doesn't get treated this way--being told to line up with the FOIA folks as they are not interested in responding to oversight requests for memos, but that is what we got. Here is another photograph from that meeting. Here is Mr. Murray telling the Energy Secretary what to do. There is the Energy Secretary--fresh out of his nice hug--being told what to do. Here is Mr. Wheeler, the guy who is going to be the No. 2 at the EPA. He was right in the room where the Murray directions to the Trump administration were being discussed and delivered. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this document be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks. Here is the action plan. It reads: ``Dear Secretary Perry, enclosed is an Action Plan for achieving reliable and low cost electricity in America and to assist in the survival of our country's coal industry.'' What are the recommendations? Page 1: ``SUSPEND THE COAL-FIRED POWERPLANT EFFLUENT LIMITATION GUIDELINES.'' Yes. Why would we want limitations on the effluent that a coal-fired powerplant can emit? Why on Earth would anybody want that? No. To suspend those is one of the recommendations. The second is to withdraw and suspend the so-called endangerment finding. The endangerment finding is the fact-based finding at the EPA that shows that, in addition to it being a matter of law pursuant to Massachusetts v. EPA, carbon dioxide is a pollutant in the air. This is the Agency's finding that it is actually a dangerous pollutant in the air. That is why it is called the endangerment finding. So they want to knock that out so they can knock out regulation of more coal-powered powerplant effluents, including carbon dioxide. Then they want to eliminate the tax credit for wind and solar. Here is an industry that gets, according to the International Monetary Fund, $700 billion a year in effective subsidies in the United States of America alone, and their goal is to knock out the little production tax credit that wind and solar get? That is what he asked for. ``WITHDRAW FROM THE . . . PARIS CLIMATE ACCORD.'' Well, we all know he was obeyed on that. Here's a particularly good one: ``END . . . OZONE REGULATIONS.'' Let me state what Rhode Island's experience in this is. The midwestern powerplants burn coal and other fossil fuels. They run the exhaust out of smoke stacks. Many of them have raised enormously high smoke stacks to get all that stuff way up into the air, so it is then carried by prevailing winds out of their State--out of their State. As it bakes in the heat as it travels through the air, it becomes ozone. That ozone lands in Rhode Island. Ladies and gentlemen, children go to the hospital because of asthma complications from ozone in Rhode Island. We have had periods when, on a bright and sunny day, the talk radio, your drive-time radio, announces to Rhode Islanders that today is a bad air day in the State of Rhode Island, and the elderly and babies and any people with breathing difficulty should stay indoors. You are not welcome out-of- doors because of ozone levels. This guy wants to end ozone regulation. I think not. This guy was his lobbyist in trying to do that. That is what has become of the EPA. What else? ``OVERTURN THE . . . CROSS-STATE AIR POLLUTION RULE.'' Rhode Island doesn't create much air pollution. The EPA protects Rhode Island from other States' air pollution with--guess what--the cross- state air pollution rule. He wants to overturn it. Finally, ``CUT THE STAFF OF THE U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY IN AT LEAST HALF.'' Well, they are doing a pretty good job of destroying the Environmental Protection Agency as an agency that does environmental protection, but I have to say, cutting the Agency in half and firing half of it--that seems a bit much. They also want Justices of the Supreme Court who rule in favor of coal. They want to replace all the members of the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission, the members of the Tennessee Valley Authority board, and the members of the National Labor Relations Board. There is a bunch in there to make sure that coal safety regulations are undone. That is what we are dealing with. We are dealing with an agency that has been taken over by the fossil fuel industry, and it has gotten so bad that I want to conclude with this editorial, which I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks. This is an editorial from, of all places, the Charleston, WV, Gazette-Mail. I think the body can take notice that West Virginia is more or less the heart of coal country. Here is what the Charleston, WV, Gazette-Mail said about where things are at EPA right now. The title is ``Editorial: With self-serving Pruitt at EPA, Trump is building a swamp.'' Here are some selections: Donald Trump campaign crowds loved to chant, ``Drain the Swamp!'' But if ever there was a political swamp creature, it's Scott Pruitt, the man Trump picked to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The Charleston Gazette-Mail continues: Pruitt has been a shill for fossil fuel industries since his days as attorney general in Oklahoma, so maybe he saw this-- all his self-aggrandizing expenditures-- as his just desserts. But of all the Trump administration flunkies who have used taxpayer money for their personal benefit, Pruitt may be the worst. That is the word from Charleston, WV. Some of the examples: [Pruitt] used a loophole in the Safe Drinking Water Act that's supposed to let the EPA hire experts quickly in a [drinking water] emergency . . . [to] give tax taxpayer- funded raises to political lackeys. [He] took first-class, charter, and military flights that cost taxpayers $163,000. He . . . tripled the size of his security detail. He had the EPA spend $25,000-- I think we actually know that is up to $43,000 now-- to build a soundproof communications booth in his office. There is nothing more that the EPA Administrator needs than a cone- of-silence soundproof booth in his office--as if he is running the CIA or something. They conclude: There are many reasons why Scott Pruitt shouldn't be leading the EPA, primarily that he doesn't seem to believe in science and is more interested in helping big business than, you know, protecting the environment. But his obvious belief that taxpayer money and resources are given to him for his personal benefit is a big reason, as well. I thank the newspaper in West Virginia for acknowledging that some conduct is so disgraceful that it goes too far. When that is the No. 1 person in the EPA, we have no business confirming this person as the No. 2 person for the EPA. With that, I see colleagues who, I assume, want to speak in favor of this nominee, and I will yield the floor to them.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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