Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am pleased to urge all of my colleagues to give a strong bipartisan voice vote in support of the amendment by the Senator from Georgia. The current budget process does not produce a meaningful budget, does not control the debt or the deficit, and does not contribute to bipartisanship or compromise. What it does produce is a meaningless, partisan vote-arama. If you believe we can do better than a vote-arama, if you believe we can have an improved and meaningful budget process, voice vote aye.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, let me echo the remarks of the senior Senator from Ohio. Like Ohio, Rhode Island has a very significant opioid problem, and we came together in this Chamber to support the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. I had the privilege of being the principal Democratic author of that piece of legislation, and Senator Portman of Ohio was the principal Republican author of that legislation. We worked for years to set it up--to hold the hearings necessary, to get the information together, to make it work. When we did, it passed this body with a massive bipartisan expression of support. It makes no sense to nominate somebody to this position who does not understand what we understand, which is that the drug epidemic is, at its heart, a public health emergency and an illness. A reversion to law enforcement harshness in dealing with this problem will simply not be effective.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, today I wish to honor the service of my friend Anne Maxwell Livingston. Mrs. Livingston has served since 2011 as chairwoman of the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council, CRMC, which protects Rhode Island's coastal resources through research, regulation, and restoration. During her 6-year tenure, CRMC has been a nationally recognized leader in ocean and coastal management. One of the shining jewels of CRMC's work has been its innovative Special Area Management Plans, or SAMPs. These plans are ecosystem-based management strategies developed in collaboration with government agencies, municipalities, and other stakeholders to best manage coastal systems. During Mrs. Livingston's tenure, the council saw its groundbreaking ocean SAMP, the first formally adopted ocean spatial plan in the country, pay real-life dividends. In developing this plan, CRMC engaged a diverse group of stakeholders and laid the groundwork for cooperation among a multitude of regulatory agencies. This effort and CRMC's continued engagement in the process paved the way for the successful development of the Nation's first offshore wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. The CRMC has also helped Rhode Island towns and residents understand the increasing effects of sea level rise and storm surge. Using the latest climate change predictions and state-of-the-art modeling, CRMC, in cooperation with the University of Rhode Island and others, developed an online tool, STORMTOOLS, that gives anyone with an internet connection free access to information that can be used to help decide everything from what neighborhood to buy a home in to where to site a new stormwater treatment plant. CRMC is now developing a coastal environmental risk index that can show Rhode Island homeowners individualized flood risks in 3-D. In addition to her service on the CRMC, Mrs. Livingston has served Rhode Islanders as a board member of the Jamestown Tax Assessment Board of Review and on the board of the Girl Scouts of Rhode Island and the Jamestown Education Foundation. She also continues to serve as treasurer for the Opera House Theater & Performing Arts Center in Newport and on the advisory boards of the Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island and the Providence Children's Museum. Mrs. Livingston is a passionate and committed leader, and I am grateful for her many years of service to our State's CRMC.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, this week on an island nation one- tenth the size of Rhode Island, more than 60 countries will gather at the fourth international Our Ocean Conference. Catalyzed by then- Secretary of State John Kerry, the United States hosted the premier international ocean conference in 2014 and 2016. Secretary Kerry's legacy continues with the Malta Conference now going on, hosted by the European Union, and that will be followed by scheduled conferences in Indonesia in 2018 and Norway in 2019. Nations come to these conferences to share ocean conservation achievements and to pledge future efforts in sustainable fisheries, marine debris prevention, marine protected areas, maritime security, and climate change. At last count, conference organizers in Malta are anticipating more than 150 separate pledges from governments, NGOs, and the private sector. Since Secretary Kerry started it, the Our Ocean Conference has produced hundreds of commitments, totaling nearly $10 billion and protecting nearly 4 million square miles of ocean. Though the oceans cover more than 70 percent of our Earth, they are often taken for granted. Oceans drive our weather, cool our planet, provide food and income for billions of people, and absorb much of our carbon dioxide emissions. So for my 181st ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, I will return to the topic of what we are doing to our oceans. The oceans provide a hard-to- deny reminder of what is happening, thanks to greenhouse gas emissions, climate change denial, and America's legislative paralysis. Physics and chemistry don't care about fossil fuel industry propaganda. It doesn't affect them at all. Science measures how our carbon pollution continues to drive unprecedented change in the Earth's oceans. The oceans have absorbed about one-third of all the excess carbon dioxide emitted by human activity since the Industrial Revolution; that is, around 600 gigatons of carbon dioxide absorbed by the ocean. The effect of absorbing all that carbon dioxide is chemical, making ocean water more acidic at the fastest rate in 50 million years. Humankind has been on the planet only about 800,000 or so years, so 50 million goes way back. This acidification is potentially calamitous for the ocean ecosystem. Off Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, 50 percent of pteropods were measured to have ``severe shell damage,'' mostly from acidified sea water. If that species collapses, the bottom falls out of the oceanic food chain, with a cascading effect up to us at the top of the food chain. Ocean acidification is causing real economic concerns on coasts all around the country. It is affecting Florida's reefs, for instance. Rhode Island's clammers, lobstermen, and aquaculture growers watch with real alarm the damage acidified seas are doing on America's northwest coast. Oyster hatcheries there experienced significant losses when new hatches were unable to grow their shells in the acidified seawater. Those hatcheries now need to buffer ocean water to keep the pH at a survivable level for baby clams, oysters, and other shellfish. Well, you can do that for your aquaculture lab, but you can't do that for the ocean. So it bodes well for the future of these shellfish. In addition to the CO2 the oceans have absorbed--30 percent of that--they have also absorbed heat. They have absorbed over 90 percent of the excess heat that climate change has trapped in our atmosphere, thanks to the operation of the greenhouse gases we have emitted. The oceans, in doing that, have conferred on us an extraordinary blessing because without their absorbing more than 90 percent of that heat--forget the 2 degrees Centigrade cap that we worry about--we would likely be already more than 36 degrees Centigrade hotter. That isn't just life changing; that is species-changing variation in our planet. When oceans absorb all of this heat, which is equivalent to more than a Hiroshima-style nuclear bomb per second going off, the principle of thermal expansion kicks in. As oceans warm, they expand, and as the world warms from the remaining heat, ice melts. So between the two, sea levels rise. NOAA, in January, updated global sea level rise estimates based on the latest peer-reviewed scientific literature. Ice sheets and glaciers are melting faster than previously expected, raising global sea level rise estimates in this century--under the ``we do nothing on climate change'' scenario--by around 20 more inches on average. Apply these findings to the U.S. coast, and the news gets particularly harsh for the northeast Atlantic coast, including my home State of Rhode Island. Rhode Island's Coastal Resources Management Council is now telling us that we need to plan for as much as 9 to 12 vertical feet of sea level rise by the end of this century. The refusal of the Republican majority to do anything serious about climate change is going to have a big effect on the very map of my State. This is the present Upper Narragansett Bay, including Providence up here, our capital city, down to Greenwich Bay down here, and Warwick on the west side. Over here, we have Bristol and Warren on the east side of the image, and it still looks actually very much like it did when early explorers first came to Rhode Island in the 1600s. And it looked very much like that for centuries before, when the Narragansetts and the Wampanoags lived here. But as climate change raises sea levels, all of this is changing rapidly. The Coastal Resources Management Council has developed something called STORMTOOLS, which is an online simulation to model sea level rise and storm surge, so we can see how rising sea levels will affect my State. This is the same image as that one. I will put one over the other so that you can see the match. Everything that is blue is land and is now submerged on these 9-to-12-foot sea level estimates. It all has changed quite dramatically. Warwick Neck breaks off and becomes Warwick Neck Island. Much of the town of Barrington here becomes a new salt lake. This is a bedroom community with a lot of wealthy people living in very nice homes, and it all goes under water. Down here, Bristol and Warren become an island, and off of them, Poppasquash Point becomes two islands. This continues all around the State. The map changes, and we become a Rhode Island archipelago. Look at Newport, Little Compton, Tiverton, Providence, Jamestown, Point Judith. Flooded areas in my State represent billions of dollars in losses to Rhode Islanders. Of course, around the visibly flooded areas are the less visible areas where legal setbacks, flood zones, velocity zones, and other building restrictions prevent construction. In those areas that are still above water, it is still unbuildable because the property has become uninsurable, unmortgageable, or unsellable. That is a pretty hard hit to expect my State to take without objection. It is not just Rhode Island; all sorts of changes are happening along America's coasts. Up in the Gulf of Maine, ocean waters are warming faster than nearly any other place on earth. A study published in Elementa last month found that summer temperatures in the Gulf of Maine last two months longer than in the 1980s. Longer, warmer summers benefit some species, but others get hurt, including what little is left of the iconic cod. Native villages in Alaska and island communities in Louisiana and Maryland are facing tough decisions about abandoning traditional shorelands and islands and relocating. Around the world, entire nations are planning for relocation as the ocean steadily rises over their island homes. Layered on top of this sea level rise is the worsening risk of storm surge and flooding from hurricanes and other storms. The Presiding Officer does not need to be told about this. His State has experienced it firsthand. This satellite image is a snapshot of this particularly destructive 2017 hurricane system. From the left to right, we see Hurricane Katia, Hurricane Irma--at category 5 strength--and Hurricane Jose down here. As the recovery efforts continue for our citizens in Puerto Rico, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, and we look at hundreds of billions of dollars in disaster relief emergency spending, here in Washington we might want to think about helping coastal States around the country get serious about predicting what is coming, shoring up our coastlines, fortifying coastal infrastructure, and preparing for what climate change has in store for us. Climate change is not the only way we are damaging the oceans. Each year, around 8 million metric tons of plastic waste enters our oceans from land. By 2050, we could see as much plastic in the oceans as fish in the oceans by weight, since plastics do not fully degrade in the ocean. They just break down into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic, and those travel the globe on ocean currents. Plastic is now everywhere; on our beaches, in our oceans, ingested and entangling our wildlife. It is even in tapwater, salt, and other foods that we humans consume. Plastic waste has been found on remote islands, in deep-sea sediments, and in sea ice. In an area previously inaccessible to researchers due to that sea ice, the Arctic is apparently releasing frozen plastic back into the oceans. That is how badly we are polluting our oceans. An international research expedition to the North Pole even found chunks of plastic littering that remote region. Thankfully, there is interest in solving our ocean trash problem in the Senate. At last year's Our Ocean Conference, over $1 billion was pledged to combat marine debris. Additional commitments are expected this year. Our Senate Oceans Caucus work parallels work around the world. The Senate Oceans Caucus is a bipartisan group. There are 36 of us. We have made marine debris one of our focus areas. In August, by unanimous consent, we passed the Save Our Seas Act, a bipartisan bill to reauthorize NOAA's marine debris program and expand its ability to deal with severe marine debris events, where tsunamis or huge storms sweep enormous amounts of plastic garbage into the oceans and then ultimately onto our shores. The bill asks the President to increase U.S. international efforts to reduce marine debris, including improving international waste management practices and improving research on plastics that will actually biodegrade in the ocean. It also directs the U.S. Trade Representative to start considering marine plastic debris--much of which comes from just a few countries--when dealing with them in future trade agreements. We reinforced this piece of the bill recently in the National Defense Authorization Act, which we passed just last month. The Save Our Seas Act garnered support from environmental NGOs, from corporations, from chemical trade groups, but there is still much more work to do. We have abused and ignored our oceans for far too long. The oceans are warning us in every way they know how, and we can't afford to ignore those warnings any longer. We must start taking serious action to respond to what we are doing to our oceans. I promise you, anybody who knows anything about oceans hears those alarm bells ringing. It is time for us 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 15 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, may I bid a public farewell to Emily Enderle, who is here with me and who has served as the lead on my very active and busy environment unit for quite some time now. She is going on to another role in Washington and will continue to serve our cause. She has done an amazing job, and I want to be sure to say that on what will be her last appearance on the floor with me for one of our ``Time to Wake Up'' speeches. Climate Change Mr. President, I have spoken before, as you know, about the fossil fuel industry's persistent effort to undermine public understanding of climate change and to confuse people about the actual effects of carbon pollution on our atmosphere and oceans. I have mentioned Drexel University Professor Robert Brulles' follow- the-money analysis, which reveals the complex network of organizations and funding--what we have called the web of denial--that is designed to obscure the fossil fuel industry's fingerprints and to perpetuate the fossil fuel industry's climate denial. Dr. Brulle calls this ``a deliberate and organized effort to misdirect the public discussion and distort the public's understanding of climate.'' That is what this industry is up to. One front group for that industry is called the Heartland Institute. It is a nice name, but they are not very nice people. For decades, the Heartland Institute has played a prominent role disseminating alternative facts and fake science at the behest of its industry funders. They have a long history of doing the bidding of industry funders. In the 1990s, it was teamed up with Philip Morris to challenge the facts about the health risks of tobacco. Using the same tactics-- along with funding from the Koch Family Foundations, ExxonMobil, and other fossil fuel interests--it undermines public confidence in the established scientific consensus about climate change. Heartland is quite shameless in its methods, once sponsoring a billboard comparing those who accept the science of global warming to the Unabomber. For my 180th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, I would like to explore the Heartland Institute's latest gambit, which is to airdrop climate denial propaganda directly into children's classrooms. This spring, Heartland delivered packages to hundreds of thousands of K-12 and college-level science teachers across the country. These materials were designed to have a veneer of credibility. Each one was stamped with the headline ``Study: Science Teachers Giving Unbalanced Education on Climate Change.'' This intriguing story was attributed to something called Environment & Climate News. Inside the package, the teachers found a report titled ``Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming.'' It was issued by something called the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. As a bonus, each teacher also received a DVD copy of the ``History of Climate Change in Greenland,'' produced by Idea Channel. A cover letter from Heartland's Center for Transforming Education-- transforming education into propaganda, I assume is how that sentence gets finished--asks teachers to ``consider the possibility'' the science of climate change isn't settled. That is the package they got. Let's look behind that veneer. When you do, the smell gets pretty rotten. It turns out that the Environment & Climate News is not actually news. It is not a news outlet. It is the monthly newsletter of, guess who, the Heartland Institute. They are citing themselves, masquerading their newsletter as a news outlet. The foolishness goes on. Their featured article, ``Study: Science Teachers Giving Unbalanced Education on Climate Change'' was written by a person named Bonner Cohen, who is a featured expert--guess where--with the Heartland Institute, who previously held senior positions in--believe it or not-- Philip Morris front groups. Their Nongovernmental International Panel On Climate Change sounds like a well-known actual authority: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The actual Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a United Nations-sanctioned, Nobel Prize-winning scientific body that reports the findings of thousands of climate scientists from hundreds of countries. The Heartland group--this so-called Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change--is a misleading decoy designed to mimic the real entity. The three experts who wrote the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change report Heartland pushed out do not have degrees in climate change modeling, do not having degrees in climate science. All are paid by Heartland. All their claims have been repeatedly debunked by real science. There is one faint hint of accuracy in this propaganda publication Heartland put out. There actually is a PBS series called Idea Channel. However, the Idea Channel DVD in the Heartland packet has nothing to do with that series. It was actually produced by something called the Free To Choose Network, whose funding, like Heartland's, is linked to the fossil fuel industry. It is another masquerade designed to mislead. One of the tricks of Heartland's little scheme was to dupe legitimate scientists into participating. One of the experts interviewed, Rie Oldenberg, the curator at Greenland's Narsaq Museum, was told she was participating in a video on Norse history for the Discovery Channel. When she found out what she had been duped into, she said: ``I am somewhat horrified.'' Other participants are frequent fliers in the climate denial circus, like Willie Soon, who received over a million dollars in funding since 2001 from the Koch brothers, the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, and other fossil fuel interests. The year the video was released, Willie Soon received nearly $20,000 from Free To Choose. The Heartland cover letter asked teachers to ``consider the possibility'' the science of climate change isn't settled. Even that is not new. This echoes the infamous Big Tobacco declaration, ``Doubt is our product.'' The heart of the fossil fuel industry's scheme is to undermine legitimate science with false doubts. Because of the financial stakes behind industry science denial and because of the communications advantages propaganda has over real science--you don't need to waste a lot of time in peer review, for instance, you go straight to the networks--this scheme is a real problem for institutions like our schools that cherish and support real science. All this masquerade and subterfuge by Heartland Institute looked a lot like fraud. Senators Schatz, Warren, Markey, and I wrote to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to ask whether DeVos and her staff at the Department of Education helped or coordinated with the Heartland Institute on this scheme to pollute our classrooms with phony science. That simple request drew quite the response from our friends at the Heartland Institute. ``Your letter is a monumental misuse of your office and a betrayal of the trust of your constituents,'' wrote Heartland CEO Joseph Bast. He called our letter ``defamatory'' and ``despicable.'' ``Shame, shame, shame,'' he proclaimed in bold font-- this, unironically, from that same classy group that put up the billboard comparing anyone who accepts climate science to the Unabomber, just to give you an idea of their level of shame. Even that little outburst is considerably nicer than in 2015 when Bast called some of us ``fascists'' and ``ethically challenged . . . mental midgets.'' Why is the Heartland Institute so very touchy? We obviously hit a nerve. The lesson is, poke an imposter and the imposter gets very agitated. Fortunately, teachers are smart people who follow real science. Imposters like Heartland that pretend their stuff is coming through an Idea Channel that it isn't, that mimic the name of real organizations to try to fool people, that pretend their newsletter is real news and package the whole thing up as if it is intended to be helpful to teachers face an uphill battle against informed educators. One example, Nebraska recently approved new State standards requiring climate change to be taught in schools. According to the Omaha World- Herald, Nebraska's new standards ``challenge kids to think and act like scientists,'' which is exactly what our science classrooms ought to do. One Omaha resident encouraged the school board to ``do the ethical thing and tell the next generation what's going on with climate.'' A science professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln said the standards represented ``good solid science, good solid science education.'' This is what we need in science education--real-life scientists from real institutions of higher learning engaging and helping our children learn. What we don't need are fossil fuel front groups pumping out more phony science to pollute public education, just like they pollute our oceans and atmosphere. I have been pretty heartened to hear about this from teachers working in classrooms in my home State of Rhode Island. Holly Emery teaches science to seventh and eighth graders at Exeter-West Greenwich Junior High School. Her students focus on solutions to climate change-- something we could use a bit more of around here. They examined Germany's plan to significantly reduce its carbon emissions. Students were so motivated by what they heard, they requested to share their projects with other grades in the school. One of Miss Emery's students said: ``This is important and the other kids need to know.'' Students in Jane Ramos's eighth grade science class at Gallagher Middle School in Smithfield learn about climates around the world. They read, research, and make slides about the human contributions to climate change, including the carbon cycle, burning fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect, deforestation, livestock practices, and the production of methane. They discuss the effects of warmer oceans, expansion of water, melting ice, and rising seawater levels. These are important issues for Rhode Island, the Ocean State. Science students from Brenda Dillmann's class at South Kingstown High School planted grass on the Narrow River salt marsh as part of a major unit on climate. During the lessons, the students learned about the role that salt marshes play as carbon sinks--absorbent carbon from the atmosphere. They went out and got dirty and planted by hand some 35,000 seedlings of 3 different types of salt marsh grasses. Since 2007, more than 500 students have become climate experts in Kara Ratigan and Renee Hadfield's fourth grade class at James H. Eldredge Elementary School in East Greenwich. Ratigan and Hadfield have developed a curriculum that integrates climate change across all subject areas. For the kids, the year begins with a visit to a local assisted living facility, where students pair up with a senior buddy. The students interview their senior buddies, asking how the climate has changed over time and looking for lessons that can be applied today. In their math class, students learn how to read charts and graphs and how to frame a convincing argument through data. In social studies, the students learn about the regions of the United States, about their differing climates, and about how each is affected by climate change. In science, the students learn about erosion and weather patterns and the effects of human activity on rock, soils, and sediments. Students make observations about climate change all around them and delve into society's responses to the harms of climate change. This past spring, the Norman Bird Sanctuary, in Middletown, hosted seventh graders for a beach ecology lesson at nearby Third Beach. The director of education, Rachel Holbert, and her staff led a discussion with the students about the greenhouse effect associated with burning fossil fuels. They explained how the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere puts stress on the oceans, undermining the oceans' ability to stabilize the global climate and, of course, leading, as we have seen, to a higher frequency and strength of extreme weather events, such as powerful hurricanes. The kids' lesson ended with a focus on solutions. If the oceans are the heart and lungs of the climate, what can prevent future damage? Teachers like them play such an important and formative role in helping the next generation understand the world we live in. They teach our children to make observations, collect information, and use evidence to formulate conclusions. They are honest and they are decent. The fossil fuel industry, on the other hand, is neither honest nor decent. The filthy hand of the fossil fuel industry has, regrettably, a firm grip on this Congress. There is a reason that we never do anything about climate change, and it does not involve the merits of the issue. It involves the politics of the industry. We have, perhaps, not yet plumbed the bottom of how low they are willing to go, but, surely, this is a new low to reach with their game of phony science, masquerade, and subterfuge into our children's classrooms, like Ms. Emery's, Ms. Ramos's, Ms. Dillmann's, Ms. Ratigan's, and Ms. Hadfield's. These honorable, decent teachers help their students gain a fact-based understanding of the changing world around them and the issues facing our society. Unfortunately, these Heartland Institute materials may require those teachers to teach about politics and propaganda as well. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, each week that you see me standing here means another week in which the Senate of the United States has sat out doing anything to address climate change and another week of carbon pollution streaming into our atmosphere and oceans. Carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is changing our atmosphere and our oceans. We see it everywhere. We see it in storm-damaged homes and flooded cities. We see it in drought-stricken farms and raging wildfires. We see it in fish disappearing from warming, acidifying waters. We see it in shifting habitats and migrating contagions. All these harms we see carry costs--real economic costs--to homeowners, business owners, and taxpayers. That cost to homeowners, business owners, and taxpayers is known as the social cost of carbon pollution. It is the damage that people and communities and States suffer from carbon pollution and climate change. The Office of Management and Budget last calculated the social cost of carbon to be around $49 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted. If you just do some simple math, you can multiply the total measured U.S. emissions coming from energy production alone in 2016--that is emissions of over 5.7 billion tons of CO2--by the $49 cost per ton. It is pretty simple math: $49 times 5.7 billion tons gives you about $280 billion. So $280 billion is the annual cost that the fossil fuel industry offloads onto the American public in harm from the carbon dioxide emissions. That is a big number and a big consequence--$280 billion per year. There was a more complex analysis than my simple math that was done by the International Monetary Fund. The International Monetary Fund has a lot of smart people. They don't have any conflict of interest that I am aware of in dealing with this issue. Their calculation puts the annual subsidy just in the United States of America for the fossil fuel industry at $700 billion per year. So is it my simple math where the social cost of carbon is $280 billion per year or is it what the International Monetary Fund calculated at $700 billion per year? Whichever it is, it is a big enough harm to the American public that you would think we might do something about it here in the Senate. But of course, we don't because that huge social cost of carbon, that huge subsidy gives the fossil fuel industry the biggest incentive in the world to--instead of fixing up its situation and cleaning up its mess--come over here and instead mess with our politics so that our ability to deal with this issue is silenced by their political muscle and manipulations. One way in which they play this game is to populate the climate denial machinery with one-eyed accountants--accountants who can only see the pollutants' side of the ledger. Honestly, we hear their testimony. The only thing they see is the cost to polluters of reducing their pollution. They don't see the public harm side of the ledger. They pretend it is a liberal conspiracy cooked up by the Obama administration. Or say you are the Republican chairman of the House Science Committee and you say: The social cost of carbon is a ``flawed value . . . to justify the [EPA's] alarmist reasoning for support of the Clean Power Plan and other climate regulations.'' Actually, if you take away the bad words ``flawed'' and ``alarmist'' and all of that stuff, the statement is actually true. There is a value to avoiding carbon pollution, and defending that public value from the polluters does justify the Clean Power Plan. This is the social cost of carbon. Let's go back for a minute to 2006, when the Bush administration's National Highway Transportation Safety Administration put out a rule for vehicle fuel economy standards. There was some dissatisfaction with that rule. States and other stakeholders complained that this rule failed to take into account the social cost of carbon emissions from cars--something that should matter for a rule that is looking to reduce emissions from cars. Well, that went up on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and in 2007, the Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. The court acknowledged that there is a cost of carbon pollution, and that cost is ``certainly not zero.'' So it told the agency to go back, redo the rule and to come up with a real social cost of carbon. Thus was born the legal requirement that agencies consider a social cost of carbon in decisions. Because of this decision, the Bush administration produced a wide range of numbers up to $159 per ton of carbon emissions. The Obama administration continued the effort to calculate a social cost of carbon. An interagency working group, including scientists and economists from across the Federal Government, relied on existing scientific literature and on well vetted scientific models to produce a first standard in 2010, with additional updates in 2013, 2015, and 2016. When Federal agencies didn't apply any social cost of carbon, courts corrected them. In 2014, a Federal judge in Colorado faulted the Bureau of Land Management for failing to account for greenhouse gas emissions when it approved an Arch Coal mine expansion in the Gunnison National Forest. The court suspended the approval until the Bureau of Land Management either used the social cost of carbon or gave a valid explanation as to why not. When agencies did use the social cost of carbon, their decisions were upheld. In 2016 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld the Department of Energy's use of the social cost of carbon in the agency's standards for commercial refrigeration equipment. The industry objected, and on appeal, the Seventh Circuit said: No, they did the right thing putting that in there. Just last month, a three-judge panel from another U.S. circuit court of appeals--in this case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit--ruled that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has to consider the effects of carbon emissions that would result from building three pipelines in the Southeast. Specifically, the ruling directed FERC to either better calculate the project's carbon emissions, using the social cost of carbon, or explain why it didn't use it. Also last month, another U.S. district court blocked another coal mine expansion in Montana, citing the agency's failure to assess the environmental effects of coal. Specifically, the judge referenced the agency's failure to include any social cost of carbon. Just last week a Federal appeals court in Denver told the Bureau of Land Management that its lack of analysis on the climate effects of four coal leases in the Powder River Basin was ``irrational'' and told them to start over. It is not just Federal courts. Agencies at the State level are also using the social cost of carbon pollution in their activities. The New York Public Service Commission affirmed the importance of the social cost of carbon in its zero-emissions credit program. The Illinois State legislature also incorporated a social cost of carbon into its zero- emissions credit program, and prevailed in a challenge in the courts. These State zero-emissions programs were the programs that were rolled out to help existing nuclear energy providers against competition by natural gas plants. The carbon price allowed carbon-free nuclear generation to better compete in the wholesale markets. Up in Minnesota, since 1993, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission has required utilities to consider the estimated cost of carbon emissions in planning for new infrastructure projects. This year, the commission voted to raise its social cost of carbon to $43 per ton. The Colorado Public Utilities Commission recently ordered the local utility Xcel to use the social cost of carbon in its resource planning documents. Colorado told its utilities to use $43 per ton starting in 2022 and to ramp up to nearly $70 per ton by 2050. It is not just Federal courts and State agencies. Private companies in the United States and around the globe are incorporating the social cost of carbon into their own operations and accounting. Investors are beginning to demand that corporations perform this kind of analysis in order to qualify for investment. Big investors like Black Rock have taken on big companies like Exxon in order to break through the denial. Just last week, the Washington Post reported that 1,200 global businesses either have adopted or are adopting a carbon price in some form. The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions found that companies like Microsoft, Disney, the insurance giant Swiss Re, Unilever, Shell, BP, the mining corporation Rio Tinto, and General Motors have all taken steps to put a price on their own use of carbon. Courts have made it the law for agencies to use the social cost of carbon. States are deploying the social cost of carbon. The business community recognizes and is incorporating into its financial planning the social cost of carbon. Yet here in Congress and down at the Trump White House, the leaders of the Republican Party continue to ignore climate change, pretend it doesn't exist, and ignore the very real costs that society bears from carbon pollution. It goes without saying that the storm that has just ravaged Florida was spun up by warmer ocean waters, carried more rain because of warmer air, dumped more rain, and pushed storm surge further into Florida because of risen seas and those other characteristics. Are we seeing any action? No. The President in March issued a sweeping Executive order rolling back Federal energy and environmental standards. It disbanded the interagency working group, and it asserted that the social cost of carbon was ``no longer representative of governmental policy.'' Nice try with that, given where the courts are. Of course, the House and the Senate Republicans followed suit by introducing a pair of bills by Congressman Evan Jenkins on the House side and our colleague from Oklahoma, Senator Lankford, on our side that purport to prohibit the Federal Government from using the social cost of carbon in rulemaking and in regulatory processes. Of course, you can't do that, and those laws aren't going anywhere. Why? Because they violate a very basic principle both in courts and in administrative agencies. That very basic principle is at the heart of the rule of law, and it is that facts have to be factual and that conclusions have to be logical. Any decision that fails this standard-- that is, to use the administrative law terms ``arbitrary and capricious'' or ``not based on substantial evidence''--fails as a matter of law. Although Congress, of course, is bound and gagged by the polluters and their front groups, it is going to be hard for those polluters to try to stop the social cost of carbon in courts and administrative agencies. Despite the efforts of ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers to make America their fossil fuel banana republic, we still are a rule-of-law country and those rule-of-law principles that facts must be factual and that conclusions must be logical are too basic for our courts and administrative agencies to ignore. In our courts and administrative agencies, lying and misleading can be exposed on cross-examination, for instance, and lying and misleading gets you punished, unlike in Congress where lying and misleading have been fossil fuel tactics for decades and sickeningly successful ones backed up by huge political muscle. The failure in Congress and the remedy in the courts is one reason the Founding Fathers designed our government that way so that even where political branches of government were captured by special interests, there would still be a path for the truth, and there would still be a means for justice to have its way. If the courts and the States and so many major businesses are all behind recognizing the social cost of carbon, who is behind the President and our Republican colleagues in denying that it is real? In my experience, it is powerful trade associations like the American Petroleum Institute, the American Chemistry Council, the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and others that have a distaste for any honest assessment of the social cost of carbon. Right now, since the costs of those industries' pollution is offloaded onto the rest of us for free, why not? Why would they want to start paying for the harm they cause right now? Think tanks and front groups funded by the Koch brothers and other polluters have vigorously fought against recognizing the fact of the social cost of carbon for years. These groups have neutral sounding names--maybe even friendly sounding names--like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Energy Alliance, the Heritage Foundation, FreedomWorks--my personal favorite--the Heartland Institute, a group so good that it put up billboards comparing climate scientists to the Unabomber. It is really a classy contribution to the debate. One thing this crowd of bad actors does know is how to throw its weight around, especially since the Citizens United decision threw open the floodgates of special interest money into our politics. That is what has put Congress in the thrall of the polluters. It is an indecent and wrong place for us to be, but with any luck, the adherence of courts and administrative agencies to the rule of law--the principles that facts must be factual and conclusions must be logical--will help us get out of the political trap that the fossil fuel industry has constructed. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as the Senate considers the annual authorization of our military and national defense programs, I am here for my 178th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, to discuss the security risks climate change presents to our Nation. I urge my colleagues to heed the warnings from our national security experts, not just the self-serving propaganda of the fossil fuel industry that blankets us. What are these national security risks? A first order of security risk is the physical damage climate change is causing in our atmosphere, oceans, and environment. Science and our senses are already perceiving this damage, indeed already measuring this damage. This order of security risk--risk to the Earth's natural order--will hurt farming communities, coastal communities, fishing communities, and anyone vulnerable to wildfires and extreme weather all around the world. Of course, the poorer you are, the more vulnerable you are to this risk. The second order of security risk from climate change is the consequences in human society from those physical, biological, and chemical changes in our Earth's environment. As farms or fisheries fail, people are impoverished and dislocated. Scarcity of resources leads to conflicts and confrontations. Storms and fires and floods can make the suffering acute. People who are hungry or dislocated or torn from their roots can become desperate, can become radicalized and violent. That is why the Department of Defense has for many years called climate change a ``catalyst of conflict.'' Researchers from NASA and the University of Arizona determined that drought in Syria was very likely the worst in a thousand years. Massive crop failures and livestock losses moved farmers into stressed cities, where popular protests met brutal violence from the Assad regime. The tide of refugees from that chaos swamped Europe. To the extent the droughts in Syria were a root cause of the discontent that led to the conflict, and ultimately to the flight of refugees, European governments have seen this second order of security risk up close. There is a third order of security risk, and that is damage to the keystone institutions of our present world order--market capitalism and democratic government. We depend for the quality of life we enjoy on market capitalism and democratic governance, and those institutions-- capitalism and democracy--in turn depend on popular approval and confidence. But if you are a person whose livelihood has been harmed by the first-order environmental effects of climate change or if you are a person swept up in the second-order societal effects of climate change or even if you are simply a person who is dismayed as you witness the suffering and harm caused by climate change around you, you will want answers. It is human nature to want answers. When people are hurt, they want a reckoning. When that reckoning comes, the discredit to institutions like capitalism and democracy could be profound for having failed to act in face of a known risk. Add to that failure to act a moral failure--why the failure to act? Fossil fuel companies, corporate entities, are knowingly causing this harm, and at least in the United States, they are aggressively fighting political solutions to the problem. They are fighting with professionally administered misinformation. Climate denial is the original fake news--with an absurd arsenal of political money. Companies not in the fossil fuel industry often have excellent climate policies within their corporate fence lines and sometimes even for their supply chains. But as we know in this building, these good companies collectively take essentially no action, particularly here in Congress, to offset the political force of the fossil fuel industry. Indeed, many companies with good climate policies nevertheless support industry organizations that are the instruments of the fossil fuel companies in preventing solutions. This all stands to be a lasting and dangerous discredit to the corporate sector and to market capitalism generally, and the discredit will worsen as the danger worsens. In Congress, we have nothing to brag about. We have shown ourselves unable to resist the fossil fuel industry, despite knowing it to be deeply burdened with obvious and enormous conflicts of interest and despite clear and repeated warnings from our national security experts. They could not have made it plainer. The Pentagon's 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review described climate change as a ``global threat multiplier,'' warning that ``the pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world.'' Similar were the 2010 QDR and our national intelligence reviews. During his Senate confirmation process, Secretary of Defense James Mattis told this body: Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today. It is appropriate for the Combatant Commands to incorporate drivers of instability that impact the security environment in their areas into their planning. That is, climate change needs to be a part of command planning. In response to a question from the Armed Services Committee, he testified: I agree that the effects of a changing climate--such as increased maritime access to the Arctic, rising sea levels, desertification, among others--impact our security situation. I will ensure that the Department continues to be prepared to conduct operations today and in the future, and that we are prepared to address the effects of a changing climate on our threat assessments, resources, and readiness. Former Admiral Samuel Locklear, as head of U.S. Pacific Command, warned in 2013 that climate change was the biggest long-term security threat in his area of operation, noting the need for the military to organize for ``when the effects of climate change start to impact these massive populations.'' ``If it goes bad,'' he said, ``you could have hundreds of thousands or millions of people displaced and then security will start to crumble pretty quickly.'' The Government Accountability Office is our Federal Government's watchdog. GAO has warned that climate change could affect military testing, training, and operating activities, hampering readiness and mission continuity. They have also warned of DOD's ``fiscal exposure'' to climate change. GAO says that climate change is already affecting our defense infrastructure around the globe--555,000 facilities and 28 million acres of land, with a replacement value of close to $850 billion. For instance, the Army's Fort Irwin, CA, is susceptible to heavy rain and flooding. Air Force radar installations in Alaska stand on unstable, thawing permafrost. The Diego Garcia installation in the Indian Ocean and Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia each face rising seas. In his new book ``The Water Will Come,'' author Jeff Goodell quotes the former Norfolk naval station commander, Joe Bouchard. The commander said: It was not a nuisance problem--it was not a minor operational issue. Sea-level rise was interfering with the combat readiness for the Atlantic fleet. I repeat: Sea-level rise was interfering with the combat readiness of our Atlantic fleet. The Navy is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to raise piers and other infrastructure above the rising waters. Goodell writes: But a base like Norfolk . . . is the hub of an entire ecosystem that has grown up around it . . . fuel suppliers and electrical lines and railroad tracks and repair shops and . . . housing . . . and . . . schools. . . . You can't just move all this to some random spot. What is happening in Norfolk is pretty damn serious. In 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry went to Norfolk, and he asked officers there how long they thought the base could hold out. ``Twenty to 50 years,'' Captain J. Pat Rios replied. Goodell describes it as what he calls ``an extraordinary moment in the annals of American military history: A U.S. naval captain had just told the Secretary of State that the strategically important base, home to six aircraft carriers and key to operations in Europe and the Middle East, would be essentially inoperable in as little as 20 years.'' The bill approved by the Armed Services Committee recognizes this and requires the Pentagon to submit a ``comprehensive threat assessment,'' describing the climate risks to military missions and the climate- related vulnerabilities of that massive DOD infrastructure. The Department is further directed to submit an ``implementation master plan,'' detailing the steps that DOD will take to mitigate climate- related mission risks, incorporate climate-related events in combatant commanders' theater campaign plans, address military infrastructure vulnerabilities, update military construction standards for predicted flooding and extreme weather, and evaluate DOD's progress adapting to climate change. I commend Chairman John McCain and Ranking Member Jack Reed, my senior Senator, for seeing to it that this language was included in this bill. I also commend my House colleague Jim Langevin for getting similar language into the House version. The House provision states--by the way, this was a big bipartisan provision when it was voted on in the House. It states: ``Climate change is a direct threat to the national security of the United States,'' and it further requires that the Department of Defense be ``prepared to address the effects of a changing climate on threat assessments, resources, and readiness.'' In the shadow of Harvey and Irma, storms that were amped up by warmed seas and that flooded further inland due to risen seas and that held and dumped more rain because of warmed air, and watching the unprecedented fires blazing across the American West and with these bipartisan provisions agreed to in the NDAA bills, I hope we may be on the brink of finally freeing ourselves from the relentless, remorseless political pressures of the fossil fuel industry. They have had their way around here long enough. We need to have a long overdue discussion of the effects of climate change on our national security, on our health, on our economy, and, ultimately, on our national reputation. Pope Francis has reminded us that we have ``a moral responsibility. We have to take it seriously.'' He said: ``You can see the effects of climate change and scientists have clearly said what path we have to follow.'' He went on: ``If someone is doubtful that this is true, they should ask scientists. They are very clear. They are not opinions made on the fly. They are very clear.'' Pope Francis is a scientist himself, and having heard plenty of confessions, he is also a man of the world, and he understands the weakness of humankind. He understands political pressures. ``When you don't want to see, you don't see,'' he said. But he reminds us that ``history will judge the decisions.'' America is an exemplary Nation. As an exemplary Nation, one that projects power by example and not just by force, America will be stronger and more respected if we pull together and craft American climate solutions. For a country that seeks to stand as an example in this world--a city on a hill, we often say--and a country that benefits from the power of that example, this shaming display of out-of-control special interest influence will have consequences. The world is watching. We have a role to play in this world, we Americans, and it is time we got about it before the consequences of climate change become, to quote Donald Trump in 2009, ``catastrophic and irreversible.'' I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to deliver my ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, which I do every week that the Senate is in session. We have been out of session for a few weeks, so there is a fair amount to talk about that happened while we were gone. One of the first things was a new study in my home State of Rhode Island. Rhode Island is a coastal State. We have considerable worries about sea level rise, and we have a State Coastal Resources Management Council that has done what is probably the best modeling anywhere in the country of the effects of sea level rise and the risk of ocean storms on our shores. In conjunction with them, there has been a report from the Rhode Island Division of Planning--this is the State government--which has identified roads and bridges that are most likely to be underwater as the tides climb higher and as waves push farther inland. The State's 10 roads most vulnerable to sea level rise are Hope Street in Bristol, which everybody knows--a beautiful, historical street; Memorial Boulevard in Newport; Wampanoag Trail in Barrington; Conanicus Avenue in Jamestown; North Road in Jamestown; County Road in Barrington; Beach Street in Narragansett, Main Street in Warren; and State Highway 24 South in Tiverton. Throw in storm surge on top of sea level rise, and the 10 most vulnerable roads are County Road North in Barrington; Phillips Street in North Kingstown; America's Cup Avenue in Newport; Route 138 West onramp in Newport; Hope Street in Bristol; Highway 24 North in Portsmouth; Centerville Road in Warwick; Narragansett Avenue in Narragansett; Main Street in Warren; and Route 38 West in Jamestown. The report goes on to identify the 10 bridges most vulnerable to sea level rise and the 10 bridges most vulnerable to a combination of sea level rise and storm surge. Overall, Warwick, Narragansett, Newport, Barrington, and Providence are our top five municipalities most vulnerable to climate change- related road damage. So when I come to the floor to talk about this, this is not some hypothetical, liberal concern. The Coastal Resources Management Council in my home State is predicting 9 vertical feet of sea level rise by the end of this century. As the Presiding Officer knows, Rhode Island is not a huge State. We don't have a lot to give back to the ocean. Nine feet of sea level rise is potentially catastrophic. And when my State Division of Planning is highlighting the roads and bridges that we are going to lose to sea level rise and to storm surge, don't expect me to sit idly by. There is a larger context, of course, for all of this. I am pretty Rhode Island-centric, but, boy, are we seeing a lot going on. Let's start off with what is going on out West. We have an extraordinary wildfire situation happening in the American West. I am reading a news story here: Wildfires burned across hundreds of thousands of acres in the American and Canadian West this week, fueled by scorching temperatures that are breaking heat and fire records across the region. In California, at least 15 cities have seen record-breaking heat. The State has experienced its hottest summer on record. San Francisco hit 106 degrees over the weekend, breaking its previous high ever by 3 full degrees. By the end of the day Tuesday, there were at least 81 large fires blazing across 1.5 million acres of the U.S. West, from Colorado, to California, and north to Washington. ``These unprecedented extreme events are exactly the types of events that are more likely due to the global warming that has already occurred,'' say the scientists. Studies find that a warmed global atmosphere with increasingly clear human fingerprints will continue driving a potent mix of heat and dryness that is projected to escalate in the West. The climate scientist at UCLA says: ``That's not a future projection, but an observational reality, and that is something that we expect to increase in the future. When we get these extremes, there is a human fingerprint.'' ``The increased occurrence of severe heat and the role of global warming on the occurrence of severe heat, that is already happening,'' said a Stanford scientific researcher. This is not a fluke. Nine of the 10 worst fire seasons in the past 50 years have all happened since 2000. And 2015 was the worst fire s in U.S. history, surpassing 10 million acres burned for the first time ever recorded. So far this year, wildfires in the U.S. are at 7.8 million acres, but the fire season is far from over. Researchers have shown that human-induced climate change accounted for about half the observed increase in fuel aridity, or forest dryness, that has been setting off these fires in the Western United States since 1979 and that this had nearly doubled the area of the U.S. West affected by forest fires since 1984. The conclusion: We know that global warming has already increased the probability of unprecedented high temperatures in the western U.S., including in California. And we know-- ``We know,'' the scientists say-- with high confidence that continued global warming will continue to intensify those increases. Last week in Montana, a 20-square-mile blaze burned the historic Sperry Chalet, a hotel and dining room built in 1914 only reachable by trail. It had been there for more than 100 years, but this is the fire that burned it down. This means a lot out at Glacier National Park. ``It's hard to think about the magnitude of what's happened,'' the National Park Conservancy Executive Director Doug Mitchell said. One of the western fires even jumped the Columbia River to burn across into Washington--the Eagle Creek fire. As the news said, in Oregon's Columbia River Gorge, a blaze known as the Eagle Creek Fire has jumped the Columbia River and is inching into the State of Washington, creating dramatic and dangerous scenes. Another news report called this a devastating summer in which an area larger than a certain State has burned. I would hate to have Rhode Island be used as the unit of measure, but that is what they said: An area larger than Rhode Island has burned this summer. And they are looking not just at the loss of the Sperry Chalet but potentially losing Lake McDonald Lodge--``a loss that would,'' says a historian who has worked at the lodge for years, ``be unimaginably devastating.'' ``These are some of the most remarkable buildings anywhere in the United States and they are an integral part of the Glacier experience and the Glacier tradition.'' They are either burned or at risk of burning. If you are in those Western States, it is not just in the high, dry forests; if you go down to the oceans, climate change is whacking away at them too. The Oregon and Washington razor clam fisheries are currently closed due to high levels of domoic acid. Domoic acid is a toxin that is produced by algae--the algae Pseudo-nitzchia--and algae are associated with climate change. For instance, a record-breaking red tide in 2015 was likely linked to climate change, and we are going to see a lot more of that in the future. Now, of course, the dry part of what is happening in our climate has really been drowned out by what we are seeing on the wet part. The New York Times recently ran an article saying: Climate change doesn't cause extreme events, it amplifies them. On the climate side of risk, we have unambiguous evidence that the hazards are changing. Our emissions of heat-trapping gases have already increased the likelihood and severity of heat waves, extreme rainfalls, and storm surges. Scientists can now even evaluate how much climate change has increased the odds of individual extreme events, including rainfall and flooding. We certainly understand the mechanisms. Put simply, a warmer atmosphere can hold more water, increasing the potential for heavy downpours. Storm surge now occurs on top of sea level rise, increasing flooding risks. We know by the law of thermal expansion why the seas rise when they warm, and we have measured that they are warming with a very complicated device called the thermometer. Warmer oceans in turn produce more intense hurricanes. We know that as well, as has occurred in the North Atlantic and the gulf. The article continues that ``unprecedented is increasingly the norm,'' and it notes that ``up to 8 feet of sea level rise is possible in this century.'' Rhode Island is in a unique place, so we are riding higher than average, and we are looking at potentially 9 feet of sea level rise. Harvey has been an astonishing monster of a storm. It was described in one article as 9 trillion gallons of water, a hydraulic cube over downtown Houston 4 miles square and 2 miles high. And then the author said: ``The cube doubled to become the most extreme rain event in American history.'' Harvey, by the way, is the third 500-year flood in the Houston area in the past 3 years. It dumped enough water in southeastern Texas to equal almost 20 times the daily discharge of the Mississippi River. So while the wildfires are burning out West, this astonishing set of deluges is happening elsewhere. Land temperatures, according to NOAA, were the hottest they have ever been in 1,651 months of recordkeeping. July also marked 384 months since the last colder-than-average month in NASA's database. So 384 months since we had a month that was colder than average, with July well warmer than average. The last 3 consecutive years--2014, 2015, and 2016--each set a new global record for warmth, according to NOAA. Politico writes: ``2016 confirmed as planet's hottest year,'' with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration documenting record- breaking global warming trends of 2016. The observed outcomes of swiftly rising temperatures include the highest sea levels ever recorded, extremes in rain cycles, and declines in global ice and snow cover, with last year the third in a row breaking global temperature records. ``Several markers such as land and ocean temperatures, sea level and greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere broke records set just one year prior,'' the NOAA report said. ``The long-term climate change is like riding up an escalator over time, and things like El Nino and La Nina are like jumping up and down on that escalator,'' one of the NOAA scientists said. So that is what we are seeing--the underlying trend of climate change raising temperatures, with El Nino and La Nina creating a variation like jumping up and down on that escalator. Greenhouse gas concentrations are now higher than ever recorded. Global surface temperatures are the highest on record. Sea levels are the highest they've ever been since record keeping began. Precipitation cycles are becoming more extreme. Antarctic sea ice levels are lower than ever recorded. Alpine glaciers have declined for 37 consecutive years. There were more tropical cyclones. . . . Something is going on, and that well-known far-left liberal outlet, USA Today, had its editorial board say the following: Could proof grow any more powerful that humanity is responsible for a dangerously warming planet? It referenced the quadrennial National Climate Assessment: Scientists from 13 federal agencies found that a rapid rise in temperature since the 1980s in the United States represents the warmest period in 1,500 years. It quotes the report: Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emission of greenhouse gases, are primarily responsible. There are no alternative explanations. Do you hear that? ``There are no alternative explanations,'' and it keeps coming down. There was an article that came out while we were away on the great flood of 2016 in Louisiana: ``The worst rainstorm in a rainy state's history,'' the article called it. In some places, more than 2 feet of rain fell over three days. . . . Research has shown it was . . . clearly linked to climate change. There were two separate teams of scientists that linked Louisiana's great flood with climate change, and the State's own meteorologist, a gentleman named Barry Keim, a professor at Louisiana State University, said that aspects of the August storm were consistent with climate change, and that both of the climate studies so far have shown it likely that climate change likely had its fingerprints on that Louisiana disaster. Indeed, in Louisiana, the State is mounting a massive battle against rising seas as well as floods. Along the coast, ``rising waters and escalating flood insurance rates,'' the article says, ``will drive thousands of families further inland, the state predicts, leaving behind homes''--these families are leaving behind homes--``they have known for generations,'' leaving behind ``places that have fundamentally shaped their identities.'' One of the Louisianans living in the area in question said: ``This is the first time that I can remember that a group came in and said it's not going to be all right.'' But over the next two generations [flooding in Louisiana along the marshes and coastal] will happen at an alarming scale, as the twin challenges of sinking land and rising seas overtake ancestral homes at breakneck speed. In 50 years, the state estimates Terrebonne parish, whose name means ``good earth'' in the French that some of its residents still speak, will lose 41 percent of its land mass. Areas are obviously going to lose their tax bases, the report says, ``as rising waters and increasing flood insurance rates drive most locals out.'' The Louisiana planners had a leg up, since the environmental changes here have been so swift that many residents have seen land lost in their own lifetimes. When you are seeing it happen before your eyes, it is not so easy to deny it. Indeed, it is affecting local markets, and ``new-gated communities advertise `higher elevations' on bright [advertising] banners facing the highway.'' In Louisiana: What had been the worst-case scenario for land loss when the legislature passed its 2012 version of the master plan became the best-case scenario in the latest version, approved by the legislature in June, thanks to updated sea-level rise estimates. So we are in Louisiana. We are in a Republican-controlled legislature, and they pass a master plan to address flooding in 2012. That master plan is based on a worst-case scenario. Just in the 5 years since then that worst-case scenario, the legislature has now updated that to become a best-case scenario, with the worst-case scenario far, far exceeding what they anticipated just as recently as 2012. ``Climate change and water management practices could significantly alter the magnitude and variability of extreme flooding events, causing flooding to become nonstationary,'' said the article, ``Deciphering Deluges.'' We have to come up with new ways on how to cope with sea level rise, offshore storms, major tropical storms, downpours, and riverine flooding. Right now, our colleague Bill Nelson has left us this afternoon after the vote to go back down to Florida because Hurricane Irma is steaming toward his State. Hurricane Irma is the most powerful storm ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. Experts say Irma's strength is the result of unusually warm water for that part of the Atlantic. Guess what global warming does. It raises ocean temperatures. Do you know how much of the excess heat created has gone into the oceans? About 93 percent--virtually all of it. Thank goodness for the oceans. Without them, we would already be baking in climate change. So 93 percent went into the oceans, but, of course, that raises ocean temperatures, and on go the storms. If Irma stays on the forecast track and reaches the Florida Straits, the water there is warm enough that the already intense storm could become much worse, with wind speeds potentially reaching 225 mph, warned Kerry Emanuel, an MIT meteorology professor. ``For the Florida Keys, if you were to create the worst case scenario, that is what we are looking at,'' Monroe County Emergency Operations Center Director Martin Senterfitt told CBS Miami. Even Tropical Storm Emily some time ago dumped enough rain on Miami Beach--7 inches of rainfall over several hours--that the pumps meant to drain the area went offline for nearly an hour because the power was interrupted. The mayor, Tomas Regalado, used the flooding to make a case for a proposed $400 million bond initiative to help pump the water out. We have infrastructure demands that come from this disaster as well. A pretty good summary came, again, from an article in the New York Times, an editorial piece. What is going on? First, hurricanes arise from warm waters, and the Gulf of Mexico has warmed by two to four degrees Fahrenheit over the long-term average. The result is more intense storms. ``There is a general consensus that the frequency of high- category (3, 4, and 5) hurricanes should increase as the climate warms,'' Kerry Emmanuel, a hurricane expert at M.I.T., tells me. Second, as the air warms, it holds more water vapor, so the storms dump more rain. That's why there's been a big increase in heavy downpours. Nine of the top 10 years for heavy downpours in the U.S. have occurred since 1990. ``Climate change played a role in intensifying the winds and rainfall associated with Hurricane Harvey,'' says Charles Greene, a climate scientist at Cornell. Last year was the third in a row to set a record for highest global average surface temperature, according to NASA. The 10 years of greatest loss of sea ice are all in the last decade. Houston has suffered three ``500-year floods'' in the last 3 years. So the author asks the question: Why can't we all respect scientists' predictions about our cooking of our only planet? How is it that we don't listen to the scientists on this, particularly right here in this room, in this Chamber? There are two very interesting articles that came out while we were away that addressed this. One is about a phony group called the Cooler Heads Coalition, whose job is to call climate science a hoax and denounce environmentalists as global warming alarmists. They write letters, blast out emails, pressure lawmakers, sponsor seminars, appear on television. They even made a documentary movie. This article in the Washington Post told the story behind this coalition. Obviously, the coalition, this Cooler Heads crowd, is paid for. ``The Cooler Heads have received more than $11 million in donations over the years from coal and oil companies.'' Who knew? ``They've taken in tens of millions from nonprofit foundations, such as those controlled by the wealthy Koch brothers. . . .'' Guess what. There is more fossil fuel money. The Koch brothers run a fossil fuel empire. The Cooler Heads Coalition . . . are allied with industry trade groups, public relations companies and lobbyists, all of whom are working to influence public debate about global warming. Climate scientists said there is no doubt about the reality of climate change and its consequences, including melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, and the intensification of storms. Benjamin Santer is a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We are pretty proud of our National Laboratories, and we usually don't think people who are there are idiots or are fooling us or are part of a hoax. Dr. Santer, by the way, also received a MacArthur Foundation Genius award. He told the Washington Post that this Cooler Heads outfit is ``attempting to turn back the clock on knowledge and science.'' The history of this is rooted in a complex influence campaign that began in support of tobacco. The tobacco plan foreshadowed the tactics that Cooler Heads members would soon employ on climate change. First, there were millions in contributions from affected industries, often laundered through front groups and through foundations. ``The same array of donors,'' the Washington Post reports, ``would help finance charities behind'' the fight against climate science. They took the skills they learned, denying the health harms of tobacco, and moved that same technology of propaganda, influence, and politicking into climate change. The Competitive Enterprise Institute became the lead group in this Cooler Heads Coalition, taking over management of the coalition, joined by groups such as the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute is really a classy group. They are the ones that put up billboards comparing climate scientists to the Unabomber. That is the quality of debate we get out of the Heartland Institute. Americans for Prosperity is another influential nonprofit organization, which is a front for--guess whom--the Koch brothers and Koch Industries; i.e., the fossil fuel industry. They got particularly cranked up by the Kyoto Protocol, and the story continues: The energy industry went on a spending spree to thwart Kyoto, devoting at least $13 million to public relations and information campaigns in 1997. . . . The Cooler Heads Coalition was in effect a loose confederation of groups with the declared mission of countering ``the myths of global warming.'' In early 1998, this Cooler Heads group met with energy industry executives and lobbyists in closed-door meetings at the American Petroleum Institute and began to soak up more money, and here is what the plan was. I am quoting from the story in the Post. One former Cooler Heads member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of a punitive backlash, said the coalition's mission . . . was to . . . simulate a ``cacophony of voices'' against climate-change science. ``There's a whole web,'' the former member said [out to do this]. The ExxonMobil Foundation, of course, had given millions to Cooler Heads members. A 2009 IRS filing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute--the group that took over the coalition and managed it--inadvertently made public a filing that disclosed their funding from two coal mining companies, Ohio-based Murray Energy and Richmond-based Massey Energy. ``Contributions to CEI during the Obama administration rose to $7.6 million in 2014.'' As the article continues, ``CEI and the Cooler Heads were just the tip of the spear. . . . [B]etween 2003 and 2010, energy companies, corporations and conservative foundations contributed hundreds of millions to 91 nonprofit `think tanks,' educational groups and associations involved in the fight against global-warming regulations.'' To put it mildly, as the expert who chronicled this concluded, ``This is a large-scale political effort.'' We have one last report from inside that large-scale political effort. This is the firsthand voice of the individual. His name is Jerry Taylor. Here is what he says: I used to be the number two person at the Cato Institute. The Cato Institute is one of this constellation of rightwing groups that foment and support climate denial and receives money from fossil fuel interests. He continues: I was responsible for building our resistance to climate action. . . . I discovered that a lot of the scientific narratives I was offering were really dodgy. . . . [O]ne of the people that I trusted the most was in the business of consciously misrepresenting the debate. This really rattled me. He goes on. [O]nce I started looking closely at a lot of the convenient, plausible talking points I was offering they began to fall apart. [I then turned to look at] economic arguments. He says: This is pretty hard. It's a very difficult thing . . . to find that you cannot trust any of the scientists that are being offered to resist climate action. This is the guy who used to lead the anti-climate action effort of the Cato Institute, saying it is a very difficult thing to find that you cannot trust any of the scientists who are being offered to resist climate action, and then the economists whom you have been relying on to put cautious remarks about cost-benefit are now all walking away from the game. He goes on to say: We got to the point . . . where you could not find an academic economist who studies climate change who argued against climate action--not one single one. Here is his conclusion: Believe it or not, libertarians and conservatives and Republicans were put on this earth with the perfect answer to climate change--harnessing markets and price signals via a carbon tax or a carbon tax-like mechanism to reduce greenhouse gas emission. We're perfectly placed to do that. [What is it that] keeps Republicans from coming to the conclusion that climate change doesn't just threaten polar bears in the Arctic, it threatens the global economy, it threatens capital flows, it threatens capitalism. . . . It's not the Republican base, let me tell you. There is poll after poll, survey after survey showing that most Republicans believe in doing something about climate. He continues: What prevents Republican politicians from acting is that there are significant members in the Republican Party Coalition who are denialist demanders. They are not just climate deniers themselves, they are denialist demanders. They have outsized influence in the party. He says: [T]he Koch-controlled Tea Party movement [has] held the GOP by the throat. By the way, if you were somebody who was trying to find some comfort in the widely reported phenomenon that 97 percent of climate scientists conclude the global warming is real and problematic for the planet and has been exacerbated by human activity, if you are comforting yourself that maybe the 3 percent were right, that the really smart place to place your bet for the future of the planet and our economy and our standing in the world is on those 3 percent--not take the 97 percent bet; no, take the 3-percent bet--if that is the way you are thinking, you got bad news. Researchers tried to replicate the results of those 3 percent of papers. Guess what. They found biased, faulty results. Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University. She said this: Every single one of those analyses had an error--in their assumptions, methodology, or analysis--that, when corrected, brought their results into line with the scientific consensus. If you are hoping that 3 percent was somehow going to bail you out from having to face this crisis, that just blew up. There is no 3 percent. Broadly, there were three main errors in the papers denying climate change. Many had cherry-picked the results . . . some that applied inappropriate ``curve-fitting'' [to try to step] away from data until the points matched the curve of their choosing. This is my favorite. Sometimes the papers just ignored physics altogether. It has been quite a month with the West ablaze, Houston underwater, the most powerful storm ever measured in the Atlantic is headed our way, heat and rain and other measures breaking records year after year, multiple departments of governments aligning to warn us, and how does the Trump Administration respond? The Energy department asked scientists to remove the word ``climate change'' from a grant proposal. I have been asked to contact you to update the wording in your proposal abstract to remove words such as ``global warming'' or ``climate change.'' Not just one fluke. In March, POLITICO reported as follows: [T]hat staff at the Department of Energy . . . were told not to use the terms ``climate change,'' ``emissions reduction'' or ``Paris Agreement.'' The Department put out a power grid study that has been long delayed, and in the power grid study, the words ``climate change'' never appeared. Wherever they were in earlier drafts, they got scrubbed. The only reference to climate is a reference to ``rescinding energy and climate-related policies.'' The EPA has been scrubbing the word ``climate change'' from its website. It removed its climate change page and then got hammered with a series of Freedom of Information Act requests as to what is going on with that so they quickly scrambled and published an archived version but buried it back in the website. The Department of Interior has also removed discussions of the effects of global warming from several of its pages. The Department of Agriculture has emails showing how staff in their Natural Resources Conservation Service was coached by managers to avoid the term ``climate change'' and instead use other language. That is where we are--all of those facts, the motive behind it, the fingerprints of the fossil fuel industry, the confessions by participants in those schemes. Where are we? In this room, silence. Nobody will talk about it because the power of the fossil fuel industry is so strong, the threats are so bloodcurdling that nobody dares. We cannot have a grownup, factual discussion about climate change in this building either. Of course, over in the Trump administration, they have completely thrown in the towel to the fossil fuel industry, and now we are hoping to dodge the problem by forbidding people from using the words ``climate change.'' It is pathetic. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to speak about President Trump's decision to shut down the DACA Program, the so-called Dream program that allows children who were brought here by their parents, often at a very young age, and who grew up here and are now, as far as they know, full Americans--this is their home--to not be thrown out of their adopted country and sent home to a place that they do not know, all because of what their parents did when they were still children. We don't even hold children accountable for contracts they enter into. You have to be an adult to be held accountable for a contract you enter into. Yet, apparently, this President is willing to take these children, break up their families, and send them to a country they do not know, all because of a decision that was made by their parents, in some cases when these kids were infants. I have spoken to these kids, who are generally called Dreamers, who have no memory of living anyplace other than this country. I don't know about the Presiding Officer, but it is hard for me to scroll back and come up with any concrete memories of when I was 1 or 2 or 3 years old. These are kids who grew up in American schools. They grew up in American families. They grew up playing American sports. They grew up as a part of our culture. But now, for reasons that really defy humane explanation, the President wants to cast a cloud over about 800,000 children--now turned into young adults in many cases and many more who are right behind them in the program--who were looking forward to this as something they could do when they came of age to get their full-on DACA permit. We have over 1,000 people who are approved under the DACA Program in Rhode Island. We are pretty proud of them. They have served in the military. They have had jobs around the country. Ninety-one percent of DACA recipients are employed, pay taxes, and contribute to Social Security. When we had the immigration debate, that is what we said we wanted people to do: Pay your taxes, get a job, pay into Social Security, support yourself, and support the system around you. Well, they have done that. But because of a decision they did not even make--a decision that under American law they would be incapable of making because they were not adults--this shadow of punishment and family disruption has been put over them by perhaps the least humane person ever to hold the office of President of the United States. And if this doesn't prove that proposition, there are plenty more that do. I understand that our leader has urged Speaker Ryan and Majority Leader McConnell to get Senator Durbin's and Senator Graham's Dream Act up for a vote. I think it will pass. I think it will pass with more than 60 votes. I think we, at least--the decent Members of the Senate-- can lift that cloud of fear, threat, and anxiety. I think we should. I think we should do it soon. And if Majority Leader McConnell is not interested in bringing this to the floor, I understand that Senator Schumer has made it pretty clear that he is going to insist on attaching this bill to some other measure as we move forward this year. I completely support him. This President said that he loves these kids and wants to approach this issue with a big heart. Huh. The White House, which, the last I heard, the President of the United States runs, put out talking points telling these kids to get ready to depart. Get ready for departure from this country. Really? That is the big heart--to threaten 800,000 kids who have played by the rules, who have done what the Government of the United States asked them to do, to get ready to depart? Because of what--some crime they committed? No. They committed no crime, but because their parents brought them here as kids. Jean came here from Peru. He was brought to the United States by his parents when he was a few months old. He is 23 now. If he were to go back to Peru, he would have to move to a village where he has never lived, that is not in a safe area, that he does not know because he has been here for over 20 years--22 and change if he is 23 now. Rodrigo Pimental came here from Portugal at 10 months old. Rhode Island has a very vibrant Portuguese community, of which we are really proud. His parents came to join that community, pursue a better life, start a small business, and succeed. Rodrigo doesn't even remember Portugal. He has a computer science degree--a college computer science degree. He says the United States is his home. What is the gain for our country in telling Rodrigo Pimental, with his computer science degree from college, that he needs to go back to Portugal because at 10 months old his parents brought him here in search of a better life? Where the heck is the justice or the decency in that? These are all Rhode Island kids whom I am talking about. There are hundreds of thousands of stories around the country. Lesdin Salazar from Guatemala was brought to the United States by her parents at age 7. We are going to break up that family and send her back to Guatemala because why? Because at age 7 she didn't successfully talk her parents out of bringing her here? Or maybe she should have left her parents then: Oh, parents, boy, it would be illegal to go to the United States without the proper paperwork. I can't be a part of that. I am staying in Guatemala. You go. Is that the expectation we have for a 7-year-old, that we would now punish her with deportation and with breaking up her family? That is the big heart of this President? I will tell my colleagues about one of her memories. She doesn't remember much of Guatemala, but she does remember sitting in her living room with her parents watching President Obama announce the DACA Program. She says that her family cried tears of joy when that happened--at last, a path forward from the problem that was not of her own making. She does not understand why the United States is giving so many children an education here and then sending them back to other countries, breaking up their families, and I don't, either. It makes no sense. Krissia Rivera came to Rhode Island from El Salvador. She came when she was 8. Oh, so maybe that is old enough that she could have broken up with her parents back then or talked them out of coming here. She lived first in Maryland. Interestingly, she went to the same school the President's son now attends. She came to Rhode Island and graduated from college. She is currently in medical school at Brown University-- obviously somebody we want to get out of our country. She is scared. She feels exposed. I would like to have one person come to the Senate floor and tell me what Krissia Rivera did at age 8 that was so wrong that we are willing to take somebody who will have a Brown University medical school degree and throw them out of our country for no reason. Explain that to me. I will tell my colleagues, there is a lot that is embarrassing about the way our President behaves. This is pretty bad, particularly in the wake of the way he behaved after Nazi flags were paraded through Charlottesville, VA--the city of Thomas Jefferson's great university. He spent the next couple of days winking at White supremacist Nazi types, equating their behavior with the behavior of the protesters who came out. I would hope that if neo-Nazis were walking through Providence, I would go out and protest. Am I as wrong as the Nazis? I don't think so. But President Trump appears to think so--it was just two sides having an evenhanded dispute. I don't think so. When the President reacted to Charlottesville the way he did, he was winking at the worst impulses in our society: bigotry, hatred, discrimination of people based on color and religion--things that we have fought back against for generations. Fighting back against those evils is part of what makes us Americans. But does President Trump fight back against those evils? No. Just a little wink, a little pat on the head along the way: Keep it up, boys; I don't mind that much. No difference between you and the people who come out because they are outraged to see Nazi flags flying in Charlottesville, VA. And now this. And now this. Who the hell is President Trump talking to when he does this? Who gets the wink this time? If this isn't another wink to bigotry and hatred and discrimination, I don't know what is. No one can explain to me why an 8-year-old, who is such a good person that she will come to a new country and come all the way to Brown University's medical school, is to be punished for not having broken up with her parents at age 8 when they brought her to this country. It makes no sense. I see the distinguished senior Senator from Illinois here on the floor. The battle for the DACA Program and for the Dream Act has been a cause of his political life. There is no person in this Chamber to whom more credit is due for this program than Senator Durbin. So with great respect, as well as affection, I will yield the floor to him.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I recently received the sad news that Dr. Herbert L. Needleman has passed away. With Herbert's passing, we lost a great man--and the scientific community lost one of its best. In the 1970s, Herb undertook groundbreaking studies that revealed the dangers of lead exposure in children. According to the Pittsburgh Gazette, Herb ``had been thinking about the impact lead had on children's cognitive abilities for nearly two decades before he finally came up with a way to test historic lead levels.'' He made powerful adversaries in the lead industry, but true to his research, Dr. Needleman found new and inventive ways to prove the toxic effects of lead exposure. As a researcher at Temple University, he developed the ``Tooth Fairy'' approach: a method to test children's baby teeth for lead exposure levels. This method led to pioneering research that found that Black children living in cities had lead levels five times higher than suburban, White children. In the words of Herb's son, ``He just couldn't tolerate injustice and could not stop seeking the truth.'' The results of Herb's hard work and his dedication to seeking the truth today reach from the halls of science to the apartments of inner cities. I got to see his determination first hand, working alongside him in fighting the lead paint industry in Rhode Island. When I was confronting the lead industry, over 35,000 Rhode Island children under the age of 6 had elevated levels of lead in their systems. His research was instrumental in the fight for the health of Rhode Island's children. I am deeply grateful for Herbert's help in my home State, and I know Rhode Island families are grateful as well. America has lost a beloved pediatrician, psychiatrist, and brilliant scientist. I offer my condolences to the Needleman family and to the many people he taught and mentored through the years. He lives on as a lasting lesson in the power of science to help others.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I think we are waiting for Senator Grassley to come, and then we will be ready to proceed.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, what I would like to speak about is a new form of fossil fuel-funded climate denial spin that has just entered the climate debate. They are always up to something, and here is their latest. The Trump administration's two great scientists, Scott Pruitt and Rick Perry, the Frick and Frack of climate denial, have called for a science showdown, where climate denial and climate science can have it out for once and for all--red team versus blue team. ``Fossil fuel man'' Pruitt has even called for the showdown to be peer reviewed. Well, what is comical about that is that climate science has been peer reviewed all along. That is how it gets to be science--by going through and surviving the process of peer review by other scientists. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter to Administrator Pruitt from a wide range of scientific organizations pointing out to him this very fact, that climate science is called climate science because it has been through scientific peer review.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, let's go back to the basics here. The basic fact is that the scientific truth of climate change threatens the business model of enormous industries that spew carbon dioxide, and it challenges the ideology of rightwing fanatics who spew hatred of government. That is what the background is to all of this, and there has been a scheme for years to protect the industry's business model and the ideology of its associated cohort of fanatics. That scheme from the industry and the rightwing fanatics has been to attack climate science. They have been at it for years. If you are a huge polluting industry or a rightwing fanatic, how do you go about attacking science? Well, you can't win a real attack on the science, precisely because the polluter nonsense could not make it through peer review. Peer review is the most basic test to enter scientific debate, but they fail at peer review because their argument is bogus, phony, and it is a front. So the scheme has always been to avoid peer review because it is a test they would fail. If you are going to fail the peer review test, what do you do? Instead of a direct attack through peer review journals, they attack science from the side. They create a phony parallel science, a simulacrum of science that doesn't have to face peer review. Their phony science doesn't even have to be true. In fact, they don't care whether it is true; indeed, I contend that some of them know it is not true and are engaged in deliberate, knowing fraud. But, in any event, getting to the truth is not the point of this phony parallel science. The goal is political, not scientific. What they want is for government--us--to let them keep polluting. Polluting with their product makes them big, big money, and they don't want to stop. So the goal is not to enter the scientific debate on scientific terms. This is no quest for truth; this is a quest to influence public opinion. So the polluter nonsense doesn't have to be true; it just has to sound legitimate enough to influence an uninformed public. The goal is to fool the public and mess with politics. That is how they keep the political pressure off having to clean up their act. Their battlefield is the public mind, and their goal is to pollute the public mind with false doubts about the real science. The climate denial apparatus that Pruitt and Perry serve just needs to create the illusion that there is still scientific doubt, and it just has to create that illusion in the minds of a nonscientific audience--the average voter, people who don't know any better and shouldn't be expected to. To do this, they have set up an elaborate con game to help them foment this illusion that there is a real contest here. Their first trick, of course, is to hide the hand of the funders who back this scheme behind innocent or respectable-sounding names. If people saw the hand of ExxonMobil or Koch Industries behind this scheme, well, the jig would be up, so they have to back front groups-- dozens, indeed, of front groups. The front groups take nice, cozy words like ``heritage'' and ``heartland'' and ``prosperity,'' and they stick them on the front of the front group. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an article entitled ``EPA is asking a climate denier think tank for help recruiting its `red team' '' in this effort at the conclusion of my remarks. This article points out that they are actually recruiting one of these phony front groups, the Heartland Institute, comparing climate scientists to the Unabomber, so you know that is going to be a fair contest between climate science and climate deniers when the group involved is a fossil-funded group that has compared climate scientists to the Unabomber. Of course you want them in the debate, don't you? It is laughable, except for the fact that it is really not. The other thing these groups do is they go down the shelves of American history and they grab the names of heroes and they slap these great names onto other phony front groups. Even the great GEN George C. Marshall has had his name slapped on a front group. I am a big fan of General Marshall. He is a hero of mine. Winston Churchill called him ``the organizer of victory'' in World War II. The Marshall plan saved Europe after that war. He won a Nobel Prize, deservedly. But in General Marshall's life of dedicated service to our country, he had his share of sorrows, and one of those sorrows was that he had no children. So today, there are no living children or grandchildren to defend his name. Any rascal can put General Marshall's name on a bogus enterprise, and these rascals did. It is beyond low. So that is the first trick: Hide the polluters' hand behind an innocent or respectable-sounding name. The second trick is camouflage. They ape real science by setting up groups with names that sound like scientific organizations. So when the United Nations convenes the real Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they put up a Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. They ape scientific activities. If scientific organizations have conferences, they have conferences. If scientific organizations have colloquiums, they have colloquiums. If scientific organizations publish findings, they publish findings. The difference is, it is all phony. None of it is peer reviewed. It is not real science; it is a masquerade designed to give the appearance of science without any of the rigor of peer review and the other attributes of real science. They even ape the publications of real science. I don't have the chart with me, but there is a publication by the legitimate U.S. Global Change Research Program that is entitled ``Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.'' That is for real. It is real science. Then there is a look-alike publication called ``Addendum: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States,'' which was cooked up by the Koch brothers-backed CATO Institute--same print, same text, same color. It virtually is a masquerade of the real item. The first thing is to hide industry's hand behind the front group, and the second is to mask propaganda activities in camouflage that resembles actual scientific activity without having to pass any tests of scientific activity. The last thing is to run the operation like a marketing campaign, since, well, that is what it is. You wouldn't market soap in peer- reviewed scientific journals, would you? First of all, the journals wouldn't publish it. Secondly, that is not your audience anyway. It is the same here. It doesn't do these scoundrels any good to be publishing in peer-reviewed scientific journals, even if they could get their nonsense published there. The people who read scientific journals know better. That is not their audience, and they know that they will lose in front of a scientific audience. They would shrivel up like the Wicked Witch. So they want to go right to the public with Madison Avenue-quality salesmanship and glossy messaging, marketing their dressed-up climate denial nonsense like you would market a new soap or spaghetti sauce. Go straight to TV, straight to talk radio, straight into the political debate. The notion that the climate denial crowd now wants a scientific showdown--some ``high noon'' for climate denial--is ridiculous. First, they do not. We know they do not. They have been dodging away from peer review for years. They want peer review like the Wicked Witch wanted water. So what are they up to? Their gambit is yet another climate denial rhetorical trick to misdirect people to the thought that maybe climate science has not been peer reviewed either. Climate science is nothing but peer reviewed--that is how it gets to be science--but this bit of trickery sets up in the unknowing person's mind the thought that climate science might not be peer reviewed. If our Frick and Frack of climate denial, Pruitt and Perry, had said outright that climate science is not peer reviewed, that would be a flat lie, and they would be caught out. Instead, they performed this rhetorical bank shot just to lay that suggestion out there, knowing perfectly well that it is false. It is a little like the old ``when did you stop beating your wife?'' trick. It lays out a false predicate by insinuation where the fact, itself, could not be properly asserted. The purpose here, like the purpose of all climate denial schemes, is to buy more time for the polluters. Think how long this imaginary process of preparing for climate denial ``high noon'' will take. Oh, they could spin this out for years. One thing you can bet is that game day will never come, but in the meantime, they have the craftily embedded lie out there that climate denial and climate science stand on an equal footing and just await peer review to decide between them, and now that lie can just hang out there, leaking its poison into the public debate. I have to ask: Who thinks this stuff up? They have made a new art form out of propaganda. Think what a schemer you have to be to think this stuff up. That is the kind of people we are dealing with here, and in this bizarro world, Frick and Frack hold high office. The problem is that there actually is a judge here. A real ``high noon'' will actually come. As the old saying goes, time will tell. When it comes to climate change, the laws of physics and chemistry and biology are at work. The things that CO2 concentrations do in the atmosphere are going to happen no matter what we say or believe about them. The laws of physics do not depend on political beliefs. The chemistry of what happens when seawater is exposed to more and more CO2 is going to happen, and it will follow the laws of chemistry, not our opinions or beliefs. What we humans say or what we believe or what we have been conned into believing by the climate denial scheme will not matter at all. Our views--our opinions--are not part of the equation. Fill one room with climate deniers and fill another room with climate scientists, and the same chemistry experiment will have the same results in both rooms. Chemistry does not care about our opinions. The way trees and animals and fish and insects and viruses and bacteria react to new temperatures and new levels of acidity and new environments we have no say in. The fossil fuel industry can cow westerners into silence or even con them into believing the industry's climate denial nonsense, and the bark beetle will not care. It will not even know that the con game is being run. The bark beetle will just keep eating its way up the warming latitudes and altitudes and killing pine forests by the hundreds of square miles. What science does for us is give us the ability, as humans, to understand the laws of science so that we can predict what will and will not happen. Science provides mankind with headlights so that we can look ahead and see what the future portends, but turning off those headlights by denying the science or trying to distract the driver so that we are not even looking out the windshield will not change what is ahead. Whatever is coming at us is still coming at us. We just will not see it in time to steer around it in order to minimize the collision or slow down and soften the impact. We will not have time because we will have given that time to the polluters. Time is what they want--more time for the polluters to make big money. All of this lying, all of this science denial is actually, truly, an evil thing, and the cleverer it gets with these bank shot, faux ``high noon'' showdown, tricky lies, actually, the more evil it is. The people who are behind this are doing a very grievous wrong. They are dishonorable, dishonest, and disgraceful. Time will tell us just how wicked they are.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Climate denial, on the other hand, avoids peer review as if it were Kryptonite, so this call for peer review of the contest between climate science and climate denial is almost comical, except for the evil intent behind it and, of course, the stakes. How very risky and dangerous continuing to get this climate issue wrong is for our country. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an op-ed written by John Holdren, until recently the President's climate adviser, called ``The perversity of `red-teaming' climate science.''

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to speak about something else, but let me take just a moment and thank my chairman for what he has done. I had the experience of serving on the HELP Committee with Chairman Alexander and Ranking Member Murray when we did the Education bill last year. Education is nearly as fraught a topic politically around here as healthcare is, and what we saw in a thoughtful, regular-order process that was developed under Chairman Alexander's leadership was a very considerable piece of work with real effect. Sometimes we agree on something on both sides of the aisle in this body because there is nothing to it. It is ``National Peaches Week'' or something, and everyone votes for that. But when it is something big and something consequential, that is where difficulties begin to emerge, and what the chairman was able to work in the committee was something big and something consequential on healthcare. To the end of my days in the Senate, I am going to remember that closing vote, when the clerk of the committee called the roll, and every single member of the HELP Committee voted in favor of the measure. It came out of the committee unanimously, and with that burst of energy, it came through the floor fine, and it passed the House without too many changes. It was just a remarkable piece of work. So I have seen what the HELP Committee can do under Chairman Alexander and Ranking Member Murray, and I am filled with confidence that the process can be terrific there, and I am filled with goodwill toward a successful outcome. I just think what the chairman has said is terrific, and I wanted to say a few words of appreciation. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 17 minutes in morning business.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Thank you, Mr. President, and thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Grassley has been a wonderful colleague in this effort. It is the culmination of years of work, including multiple committee hearings, briefings at home in Rhode Island and elsewhere, and really working the regular order of the Senate to get this done. Chairman Grassley has been both patient and persistent, and I really appreciate his leadership. I also thank our ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, Senator Feinstein, for her work. I thank Senator Rand Paul. He would have liked to have seen a stronger bill, but it simply--as would we have, by the way. He held on for a while, hoping we could strengthen it, but it turned out there was objection to that--and he was gracious about yielding--and now we are able to move forward bipartisanly and unanimously. The history of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act is a noble history. It is because of this law that children aren't locked up in adult prisons any longer. It is because of this law that children don't get placed in solitary confinement for extended periods or shackled when they are arrested for things like running away from home or not coming to school, but it had been a while since this bill was updated. The last time it was reauthorized was 13 years ago, and we have learned a lot about adolescent development and the best practices for dealing with children in those 13 years. So we are moving forward today. I look forward to working with my chairman on the broad-based criminal justice reform that he is championing in the committee, but there is no reason we shouldn't go forward with getting juvenile justice right while we move on to other areas. I particularly want to thank him and recognize the groups involved for the patient work that was done over many years with all sorts of interested groups. We had to make this right. We wanted to minimize conflict. We wanted to maximize what we were able to accomplish, and the result is, we have over 150 organizations that have endorsed this legislation, from the ACLU to the national association that supports probation and parole officers, from Boys Town to the National Association of Counties and the National Center for Victims of Crime. The bill focuses the way it should, on evidence-based and trauma- informed programs that have emerged in the last 13 years. It focuses on protecting juveniles who are held in adult facilities, making sure they are fully separated in sight and sound from adult inmates. It limits the narrow circumstances under which they may be confined in isolation, and it requires data-driven approaches to reduce ethnic and racial disparities. We recognize that kids now are much more vulnerable to substance abuse issues and that they, too, face mental health challenges, and we try to bring this bill together so States have to provide appropriate treatment and recognition when the cause of what is going on in that child's life is substance abuse or a mental health challenge. We make it a good deal harder to incarcerate for the status offenses. A status offense is an offense that wouldn't even be an offense if an adult did it. It is only because you are a child that it is even an offense at all--skipping school or running away from home and so forth. There are better ways to deal with those children than incarcerating them, and we steer in this direction, promoting the community-based alternatives to the tension. For instance, we have community courts in Rhode Island that work really well, where the family is engaged, the child is engaged, and the community is engaged. They really learn a lesson from what they did. They have to do something helpful in order to kind of remediate themselves with their community. It has been very successful. So there are real things that can be done. Of course, separating a child from their family in order to try to improve their situation is usually something that backfires. You need to have the family engaged. Consistent with Senator Portman's remarks, we also recognize that very often some of the times that children get in trouble is because they have been traumatized. They have been either the victim of violence themselves or witnessed violence in ways that have created trauma and, in many cases, are sadly the victims of child sex trafficking. So we focus on States identifying and responding to those particular children to make sure, if that is what is behind what is going on, that those needs are met--simple things. We banned the use of shackles on girls once they are pregnant. It shouldn't be asking too much, and it is about time we stopped shackling girls, particularly pregnant girls. Last, something near and dear to my chairman's heart, it improves the accountability and the oversight of the Federal grants program. I know that has been a goal he has pursued for a long time. The chairman is one of the most determined Members of the Senate when it comes to transparency and accountability, and so I am very pleased to be his partner in that particular piece of the bill. With that, I yield the floor back to Chairman Grassley so he may take us through the formal steps of passing this law. It is a very happy moment for me, and I extend my appreciation to Chairman Grassley.