Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, Donald Trump has decided to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change. This is a decision that may prove to be one of the worst foreign policy blunders in our Nation's history. There is no denying the mounting threat of climate change. We observe rising seas, warming global temperatures, and melting glaciers and ice sheets. Yet the President cast aside a historic global agreement forged through American leadership. Americans now ask what to do next. For individual citizens, my answer is simple: Take action. Join an environmental group. Support science and scientists. Organize in your community. Many Americans have been publicly pledging to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement through movements like the ``I am still in'' pledge. Every action, big and small, counts. American corporations must also act. Unfortunately, they have been AWOL in the politics of climate change. This has been so frustrating because so many of them have great climate principles. They just abandon them when they come to Washington. That is why, for my 169th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, I have a message for corporate America: First, know that you are hugely influential in Congress. You command extraordinary attention in our political system. This gives you a unique power against the Breitbart fake-news spigot, the shameless fossil fuel industry, and the Koch brothers' climate denial operation, which were all behind the President's fateful decision. President Trump's brain-dead withdrawal from the Paris accord may prove to be for the best if it creates heightened political interest in climate action from American business leaders. At the moment, corporate political interests in climate action, setting the fossil fuel industry aside entirely, still averages out below zero. As a Senator, I see corporate America's lobbying efforts in Congress firsthand. Here are some highlights: Silicon Valley lobbies through an organization called TechNet. TechNet represents Goliaths, like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook, all of which have great climate policies. TechNet also represents clean energy companies, like Sunrun, Bloom Energy, and SolarCity. TechNet came again this year to lobby Congress on its six priorities. Here is a page from the actual lobbying materials that TechNet brought to our meeting. The group's Federal policies are these: tax reform, high-skilled immigration reform, education and workforce development, entrepreneurship and job creation, smart infrastructure, and digital trade. Climate change did not make it onto TechNet's priorities list. Even clean energy failed to make it onto the list of the organization that includes Bloom Energy, SolarCity, and Sunrun. This is not a matter of these giants being cowed by the Trump administration. TechNet came last year when Obama was President, and climate change was not on their agenda then, either. Indeed, the week TechNet came last year, I also had a visit from the timber and lumber industry. Despite what climate change is doing to America's forests, climate change was not on the lumber and timber industry agenda. That very same week, the property casualty insurance industry came to meet me. These insurance companies write the big checks when climate change sends Mother Nature haywire. Climate change was not mentioned by this industry, either. That was quite a week. Big business lobbying on climate change is actually worse than zero because the big business trade associations and lobbying groups are often run by the fossil fuel industry. Green energy manufacturers, represented in Washington, DC, by the National Association of Manufacturers, will find their own association lined up against them on climate change. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is one of climate action's most implacable enemies, despite the good climate policies of so many companies on its board. These lobby groups are the most persistent voices of America's business community here in Congress. They are the ones who are most active, and they are constant enemies on clean energy and climate action--despite the companies they represent--because, in truth, they answer to the fossil fuel industry, not the business community, when it comes to climate change. Here is how this can play out. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are the two biggest beverage companies in America. Both have excellent climate policies. Pepsi even supports Ceres, a fledgling business lobbying group for climate action, but their trade association, the American Beverage Association, takes no lobbying interest in climate change. It knows how to lobby. We can see the lobbying expenditures run up in 2009 and 2010, when they were concerned about Congress's taxing sweetened drinks or corn syrup. It just takes no interest in climate issues. Worse, Coke and Pepsi run money through the American Beverage Association to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Add their lobbying all up, and Coke and Pepsi do virtually nothing themselves. A few ounces of credit go to Pepsi for supporting Ceres. Their American Beverage Association trade group doesn't lift a finger to help, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a brute force adversary. The result is that the net lobbying presence of Coke and Pepsi in Congress on climate change is exactly opposed to the two companies' stated policies on climate change. They say one thing; their lobbying effort does the opposite. On the other side of the fossil fuel divide, the heavy political hand of the fossil fuel industry is felt constantly around here, and that heavy hand is mercilessly opposed to any climate action and enforces its will with a parade of political weaponry akin to those old Soviet May Day parades of tanks, rockets, and artillery. Cross them, and they come after you hard. Ask former Congressman Bob Inglis. He urged his fellow Republicans to heed the climate science and was hammered for it. Also, no one should buy the phony assertions by Big Oil CEOs that they recognize that climate change is real and support putting a price on carbon. They say that. ExxonMobil's CEO said that to his shareholders again just last week. In the Senate, I am the Senate author of a carbon price bill. I know who is lobbying where on carbon prices, and I can tell you their statement is just not true. Every single element of that Soviet May Day parade of fossil fuel political weaponry is dead set against any such thing. What do we conclude from that? Either Big Oil's CEOs don't know what their own lobbying apparatus is doing, or they are just not telling the truth. You guess which. The strategy of the fossil fuel industry has been to control the Republican Party. You can jam things up by jamming up one party, and you can make it look like it is a partisan issue when it is just old- fashioned, self-interested lobbying. In order to accomplish that purpose, the worst of the political threats and blandishments of the fossil fuel industry are directed against Republicans. As long as legitimate corporate leaders in America sit idly by while fossil fuel terrorizes and corrupts the Republican Party, there will not be much progress. ``But, oh,'' some will say, ``there aren't Republicans who will respond. This is too partisan an issue. It will be a wasted effort.'' Not so. I came to the Senate in 2007, and for years there was bipartisan action on climate change--2007, 2008, 2009. It only stopped when the fossil fuel industry secured from five Republican-appointed Justices on the Supreme Court the disgraceful Citizens United decision of 2010. In 2007, lots of bipartisan activity; 2008, lots of bipartisan activity; 2009, lots of bipartisan activity; 2010, Citizens United--dead stop. That Citizens United decision is what started the fossil fuel Soviet May Day parade of unprecedented political artillery. No special interest had that kind of political artillery before Citizens United opened it up, and much of the post- Citizens United effort has been using dark money to hide the fossil fuel industry's hand. Since Citizens United, there has been no bipartisan climate action, but that doesn't mean there aren't still Republicans willing to work with us. I know this firsthand. There are Republicans willing to work with us. They just need to know somebody will give them safe passage through the political kill zone that Citizens United has let the fossil fuel industry create. Well, with the Trump administration now all the way over in the ``fossil fuel, Breitbart, Koch brothers climate denial corner,'' it now rests on the shoulders of the legitimate business community to come off the sidelines. They can't count on this administration. They now have to come off the sidelines themselves and do so in strength commensurate with the seriousness of the problem. If, as a country, we pitch ourselves and the world into the present worst-case climate change scenarios, billions of people will suffer, and suffering people want answers and justice. It will become hard to defend to them our American system of democratic government against charges of corruption and our system of market capitalism against charges of indifference. Government has been corrupted by fossil fuel interests, and too many companies are indifferent. You can't make a case without the facts to back it up, and American companies, more than anyone else, benefit from a world order where liberal democracies prevail. So the stakes for the American business community are very real. The political mischief of the fossil fuel industry and its front groups will leave a lasting stain on the democracy we all treasure. It is time, in the wake of the President's decision on Paris--isolating America with Syria as our companion in isolation--it is time that the decent and honorable business community played a meaningful role in setting this right. To them, I say: Trump has betrayed you so now is the time to align your industry's political engagement with your industry's position on climate. That is not asking much. We are only asking that American corporations align their political engagement on climate change with their actual position on climate change. If you take climate change seriously, great. Take it seriously when you come to Congress. The United States of America, where 1 day after D-day--a day when Americans stormed ashore to free the continent of Europe, fought their way through to knock down Nazi tyranny, and then rebuilt Europe under the Marshall Plan and came home--that country ought not to be a pariah nation with Syria. We needn't be a banana republic for fossil fuel. We can lead the world into a brighter, cleaner, safer energy future, but it will take an effort. So, corporate America, let's make the effort. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I come to the Senate floor every year around this time to discuss an important incident in the history of Rhode Island largely overlooked in the history books, certainly overlooked in consequence to its importance. We have to understand that we Rhode Islanders have always had a pretty fierce independent streak. The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations was founded by Roger Williams and others fleeing the harsh ideological conformity of the Massachusetts theocracy. Our 1663 charter, describing the colony as a ``lively experiment,'' is the first formal document in all of history granting to a political entity the separation of church and state, along with unprecedented freedoms of speech. Rhode Island was the first colony to declare its independence from Britain, on the Fourth of May, 1776--2 months before the rest of you did on the Fourth of July--and we were the last colony to join the Union, waiting for an independent Bill of Rights. Like I said, an independent streak. Colonial Rhode Islanders chafed at the inequities of British rule, especially the disruption of our liberty at sea. We are the Ocean State. Living and working on the water has always been a Rhode Island way of life. As tensions with the American Colonies grew, however, King George III stationed revenue cutters, armed Customs patrol vessels, in the waters of Narragansett Bay to prevent smuggling, enforce the payment of taxes, and impose British sovereignty. In 1764, after a British ship called the HMS St. John stole goods from Newport merchants, a group of Rhode Islanders seized control of Fort George on Goat Island in Newport Harbor and fired cannons on the vessel. In 1769, the HMS Liberty, a sloop confiscated by the British from none other than John Hancock and repurposed as a Customs vessel, was boarded, scuttled, and burned by a mob of angry Rhode Islanders. In 1772, on a dark night, a band of Rhode Islanders destroyed the HMS Gaspee, one of the most hated imperial ships, drawing what the Rhode Island abolitionist Frances Whipple McDougall called, in 1884, ``The first blood in the Revolution.'' The Gaspee and its captain, Lieutenant William Dudingston, were known for destroying Rhode Islanders' vessels, seizing their cargo, and flagging down ships to harass, humiliate, and interrogate the Colonials. As historian Steven Park describes in his new book, ``The Burning of His Majesty's Schooner Gaspee: An Attack on Crown Rule Before the American Revolution,'' the Gaspee was an unwelcome, even hated, presence in Narragansett Bay. Rhode Island Deputy Gov. Darius Sessions complained to Gov. Joseph Wanton, in March 1772, that Lieutenant Dudingston had ``no legal authority to justify his conduct, and his commission . . . [was] more of a fiction than anything else.'' When British authorities assured Governor Wanton that Dudingston was there to protect the Rhode Island colony from pirates, the Governor replied that he didn't know whether Dudingston was protecting them from pirates or was the pirate himself. On June 9, 1772, all this tension came to a head. On this day, Rhode Island Captain Benjamin Lindsey was en route to Providence from Newport in his ship the Hannah. He was ordered by the hated Gaspee to halt for inspection. Captain Lindsey refused, and he raced up Narragansett Bay-- despite warning shots fired at the Hannah. The Gaspee gave chase to the Hannah, and Captain Lindsey, who knew the waters of Narragansett Bay far better than Dudingston did, steered his ship north toward Pawtuxet Cove in Warwick, right over the shallows off of Namquid Point--known today as Gaspee Point. The lighter Hannah was able to shoot over those shallows, but the heavier Gaspee ran aground and stuck firm in a sandbar in a falling tide. The British ship and her crew were stranded and would need to wait many hours before a rising tide could free them. Wasting no time, Captain Lindsey sailed up to Providence, and with the help of the respected merchant and statesman John Brown, rallied a group of Rhode Island patriots at Sabin's Tavern, in what is now the East Side of Providence. Together, after suitable refreshment, the group resolved to end the Gaspee's menace in Rhode Island waters. That night, 80 or so men shoved off from the wharf under a moonless sky, with their faces blackened and their oarlocks muffled, paddling eight longboats down Narragansett Bay toward the stranded Gaspee. The longboats silently surrounded the Gaspee, and the Rhode Islanders shouted for Lieutenant Dudingston to surrender his ship. As Daniel Harrington recounted in the Providence Journal, ``Captain Abraham Whipple spoke first for the Rhode Islanders, summoning Dudingston: `I am sheriff of Kent County, [expletive]. I have a warrant to apprehend you, [expletive]; so surrender, [expletive].' It was a classic Rhode Island greeting!'' Surprised and enraged, Dudingston refused and ordered his men to fire upon anyone who attempted to board the Gaspee. Gunshots struck out in the night, and musket balls hit Lieutenant Dudingston in his groin and his arm. The Rhode Islanders, outnumbering the British, swarmed onto the deck and commandeered the ship. Brown ordered one of his Rhode Islanders, a physician named John Mawney, to tend to Lieutenant Dudingston's wounds. After properly plundering the lieutenant's quarters, the patriots removed the British crew to land and returned to torch the Gaspee. Ultimately, the flames reached the powder magazine, and the resulting blast echoed across the bay as the dreaded Gaspee blew to smithereens. When word got back to the King, he was furious, and he offered huge royal rewards for the capture of the rebels who had done this deed, but, strangely enough, no Rhode Islander would step forward to finger the perpetrators. You have to admire, under that kind of pressure, that with 80 people who had gone down in those longboats, not one Rhode Islander would spill the beans. Word spread throughout the Colonies of this incident and of the Crown's brand of justice. Samuel Adams wrote a letter in the Providence Gazette on December 26, 1772, that read, in part: A court of inquisition, more horrid than that of Spain or Portugal, is established within this colony, to inquire into the circumstances of destroying the Gaspee schooner; and the persons who are the commissioners of this new-fangled court, are vested with most exorbitant and unconstitutional power. They are directed to summon witnesses, apprehend persons not only impeached, but even suspected! And . . . to deliver them to Admiral Montagu, who is ordered to have a ship in readiness to carry them to England, where they are to be tried. The Reverend John Allen delivered at the Second Baptist Church in Boston a Thanksgiving sermon on the Gaspee Affair that was distributed in pamphlet form throughout the Colonies. His words helped rouse the spirit of independence of this fledgling Nation. He said: Supposing . . . that the Rhode Islanders, for the sake of the blood-bought liberties of their forefathers, for the sake of the birthrights of their children, should show a spirit of resentment against a tyrannical arbitrary power that attempts to destroy their lives, liberties and property, would it not be insufferably cruel (for this which the law of nature and nations teaches them to do) to be butchered, assassinated and slaughtered in their own streets by their own King? Well, schoolchildren's history books tell a tale of Bostonians who dressed up in funny outfits and climbed onto a British boat and pushed bales of tea into the harbor, but not enough schoolchildren know of the bravery of the Rhode Islanders who, more than a year earlier, fired the first shots and drew the first blood in the quest for American independence. It is a fine thing, I am sure, to push tea bales off a boat. We blew the boat up, and we did it more than a year earlier. Rhode Islanders are justifiably proud of our role in our rebellion. We have made a tradition of celebrating the Gaspee incident with the annual Gaspee Days celebration and parade through Warwick. An independent study group at Brown University is adapting the tale of the Gaspee into a virtual reality educational experience so you can put on the goggles and reenact the experience of the Gaspee, marrying Rhode Island history with cutting-edge technology to engage middle and high school students in this history. Someday soon, children across the country may be able to join Captain Whipple and John Brown and step into a virtual longboat, coast down a virtual Narragansett Bay, and watch the sky over a virtual Rhode Island, alight with the fire of revolution. I thank the Presiding Officer. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am very pleased to join my colleagues, Senator Franken and Senator Warren, who are also here for this conversation that was kicked off earlier this afternoon by our friend and colleague from West Virginia, Senator Manchin. West Virginia does not have a whole lot in common with Rhode Island. We are a coastal State. Senator Manchin comes from a very landlocked mountainous State. Our biggest mountain in Rhode Island is probably the Johnson landfill. But we have something in common, which is the extent to which opioid addiction and opioid overdoses have stricken our State. We have had over 200 deaths per year. In a State our size, everyone is within 2 or 3 degrees of separation of everyone else. Those 200 deaths reverberate through our whole State. There is a small town in Rhode Island called Burrillville, up in our northwest corner. Burrillville is a very small town in Rhode Island. I went up there for a meeting about the opioid epidemic at Burrillville High School. In the previous quarter, in just 3 months, that one little town had six deaths from opioid overdoses. That is six times that the little police force had to respond, six times the funeral parlors had to handle grieving families, six times that death notices had to be published in the local paper. It felt like a battering to people in that community. Senator Manchin has a pretty good idea to help make sure that we have the funding to get treatment to people before these tragedies take place. He proposes what he calls the LifeBOAT Act, which is one penny for each milligram of active opioid in a prescription drug--one penny. It is only a penny, but it would have raised about $2 billion last year. So $2 billion would save a lot of people and save a lot of lives. Just to give you some idea of the scale, Purdue Pharma has generated estimated sales of more than $35 billion since 1995 for opioid medications. It has annual revenues of about $3 billion, mostly from OxyContin. That is just one company. So the idea of adding a penny really does not seem to me to be asking very much. The way we operate now in the Senate, I know that asking corporations to do anything seems impossible because they have the financial whip hand over so many Senators because of the unlimited money they are allowed to spend and threaten to spend in our politics. But really, after all the lives that have been lost, after all the lives have been affected, you would expect that just out of common decency this industry would step up and say: For a penny, we are in. So let's hope they come around to that because I think it is a good plan. TrumpCare, on the other hand, would be a disaster. So many people get their opioid treatment through Medicaid and through the expansion of Medicaid that the Affordable Care Act created. To undo that, to strip $1.4 trillion, as President Trump has proposed, out of Medicaid is inevitably going to deny people access to care. I am not the only one saying this. Someone who works in Providence with recovering heroin addicts wrote to me. His name is Travis. He wrote to me about his clients who are receiving medication-assisted treatments. He credits their being able to come in and get the care that they get to the Affordable Care Act. He said that it is the reason he and his colleagues have been able to help recovering addicts enter effective treatment programs. It works. Travis relates that repealing the Affordable Care Act would have what he calls a profound impact on his clients' ability to get needed addiction and recovery services. I will turn the floor over to Senator Warren in a minute, but I want to recognize one other person. I will not use last names. His name is Mark. He wrote to me from Rumford, RI, which is a very nice part of East Providence, RI. This is a gentleman who became addicted to opiates at the age of 52. He had surgery, and after the surgical procedure, his doctor gave him opiates for the pain. The doctor was somewhat indiscriminate about continuing to prescribe those opioids. Mark realized that he was addicted. He went to a recovery group in Rhode Island called CODAC, which does very good work for treatment. He went into recovery, and he succeeded for 8 years without using opioids. As sometimes happens, family stresses, business stresses, other stresses intervene. In his case, a family stress caused a relapse, but he knew what to do. He went back to CODAC. He became sober again. Now he is back in recovery, clean and sober. This pattern of recovery and then an occasional relapse and then back to recovery again is very often the way people who have an addiction get through it. To make sure that the treatment is there for them when they relapse can be a lifesaver. By the way, Mark is a success. He is in the music business. He has toured around the world. The fact that CODAC was there for him on those two occasions has allowed him to achieve that success. Again, this was a 52-year-old individual whom a surgery sent into addiction. I will close by pointing out that one of the things the CARA bill, which many of us worked so hard on, accomplished was to send the message that addiction is not a moral failing. It is a medical condition. It should be treated as a medical condition. Not only is it not a moral failing, I think many of us who have had family, loved ones, friends, or any experience with folks who are going through recovery--what we have learned is that recovery is actually a noble accomplishment. It is not an easy path, but it is a path that demands deep honesty, deep courage, deep trust, very often love. It is a path that people who are walking it can and should be proud of, and we should be proud of them for their achievements, and we should be there for them in their relapses and make sure the care that will put them back on that path is available. I yield the floor to my terrific colleague from Massachusetts.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to discuss what you might call the Scott Pruitt philosophy of environmental regulation. In a recent interview, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency expressed his view that the EPA should ``simply pass regulations that provide fairness and equity and allow utilities to make decisions based upon stability, cost, and security to the consumers that they serve.'' Did we notice anything missing in that assertion of what EPA's role should be? How about no mention of the environment, no mention of climate change, no mention of public health? So my 168th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech will look at how paid-for Administrator Pruitt is by the very industries he is supposed to be regulating. Often, the word for this is ``corruption.'' Scott Pruitt is a functionary of fossil fuel money. He has a long record of dark money fundraising and long, cozy relationships with big fossil fuel political donors. As you can see, energy interests contributed over $136,000 to Pruitt's 2014 campaign even though he ran unopposed. During the 2010 and 2014 election cycles, oil and gas giants Devon Energy and Koch Industries--yes, of those infamous Koch brothers--maxed out to Pruitt's campaigns. Thanks to Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting by the New York Times, we know that backing Pruitt was a good fossil fuel investment, particularly for Devon Energy. In 2011, Attorney General Scott Pruitt took a letter written by Devon Energy, he put it onto his Oklahoma attorney general letterhead, he signed it for them, and he sent it off to EPA, pleading Devon Energy's anti-regulatory case as if it were his own. As attorney general of Oklahoma, Pruitt directly solicited political donations from companies now regulated by EPA, then regulated by EPA as well. He spoke at dozens of industry events but never at a public health or environmental event. He led the boards of political organizations, like the Republican Attorneys General Association and its dark money political fundraising arm, the so-called Rule of Law Defense Fund, this thing. Pruitt was a member of the RAGA executive committee--RAGA being Republican Attorneys General Association. He was a member of their executive committee between 2014 and 2016, when RAGA raised $530,000 from Koch Industries-- yes, those same infamous Koch brothers--and $125,000 from Devon Energy--yes, of the letter he put onto his own letterhead. Coal giant Murray Energy donated $50,000 to Liberty 2.0, Pruitt's own super PAC, and it donated $350,000 to RAGA between 2014 and 2016. The Rule of Law Defense Fund doesn't have to disclose its donors. They hide in a loophole in the law. But other public reporting has shown that it received at least $175,000 from something called Freedom Partners. With a name like that, you know it is up to no good. Sure enough, it is another dark money group run by several Koch Industries executives. That is not Coca-Cola; that is the Koch brothers' fossil fuel processing company. We don't know more about this. Why do we not know more about this? Because Republicans in the Senate protected Scott Pruitt from having to answer these questions during his confirmation process. While he was busily helping raise dark money, dark money groups, in turn, came back and worked hard to help Pruitt get confirmed to the EPA. A Republican opposition research PAC called America Rising launched a pro-Pruitt ad campaign, and its dark money arm, America Rising Squared, funded confirmpruitt.com. A 501(c)(4) dark money entity ironically named Protecting America Now was created solely to help confirm Pruitt to the EPA. Its fliers asked for contributions ranging from $25,000 to $500,000. Just another grassroots group trying to get a good guy confirmed. Koch Industries' own lobbying disclosure forms reveal it spent part of $3.1 million lobbying to confirm Scott Pruitt. In Trump's science-denial Cabinet, Administrator Pruitt seems to see little reason to hide his anti-environment and Republican political interests. He has spoken at the Conservative Political Action Conference and the American Farm Bureau board meeting. He attended rallies with coal miners against his own regulations and met with the National Mining Association's executive committee ``to lay out his concerns with the Paris accord'' the day before the mining association voted to press President Trump to withdraw from that agreement. Administrator Pruitt planned to appear as the keynote speaker at the Oklahoma Republican Party Gala on May 5. This invitation mentioned his official position as EPA Administrator three times. It featured this photo of him being sworn in as the EPA Administrator. It promised donors a ``once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear him discuss his plans to slash regulations, bring back jobs to Oklahoma, and decrease the size of the EPA.'' Well, the 1939 Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities, more commonly known as the Hatch Act, forbids this, so I filed a Hatch Act complaint and Administrator Pruitt's appearance was canceled. The Office of Special Counsel is now conducting a full investigation. But it wasn't just there. He goes to other dinners. On February 28, 2017, Pruitt was a speaker at a RAGA major donors dinner. You know who major donors are by now. Days after the RAGA major donors dinner, Pruitt unilaterally withdrew an EPA request for information from oil and gas producers about their methane emissions, citing a letter from nine members of RAGA and two Republican Governors, who alleged the methane information request ``furthers the previous administration's climate agenda and supports . . . the imposition of burdensome climate rules on existing sites, the cost and expense of which will be enormous.'' There was no public comment period. There was no request for input from other States. This basically was a little party favor for his RAGA pals right after the RAGA dinner. This EPA Administrator has solicited thousands, if not millions, of dollars from corporations he now regulates. Our current ethics laws do not require nominees in the confirmation process to disclose their political and dark money connections, so the Senate and the public are kept blind to the conflicts of interest of such nominees, and we have no idea how those conflicts would manifest in their offices. Pruitt knows who gave dark money to his political causes. The corporations know what dark money they gave. It is just the rest of us who are in the dark. This is new, and this is weird. This was not a problem for President Obama's nominees because the dark money political tsunami that has swamped our politics in slime did not exist when President Obama was elected. It was the Citizens United decision of 2010 that allowed unlimited political spending by big special interests, and that unlimited money found dark money channels. To address the gaping loophole in our Federal ethics laws, I have introduced the Conflicts from Political Fundraising Act with Senators Udall, Carper, Van Hollen, and Franken. This bill would require Presidentially appointed Federal officials like Scott Pruitt to disclose their political fundraising, and it would require Federal ethics officials to address these conflicts by, for example, making sure officials are recused from decisions affecting big political donors, making sure the public has the information to know they should ask for a recusal because the director is conflicted by reason of his political relationship with big dark money donors. I wish the conflicts at EPA stopped with the Administrator, but they don't. It is a swarm of swampy conflict over there. Pruitt has surrounded himself with political operatives and fossil fuel lobbyists. The Associate EPA Administrator for Policy previously worked at RAGA, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, and something called the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce--a Koch brothers-funded dark money group that has underwritten the Rule of Law Defense Fund. EPA's Senior Adviser for Regional and State Affairs came from Pruitt's own fossil fuel-funded super PAC, Oklahoma Strong. The Assistant Administrator for Congressional and Intergovernmental Relations came from the oil company, the Hess Corporation. One Deputy Associate Administrator is the former president of the Ohio Coal Association. Another Deputy Associate Administrator was a registered lobbyist at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, where she specifically lobbied against EPA's Clean Power Plan and New Source Performance Standard, the clean water rule, the ozone standard, EPA enforcement, pesticides bills, budget resolutions, and EPA appropriations bills. This corruption of EPA is the work of the fossil fuel industry. One day there must come a reckoning. Just this weekend, the New York Times reported ``How Rollbacks at Scott Pruitt's E.P.A. Are a Boon to Oil and Gas.'' The article included a checklist of rollbacks that specifically benefit long-time Pruitt benefactor Devon Energy--the one that got the letter--delaying a rule raising royalties on fossil energy production on Federal land, undoing new fracking standards, rolling back rules on the leaking and flaring of methane, and rolling back reporting of methane emissions. In another matter, Devon Energy had been preparing to pay a settlement of over $100,000 and to install emissions scrubbing equipment to remedy illegal emissions from a Wyoming natural gas facility. Five days after Pruitt was installed at EPA, the company told officials it was ``re-evaluating its settlement posture,'' offering a quarter of what it had previously proposed to settle the charges and scrapping the emissions controls entirely. They know their Administrator Pruitt. Pruitt's record at EPA reveals he is unabashedly looking out for his industry donors at the expense of public health and the environment. As far as I can tell, every action he has taken since taking office will lead to an enriched industry--at the expense of dirtier air and dirtier water--and a more imperiled climate. Myron Ebell is someone I don't quote often. He is the head of President Trump's EPA transition team and a prominent climate denier. He has something interesting to say about Scott Pruitt. He has said that he thinks Scott Pruitt is using EPA as a ``stepping stone to political office'' and that ``everything he does is going to be a political calculation about what furthers his own political career.'' This is not a liberal environmentalist making these accusations. This is somebody who is right in Scott Pruitt's climate denial wheelhouse. This is someone from the Trump science denial EPA destruction team. This is the guy who is in the club of fossil fuel-funded climate denial, and he thinks everything Pruitt does is a political calculation about what furthers Pruitt's own political career. If that is the case, everything Scott Pruitt does is a conflict of interest, as he sees regulated industry as the funders of his next political campaign. They pay for him now, and he delivers. Sadly, the people who own Pruitt also own Congress. So good luck getting an honest look at this mess from our fossil fuel-funded colleagues in the majority. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for adjournment occur following the remarks of the Democratic leader.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as we know here in Washington, politics is a battlefield as much as it is a debating society. On this battlefield, a new form of political weapon has emerged, one for which the American political system was not well prepared. As Democrats, I can say from our side, we were virtually blind to this weapon in the last election. For my 167th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, I am here to discuss this new political weapon: systematic fake news. Fake news does not just fall like rain from heaven. In its most dangerous form, fake news is weaponized for effect--usually, political effect. Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia made weaponized fake news a core element of its political manipulation throughout the former Soviet Union and the modern European Union, revving up public ire over rapes that never happened, for instance; planting fake material in politicians' laptops and social media that can then be ``exposed,'' and broadcasting false political propaganda. This phenomenon has been documented in Chairman Graham's recent hearing in our Crime and Terrorism Judiciary Subcommittee, featuring, among other sources, the Center for Strategic and International Studies' ``Kremlin Playbook,'' and it has been documented throughout the proceedings of this year's McCain Institute Sedona Forum. Because of this history of political manipulation, the Putin regime's interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election ought to be a wakeup call for America. Weaponized fake news requires a delivery system, and here is where this connects to climate change. In America, we are particularly vulnerable to such election interference because a robust delivery system for weaponized fake news already exists. Putin doesn't need to build a fake news delivery system in America. The fossil fuel industry already did. Climate denial was the original fake news. They have been at it awhile. A decade ago, a peer-reviewed academic study of the climate denial apparatus described how this works. The fossil fuel industry sets up an array of ``environmental skeptics.'' But of course they are not just skeptics; they in reality ``are predominantly agents of conservative think tanks.'' These think tanks, in turn, have the ``essential role'' of providing what the report calls ``political insulation for industry,'' including ``for companies such as ExxonMobil''. Again quoting this report, the ``defining feature'' of this apparatus is the ``denial of the authenticity of environmental problems.'' Collectively, this climate denial apparatus creates for the fossil fuel industry ``a full scale counter movement'' against environmental science. Concluding in the report, ``Its major tactic is to manufacture uncertainty.'' The Center for Strategic and International Studies' ``Kremlin Playbook'' report, by comparison, describes Russia's fake news tactic as ``to disseminate erroneous information that fosters public confusion.'' To manufacture uncertainty, ``to disseminate erroneous information that fosters public confusion''--do you see the similarity? If we collapse into fewer words these decade-old findings about the fossil fuel industry climate denial apparatus, here is what you have: front groups who disguise the identity of the real actors and pump out fake news--in their case, the fake news of climate denial. The tactics and methods of climate science denial are the tactics and methods of weaponized fake news: false front organizations, hidden funding sources, controllable means of communication, mimicry of legitimate groups, personal disparagement of opponents, relentless repetition of lies, and shameless persistence when debunked. You could say that the fake news propagation we face today in America metastasized from climate denial. Climate denial was the original ``School for Scoundrels'' in these fake news techniques. To put financial scale to this, Putin's Russia has a $200 billion annual budget. With that, they funded a significant weaponized fake news effort to influence our Presidential election. But the fossil fuel industry has a $2 trillion annual budget. The fossil fuel industry fights to protect an annual subsidy in the United States estimated by the International Monetary Fund to be $700 billion. With stakes like that, the climate denial delivery system the fossil fuel industry could profitably set up in the United States can be very robust and complex, and it is. Fake news, dark money, and hidden political spending have been the fossil fuel industry's primary political weapons. This creates the problem. Once a fake news delivery system is in place, that system will not necessarily differentiate between different types or sources of fake news. Once that road is open, anyone can travel it with any fake news cargo. The same fake news delivery system that will distribute fake news designed to manipulate American politics for the fossil fuel industry can just as effectively distribute fake news designed to manipulate American elections for Russia or China or Iran. The fake news delivery system is not restricted to any one payload. The fossil fuel industry also fought hard to create the dark money political spending apparatus that now despoils American politics. They lobbied the Supreme Court for the wretched Citizens United decision. They saw it coming and they were swift at the mark, and they have stopped any effort in Congress at political spending disclosure. They need and depend on dark money to buy influence in Congress. Here, the problem is the same. Once you tolerate a dark money political spending apparatus in American politics, that dark money apparatus will be just as good at hiding the hand of Vladimir Putin or China or Iran as it is at hiding the hand of the fossil fuel industry. Darkness is darkness, whether it is Charles and David Koch or Vladimir Putin operating in that darkness. The dangers of fake news, dark money, climate science denial, and foreign interference in our elections are thus all tied together, and they call for an American response. Politics is a battlefield, and dark money and fake news are now assets for our Nation's enemies.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, it is perhaps a providential happenstance that I should be giving this particular speech while the Senator from Louisiana is presiding because we are both from coastal States. I am sure he will find things that are familiar in my Rhode Island remarks, particularly given that his Governor has declared the Louisiana coast a state of emergency due to sea level rise. As the Presiding Officer knows, one place where the effects of climate change are most evident is in our oceans and along our coasts. Rhode Island is the Ocean State, and we have almost 400 miles of beautiful coastline. Everyone in Rhode Island lives less than a half hour from the shore. We count on a healthy ocean and vibrant coast. Our ocean economy, including fishing, tourism, and shipbuilding, amounts to nearly $2.5 billion every year--perhaps not what Louisiana's coastal economy is but pretty good for our small State. It employs over 42,000 Rhode Islanders. Warming, acidifying, and rising oceans are a clear and present danger to many aspects of our Rhode Island way of life. Sea level rise now threatens to remake our Rhode Island coast, swallowing low-lying land, widening existing inlets, eroding beaches, and stranding higher shorefronts as new islands. For my 166th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, I want to show the Senate what this new island chain, the new Rhode Island Archipelago, would look like. The latest modeling software allows us to visualize these projected changes, and the latest science shows that they may be coming sooner than we thought. How soon and how much? Well, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a new report in January updating global sea level rise estimates based on the latest peer- reviewed scientific literature. Ice sheets, it turns out, and glaciers, are melting faster than expected, raising the so-called extreme scenario for average global sea level rise in this century, the ``we do nothing on climate change scenario,'' by around 20 inches. When NOAA and its partners applied these findings to America's coasts, taking into account things like regional variations in ocean circulation, in gravitational pull, and in landside conditions like erosion, settling, and depletion of groundwater, the news was particularly harsh for the northeast Atlantic coast--from Virginia through Maine, including Rhode Island. Our Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council is now telling us that for planning purposes we need to face the possibility of 9 to 12 vertical feet of sea level rise along our shores by the end of the century. A little girl born today at Rhode Island's Women and Infants Hospital will likely actuarially live to see all of these changes. That invasion of our shores by the rising oceans will leave Rhode Island's map unrecognizable. Early explorers to Rhode Island found our coastline looking much like it does today. Before the 1600s, it had looked much the same for many centuries before that to the Narragansetts and the Wampanoags who lived here. In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution, which began in America in Rhode Island, brought our Nation great wealth, but it also created manmade pollution which began changing our climate. Climate change causes sea levels to rise. As oceans warm, they expand. As the world warms, ice sheets melt and pour water into the oceans. We measure these things happening. This is not a guess or a projection. Rhode Island's Coastal Resources Management Council has developed STORMTOOLS, which is an online simulation that models sea level rise and storm surge so we can see ahead what is coming at us. Once again, science gives us the headlights to look forward and see what is coming at us. This is what Rhode Island can expect. Here is the high water scenario. This is the upper part of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, including Providence, up here, Warwick, and Warwick Neck and Greenwich Bay over here to the west. Bristol and Warren here, with Mount Hope Bay to the east. This graphic shows the same image overlaying that previous scenario with the scenario that Rhode Island's CRMC now predicts for our State. This bright blue color depicted is land that gets covered up with 10 feet of sea level rise, and this teal color is what we get when the sea level rise hits 12 feet. Over here, Bristol gets two new islands, and Bristol and Warren become an island themselves. If you cross over the bay to Warwick Neck, which is now part of our new coastline, that becomes a new island, Warwick Neck Island. Much of Barrington, which is a well-developed and prosperous bedroom community, just disappears under the water. As I said, Warren and Bristol become their own island. Now we move down the bay to historic Newport, RI, and the historic waterfront area completely floods, the historic Point section here floods, down here the western part of Newport becomes a new island. Again, all of this is now land that we lose to rising seas. Not only does Western Newport become Western Newport Island, but it gains its own Castle Hill Island off to the side of it. Up here, the existing Goat Island virtually disappears. This story is repeated all along Rhode Island's coast. The tip of Little Compton breaks off to become its own tiny little archipelago of new islands. This is Tiverton, which is just north of Little Compton. On the other side, here, is the shore of Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island. What you see is that the sea level rise turns Nonquit Pond into ocean and makes an island of this section of Tiverton here near Fogland Point, another new island. Here we see the point on the other side of the opening into Narragansett Bay from Little Compton. You have Little Compton here, Aquidneck Island comes down in the middle, and on the other side you have Point Judith. Point Judith also begins to break up into little islands. If you go up here, Galilee is our fishing port. It is where most of the fishing trawlers have their home port and the entrance runs right up here into the protected harbor area. As you can see, Galilee is now pretty much underwater. So for folks who like to go to Champlin's Seafood, you will probably have to row there, and it might not even be there. For those who like Aunt Carrie's better, it is here, and it is not in great shape for surviving storms. So we can go offshore to Block Island, which has been designated by The Nature Conservancy as one of the world's last 10 great places. Well, it is no longer one of the world's last 10 great places, it is now two of the world's last--I guess it would have to be 11 great places because it breaks into two separate islands. Block Island becomes Block Islands. The beautiful town of Jamestown, which is its own island between Aquidneck Island and our mainland shore, breaks up into three separate islands. It is now one. Jamestown goes up a little bit further, that part stays intact, but the upper part breaks away from downtown Jamestown, here, and the Beaver Tail area breaks off into, I guess it would become Beaver Tail Island. Now let's go up to our capital city. We started with the first map showing Providence. This series of images will show what happens to Providence as sea levels rise. Just to orient people who are seeing this, this is the Providence River coming in. This is the Woonasquatucket River. This is the circle at Waterplace Park and the Woonasquatucket River goes out over the Providence Place Mall, and it goes on from there. This is Providence's downtown business district. That is 3 feet of sea level rise--not much change. Now you get to 7 feet of sea level rise, and you see the encroachment of the ocean into our business center. Seven feet used to be our worst-case scenario, but as the evidence comes in and we are seeing things happening faster and the sea level rise occurring greater than had been expected, we have been raising our expectations. So here is the new worst-case scenario--10 feet of sea level rise. As you can see, the business section of downtown Providence is entirely overwhelmed. Twelve feet of sea level rise is a natural consequence once you get to 10 feet of sea level rise because if you have 10 feet of sea level rise, then what you get is a regular and recurring, what people call astronomic tides or king tides, when celestial bodies line up so you have a higher than usual tide. For sure people from Florida know about it because those are the days when the street in front of their house on a sunny day is filled with saltwater because the tide has washed in over it. If you go at king high tide time along the Boston wharf, you see parking areas and walking areas already flooded. So it is not unreasonable to look at 12 feet of sea level rise if you are expecting a baseline, what they call bathtub level of 10 feet. As you can see, downtown Providence, our business district is more or less completely inundated. So this is Climate Central. Climate Central has allowed us to get these images of what downtown Providence looks like up close, with various levels of sea level rise, and this is something they run off of Google Earth. This, again, is downtown Providence. This is Providence City Hall. This is Kennedy Plaza, you will be pleased to know, Senator. It is named after another John Kennedy because he gave his last speech in his campaign for President before he went home to take in the election results and find out that he had been elected--his last speech was right here to a huge crowd that had come out to see him in downtown Providence. This is our famous Biltmore Hotel. This used to be the train station. Now the offices of the Rhode Island Foundation are there. As you can see, most of these historic buildings are up to their second floor. If you look at old pictures from the hurricane in 1954 and the hurricane in 1938, you see buildings where the water got that high, but that was at a peak of a hurricane surge. This becomes the baseline. This is what it looks like every day. Here is a closeup of Providence City Hall. Instead of coming along the sidewalk and walking up the steps, you would have to come over in one of our gondolas in order to get in the front entrance, and the first floor of City Hall is lost. If you look at all of this, it represents a loss of billions of dollars in property value to Rhode Islanders. Let me grab the original. All of these areas are occupied right now-- people's homes, people's businesses are there, and if they disappear below rising seas, all that value is lost. It is actually worse than that because if this is the new coastline, then behind that coastline is going to be a new set of flood zones and a new set of velocity zones. For those who are not familiar with what a velocity zone is, that is the part of the flood zone in which it is deep enough and exposed enough that you actually get wave action against structures. So you get the physical force of waves damaging structures rather than just tides rising. Between the V-zones and flood zones, there is a much larger area in which structures become uninsurable, they become unmortgageable, and as a result they become unsellable. So the economic harm from this potential sea level rise inundation of Rhode Island is virtually incalculable, and we are not the only ones who are looking at this. Looking ahead at this coastal threat also is the massive government- backed home loan mortgage corporation Freddie Mac. Freddie Mac has predicted ``the economic losses and social disruption may happen gradually, but they are likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the housing crisis and Great Recession.'' Think about that. Think about the economic damage that this country sustained and the pain the families experienced after the 2008 Wall Street meltdown in that housing crisis, the great recession. Here is Freddie Mac saying this problem is going to be greater in total than the harm from the housing crisis and great recession. Some people would say you can't trust the government about this stuff. You have to trust the private sector. The government doesn't know what it is talking about. Here is a quote from a recent article in the trade publication Risk & Insurance, an insurance trade publication. The editor of that publication wrote that this was what he called ``a growing and alarming threat.'' He went on to say: ``Continually rising seas will damage coastal residential and commercial property values to the point that property owners will flee those markets in droves, thus precipitating a mortgage value collapse that could equal or exceed the mortgage crisis that rocked the global economy in 2008.'' For anybody who wonders why I come and give these speeches every week, for anybody who wonders why I am up to No. 166, it is about seeing the coastline of my home State of Rhode Island being whittled away into this chain of islands--this new Rhode Island archipelago. If this were your State, you would be up here too. We have a responsibility here in Congress to all Americans to face up to what is happening. This is not just a Rhode Island circumstance. It is going to be Louisiana. It is going to be North and South Carolina. It is going to be Massachusetts and Maine and California. It is going to be the gulf coast. We are all going to have to face up to this and help communities prepare. The carbon dioxide that we have already pumped into the atmosphere will make some of this sea level rise inevitable. It is baked in now, and we just have to wait for it to happen. We can still avoid these worst case scenarios if we act promptly and if we will, for one minute, say to the fossil fuel industry: You have had enough. You have fed enough at this trough. You have silenced Congress enough. Your power and your greed will no longer prevail here. We are going to solve this problem for the people of our States. We can still do that, but we do have to act promptly. With regard to the stuff that we cannot avoid, we also have an obligation to help our coastal communities prepare for this, to make this transition. All of these islands are going to need bridges to get to them where there are now roads. Where things are falling into the ocean and you can shore them up and protect them with hard protection, you need to do that. Where not, you need to go back and adjust zoning and planning so that nature can defend herself a little bit better through dunes and through marshes and so forth. There is a lot of work we need to do with this coming at us. This is not funny. Nature will not wait for our politics to sort themselves out. The laws of physics, the laws of chemistry, the laws of biology do not give a hoot about the laws in the Senate. They are going to do their thing, and we need to get ahead of them. When this happens, that big, old fossil fuel industry, with all of its lies and its long, dishonorable campaign of calculated disinformation and phony front groups--so that you do not see its hands--and deliberate political mischief to prevent us from acting, is not going to be around to help us. It will be no help when this flooding comes, so it is up to us. That is why we have to wake up. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, today I join so many Rhode Islanders in honoring the life, service, and gifts of GEN Amedeo C. Merolla. Armie Merolla served his Nation and the State of Rhode Island with distinction, including service in the Marine Corps and more than 30 years in the Rhode Island Army National Guard, where he rose to the rank of brigadier general. He earned numerous awards and decorations, including the Legion of Merit, the Meritorious Service Medal, and the Rhode Island Cross for Valor. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Armie was also an accomplished jurist. In the Guard, he served in the Judge Advocate General Corps. He also worked in public service, as assistant solicitor for the city of Providence and legal counsel to multiple Rhode Island State agencies and offices, as well as to my colleague Congressman James Langevin. He eventually established his own firm, Merolla, Accetturo & Lough, where he practiced alongside two of his children until the time of his death. Armie touched many people's lives through his generous volunteer work in his community, from his church to the Boys and Girls Clubs to the Knights of Columbus, but perhaps his greatest achievement was raising four children with his wife of 64 years, Kitty. My thoughts and prayers are with Armie's family in this time, as we celebrate his good works and kind spirit.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, the last two weekends have surged with political activism. Around the world, millions of people took to the streets to stand up for science and to call attention to the global crisis of climate change. This past weekend, my wife and I marched here in Washington, alongside 200,000 people from across our country in the People's Climate March. I joined faculty and students from Rhode Island's Greene School, an environmental charter school named after the great Nathanael Greene. The Presiding Officer may well know that Nathanael Greene worked his way through the Presiding Officer's State during the course of fighting the Southern Revolutionary campaign and that General Cornwallis wrote to his wife that ``that damn Greene is more dangerous than Washington.'' So we are very proud of Nathanael Greene in Rhode Island and of the school that bears his name. The kids who came down traveled overnight, through the night, to participate in that march. Joined by 375 sister marches worldwide, we came together with one voice to demand leadership in the fight against climate change. The Science March in Washington over Earth Day weekend, led by a nonpartisan group of scientists, was joined by people in 600 satellite marches around the world. I went to Earth Day Texas, a truly impressive event, with 150,000 people, making it the largest Earth Day event in the world. It is the passion of businessman and philanthropist Trammell Crow, who has been bringing Republicans and Democrats together to combat climate change since 2011. So for my 165th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, I want to thank all of those folks who made their voices heard these past few weeks in the streets or online. With the Trump administration locked into tone-deaf climate denial, these marches mattered. And how tone-deaf this administration is. Data from Yale's program on Climate Change Communication shows national support for climate action across a broad range of questions. Nationally, 71 percent trust scientists about climate change--right here; trust climate science about global warming, 71 percent. So many folks came out to the Science March to show that. A majority of Americans, 53 percent, believe climate change is caused mostly by human activity. That compares to 9 percent--9 percent of the Republican caucus here in a vote taken just last Congress. History will have to look back and explain why 53 percent of the American people say that is the case and only 9 percent of our Republican caucus was able to recognize that. Eighty-two percent of Americans want research into clean and renewable energy sources. Seventy-five percent want us to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and 69 percent--right here--want strict CO2 limits on existing coal-fired powerplants. The President is disparaging the Paris climate agreement, but 7 out of 10 registered voters say the United States should stay in. Republicans favor staying in the Paris agreement by 2 to 1. This chart shows that support for research into renewables is strong across the country, even in coal country: 79 percent in Kentucky, 81 percent in West Virginia, and 82 percent in Wyoming. It is the same in the oil patch. Seventy-nine percent of Texans support research into renewables. Despite this overwhelming public support, even in the reddest and most fossil fuel States, President Trump is proposing massive cuts to this research--clearly, tone-deaf. It is the same for emissions limits on coal plants. In all 50 States, in all 435 red, blue, and purple congressional districts, there is majority support for emissions limits. Every single congressional district in the country has majority support for emissions limits. Of course, in some, it goes up into huge numbers like over 75 percent here in Vermont, but the baseline is that every single congressional district, a majority want emissions limits, but of course tone-deaf President Trump has directed his EPA Administrator to look at dismantling the Clean Power Plan. A majority of Americans in every single State and in every single congressional district, which obviously includes every Republican congressional district, agree that climate change is happening. Whether you break it down by State or break it down by congressional district, the results are the same. From here--50 percent and down--are various shades of blue. From here--50 percent and up--are various shades of orange. As you can see, there is not a remaining speck of blue on this map. The American people have settled this question in their minds. Here is what, by the way, the next generation of Republicans think. The Thomson Reuters Foundation surveyed 21 college Republican clubs, of whom half said their members believe human activities are changing the climate. ``The people that are in power right now, for whatever reason, don't have that same global view,'' said Grace Woodward, the president of the Davidson College Republicans. She continued: ``When our generation is in power, we will take climate change much more seriously.'' I am not sure we have the time for that, but I appreciate Grace's sentiment. Kent Haeffner, president of the Harvard University Republican Club, said he, too, believes it will eventually become politically unviable for Republicans to keep dismissing climate change. He said: ``I think that the folks that are our age are going to have to reshape the party and take it in a different direction.'' It sounds like these future leaders of the Republican Party are putting their elders on notice. It is not just a majority of the American people and it is not just young leaders of the Republican Party who don't buy President Trump's tone-deaf climate agenda; corporate America is not buying it either. In the lead-up to the inauguration, more than 630 companies and investors, representing nearly 2 million employees and more than $1 trillion in annual revenue, wrote to Donald Trump, counseling him to follow through on U.S. commitments to combat climate change. Food giants Kellogg's, Campbell's, and Mars, clothing brands Nike and Levi's, and other corporate heavyweights like Monsanto and Johnson & Johnson urged the incoming President to maintain national efforts to reduce emissions, invest in the low-carbon economy at home and abroad, and keep the United States in the Paris Agreement. Just last week, 13 of the largest and most successful companies in America wrote to the President to, and I quote them here, ``urge that the United States remain a party to the Paris Agreement, work constructively with other nations to implement the agreement, and work to strengthen international support for broad ranges of innovation technology.'' I don't know how the business community could state its position much more clearly. That group included BP, DuPont, General Mills, Google, Intel, Microsoft, National Grid, Novartis, PG&E, Schneider Electric, Shell, Unilever, and Walmart. As former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg put it, ``Washington won't determine the fate of our ability to meet our Paris commitment.'' Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have both of these letters printed in the Record.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. These companies know that climate change could disrupt their supply chains, make water or commodities more costly, or even roil international markets. So they are moving ahead whether the President and congressional Republicans are with them or not. Mars, the maker of M&Ms and Snickers bars, has pledged to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from its facilities by 2040. When asked by the New York Times if President Trump's threats to leave the Paris accord had any effect on Mars' plans, global sustainability director Kevin Rabinovitch replied: ``This doesn't change our commitments. . . . We're doing this because we see a real business risk.'' Walmart, which already has set a goal of deriving half its energy from renewable sources by 2025, recently announced Project Gigaton, an initiative to eliminate 1 gigaton of carbon emissions by 2030 from its entire supply chain. Big league sports is engaged too. Major League Baseball stadiums and National Basketball Association arenas have installed wind turbines to generate their own low-carbon energy, or solar panels, like the Red Sox's Fenway Park. The National Hockey League has partnered with ENERGY STAR and the Natural Resources Defense Council to make its facilities more energy efficient. Salt Lake City's Major League Soccer stadium built one of Utah's largest solar panel arrays, providing more than 70 percent of that facility's energy. The National Football League has a program to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions during every Super Bowl, which has resulted in the planting of over 50,000 trees in Super Bowl host communities. In 2016, outdoor retailer REI hit 100 percent renewable energy for the fourth consecutive year, and they just opened a new net-zero energy distribution center in the Arizona desert. Starbucks announced plans to power 116 stores in Washington State on renewable energy. Patagonia created an incentive program for employees who commute to work without driving, saving more than 25,000 gallons of fuel last year, and it invested more than $50 million to purchase 2,500 residential solar units. And it is not just the business community that makes things; financial firms are urging their clients to factor climate change into their investment decisions. Last year, the investment firm BlackRock, with more than $1 trillion in assets under management, issued a report titled ``Adapting Portfolios to Climate Change,'' which describes ``how investors can incorporate climate factors to reduce risk and seize opportunities.'' The Asset Owners Disclosure Project last week reported that ``[s]ixty percent of the world's 500 biggest asset owners, with funds worth $27 trillion''--hold your breath on that--``now recognized the financial risks of climate change and opportunities in the low carbon transition and are taking action.'' Bill Gates, along with more than 20 of the world's most successful businesspeople, launched a $1 billion investment fund in late 2016, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by financing clean energy technology. These clear-eyed assessments of the business effects of climate change are not entirely new. Back in 2009, Donald Trump joined business leaders to warn us about the ``catastrophic and irreversible effects of climate change.'' There advertisement read: ``There will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.'' That was then, I guess. The country is moving on without President Trump and without the Republican Party. State and local officials are on the march, leading their communities on a path to reduced carbon emissions. Companies are on the march, greening their operations and supply chains. And on campuses across the country, young Republicans and young Democrats are on the march, coming together to prepare for a cleaner future. As the marches and events of the past 2 weekends demonstrated, there is no going back. I realize it is hard for my Republican colleagues to go against the fossil fuel cartel, but it is not too late for them to finally say enough is enough, to wake up and to join the march. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for up to 18 minutes.

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, on Monday night we confirmed former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue to be President Trump's Secretary of Agriculture, and I am here for my 164th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech to urge Secretary Perdue to listen to his agency, to scientific researchers in farm States across the country, to our major food and agricultural producers, and to farmers, fishermen, ranchers, and foresters about the serious and growing effects of climate change. Carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is changing the atmosphere and the oceans. We see it everywhere. We see it on drought-stricken farms and in raging wildfires. We see it in fish that are disappearing from warming, acidifying waters. We see it in our dying pine forests. We see it in extreme weather events. Secretary Perdue is taking the helm of an agency with a key role in mitigating those very effects. The USDA provides farmers, foresters, commodities markets, and State and local officials with analyses of trends and emerging issues affecting agriculture, the food supply, the environment, and rural communities. In its own Climate Change Adaptation Plan, the Department notes: ``Climate change has the potential to confound USDA efforts to meet these core obligations and responsibilities to the Nation.'' During his tenure as Governor, Secretary Perdue issued a State energy strategy, stating: ``Strong scientific evidence exists that increasing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are affecting Earth's climate.'' That is encouraging. Yet, when asked by Senator Leahy about climate change during the Secretary's confirmation process, he backpedaled and said: ``It is clear that the climate has been changing,'' but there is ``significant debate within the scientific community'' on whether human activities play a role in that. Whoops, that is the classic denier dodge, and it is just not true. Secretary Perdue said several times during his confirmation process that he will use the ``best scientific and statistical data available'' to make decisions. The National Climate Assessment uses the ``best scientific and statistical data'' to conclude this: ``In the long term, combined stresses associated with climate change are expected to decrease agricultural productivity.'' In the Midwest, for instance, the National Climate Assessment reports that temperatures are increasing, and the rate of warming tripled between 1980 and 2010. Under the assessment's worst-case scenarios, temperatures across the Midwest are projected to rise 8.5 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100. If you are a farmer, 8.5 degrees changes everything. In the western mountains, massive forests stand dead on the mountainsides as warmer winters allow the killer bark beetle to swarm into higher latitudes and higher altitudes. Over 82 million acres of national forests are under stress from fires, these insects, or both. Ominously, the assessment says that the combined effect of increasing wildfire, insect outbreaks, and diseases is expected to cause an ``almost complete loss of subalpine forests.'' The cost to taxpayers of fighting fires in those dead and dying forests is growing dramatically. Firefighting has gone from just 13 percent of the Forest Service's budget in 2004 to over 50 percent in 2015. The Forest Service estimates that by 2025 fighting fires will take up to two-thirds of its budget. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell testified to the Senate: ``This increase in the cost of wildland fire suppression is subsuming the agency's budget and jeopardizing its ability to implement its full mission.'' One place Secretary Perdue can go to find out a little bit about this is from our State universities. The University of Wyoming's Center for Environmental Hydrology and Geophysics, for example, reports: ``Many of the most pressing issues facing the Western United States hinge on the fate and transport of water and its response to diverse disturbances, including climate change.'' At Kansas State University, professor of agronomy Charles Rice is using climate modeling to help anticipate climate effects in the Great Plains and to help the region mitigate and adapt to those effects. In Wisconsin, Victor Cabrera, an assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Dairy Science Department, says that higher summer temperatures and increasing drought will interfere with both livestock fertility and milk production, and dairy cows could give as much as 10 percent less milk. Secretary Perdue's own Department of Agriculture predicts that by 2030 climate change will cost the United States' dairy sector between $79 million and $199 million per year in lost production. South Dakota State University professor Mark Cochrane is working with the Forest Service to better understand how a changing climate is affecting our forests. Professor Cochrane reported: ``Forest fire seasons worldwide increased by 18.7 percent due to more rain-free days and hotter temperatures.'' Secretary Perdue could travel to Iowa and hear from Gene Takle, an Iowa State University professor of agronomy and geological and atmospheric sciences, who told a United Nations conference recently that climate change is already affecting Iowa farmers. ``This isn't just about the distant future,'' he said. At Iowa State's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Secretary Perdue could also hear about what the center calls ``aggravated and unpredictable risk that will challenge the security of our agricultural and biological systems.'' I am from the Ocean State. So let's turn to the oceans, where the National Climate Assessment predicts: ``Fishing costs are predicted to increase as fisheries transition to new species and as processing plants and fishing jobs shift poleward.'' In the Pacific Northwest, ocean acidification caused a 70-percent loss of oyster larvae from 2006 to 2008 at an oyster hatchery in Oregon. Wild oyster stocks in Washington State have failed as weather patterns have brought more acidic water to the shore. This is an industry worth about $73 million annually. So we ought not to laugh this off. In Alaska, the University of Alaska has an Ocean Acidification Research Center. That is how seriously they take it. The Ocean Acidification Research Center warns that ocean acidification ``has the potential to disrupt (the Alaskan seafood) industry from top to bottom''--a top-to-bottom disruption of one of Alaska's major industries, and we cannot get a word on climate change out of the Republican side of the aisle in this building. It is, of course, not just scientists. Some of the largest agriculture and food companies are speaking out as well. For these companies, climate change is not a partisan issue. It is not even a political issue. It is a business survival issue. It is their new reality. In 2015, major food and beverage companies visited Congress to tell us how climate change is affecting their industry. ``Climate really matters to our business,'' said Kim Nelson, of General Mills. ``We fundamentally rely on Mother Nature.'' The choices we make to protect or forsake our climate, she said, will be ``important to the long-term viability of our company and our industry.'' Paul Bakus, of Nestle, agreed, saying that climate change ``is impacting our business today.'' His company cans pumpkins under the Libby's brand. They have seen pumpkin yields crash in the United States. Mr. Bakus told us: ``We have never seen growing and harvesting conditions like this in the Midwest.'' Chief sustainability officer for the Mars Corporation, Barry Parkin, was blunter in his assessment: ``We are on a path to a dangerous place.'' Greg Page, the former CEO of Cargill, has publicly stated that climate change must be addressed to prevent future food shortages. Specifically, he said: U.S. production of corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton could decline by 14 percent by mid-century, and by as much as 42 percent by late century. From an agricultural standpoint, we have to prepare ourselves for a different climate than we have today. In advance of the Paris climate conference, the heads of Mars, General Mills, Nestle USA, Unilever, Kellogg Company, New Belgium Brewing, Ben & Jerry's, Cliff Bar, Stonyfield Farm, Danone Dairy, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Hershey, and Hain Celestial signed a public letter--this one here--that said: Climate change is bad for farmers and agriculture. Drought, flooding, and hotter growing conditions threaten the world's food supply and contribute to food insecurity. They continued: Now is the time to meaningfully address the reality of climate change. . . . We are ready to meet the climate challenges that face our businesses. These big, successful companies don't take climate change lightly, and neither do our farmers, loggers, ranchers, and fishermen. In South Carolina, farms that have been in families for generations, like that of Representative Mark Sanford's, are under threat from climate change. Congressman Sanford said: ``At our family farm in Beaufort, I've watched over the last 50 years as sea levels have risen and affected salt edges of the farm.'' Out West, ranchers are experiencing longer and more severe droughts. In a 2012 survey of Southern Colorado ranchers, roughly one-quarter of respondents said they would likely leave the industry if the drought persisted. Carlyle Currier, who owns a ranch in Molina, CO, said: ``We just can't grow enough to feed the cattle ourselves.'' In New Hampshire, Jamey French, President of Northland Forest Products, has seen hardwood tree species begin to migrate, with less valuable timber trees like oak and hickory beginning to take the place of sugar maple and yellow birch. I sure hope Secretary Purdue will come to Rhode Island and meet our fishermen. Chris Brown is the owner of Brown Family Seafood and the president of the Rhode Island Commercial Fishermen's Association. He has fished in the waters of Rhode Island Sound for years: ``We used to come right here and catch two, three, four thousand pounds [of whiting] a day, sometimes 10,'' he told the New York Times. But the whiting have moved north to cooler waters. ``Climate change is going to make it hard on some of those species that are not particularly fond of warm or warming waters,'' Chris said. And he is not alone. I have been told by other fishermen that it is getting weird out there in Rhode Island's waters, that this is not our grandfathers' ocean. These changes are serious for this industry. So I hope Secretary Perdue will hear the message of our farmers, foresters, ranchers, and fishermen. They are sending this message loud and clear. Climate change is happening now, and they count on us to face the challenge. The problem, of course, is the fossil fuel-funded denial machine that has so much influence over the Republican Party in Congress today. That fossil fuel-funded denial machine will do its best to change the subject, to muddy the waters, to create artificial doubt, and to use its anonymous dark political money to break up and thwart any signs of progress, but all the dark money in the world can't change the things that Iowa farmers, Wyoming ranchers, South Dakota forest managers, and Rhode Island fishermen see. If this body--if our Republican friends here--will not listen to Mars Corporation, to General Mills, to Nestle USA, to Unilever, to Kellogg, to Coke and Pepsi and Hershey, it is really time to wake up. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, this is my 163rd ``Time to Wake Up'' speech. I persist in the hope that one day these little water drops will ultimately cut through the stone of fossil fuel intransigence. Last week our new President, Donald Trump, announced an Executive order aiming to wipe out many of his predecessors' climate change measures. So I would like to take some time this evening to examine his Executive order--which is, in many respects, a sham--and show how very far away it is from the actual wishes of the American people. So to set the scene, exactly as the big polluters wanted, the Trump Executive order purports to roll back climate protections. It seeks to change rules for how industry controls methane leaks from natural gas extraction and to lift a ban on new coal leases on our Federal lands. It signals an effort to unwind the Clean Power Plan, which has helped put us on track to sharply reduce carbon emissions over the next decade. Typical for this insider-friendly administration, it is a polluter's wish list, but terrible for the American people--sad, as the President would say. President Trump promises that this will revitalize the coal industry, but it won't. Appalachian coal is being crushed in the market by Wyoming coal, and cheap natural gas is crushing both Appalachian coal and Wyoming coal, and ever-cheaper renewables are catching up on them all. So like so much of what this Oval Office does, this was political theatrics, not real policy. The Clean Power Plan is going nowhere because America is not, despite Trump's best efforts, a banana republic. The administrative agencies that Trump directed to stop taking action on climate change are actually obliged to follow the law, and they will be held to the law. Under the Administrative Procedures Act, these agencies have to follow real facts, not conjure up ``alternative facts'' from the fever swamp of the Breitbart imagination. Their record and their decisions will be reviewed by courts--not ``so-called'' courts, real courts. Administrative agencies cannot make decisions that are, to use the standard of administrative law, arbitrary and capricious. This is an Oval Office that lives by being arbitrary and capricious, but administrative agencies cannot be, or their work will be thrown out in court. The question of carbon dioxide as a pollutant has been settled by the U.S. Supreme Court. Even Administrator Pruitt seems to recognize the folly of trying to undo the EPA carbon dioxide endangerment finding. So we have, as a matter of law, a dangerous pollutant, and under the law, it must be regulated. So this performance of the Trump Show is a waste of time because ultimately lawyers and courts will give the law--the law--the final say. Courts are actually pretty good places for addressing climate change. It is very hard for the lies that are at the heart of climate denial to withstand judicial scrutiny. Smelly conflicts of interest can be exposed, and administrators with those smelly conflicts can be removed or recused. Judges aren't supposed to be influenced by campaign contributions or political threats. The law, and real facts, not alternative facts, prevail. In litigation like the cases in New York and Oregon, the fossil fuel industry will face discovery, testimony, and cross-examination. Lawyers and courts will ultimately force things back on track. In the meantime, this Trump show makes losers of the American people. The Clean Power Plan is a reasonable approach to confronting our carbon problem. It gives States flexibility, and it would save American families $85 a year on energy costs once fully implemented. Good luck making a better plan. I represent Rhode Island, a downwind State prone to air pollution from out-of-State smokestacks. We are also a coastal State, where rising seas driven by climate change threaten our coastal towns. I am sure the Presiding Officer can sympathize with the risk to coastal communities as the sea levels rise. Just this past week, our Providence Journal had a story that said there are seven water treatment plants that are in danger of inundation in a 100-year storm, which, of course, is becoming more and more likely each year. So for Rhode Island, reducing carbon pollution and other greenhouse gases is part of preserving the map of the State we love and protecting the health of our people. We need EPA, because our State environmental agency can't regulate out-of-State pollution. That brings me to the man standing next to the President as he signed this order, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. He is a man who built his career raising money from the industry, and for years lent his badge of office to the industry-enabled legal assault on the Clean Power Plan. As you might imagine, he beamed as President Trump passed him the pen used to sign the Executive order. Years ago, in Central and South America, fruit company puppets ruled banana republics. They wore ostentatious uniforms and enjoyed the trappings of power, but it was the fruit company backers who really called the shots. That is why banana republics are called banana republics. The fossil fuel industry is well on its way to try to turn America into a banana republic, but it won't work. It is a stain upon the Senate that Pruitt actually got through the Senate without ever having to disclose who funded his political dark money operation. That is a first. That is a first. The Republican majority would not have those questions answered because they were so eager to shove this fossil fuel operative into the Administrator's seat at EPA. Inconvenient questions like that wouldn't get answered in banana republics, either. While fossil fuel interests have been calling the shots in Washington, the American people have been of an entirely different mind. Let me show several polls that have come out over the past few weeks documenting public concern about climate change. The Gallup poll shown here found that 71 percent of the American people believe climate change is happening--71 percent. Seventy-one percent trust scientists that, in fact, climate change is happening; 68 percent believe that global warming is caused by human activities; 62 percent believe we are already feeling the effects of climate change in our lives; and 45 percent worry a great deal--worry a great deal--about global warming. A recent poll indicates that climate change is the top worry for 66 percent of Democrats. Yale's program on Climate Change Communication recently launched an extensive interactive map. It was featured recently in the New York Times. It shows that Americans all over the country overwhelmingly believe that climate change is real and support a variety of actions to address it. So let's start with what Americans believe. Seventy percent believe that global warming is happening, and 53 percent believe it is caused mostly by human activities. Most scientists think that global warming is happening--that is a near majority--and 71 percent trust scientists about global warming. That, by the way, compares to 9 percent of the Republican Senate caucus when we called a vote on the issue last Congress. So if we are looking for who is out of step here, it is the Republican Senate caucus that is very out of step with the public. And when you go on to solutions, 82 percent of Americans want research into renewable energy sources; 75 percent want to regulate CO2 as a pollutant; and 69 percent want to set strict CO2 limits on existing coal-fired powerplants. Actually, the Clean Power Plan was a good deal softer than strict CO2 limits, and even then, 69 percent of Americans support it, and 66 percent of Americans support requiring utilities to produce 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources. So my colleagues from Republican States might think this data is representative of people living in their districts, that this is being biased by concern from blue States. Well, here is a State-by-State look. So these are all the States. The colors reflect the percentage of Americans who think that climate change is happening. The break point from blue to tan is the 50-percent break point. So in every single State in the Union, no matter how red, a majority of Americans understand that climate change is happening. How that 50 percent ends up being 9 percent on the Senate floor is a story that I have told in other speeches. But we will see that at 45 percent, it is just pale blue. There is not a bit of pale blue anywhere. The entire country is above 50 percent. So the next item this allows us to look at is Americans who support funding for research into renewables. Now, the lowest color here is the kind of deep orange and that comes in at 75 percent. That is the lowest point of any State in wanting support funding for research into renewables--75 percent--and it goes all the way up into the 90s. For renewable research in coal country, we see 82 percent support in Wyoming; 81 percent support in West Virginia; 79 percent support in Kentucky; and the same in the oil patch--79 percent of Texans support renewables. Despite this support, President Trump recently proposed massive cuts, showing once again that the Trump show is not the America show even in fossil fuel States. The support for carbon dioxide limits on existing coal-fired plants is also widespread. In all 50 States--in all 435 red, blue, and purple congressional districts--there is majority support, every single place. So what did President Trump and the fossil fuel operative at EPA do in the face of this? Signed this silly Executive order purporting to undo the Clean Power Plan. Yale's map allows us to do some interesting stuff. It is interactive, so we can zoom in. Let's take a quick zoom in Oklahoma, Administrator Pruitt's home State. As we can see, in every congressional district, a majority of Oklahomans believe climate change is happening, trust climate scientists about climate change, support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and support setting strict carbon dioxide limits on existing coal-fired powerplants--even in Oklahoma. So who is Scott Pruitt representing? Because he is certainly not representing any State in the country, any congressional district in the country, certainly not representing Oklahoma or any congressional district in Oklahoma. Interestingly, not too long ago, President Trump and his children were on the same page as those majorities of Oklahomans and Americans. I have shown this before: In 2009, Donald, Ivanka, Donald Junior, and Eric Trump supported meaningful and effective measures--in an ad in the New York Times to fight climate change--calling climate change ``scientifically irrefutable'' and warning that its consequences would be ``catastrophic and irreversible.'' So 7 years ago, the entire Trump family recognized that climate change was based on scientifically irrefutable evidence and had catastrophic irreversible consequences. Despite the popularity of getting something done on climate change in every single congressional district in the country, we do nothing. What is up with that, if not politics--fossil fuel industry politics? The most voracious special interest in American politics, the fossil fuel industry, has captured the Trump show, installed its flunkies at the EPA, and hopes to unwind environmental and public health safeguards that the public supports. So I have to keep asking the fossil fuel guys: How do you think this ends? Are you delusional enough to believe that you can defeat real science and ignore both the laws of nature and the will of the American people? It is bonkers. It is political power run amuck. We have a chance to push back a little bit. Scientists will be marching in Washington, DC, and around the country on April 22 to reject the phony-baloney alternative facts of President Trump. Please join them wherever you can. The following weekend, people from around the country are coming to DC--April 29--for the People's Climate March. I was in the People's Climate March in September 2014 with more than 400,000 other concerned Americans, and it was a heartening and energizing experience. So mark your calendars for April 22 and for April 29, and come to DC or to the satellite marches being held around the country. As these maps have shown, you are not alone in seeking climate action. Every single congressional district in the country wants climate action. It is only the death grip of the fossil fuel industry on this building that prevents that from happening. So help make these the last days of denial by this dirty industry and its rightwing climate denial fanatics. As days and months slip by, we lose precious time to address both the harm to Mother Earth of climate change and the harm to America of being made ridiculous around the world by our obeisance to the fossil fuel industry. We are supposed to be the city on the hill, not fossil fuel's banana republic. It is time for America to begin leading again on climate. It is time to wake up. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I thank the Senator for yielding to me. I wish to say how nice it is to see the Senator from Georgia back here with us. It means a lot to all of us to have Senator Isakson back on the Senate floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, with the Republican plan to defeat the Affordable Care Act itself defeated, President Trump says he wants to move beyond healthcare to focus on other priorities. One area that he has often highlighted is our Nation's crumbling infrastructure, which is a priority that many of us share and is something I would like to discuss today. All of our kids, I suspect, dread having to bring home a lousy report card. They would be facing a serious talk. Every 4 years, the American Society of Civil Engineers issues a report card for American infrastructure. Our 2017 report card--out just this month--shows lousy marks across the board for American infrastructure. Our ports and bridges got C-pluses, flat Ds for both drinking water infrastructure and roads, and our energy grid got a D- plus. Overall, the United States took home a D-plus grade point average. It is not pretty, and not an improvement over the scores we got 4 years earlier. A report card is a progress report, and our grades show we are not making progress. So it is time to get serious about the sorry state of America's roads, bridges, ports, and pipes, which literally keep our economy moving. The Civil Engineers estimate that we need an additional $2 trillion in infrastructure investments over the next 10 years to get our infrastructure back to a B grade level. The study also found that there is a cost for lousy infrastructure--that we are set to lose nearly $4 trillion in GDP and $7 trillion in lost business sales by 2025, which would result in 2.5 million fewer jobs that year. America's declining infrastructure also faces growing demand. The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates an additional 100 million more people will rely on our transportation system by midcentury. The U.S. Department of Transportation says that we can expect twice the level of freight traffic on our highways and roads by then, so our already worn- down infrastructure is going to take an even heavier beating. We have to be ready for this. We have to make smart investments in the infrastructure backbone of American commerce. We should make those investments now, and we should make them for the long term. I am hopeful. Transportation infrastructure has been a rare bipartisan bright spot in Congress. After all, our red States and our blue States both have bridges that age and water mains that rupture. Congress has tried many times to push large bipartisan infrastructure bills. In the 112th Congress, a bipartisan group led by Senators Kerry, Graham, and Hutchinson, introduced the BUILD Act to create a national infrastructure bank that would have authorized up to $10 billion to underwrite transportation, water, and energy projects. The Partnership to Build America Act, introduced in the 113th Congress by Senators Bennet and Blunt, also proposed an American infrastructure fund, this time financed with a form of tax repatriation. In the 114th Congress, we were actually able to pass the first long- term transportation law in 10 years. The FAST Act--short for Fixing America's Surface Transportation--authorized more than $300 billion in transportation infrastructure investment over a 5-year period. We also passed the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act to address drinking water emergencies and authorize a number of new Army Corps of Engineers projects, including the removal of pilings and debris from the Providence River in Rhode Island. These bipartisan successes, however, barely put a dent in our Nation's total infrastructure needs. Out on the campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump spoke broadly of a $1 trillion infrastructure push. I agree we have to make that investment in America's infrastructure, but we also need to make sure we get real commitment from Washington, not just public-private partnerships and nebulous tax cuts. To bring our roads and bridges into the 21st century, we need a far-reaching infrastructure program like Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration. The Joint Economic Committee's Democratic contingent put out a report analyzing the President's proposal to use investor tax credits to close our infrastructure gap. What they found was that using these tax credits alone would actually ``cost nearly 55 percent more than traditional infrastructure financing.'' We can't let infrastructure turn into a special interest boondoggle. In the absence of any sort of Executive plan or strategy, Senate Democrats, led by Minority Leader Schumer, put forward our own blueprint to rebuild America's infrastructure. It would invest $1 trillion in the Nation's infrastructure, as the President wished, creating over 50 million American jobs. The blueprint encompasses not just roads and bridges but parks, schools, hospitals, and airports. It calls for investing $100 billion in smalltown communities that need revamped infrastructure, over $100 billion in aging water and sewer systems, $50 billion in our railways, over $100 billion in public transportation, and $30 billion in our essential port infrastructure. It would put billions toward modernizing our energy grid by connecting rural areas and driving investment in clean energy. It includes strong support for American workers--something the President claims as a priority--with ``Buy American'' provisions to promote American-made products and protections like the Davis-Bacon law to make sure Americans earn fair wages. For a coastal State like Rhode Island, which has to prepare for rising seas and increased storm surges from climate change, the blueprint includes $25 billion to improve coastal infrastructure and make coastal communities more resilient. This includes competitive critical infrastructure resiliency funding, a new Resilient Communities Revolving Loan Fund, and support for the National Oceans and Coastal Security Fund, which I authored sometime ago to research, restore, and reinforce our cause. Our plan is big, it is bold, and it should garner the support of anyone who says they want to improve America's infrastructure and create jobs at home. This work is vitally important in my home State. The American Society of Civil Engineers' report card shines a light on Rhode Island's particular infrastructure woes. It shows we need $148 million for drinking water infrastructure needs and nearly $2 billion for wastewater infrastructure fixes over the next 20 years. We have $4.7 million of backlogged park system repairs and a $241 million gap in needed upgrades at schools. More than half of our roads are in poor condition. A lot of our infrastructure, unlike Alaska, dates back to colonial days when the foundations of our roads were first traveled by ox carts. This state of disrepair costs my constituents a lot of money. I have been told by the transportation research group TRIP that driving on cracked and crumbling roads in Rhode Island costs our motorists $604 million per year--more than $810 per motorist, per year, in vehicle repair and operating costs from banging into potholes. In our State, 56 percent of the bridges are deficient or obsolete. That, I am sorry to say, is the worst rate in the country. Those bridges have been around a long time in many cases, and they are literally falling down piece by piece. It can be pretty shocking to see. This photo shows part of the 6/10 Connector in Providence. The interchange is a vital link in the State's highway network for vehicles traveling between Interstates 95, 195, and 295. It was built in stages through the 1950s, and it can no longer accommodate the approximately 100,000 automobiles and heavy trucks that travel on it each day. Our department of transportation has spent millions of dollars on temporary maintenance to keep the interchange shored up and in operation, but you can see that this type of jury-rigging is not a lasting solution. While Rhode Island directs millions of State funds to repair and replacement of these structures, we need some Federal financing to ensure that this work gets done before a serious failure occurs, which could disrupt commerce up and down the entire Northeast Corridor. The evidence of dangerous disrepair is all over my State. This photo depicts a crumbling bridge on Route 37, the east-west freeway servicing the cities of Cranston and Warwick. The tumbledown cement and rusting ironwork are not reassuring. Here is another graphic showing a rusted and ramshackle bridge over Highway 95. We can save money in the long term--a stitch in time saves nine--if we can get on to these repairs and get these bridges fixed. We also have to consider the bridges, roads, ports, rails, and other transit systems in the Ocean State that are, as you might imagine, very close to our coast. This infrastructure is at particular risk from sea level rise, from storm surge, and from the more severe storms that come at us offshore, driven by warming seas and climate change. Recently, NOAA released updated global sea level rise estimates, and they focused those global estimates on the U.S. coastline. The estimate for their ``extreme'' scenario--that is, if we continue to emit high levels of carbon pollution--was increased by half a meter, to a total of 2.5 meters or over 8 feet of global mean sea level rise by 2100. My State's Coastal Resources Management Council has adopted the ``high'' scenario for planning purposes and made the adjustments for the local conditions, and they now put 9 vertical feet of sea level rise as the expectation for Rhode Island's coast by 2100. Of course, as any coastal Senator knows, when you go straight up 9 feet, you can go a long way back, pushing the shoreline into what is now inland, flooding a lot of infrastructure. We need to protect evacuation routes from flooding, we need to bolster hurricane barriers, and we need to replenish beaches and nourish wetlands. To protect infrastructure from storms, we need to raise ports and reinforce bridges that are exposed to corrosive saltwater from storms. We need to manage upstream reservoirs to control downstream flooding. We need to protect groundwater drinking water supplies from intruding saltwater. We need to retrofit lowland wastewater treatment plants that are in danger of flooding. Some of them are not just in flood zones, they are actually in velocity zones where wave action is expected against the structures. These improvements are essential to meeting our infrastructure needs over the coming decade. Every coastal State--especially those in the Northeast and the western Gulf of Mexico, which are expected to see the most dramatic rises in sea level--should be nervous. That is why the Democratic infrastructure blueprint includes funding for resilient coastal communities, including support for the National Oceans and Coastal Security Fund. I have worked to establish this lifeline for coastal infrastructure since my early days in the Senate. Once we fund it, it can be a tremendous resource for coastal communities needing infrastructure improvement and smart coastal adaptation. President Trump has said he wants a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. I am ready to roll up my sleeves and ``git 'er done.'' Democrats have put forward a blueprint for making the investments our Nation so badly needs. Congress can come together on a plan that can provide direct, long-term support and help communities address current needs, while also preparing for the changes we know are coming down the pipeline at us. I say to my Senate colleagues and to the administration, let's get to work. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to speak as in morning business for up to 17 minutes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to give my weekly ``Time to Wake up'' speech. It is occurring on a day when the President has signed an Executive order that purports to be an effort to undo a good deal of work the American Government has done to address climate change. I have to say that it is a little bit hard to take this Executive order very seriously when the President is in trouble, which seems to be an everyday experience for him right now. The White House staff seems to entertain him and distract him by putting on these amateur theatricals in which they can give him a nice big folder that he can make a big signature on with a flourish and feel like he is doing something significant, when, in fact, these entertainments create little effect and mostly just confusion. The administrative agencies that he is purporting to direct to stop taking action on climate change have a couple of differences from this particular Oval Office. One is that they are obliged to follow the law and will be held to the law. The second is that under the Administrative Procedures Act, they have to follow real facts. They don't get to make up ``alternative facts'' in the fever swamp of the Breitbart imagination--at least not for long, because their record can be reviewed by courts. Finally, they can't make decisions that are, to use the standard of administrative law, ``arbitrary and capricious.'' This is an Oval Office that lives by ``arbitrary and capricious,'' but administrative agencies don't get to follow it there without having their rulings thrown out by courts. So ultimately this is going to come down to lawyers and to courts, and lawyers and courts are actually pretty good places for addressing climate change seriously because it is very hard for the lies that are at the heart of climate denial to withstand cross-examination and to stand up to the obligation of witnesses to actually testify truthfully and under oath in court proceedings or even in administrative proceedings. The inconsistencies of people's statements and behavior can be brought out through cross-examination, which has been described as ``the greatest engine for the discovery of truth ever invented.'' Discovery means that litigants get access to documents on the other side, and it also means that the court has a chance to look into conflicts of interest. Administrator Pruitt, thanks to the backing of the fossil fuel industry, which is well on its way in trying to turn America into a banana republic through its interests, actually got through the Senate without ever having to disclose who funded his dark money operation. That alone is a kind of preposterous statement, but it is true, because the Senate majority wouldn't insist that those questions be answered because they were so all-fired eager to shove this fossil fuel tool into the Administrator's seat at EPA. Those questions never got answered. Once there is a case brought against him in which he has to decide whether to recuse himself and that decision gets reviewed by a court, guess what. A court gets to have those questions answered. So there is going to be a lot more that gets discovered as this all goes forward. The President, with the Executive order today, has made himself ridiculous, which is no great achievement given his recent record. He has made his administration ridiculous, which is unfortunate but not unexpected given the climate-denying crowd who has been given positions of responsibility in this administration. Unfortunately, he has also made the United States of America ridiculous, at least until the checks and balances of government set aright the forces unleashed by this ridiculous Executive order. So let's go on to something that is a little bit more fact-based and serious. I take climate trips to various places. I went to Ohio back in 2015, and there I met two remarkable and very cool people: Ellen Mosley Thompson and her husband, Lonnie Thompson. They have been married for 45 years, and that is also how long, more or less, they have been research partners. They do particularly amazing research. They are glaciologists. They study glaciers. They run the Byrd--as in Commander Byrd--Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State. They have spent years and years, decade after decade, studying the world's glaciers and leading expeditions to the far corners of the world to incredible places--to the North Pole, the South Pole, the Greenland ice cap, the high mountains of Peru, and glaciers in faraway China. They gave me this on my visit. This is a little piece of a plant. You can look closely at it, and you can see the little sticks and leaves that are in it. This plant has an interesting history. It grew about 6,600 years ago, and when it grew and lived, woolly mammoths roamed the Earth. Woolly mammoths might have been eating neighboring plants. The human race was just entering the Bronze Age, and it began to snow. It snowed on this little plant. Snow piled on snow year after year, and this plant was buried under a glacier, preserved by the pressure and the cold. And there it stayed, so that now I can hold it up on the floor of the Senate 6,600-and-some years later. Climate change is what brought me this plant because as temperatures steadily rise, glaciers the world over are melting. The glacier that buried this little plant 6,000 years ago receded so fast that here it is now--6,000 years in a glacier and now here in my hand in the Senate. It is not just plants that are emerging from this great melting. We are actually seeing remains of our own long-dead ancestors emerge from melting glaciers. This is all becoming so common that a new field of study has been created--glacial archeology. For my 162nd ``Time to Wake up'' speech, I will share the story of the warming Arctic and our world's disappearing glaciers. The Thompsons, when they leave Ohio State and travel, drill down into the ice, and they take deep core samples out of the glacier, long tubes of ice from the glacier. For Ellen and Lonnie, that means long trips and some challenging logistics, making sure that packed-down ice and snow containing hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated snow and ice doesn't melt along the way back to their lab at Ohio State because in those hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated snow and ice are hundreds of thousands of years of data. I remember going to visit them. They store the core samples from these glaciers around the world in a huge walk-in freezer. It is like a library with metal shelving, except instead of having books on the shelves, it has these tubes, and they are marked as to where they were drilled out. You can pull the tubes off the shelf and take them to a viewer, and they have a light underneath it, and you can look at the light coming through it. You can see bubbles in the glass that captured the atmosphere from thousands of years ago, and you can draw the air out of those ancient bubbles and learn what the atmosphere was like back then. There was a line through the core that they showed me, and I asked them: What is this line in the core? They said: Well, that was a really bad sandstorm. It is actually written about in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and we can connect the timing of those ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs talking about this terrific sandstorm and going back through time, the date. And we know that this dark line in the core reflects that big storm that ancient Egyptians wrote about thousands of years ago. There are other researchers doing similar things. France and Italy have researchers creating a separate ice core repository, and they have dubbed their project ``Protecting Ice Memory.'' Their bunker for these cores is going to be 33 feet under Antarctica's surface, where they hope to be able to keep the cores cold for posterity because given the rate of climate change, these carefully preserved, packed-away, and frozen ice core samples are probably going to be the last record we have of all the information that was left in and lost in melting glaciers. This photo depicts Grinnell Glacier in Montana in what is now called Glacier National Park. This was a picture that was taken in 1940. You can see the glacier here pushing up into the mountain. In this photo, you can now see the glacier as it is here. If it is not clear, all of this is not glacier; it is lake, it is water. The U.S. Geological Survey described what was going on as Grinnell Glacier lost 90 percent of its ice in this last century. Here is what the U.S. Geological Survey said: Glacier recession is underway, and many glaciers have already disappeared. The retreat of these small alpine glaciers reflects changes in recent climate as glaciers respond to altered temperature and precipitation. It has been estimated that there were approximately 150 glaciers present in 1850, and most glaciers were still present in 1910 when the park was established. In 2010, we consider there to be only 25 glaciers larger than 25 acres remaining in Glacier National Park. There were 150 glaciers 100 years ago and 25 now. I wonder what they will call Glacier Park when all the glaciers are gone. This was--is or was, depending on what you look at--Lillian Glacier up in the State of Washington in Olympic National Park. On the top, we see the healthy glacier in 1905. In 2010, it is virtually all gone. There are just little bits of snow in exposed mountain. Glacier loss is not just happening in our parks in the United States; it is happening all over the world. A man named Christian Aslund has been documenting this recently, and National Geographic has printed his work. What he did was go to the archives of the Norwegian Polar Institute, and he found pictures of glaciers in Svalbard, Norway, back from the 1920s--old black and white pictures. Then he went back to the exact same spot from which the old picture was taken, and he took a picture. Most of these are from 2003, so some time has gone by since he took the picture, and the situation has actually gotten worse. You will see here that these two mountaintops that are sticking above this glacier are these two mountaintops right there, but, of course, the glacier is no longer there. You just see a bit of snow back there behind the shore. Here you see this vast wall of ice and the glacier pushing back up into these mountains behind it. Here the wall of ice is essentially gone. You see this whole mountain front that has opened up, and the glacier is now simply back up in the valley behind it. You can see the glacier here from the 1920s filling up this valley and the streams coming off the base of it down there. Here you see the glaciers completely gone. The rock is exposed, and there is a lake at the bottom, and you have to actually look over the top of the mountain to this faraway peak to even see any snow in the photograph. It is the same story elsewhere in the Arctic. The Greenland ice sheet is the world's second largest glacier landmass. A study last year from the journal Science Advances found that we might have underestimated the current rate of mass loss of the Greenland ice sheet by about 20 billion tons per year. As ``Science'' magazine recently highlighted, the accelerating surface melt of ice and snow off the Greenland ice sheet, since 2011, has doubled--Greenland's contribution to global sea level rise. It is a phenomenon that the Presiding Officer sees and hears about in his home State of Florida all the time. All told, the melting Greenland ice sheet holds the equivalent of more than 23 feet of sea level rise in its ice. That would be a lot in Miami. That would be a lot in Providence. That would change the map of the United States of America. Why are these glaciers changing and shrinking? Obviously because the Earth is warming and ice melts. Over the last 150 years, industrial activities of modern civilization have caused the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil. Their emissions have increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and we have known since Abraham Lincoln was President that that traps heat in the atmosphere, warming the planet. What we are learning more and more is how much the warming of the planet accelerates at the Poles. The distribution of the warming is not even across the Earth. Things are warming much faster at the Poles. The Norwegian Polar Institute found that the rate of warming in the Arctic is about twice as high as the global average. For one thing, when snow and ice melt, they can expose darker surfaces underneath, whether it is water or Earth or rock, and a darker surface will absorb more solar energy than reflective snow and ice, and that warms the region even faster. So climate change has this compounding effect in the high latitudes. Temperatures in the Arctic were the highest in recorded history for the period between December 2016 and February 2017. The World Meteorological Organization noted that ``at least three times so far this winter, the Arctic has witnessed the polar equivalent of a heat wave.'' What this means in layman's terms is that when the ice in the Arctic should have been freezing in the deep midwinter, it was actually melting. More warming and more melting mean more sea level rise. Last year, researchers published in ``Nature'' an updated estimate of global sea level rise as this phenomenon accelerates. The prediction is not pretty. This new study doubles the previous estimate, putting global sea level rise over 6 feet by the end of this century. This led to the January NOAA report that I discussed last week which updated global sea level rise region-specific assessments for our U.S. coastline. The report raised the previous upper range or extreme scenario for average global sea level rise in the year 2100 by 20 inches, to a total of 8.2 feet. NOAA and its partners' findings were particularly harsh for the western Gulf of Mexico--the back side of Florida, if you will--and the northeast Atlantic coast; that is, Virginia through Maine, including my home State of Rhode Island. Coastal managers, like Rhode Island's Coastal Resources Management Council, or CRMC, are taking these new estimates very seriously and incorporating the ``high'' scenario into their planning, with the local high scenario now projected for Rhode Island by our CRMC at between 9 and 12 vertical feet of sea level rise. And, of course, when you go up 9 feet or 12 feet, you go back many hundreds of feet in many places. And all of this, whether it is happening in Florida or whether it is happening in Rhode Island or whether it is happening in other coastal States, it all starts with warming seas and melting glaciers. When National Geographic caught up with Aslund a few weeks ago, he said something striking: ``What's happening in the Arctic is spreading around the whole globe.'' These pictures he had taken 14 years ago now--back in 2003--were just the beginning. Kiribati, an island nation, has to face the real consequences of climate change and sea level rise. It is preparing to become a modern- day Atlantis--lost forever to the waves. Aslund describes a meeting with Kiribati's President: ``He knows climate change is just a fact . . . they're buying upland in Fiji so they can evacuate in the future.'' I will end with one final quote from Mr. Aslund. When asked about the devastating effects of climate change that he had seen firsthand, he responded: ``It is the biggest challenge we face and we must act now before it is too late.'' Do one man's photographs stand any chance against the massive deception apparatus orchestrated by the fossil fuel industry, when they can call in a President of the United States for as ridiculous and preposterous an Executive order as he signed today? It is hard to know. I hope this body will rise to its best traditions and meet the needs of its constituents, whether they are coastal constituents threatened by sea level rise or farm constituents threatened by changes in weather or forest constituents who are seeing the pine beetle destroy western forests by the millions of acres. I hope we wake up before it becomes too late. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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