Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, this is the 133rd climate speech that I have delivered, and it has been an amazing week. On Saturday, the New York Times posted its cover story about dying coral reefs in our oceans. On Sunday, the cover story in the Providence Journal was about drowning salt marshes in Rhode Island. Both are the handiwork of climate change. Even more amazing, listen to what a Koch brothers operative said last week: ``Charles has said the climate is changing. So, the climate is changing.'' That was Sheryl Corrigan speaking, of Koch Industries, the massive fuel conglomerate led by Charles and David Koch, and the Charles was Charles Koch. She went on: ``I think he's also said, and we believe that humans have a part in that.'' Climate change is real, it seems, and manmade if even they say so. What this really means is that the denial shtick has collapsed entirely. We saw this coming with the oil and gas CEOs. In the runup to the Paris climate summit, the chief executive officers of 10 of the world's largest oil and gas companies declared their collective support for a strong international climate change agreement. ``We are committed to playing our part,'' they professed. ``Over the coming years we will collectively strengthen our actions and investments to contribute to reducing the GHG intensity of the global energy mix.'' So if the oil and gas CEOs will not do it and now even the Koch brothers will not do it, it looks like denying climate change is no longer acceptable--even to those who most cause it. As we know, Big Coal took another path, denying to the end, and for many players in the coal industry it really is the end. The industry is being devastated by market forces and is in precipitous decline. As I noted in my last climate speech, the Wall Street Journal reported that the ``war on coal'' was a war on coal by the natural gas industry, and the natural gas industry has won. Appalachian Power president and CEO Charles Patton told a meeting of energy executives last fall that coal was losing a long-term contest with natural gas and wind power. Today we learned America's largest coal company, Peabody Energy, filed for bankruptcy, as Arch Coal did in January. In recent years, one report found 26 U.S. coal companies have gone into bankruptcy. Some of the most notable bankruptcies include James River Coal and Patriot Coal Corporation, which had combined assets that totaled $4.6 billion. Denial was not a winning strategy for the coal industry. If outright denial of manmade climate change is no longer a viable strategy, what is left? It is an old classic: Dissembling--saying one thing and doing another. The polluters say climate change is real and they say that a carbon fee makes sense, but they put their entire massive lobbying and political operations to work to prevent Congress from actually acknowledging that climate change is real or from working on legislation to establish a carbon fee--even a carbon fee that would dramatically reduce the corporate income tax rate. For example, USA TODAY reported this week that oil titan Chevron has pumped at least $1 million into the super PAC set up to keep the Senate in the hands of the climate denial party. I don't know of a penny that Chevron has put into supporting climate action in Congress. Say one thing; do another. A new report from the nonprofit research organization Influence Map shows that two other major oil companies, along with three of their industry trade groups, spend as much as $115 million a year to lobby against the very climate policies they publicly claim to support. Say one thing, do another. This chart shows the streams of money from ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell--whose CEO, by the way, signed the oil-and-gas Paris declaration--as well as the American Petroleum Institute, the Western States Petroleum Association, and the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association. That is Shell and that is Exxon. This money deluge--total spent, $114 million--includes advertising and public relations, direct lobbying here in Congress and at State houses, and political contributions and electioneering. Don't think any of this goes to support a solution to climate change. What this chart doesn't show is the dark money these corporate behemoths funnel through phony-baloney front groups, often untraceable, to undermine public understanding of the climate crisis and to undermine action in Congress. Front groups have been testifying this very week in the Environment and Public Works Committee against climate action. Was there any pushback from Charles Koch or from the oil CEOs? No. Nor does this chart show the undisclosed fossil fuel millions dumped into our elections thanks to the regrettable Citizens United Supreme Court decision. Academic researchers like Robert Brulle at Drexel University, Riley Dunlap at Oklahoma State University, Justin Farrell at Yale University, and Michael Mann at Penn State University, among many others, have studied and are exposing the precise dimensions and functions of the corporate climate denial machine. It is quite a piece of machinery. Investigative writers like Naomi Oreskes, Erik Conway, Naomi Klein, and Steve Coll are also on the hunt. Jane Mayer of The New Yorker has put out an important piece of legislation--her new, aptly titled book ``Dark Money,'' about the secret but massive influence-buying of rightwing billionaires led by the infamous Koch brothers. Mayer's book catalogs the rise and the expansion into a vast array of front groups of this operation and the role in it of two of America's more shameless villains Charles and David Koch. If you want a little more history on this unholy alliance, you can read ``Poison Tea,'' a new book out by Jeff Nesbit. Mr. Nesbit was a Republican who worked in the Bush 41 White House. He was there at the creation. He has reviewed an enormous array of documents and he has written an amazing expose. The Koch brothers' say one thing, do another strategy is every bit as bad as the say one thing, do another strategy of their oil and gas allies. Remember, here is what they now say: Charles has said the climate is changing. So, the climate is changing. . . . I think he's also said, and we believe that humans have a part in that. Again, that is the Koch Industries' rep. Here is what they still do: They threaten that Republicans who support a carbon tax or climate regulations would ``be at a severe disadvantage in the Republican nomination process. . . . We would absolutely make that a crucial issue.'' That is the President of Americans for Prosperity, the juggernaut of the Koch brothers-backed political network, which has promised to spend, believe it or not, $750 million just in this 2016 election. What on Earth could they possibly want to spend $750 million on? Americans for Prosperity's president also takes credit for the ``political peril'' they are proud to have created for Republicans who cross them on climate change. This threat is not subtle. Step out of line and here come the attack ads and the primary challengers all funded by the deep pockets of the fossil fuel industry, powered up by Citizens United. The result? The issue of climate change is completely absent from the Republican campaigns. They really don't want to talk about it. Every Republican candidate has gone into silence or outright denial. Their silence or outright denial is exactly paralleled on the floor of this body. Just this week, a bipartisan effort to extend tax incentives for renewable energy fell apart after it was reported that the Kochs and an array of their front groups told the Senate majority to cease and desist from allowing an extension of renewable tax credits the majority had already agreed to. So down came the FAA bill compromise. Of course, the Big Oil tax credits have been baked into the Tax Code, and there is no contesting them that is allowed. We now have a field in which renewable tax credits that were agreed to are not in place, but Big Oil protects its own tax breaks as the fossil fuel industry attacks the renewable tax breaks. Look at what fossil fuel influence has done to the business lobby groups. The Chamber of Commerce, which is probably more accurately defined now as the chamber of carbon, the American Petroleum Institute, even the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Federation of Independent Business, and the Farm Bureau--Big Oil and the Koch brothers have locked them all down. It is a wall of opposition among those groups to any sensible conversation about carbon pollution. I have spoken before about the well-defended castle of denial constructed by the big polluters to attack and harass their opponents and to keep out the unwelcome truths of climate science. Built as it is on a foundation of lies, the denial castle is bound to crumble. We have seen cracks begin to appear in the edifice. This revelation on the part of the Koch brothers that they finally see that climate change is real and manmade is another collapse. It is a big collapse. But don't believe they are surrendering their position entirely. What we see here in Congress is that they are still fighting as hard as ever. They are just conceding some of their more extreme positions because they know some of their nonsense is now simply beyond the pale and is not acceptable. This is just a strategic retreat from a preposterous stance. Every major scientific society in America agrees on the cause and urgency of climate change, and, I think, so do every one of our major State universities--certainly every one I have looked at--all of our National Labs, NASA, NOAA, America's national security and intelligence community, and all the corporations that signed the American Business Act on Climate Pledge, which includes major corporations from a lot of our Republican colleagues' home States. That is a lot of information to deny and ignore, and that is an awful lot of legitimate people to claim our part of the hoax. Here it comes--the whole structure of deceit and denial erected by the fossil fuel interest is creaking and crumbling. More than a dozen attorneys general are starting to poke and probe. My Republican colleagues may want to consider getting out of the way of this because the day is coming--and soon--when the whole denier castle collapses, and that day cannot come too soon. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here for my 132nd ``Time to Wake Up'' speech. We are now back from recess, and while we were away, one little thing and three really big things happened. The little thing has to do with the so-called war on coal which we have heard so much nonsense about in this Chamber. There was this article, which I am showing on this chart, saying: ``Natural gas has been waging a war on coal for more than a decade, and this is the year it plants the flag.'' Natural gas has been waging a war on coal. Not Obama. Not liberals. Natural gas. The article predicts a resulting ``wave'' of coal plant retirements. Who wrote this? Some green, lefty publication? Actually, it was the Wall Street Journal news department. So as coal companies go bankrupt left and right, there is the coal story. Natural gas has been waging war on coal for more than a decade. Spinning this against the President has been easy politics, but false, and that false political strategy has left coal country with what? Nothing. A carbon fee could produce revenues that could power wealth into coal country, but, no, what they got instead was someone to blame--someone to blame wrongly. Great job. Now to the three big things that happened during our recess. First, a group of very distinguished scientists, led by legendary climate scientist Dr. James Hansen, warned us that this climate change thing is likely to be a lot worse than we thought. Their sweeping synthesis, which underwent an involved and public peer-review process, suggests the possibility of greater sea level rise in this century than forecast. It suggests, worse, even epic storms, and it posits ``losing functionality of all coastal cities.'' How about that for a phrase? They go on to conclude, obviously, that ``the economic and social cost of losing functionality of all coastal cities is practically incalculable.'' That was one. Second is the Great Barrier Reef, a wonder of the world, hit by the worst coral bleaching ever measured. For those of my colleagues who don't know, uplanders who may not understand what coral bleaching is, it is like cardiac arrest for coral. You are not necessarily dead yet, but there is a very good chance you will be, and for sure you are in serious trouble and you will need time to recover. That is what is happening in the Great Barrier Reef. The third thing is a new study out of UMass and Penn State which found that the expected loss of Antarctic ice ``nearly doubles'' prior estimates of sea level rise. I am from an ocean State. I am from Rhode Island, the Ocean State. This is consequential. How consequential? Here is what one of the authors of the study said: ``You're remapping the way the planet looks from space with those numbers, not just subtle changes about which neighborhoods are going to be susceptible to storm surge,'' but remapping the way the planet looks from space. Of course, CO2 levels continue to exceed 400 parts per million against a human history where they were always between 170 and 300 until the industrial era drove it up. So that is not great news, but here is what is sickening about it. We don't seem to care here. It has all been in the news. Senators read the news. It is not like we are being deprived of information. We just as an institution do not care. That is a defect. That makes us a defective institution, not to be able to receive and process information like this. This is institutional failure, and we don't even care about that because one might say: You know, I don't really care myself about all of this damage, but as a Member of this body, I get that the U.S. Senate ought to care institutionally. It is like secondary caring. I will do my duty. Even if I personally don't care about oceans or reefs or coasts or storms, I am in. I am in, even though it is not my thing, because I know it is important. But we don't even do that. So we really don't care. Why? Why would we be so blind? We are not all terrible people. Some of us actually spend time outdoors and profess to care about nature. So why does the Senate, as a body collectively, not give a hoot? It is a deadly combination of politics and money. That is what investigation and history will show, and the investigations are underway. The history will not be pretty. We are surrounded by money. Senators exist in a world of money the way fish exist in a world of water. We are so accustomed to it, we barely even notice it. Hundreds of millions of dollars every year in lobbying money surround us. Hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign money every election have to be raised. Hundreds of millions in PAC money pours in and exerts its influence, and we don't even know how much dark money there is flowing around through loopholes the size of the Holland Tunnel. Just one--one--dark money group is spending $750 million in the 2016 elections. It is a disgrace, but it has an effect. The interests that spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying us want things. The interests who give hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign money want things. The PACs and the super PACs pointing $750 million in political artillery at us, they want things. Some want ideological things, but most want money. More exactly, they want things we can do that can be turned into money: licenses, tax breaks, trade advantages, regulations, relief from regulations. You name it, they want it because they can turn it into money. All of that has a desensitizing effect on our values here. If something can't be monetized, we get trained not to care about it. Values that aren't monetized in the marketplace start to seem weird. Who cares about a reef? What is that weird Senator doing talking about a reef? What a silly thing to talk about in our serious world. Now, someone's favorable fat cat tax rate, that is important. Jerking around a perfectly qualified Supreme Court nominee, that is definitely important, but the greatest crisis facing the natural world as we know it, no. And we go along. We go along with that warped value system. It is a lie. It is a moral lie so big it envelopes us, and we acclimate to it. All that money around us slowly anesthetizes our moral and natural senses, and that is how this place becomes Mammon Hall. It is actually even worse than that. It is not just that if you can't cash it in, it doesn't matter around here. It is that big, greedy special interests come here to plunder, and we let them. We let them, and we even help them because we become dependent on their money. Well, I have a proposition. Years ago, one of the Koch brothers, America's biggest polluters, ran for Vice President as a Libertarian Party candidate. When he ran, he learned something. He learned the perverse math of third parties in a two-party system. The perverse math of third parties in a two-party system is that you only hurt the ones you love. You hurt the party you are closest to by your third party taking votes away from the party closest to your politics. Well, the Kochs may be a lot of things, but they aren't stupid, and I think they learned. They learned that a creepy far-right third party that could be put in tow to big polluters was not the right method to achieve their purposes. There was a smarter method. Invade the Republican Party, that Grand Old Party of Theodore Roosevelt, capture it, turn it into the far-right party of their dreams. That was the smart play. Money and secrecy could make it happen, and they are pretty close to having done it. The Republican Party in Congress is as dependent on fossil fuel and polluter money now as a deep sea diver is on his air hose. Cut the airhose or pinch the flow, and we have a diver in real distress. When you control a deep sea diver's airhose, he becomes a pretty obedient diver. It is a form of the Golden Rule: He who wields the gold makes the rules. The political press, by the way, does little to help. It is a game to them. Who will say something appalling we can chatter about on the talk shows? Who is up? Who is down? Who said what about whom? It is akin to a soccer team of 7-year-olds. Most everybody runs to the ball or whatever the shiny object of the moment is, and in the midst of them are outfits that masquerade as the political press, but they are really polluter PR fronts in disguise. They, too, are in tow to the fossil fuel industry. Money and secrecy have their way. So here we are in the Senate, in the face of this news that came to us over the recess, ineffective, defective, idly paying no attention to what is really important as we chase political trifles around, making a mockery of our great American democratic experiment. Well, folks, people are going to notice. This climate mess we have created is only going in one direction. When everybody has noticed, when it is way past denying, elected officials who refused to even look at the problem are going to look pretty foolish, and they are going to have to explain. Well, you see, I thought there was this big hoax. Really. Yes, I thought NASA's scientists and NOAA's scientists were all in on it, along with the U.S. Navy and every National Lab we fund. Hum. That is a big hoax. Oh, did I forget to mention my home State university must have been in on the hoax too? They were all studying climate change effects actually happening in my home State, but I knew better. Great. And every major legitimate American scientific society and most of my home State corporate leaders--I figured they were all wrong. Oh, OK, and where did you get that idea? Oh, from a bunch of guys with financial ties to the polluters. Come on--seriously? Didn't you think that was a pretty obvious conflict of interest? Wow, is that something I should have thought of? But listen. Now I want you to reelect me because I am such a good, prudent, and responsible decisionmaker. Folks, good luck with that. If you think the Republican Party is in trouble now, wait until the day of reckoning comes on climate change. Explain the money. Explain the money. You don't think people are going to figure out how it works? Explain the talk show science you believe instead of the peer-reviewed stuff. Explain the quality of your due diligence into the science. Good luck with that. Explain why you thought NASA, which is driving a rover around on the surface of Mars that they flew there and safely landed--that is probably the greatest scientific and mechanical achievement of our time. They did that, but you say they were part of a hoax on climate change. Really? By the way, I think people here actually owe NASA an apology for saying such nonsense about them, but that is for another day. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I come to this Chamber for the 131st time to urge this body to break free and wake up to what carbon pollution is doing to our atmosphere and our oceans. Last week, scientists at NOAA reported that carbon dioxide levels at their Mauna Loa Observatory jumped in 2015 by the largest year-to-year increase in 56 years of research. Pieter Tans, lead scientist at NOAA, said: Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than they have in hundreds of thousands of years. It's explosive compared to natural processes. We see the effects of this runaway carbon pollution everywhere, in ever-climbing temperatures, in ever-changing weather patterns, and in ever-rising, warming, and acidifying seas. But the Republican- controlled Congress refuses to take responsible action. They put their climate effort elsewhere, such as attacking former Vice President Al Gore for raising awareness of the real and looming climate crisis. One Republican colleague has railed against Mr. Gore, calling him ``the world's first climate billionaire,'' claiming that he is ``drowning in a sea of his own global warming illusions'' and faulting him for ``desperately trying to keep global warming alarmism alive today.'' Another prominent Republican, this one running for President, suggested ``the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore.'' Others claim that cold or snowy weather proves Mr. Gore wrong. After one snow in DC a few years ago, a prominent Republican TV personality claimed the storm ``would seem to contradict Al Gore's hysterical global warming theories.'' A Senator gloated after that storm, ``Where's Al Gore now?'' Another Senate colleague said while campaigning for President in Iowa: I have to admit, I was really confused. Al Gore told us this wasn't going to happen, but it was cold there. These are all profoundly ignorant comments if you know anything about climate change, but they cannot resist. They inhabit what Politico's Daniel Lippman and Mike Allen this week called ``a political reality indifferent to the exigencies of climate change.'' So let's catch up on what Al Gore is up to on climate change. He has a TED talk on the ted.com Web site, and I highly recommend it. Mr. Gore's presentation opens with the fact that our atmosphere is not as big as most people think. He shows this picture taken from the International Space Station to remind us that the atmosphere surrounding our planet is really just a thin shell. It is into this thin shell that we continue to spew megatons of heat-trapping carbon pollution day in and day out. Mr. Gore explains that this thin atmosphere ``right now is the open sewer for our industrial civilization as it's currently organized.'' Here is how he shows our carbon dioxide emission rates through time. You can see the amount of carbon emissions really started to increase here after World War II. Vice President Gore explains: ``[T]he accumulated amount of man-made, global warming pollution that is up in the atmosphere now traps as much extra heat energy as would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours, 365 days a year.'' He continues: [T]hat is a lot of energy. . . . And all that extra heat energy is heating up . . . the whole earth system. The Vice President didn't mention it, but the Associated Press has used a similar analogy about the heat from climate change that is going into our oceans, a piece that said: ``Since 1997, Earth's oceans have absorbed man-made heat energy equivalent to a Hiroshima-style bomb being exploded every second for 75 straight years.'' Mr. Gore showed this depiction of average temperatures between 1951 and 1980. The blue is cooler-than-average days, the white is average days, and the red is warmer-than-average days. Now we are going to look at what happened in the next three decades after this 1951 to 1980 period. What is going to stay the same is this green line. That will be the constant against which you can see the change. Let's go to the next chart. This is 1983 to 1993. You will notice that everything has moved against the constant. You will also notice down here that a new category has emerged. This category is extremely hot days. The next chart is 1994 to 2004. Again, the average continues to move against this green line which is a constant, and now you see that new category of extremely hot days growing even more. Here is our last decade, 2005 to 2015. What we experience in this last decade has moved completely away from the historic norm indicated by that green line, and this extreme temperature, the extremely hot days category, is now bigger than the cooler-than-average category. Remember, 1950 to 1980, this category didn't even exist. Now it is bigger. Well, it might have existed, but it wasn't visible on the graphs; let me put it that way. Now it is bigger than the cooler-than- average category. Mr. Gore points out that these extremely hot days in the last 10 years ``are 150 times more common on the surface of the earth than they were just 30 years ago.'' By the way, we measure this stuff. This is not a theory. Worldwide, 2015 was the hottest year since we began keeping records in 1880, according to NOAA and NASA. That Republican colleague who went to Iowa and thought that the cold disproved climate change dismissed that finding as ``pseudo-scientific theory.'' You know what. NASA is driving a rover around on the surface of Mars right now, so I will go with them knowing what they are talking about. The last 5 years have been the warmest 5-year period on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization, and 14 of the 15 hottest years ever measured have been in this young century. We are a terrestrial species. We live on the land, so naturally we pay more attention to the land and not so much to what is happening in our warming and acidifying oceans. This chart shows the oceans absorbing over 90 percent of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gas emissions. This is the effect of those Hiroshima bomb equivalents warming up the oceans that the Associated Press used as their example. What does all that extra heat mean for the oceans? Well, unless you are going to dispute the law of thermal expansion, it means that warming things expand. Last month, a study of tidal flood days along my east coast came out. The author's conclusion? I will quote him: It's not the tide. It's not the wind. It's us. There is one industry, the insurance industry, that pays serious attention to climate change as their losses have been mounting. This is insurance company data from the Insurance Information Institute in January of 2006 showing the climate rate of worldwide extreme weather catastrophes. Why? Well, Dr. Kevin Trenberth works at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He says: All storms are different now. Do you hear that? All storms are different now. There's so much extra energy in the atmosphere, there's so much extra water vapor. Every storm is different now. Well, the challenge of climate change is urgent, but Mr. Gore points out that we have the understanding and engineering prowess to generate energy from new sources, and we are doing unexpectedly well. Vice President Gore says: The best projections in the world 16 years ago were that by 2010, the world would be able to install 30 gigawatts of wind capacity. We beat that mark by 14 and a half times over. It is the same story for solar capacity, which is taking off even more quickly than wind. Again quoting Vice President Gore: ``The best projections 14 years ago were that we would install one gigawatt [of solar] per year by 2010.'' The Vice President continues: When 2010 came around, we beat that mark by 17 times over. Last year, we beat it by 58 times over. This year, we're on track to beat it 68 times over. Look at that curve. These innovations helped renewable energy costs become comparable with fossil fuel power even though, as Vice President Gore points out, ``fossil energy is now still subsidized at a rate 40 times larger than renewables.'' If you look at what the International Monetary Fund has said about the ``effective subsidy'' of fossil fuel, the subsidy for fossil is actually way bigger than that. Most importantly, society is moving. More than 150 major U.S. companies signed onto the American Business Act on Climate Pledge, supporting a strong outcome in the Paris climate negotiations. Fifty- three percent of young Republican voters--that is, young Republican voters under the age of 35--have said they would describe a climate change denier as ``ignorant,'' ``out-of-touch'' or ``crazy.'' Those are not my words; these are the words in the poll that the young Republicans chose. Despite the recent stay of the administration's Clean Power Plan, 19 States are continuing with EPA to develop compliance strategies for their economies and their energy sectors. Roughly 6 in 10 Republicans and GOP-leaning Independents under age 50 think the government should limit greenhouse gases even if it causes a $20 increase in their monthly bill. So people are moving. Mr. Gore uses a line from the great American poet Wallace Stevens: ``After the final no, there comes a yes, and on that yes the future world depends.'' Well, Al Gore has faced a lot of ``no.'' The fossil fuel industry and its minions have mocked and derided him. The climate denial machine keeps working its poison. In fact, we just learned that Arch Coal's bankruptcy filing shows they were funding an extremist group dedicated to harassing and threatening scientists. As the evidence comes in, as every major science agency and organization lines up with all our National Labs and military services and our home State universities across the country, it turns out the mockers and the deniers were wrong. In fact, in all decency, Al Gore deserves an apology, as do the countless men and women who scrutinize these data, who labor in the real science, and who call us to action. If we continue sleepwalking in Congress, we will need to apologize not just to Al Gore but to future generations. We will need to apologize to our own grandchildren for our negligence when we knew better. So let us wake up from our fossil fuel-funded make-believe and meet our moral obligation. Madam President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I am delighted to join Senator Casey of Pennsylvania and Senator Brown of Ohio on the floor this morning to applaud what appears to be the imminent passage of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. So far we have had less than a handful of votes against this bill at any stage through the voting on it, and I suspect that some of those votes may have had to do with amendments and so forth. We might even do better than that on final passage. I thank my cosponsors. This was not a bill that was just dreamed up in back offices. We had five national seminars in Washington, bringing people in from all around the country to share their experiences, to share their advice, to share their best practices, and to inform the development of this bill. It has been years of work in the making. On our side of the aisle, Senator Klobuchar has been an extremely valuable colleague. On the other side of the aisle, Senator Portman and Senator Ayotte were our coconspirators on this bill. I thank them and extend my appreciation to all of them. This truly is a comprehensive bill: everything from at the point of overdose getting naloxone into the hands of first responders so that lives can be saved; through the prescribing process and the prescription drug monitoring process; through a whole variety of new treatment programs; and through intervention for people who are incarcerated and the prevention of incarceration, particularly for our people in veterans courts and so forth, who can be diverted out of the prison system through new means of treatment such as medically assisted treatment that is emerging as a very promising new strategy; and all the way, ultimately, to disposal of excess drugs. This truly is a comprehensive bill. Its only faults are ones that the Republican leadership are in a terrific position to remedy, if they would. The first is that there is no additional funding to support any of these new programs that I have described. The funding for the accounts in question was determined months and months and months ago in the Appropriations Committee before anybody could know what this bill was going to look like on the floor. When the final deal was reached, the numbers actually matched the President's budget, and the President's budget was issued even before the appropriations measure came out of its relevant subcommittee. So the President's budget folks would have had to have been astonishing masters of prediction in order to put in money for programs that weren't even law at that time. There has been considerable commentary from the other side that there is funding for this, but what they overlook is that, yes, there is funding for these programs, but you would have to take it away from other treatment and recovery programs to fund these. It would be robbing Peter to pay Paul. Now, an argument could be made that under this bill, Paul will be a more effective program than the pre-CARA Peter would have been, and, therefore, robbing Peter to pay Paul is a net good. But, please, let's not pretend there is money for this. If there is one indication of how there really isn't new money for this, it is the fact that our friends on the other side can't agree on how much money there is for this. Some Senators have said that there is $78 million for funding CARA. The majority leader has said there is $400 million to fund CARA. The deputy majority leader has said there is $517 million to fund CARA. If the money were real, I suspect they could agree on the amount of it. I think the fact of the matter is that there is no new money for this, and the sooner we can get this funded, the sooner it will save lives. The second problem is that the House, under Republican leadership, has taken no action on this bill. No committee has taken it up and passed it. So I take this opportunity to call on the leadership here and in the House to put money where their proverbial mouth is to pass this bill, to get some funding behind it--Senator Shaheen's measure would have been terrific--and to get some action out of their colleagues in the House. If we pass it in the Senate and the House takes no action, this will be a sham, and that will have been a shame. With that, I yield the floor for Senator Brown.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am on the floor for the 130th time in my ``Time to Wake Up'' series urging us to wake up to the threat of climate change here. Time and time again, peer-reviewed science demonstrates that carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels is causing unprecedented climate and oceanic changes. We see the effects already in our farms, our forests, and our fisheries. Yet the Republican-controlled Congress continues to hit the ``snooze'' button every time an alarm goes off. Every major scientific society in our country, upon examining the data, says climate change is real and it is caused by our carbon pollution. So do all of our National Laboratories. So do our leading home State universities. The Presiding Officer is from Nebraska, so let me read what the University of Nebraska says on its Web site: ``Climate change poses significant risks to Nebraska's economy, environment, and citizens.'' Another quote: ``The magnitude and rapidity of the projected changes in climate are unprecedented.'' The fundamental science of climate change is settled, and the stakes of the climate crisis loom large. In poll after poll, Americans demonstrate they understand the connection between climate change and the role humans play in affecting climate. A recent poll shows that 64 percent of Americans support enacting policies to address climate change and 78 percent of Americans think Federal Government should curb the release of greenhouse gases. In spite of the overwhelming science demonstrating that climate change is real and the growing awareness and determination of the American public to do something about it, Congress continues to prevaricate. The reason is simple: the power and threats of the fossil fuel industry. But is this strategy, the fossil fuel industry strategy of obstruction and denial, actually self-injurious? Let's look at coal. The coal industry--longtime provider of inexpensive yet dirty energy--is in economic decline. Between 2008 and 2014, coal production and consumption have decreased by 15 percent and 18 percent respectively. Analyses by the U.S. Energy Information Administration suggest 2015 U.S. coal production was likely down a further 10 percent, the lowest level since 1986. Coal is losing its share of the electricity market to natural gas and to wind power. From 2002 to 2012, net generation from coal declined by 22 percent and coal- fired electricity, which just 15 years ago constituted 50 percent of the electricity on the grid, now makes up only 33 percent, roughly, and falling. Gas-fired powerplants generated more energy than coal in 7 of the 12 months of 2015. Prior to 2015, gas-fired electricity generation never exceeded coal. The top four U.S. coal companies--Peabody Energy, Arch Coal, Cloud Peak Energy, and Alpha Natural Resources--produce approximately half of the domestic volume of coal in this country. In the past 5 years, all four companies' stock prices have crashed. According to a recent report from the Niskanen Center, a Libertarian-leaning think tank, the combined total revenue of these top producers between 2010 and 2014 declined by approximately 18 percent. Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs recently delivered more bad news for the global coal market. According to its analysis, ``the industry does not require new investment given the ability of existing assets to satisfy flat demand, so prices will remain under pressure as the deflationary cycle continues.'' The coal industry seems divorced from this reality. Consider what Peabody's CEO Gregory Boyce argued in his company's 2014 annual report: ``[T]hermal coal consumption from the low-cost U.S. regions . . . is likely to increase 50 to 70 million tons over the next 3 years as natural gas prices recover, demand from other regions is displaced, and expected coal plant retirements are offset by higher plant utilization rates.'' Well, the Energy Information Administration disagrees, projecting thermal coal demand growth of just 4 million tons between 2012 and 2018. And remember, this was Peabody Energy's CEO speaking last week. Wyoming's Star Tribune reported that Peabody Energy's senior lenders are recommending that America's largest coal company file for bankruptcy, as Arch Coal, the second largest coal miner in the United States, did in January. Patriot Coal Corporation, Walter Energy, and Alpha Natural Resources have also all filed for bankruptcy in the past year. The fossil fuel strategy of political obstruction for coal is looking more and more like economic suicide. In some corners, light is dawning. Appalachian Power president and CEO Charles Patton told a meeting of energy executives last fall that coal is losing a long-term contest with natural gas and renewables. He said this: ``If we believe we can just change administrations and this issue is going to go away, we're making a terrible mistake.'' Well, what if there is an answer to this terrible mistake that is also an answer to climate change. What if we could reduce the amount of carbon pollution we dump into the atmosphere and oceans while helping communities to transition from coal-based economies to clean energy ones, helping coal miners. More and more conservative and libertarian economists are making the case that the ailing coal industry should embrace a fee on carbon. The idea is simple. You levy a price on the thing you don't want-- carbon pollution--and you use the revenue to pay for things you do want. Greg Ip, chief economics commentator for the Wall Street Journal wrote: The most reliable way to limit the bushing of fossil fuels is to alter market signals so as to divert demand toward cleaner sources of energy or conservation. We know how to do that: Put a price on carbon dioxide emissions via a tax, or via tradeable emission allowances in a cap-and-trade system. Both incentivize the market to find the least economically harmful way to reduce emissions. Dr. Aparna Mathur of the conservative American Enterprise Institute conducted an analysis with a colleague from the Brookings Institution showing a carbon fee could reduce emissions, shore up the country's fiscal outlook, and play an important role in broader tax reform. Dr. Mathur points out: ``The fact that we understand better the burden of a carbon tax and how to offset it for low-income households should make us more likely to adopt this policy, not less so.'' In fact, even the fossil fuel industry knows a carbon tax is an effective mechanism to help shift toward a low-carbon energy future. Six of the world's major oil and gas companies, including BP Group and Royal Dutch Shell, wrote the United Nations last summer saying they could take faster climate action if governments work together to put a proper price on the environmental and economic harms of greenhouse gas emissions. Here is what they said: [W]e need governments across the world to provide us with clear, stable, long-term ambitious policy frameworks. We believe that a price on carbon should be a key element of these frameworks. Harvard Professor N. Gregory Mankiw was chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for President George W. Bush, and he served as an economic adviser to Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney. He agrees: ``The best way to curb carbon emissions is to put a price on carbon.'' With a robust price on carbon, Congress could help coal mining companies, help coal mine workers, and help States and communities with significant coal mining activity. A carbon fee could be used to help coal companies by supplanting current taxes and fees and funding carbon capture for existing operating coal plants. A carbon fee could help coal workers by retraining them for high-paying jobs and providing pension and health care security not available from bankrupted employers. A carbon fee can provide assistance to coal mining communities to help them transition through all the challenges I have described. A report by David Bookbinder and David Bailey of the Niskanen Center said this: The coal industry is facing terminal decline. . . . An unfettered chaotic decline of the coal industry would create major social and economic issues such as deep regional unemployment and a multitude of unfunded liabilities, particularly for coal-dependent States. They point out that there is a way to solve these problems: Compensation for the losers from government policy action is an important conservative principle. It is in this spirit that I introduced, along with Senator Schatz, the American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act of last year. I call it a carbon fee because none of the revenues would go to fund Big Government. The bill is a simple proposal to cut emissions while raising over $2 trillion in revenue, all of which would be returned to the American people--no bigger government. In addition to slashing the corporate tax rate, which the revenues would let us do, and providing families with tax credits beginning at $1,000 per couple, which the revenues also would allow us to do, the bill would provide $20 billion of flexible annual funding back to the people through their States to be used to help them through this inevitable transition--this inevitable transition. In coal-heavy States, this money could make the difference for communities that have been reliant on coal jobs. Arthur Laffer, economic adviser to President Reagan, called our bill a ``game-changer.'' He said of my proposal: ``I applaud Senator Whitehouse's efforts to reduce carbon emissions while simultaneously offsetting--through pro-growth marginal tax rate decreases--the harm done to the economy by the carbon tax.'' I introduced my bill to start a conversation with Republicans on how best to design a carbon fee to help the economy. I would welcome the opportunity to sit down with any colleague to discuss ways to improve our proposal. The coal industry in particular has a clear choice: either to keep fighting climate action, keep obstructing, keep their head in the sand, continue to be truculent and obtuse until they crash into more bankruptcy in that unfettered chaotic decline the Niskanen Center predicts or they could embrace a carbon fee and use it to provide for coal communities, to provide for coal workers, to provide for carbon recovery, and to provide for retirees burdened with unfunded pension obligations. Mr. President, I have put a ladder into the water, and I urge the coal industry, before it goes under, to grab hold. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I thank the ranking member for that courtesy. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution states quite clearly that the President shall nominate a candidate when there is a vacancy in the United States Supreme Court. I would like the record of this discussion to reflect that the term ``shall,'' as defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary--the relevant definition--is A, used to express a command or exhortation, and, B, used in laws, regulations, or directives to express what is mandatory. Under the Constitution that we are all sworn to uphold, the President of the United States has a mandatory duty. I think it is important that he accomplish it and nominate a candidate. I ask my colleagues to imagine if there were another mandatory duty of the President of the United States that this President refused to perform--imagine the cavalcade of Republican Senators to the studios of Fox News to decry and condemn this President for that omission. This should be no different. The President must and will do his constitutional duty. If and when he does that, then the constitutional burden of duty moves from the President to the U.S. Senate, and we will then have to decide whether we will abide by our constitutional duty, whether to follow the regular order that so many of us have articulated as an important goal, whether to follow the precedents of previous nominees, whether to act fairly, whether we are going to be an organization here, an institution, that will prejudge a nominee before we even know who he or she is. Prejudge is at the heart of prejudice; it is not a good thing for the Senate to be doing. Finally, we will have to decide what kind of example we want to set to the rest of the world--of a country that follows the regular order as established in its constitution and has its institutions of government do their duty or as a country that will bend, twist, and dodge those responsibilities because of the demands of immediate politics. Those are choices I will address when they come to us. For now I wish only to say that the President's mandatory duty is clear, and no one should be surprised that he performs it. I thank the Senator from Vermont.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, the letter I have submitted was written to bring CARA to the attention of both the CJS and the Labor- HHS subcommittees. But those subcommittees, when they got this letter, had no idea the bulk of this would move from the Judiciary Committee to the HELP Committee. Back then, CARA was mostly funded through another subcommittee--CJS. Back then, CARA had not even been scheduled for its hearing in Judiciary. So why was the funding for the opioid crisis put in and, indeed, increased by the appropriators of the HELP accounts? Obviously, because 47,000 people died last year--in 2014, the last year we have on record--of opioid overdose deaths. This is a national crisis. They were paying attention to it. They were putting resources in, but not resources to implement the bill that we are about to vote on in the next few days. Indeed, as we speak, SAMSHA, the relevant agency, is gearing up its grant applications to go forward and solicit bids for all the money the appropriators approved and that was dialed up in the omnibus. And SAMSHA is proceeding under the pre-CARA laws. SAMSHA intends to spend every dollar of the appropriated funds, CARA or no CARA. That means if this CARA bill passes, every dollar that goes this year to fund a CARA program will take away funds from that pre-CARA grant array that SAMSHA is preparing right now. In that case, we will necessarily be robbing Peter to pay Paul. You cannot count the same funding twice, and there is no new money for CARA. One can make the argument, and, indeed, I would accept the argument that though we are robbing Peter to pay Paul, CARA's Paul is better than pre-CARA's Peter. CARA is, after all, a very good bill, but the funding math is still undeniable. We are, in fact, robbing pre-CARA Peter to pay for a new CARA-improved Paul. So one can argue that funded programs may improve because of CARA, at least to the extent the funding goes to new CARA-authorized purposes. But that is an argument that the same money will be better spent. It is not a fair argument that there is new money for CARA programs. There is no new money. In sum, the timing does not support the argument that there is new funding for CARA. That money was appropriated long ago. Indeed, this bill will not even be law if we get it through the Senate. There is still the House, the Conference, and the President. What kind of wizards do we think our appropriators must have been 8 months ago at seeing a future for this bill which we even now cannot see? On top of that, the jurisdictional problem between Judiciary and HELP shows that the HELP appropriations had to be intended back in June for other programs, specifically for the HELP grants now underway at SAMSHA, which we would be robbing to fund CARA programs. Unless they were time-traveling wizards, if the appropriators had intended to add extra money for CARA for this fiscal year, they would have added the money to the Judiciary accounts that were what CARA authorized back then when it was introduced and when the appropriators passed the appropriations in the subcommittee. Finally, it is a fact that all of this appropriated money my friends speak of is already on its way to being spent. It will be spent even without CARA. It will be spent even if, for some reason, CARA fails. It may even be spent before CARA becomes law, and it will be spent in programs to support addiction recovery. That is the logic of my conclusion that there is no funding for CARA. That is the logic of my conclusion that to fund CARA without robbing other addiction recovery programs, we would need new funding, not just last year's appropriations. And that, my friends, is why Senator Shaheen's emergency funding bill is so important. With that, I see my distinguished chairman on the floor, and I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank the distinguished ranking member of the Judiciary Committee very much. While he is on the floor, let me thank him for his leadership, support, and passion for the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which was shepherded through the Judiciary Committee under his guidance and with his wise and benevolent support. I am very grateful. I am on the floor to talk about the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act today because it has been said by several of my colleagues that there is funding to implement this bill and that that funding is already in the government's accounts, that if we pass the CARA bill, we will be able to fund it and put it to work right away. Let me say with regret that I disagree with that assertion. I am sorry to have a disagreement with my colleagues over this funding question after all the very excellent bipartisan work we have done to get this bill to this point. This really has been a legislative model. For years we worked on the statute. We had five different full- on national seminars in Washington, bringing people in from all around the country to advise us on all the different aspects of the opioid problem. We had an advisory committee that supported us which was broadly represented from all the different interests that are affected by the opioid crisis. We came up with a bipartisan bill which came through committee in regular order, without objection from anyone, and which is now on the Senate floor awaiting passage. That is the way it is supposed to work. But on this question of whether it is funded, I must disagree, and I wish to explain why. For openers, let me explain that in Congress, there are committees that authorize funding. In the case of this bill, the relevant committees are the HELP Committee and the Judiciary Committee. But it is the Appropriations Committee that actually determines what funding will go into which accounts. The Appropriations Committee, in turn, is broken up into subcommittees, which determine the funding of different accounts in different areas of government. So one subcommittee has jurisdiction in one set of accounts and another subcommittee has the appropriations authority over other accounts. The funding my colleagues have referred to as the funding for this CARA bill was appropriated by what we call in the Senate the Labor-HHS Appropriations Subcommittee. The Labor-HHS Appropriations Subcommittee appropriates two accounts that generally correspond to the authorizing power of the HELP Committee. So there are three committees involved: Judiciary, HELP, and Appropriations. The subcommittee on Appropriations that appropriated this money generally correlates to the authorizing power and jurisdiction of the HELP Committee. There are other Appropriations subcommittees. For instance, there is one that we refer to as CJS. CJS appropriates to, among others, the accounts within the authorizing power of the Judiciary Committee. So that is the background. Now let's go through the problems. One problem with my friend's argument that the bill is funded is that the funding measure to which they refer originally passed out of its Appropriations subcommittee last June. We didn't even take up the CARA bill in the Judiciary Committee until this February. So there is a timing problem. How could the appropriators last June have predicted this state of affairs on the floor right now? The appropriators would have had to have had an astonishing, wizard-like ability to read the future in order to fund back then an unpassed bill--indeed, a bill that then didn't even have a committee hearing scheduled, let alone markup, passage, and the choice to bring it to the floor. Clearly, in June the Labor-HHS appropriators were funding existing programs, and when the omnibus passed in December, these same programs were funded at an even higher level. In fact, Democrats demanded they be funded at nearly the identical level proposed in the President's budget. The President's budget goes even further back in time. The President's budget certainly could not have foreseen CARA, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. So there is a timing problem. Second, this CARA bill, back when these appropriations were passed in June, was funded through different accounts than the accounts it is funded through now as we see it on the floor. When the appropriations were passed, it was funded through accounts that would be funded by CJS appropriators. So there is a committee mismatch as well as a timing problem to any claim that these funds were intended for the CARA bill. The bulk of the CARA bill back then--in fact, 10 out of its 13 programs--authorized funding through Judiciary Committee programs, which is why the bill was sent by the Parliamentarians here to the Judiciary Committee. So if back then the intention was to fund CARA, it would have been CJS that would have funded 10 of those 13 programs. The appropriators for the funds my colleagues speak of were not the CJS appropriators but the Labor-HHS appropriators. Again, there is a committee mismatch. Here is what happened that explains the shift. After the fiscal year 2016 omnibus had passed, we were informed--the sponsors and authors of the legislation--that in order to get our bill out of the Judiciary Committee, the CARA bill had to be rewritten so that it operated only through existing Federal programs. There are Republicans, as the Presiding Officer well knows, who live by the principle of no new Federal programs, even for new crises, and we were asked in the Judiciary Committee to accommodate them. So we accommodated them. We rewrote the bill in January to accommodate those concerns. So this February, when CARA came before the Judiciary Committee, it had been revised to move the bulk of its new programs out of the Judiciary Committee accounts and into accounts under the jurisdiction of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Now, of the 10 programs remaining in the bill, 8 are located at the Department of Health and Human Services, in the jurisdiction of the HELP Committee. But that move was long after these appropriations were made. You cannot connect them. I should interject that this change created an intrusion by our Judiciary bill into the jurisdiction of the HELP Committee. All here today who support the CARA bill owe a great debt of gratitude and appreciation to Chairman Alexander and to Ranking Member Murray for allowing this bill to proceed, even though it now involves a considerable number of accounts under their committee's jurisdiction. They have done so very graciously, without demanding further hearings or otherwise asserting their HELP Committee's turf. So to both of them I offer, and we should all offer, our sincere and heartfelt thanks. It does seem a stretch to think that the appropriators in the Appropriations subcommittee that funds these HELP accounts could have foreseen last June not only that CARA would pass out of the Judiciary Committee in February and not only that it would come to the floor now, but also could have foreseen that so many of its programs would have been transferred from Judiciary Committee to HELP Committee accounts. That would have been an astonishing--indeed, truly magical--feat of prediction. The simple fact is that the Labor-HHS appropriations that my friends rely on as the funding for this CARA bill passed out of the relevant subcommittee with little or no regard for CARA. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter dated April 2, 2015, regarding this matter.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I yield back all time.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as one of the authors of the bill before us on the floor now, I wish to say that I appreciate and welcome the Senator's amendment, and I appreciate the bipartisan way in which it was achieved, with Sherrod Brown and Tim Kaine, as well as with the other cosponsors of the bill. With that, I yield the floor back so that we may hear from another coauthor of this legislation who was with us through the long and arduous process of preparing this bill, running the seminars, putting together the advisory committee, and crafting the legislation. I yield for the Senator from New Hampshire.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, if I can have 1 minute before the Senator departs.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I, Senator Shaheen, and Senator King be recognized for a 15-minute colloquy.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank the Chair. I would like to end this conversation on a happy note, after what I consider to be a very unhappy vote, and that is to express my appreciation to Senator Portman for his collegiality and his work over many years to get this bill to where it is now in the Senate. I express my appreciation to him for voting for the amendment of Senator Shaheen. I express my appreciation to him for publicly pledging to work as hard as we can together to get funding for this bill into the appropriations process that is underway right now. I look forward to working with him on all those endeavors. I do believe that we missed a big opportunity, because Senator Shaheen's bill, had it passed, would have flooded a lot more money, a lot faster, into the solution of this problem. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, we rise to express our disappointment with what just took place. I am one of the authors of the underlying bill. I think it is a very good piece of legislation, but it would make a very significant difference if it had some funding. The simple fact that we have to face is this bill has no funding right now. I know colleagues on the other side have come to the floor to say there is funding--$80 million, $400 million--but in point of fact I must disagree with them. Let me list the points that show, I believe, why there is no funding to this bill at this point. The first is that the funding they point to was passed out of the Appropriations subcommittee 7 months before this bill even had its markup. It would have been an astonishing feat of prediction to be able--back then--to fund this bill now. If that weren't clear enough, there was a change in the bill between then and now. Then, if you wished to fund this bill, you would have put the bulk of the money through the CJS Appropriations Subcommittee because the bulk of this bill was written in the CJS Appropriations Subcommittee. We only changed it this January in response to Republican objections that nobody wanted to create new programs. So we rerouted the new programs through existing programs. That is when it became a Labor-HHS-dominated bill. So there is no way that last June, when this money came through that Appropriations subcommittee, they knew it was going to this. Moreover, if you go to the agency that is responsible for distributing this money, they are bidding the money out right now. They have a use right now for every dollar of it. If we don't pass this bill, they will put the money out and it will be spent. If we do pass this bill, they will put the money out and it will be spent. If we don't get the bill out soon enough, they will have to pass it out and get it spent under existing law. So you simply can't say with a straight face that this is a funded bill. The only way this is funded is by robbing the accounts that SAMHSA is now putting out now to bid to fund, in order to fund this bill. You can say the money will be better spent under this legislation. I think that is true. I support this bill. I am going to be for the bill all the way through, even if it is not funded, but you can't say there is funding. This is a very solvable problem. We have done it before. As Senator Shaheen pointed out on the floor, when it was the swine flu, on an emergency appropriations process, we appropriated $2 billion and when it was Ebola, $5 billion. If you say: Well, no, now something has changed, we can't do that, we have pay for it--Senator Manchin has a pay-for. A penny per milligram of opioid raises over $1 billion. You could do half a penny that could be contributed by the pharmaceutical industry that is so culpable in this predicament, in this tragedy we have, but, no, rather than allow this good program, this bipartisan program to be expedited out there, to help the people who are dying-- 47,000 in 2014, the last year--what we have done is protect the pharmaceutical industry from having to pay any share of the solution. I yield to my colleagues.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I will continue my remarks. We were discussing the forums that the Presiding Officer, Senator Ayotte, Senator Klobuchar, and I organized. Out of that developed a national working group of stakeholders from the public health community, from behavioral health folks, prevention, treatment, recovery, and law enforcement. The forums informed us and the working groups supported us as we worked to draft legislation that would promote effective, evidence-based policies and increase collaboration among what are too often siloed areas of activity and expertise. The bill we developed would do a great number of things. They fall into four major categories: First, it would expand prevention and educational efforts-- particularly aimed at teens, parents, and other caretakers, and elderly folks, aging populations--to prevent the abuse of opioids and heroin and to promote treatment and recovery. Second, it would expand the availability of naloxone to law enforcement agencies and other first responders to help in the reversal of overdoses and save lives. Third, it would expand the resources to identify and treat incarcerated individuals suffering from addiction disorders promptly by collaborating with criminal justice stakeholders and by providing evidence-based treatment. Fourth, it would strengthen prescription drug monitoring programs to help States monitor and track the diversion of prescribed drugs out of the proper and legitimate market and to help at-risk individuals get access to the services they need. It does a number of other things, but I will not summarize them all now. The Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act recognizes what we have learned from science and from experience, and it promotes those practices that we know work best to confront the multiple facets of this new epidemic. It sends the message that we in Congress understand that addiction is a disease, a public health crisis that requires more than the enactment of stiffer criminal penalties. We tried that road. We know it was not a success. The bill we worked on and prepared has been endorsed by over 130 community and national organizations on the frontlines of this epidemic, including the National Council on Behavioral Health, Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, the National District Attorneys Association, the National Association of Attorneys General, major county sheriffs, the American Correctional Association, and many others. Here in the Senate, at the last count, we had 38 cosponsors and myself. I am sure that number is climbing. As committed as I am to the principles in this legislation and to the need to encourage and support these policies, I recognize that this bill alone is not enough. Without adequate resources to fund the programs in the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, CARA, they will remain out of reach to too many of the individuals, communities, and first responders who most need them. Without adequate resources for prevention, treatment, and recovery, we will continue to spend billions of dollars elsewhere in economic and societal costs that would be avoidable if we got this right. Without adequate resources, too many people who desperately want to turn their lives around will be told to wait another day. Anybody who knows about addiction recovery knows what the consequences can be of being told to wait another day. Senator Shaheen of New Hampshire has proposed an amendment which provides emergency appropriations to address this crisis. I am a cosponsor of that amendment because I agree with her that the opioid epidemic is an emergency, a public health emergency, and should be treated as one. Building on the strong commitment Congress made to funding addiction and recovery programs in the fiscal year 2016 omnibus, Senator Shaheen's bill would appropriate an additional $600 million to the Department of Justice, to SAMHSA, and the CDC, much of it going to programs authorized in CARA, the Comprehensive Reduction Recovery Act, or complementary to CARA's goals. This would not be the first time the Congress has authorized emergency spending in response to a public health emergency. When the swine flu epidemic hit, and I believe took 11,000 lives, Congress appropriated $2 billion on an emergency basis with broad support on both sides of the aisle. Here, in the latest year for which we have the data, the body count is 47,000 deaths. We lost 11,000 lives to swine flu and 47,000 lives in 1 year to the opioid epidemic. I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will join me and Senator Shaheen and vote, not only to support the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act but to also provide added resources to make those principles a reality in the lives of the people who are counting on us to come to their aid. Addiction is a tough illness and recovery from it is a hard but noble path. Men and women who walk that path deserve our support, encouragement, and admiration. I thank my fellow sponsors, Senator Portman, Senator Klobuchar, and Senator Ayotte, for their partnership over the past 2 years as we prepared this legislation. I thank Chairman Grassley and my ranking member Senator Leahy for their commitment to tackling this epidemic and for bringing this bill out of the Judiciary Committee without opposition and now to the floor where we hope we can bring it across the finish line. Let me say that I anticipate we are going to have a disagreement about the funding of this bill. I will fight as hard as I can to make sure this bill is adequately funded, but I do not intend, nor do I know anyone who intends, to block the passage of CARA or to interfere with it going into law over the question of funding. People will have to check in with their own consciences, check in with the desires of the addiction and recovery communities in their home States, and check in with their constituents as to the right way to vote on giving this adequate funding. Finally, let me close by thanking the advocates, providers, police officers, rescue personnel, and of course the families who support and help the people in recovery through the tough nights and days. They do the hard work of saving lives every single day, and we would do well to honor them by passing this bill and seeing to it that it has adequate funding support. I yield the floor to the Senator from Virginia.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to deliver my climate remarks, but I wish to thank the Senator from Florida for his description of what is happening up in space and what our fellow Americans have achieved. One of the unforgettable moments of my time in the Senate has been to hear Senator Nelson's description of the events that led up to his space flight, the experience of his space flight, and, frankly, the spiritual nature of the events and the effects on his life. It has been impressive, and I am honored to serve with Senator Nelson. Climate Change Mr. President, as the Presiding Officer knows, this is my 129th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech to my colleagues about the serious threat of carbon pollution and our responsibility as Senators to heed that threat and to take steps to soften the blow of climate change. With each passing week, the evidence of climate change continues to mount and public understanding of the stakes of the climate crisis continues to grow. Worldwide, 2015 was the hottest year since we began keeping records back in 1880, according to both NOAA and NASA. The last 5 years have been the warmest 5-year period on record since the World Meteorological Association. We know the amount of carbon in the Earth's atmosphere has risen to its highest level in at least 800,000 years--probably several millions of years but at least 800,000 years. Global sea levels are rising along our shores at their fastest rate in nearly 3,000 years. The current rate of change in ocean acidity is already faster than at any time in the past 50 million years. Our oceans are acidifying more rapidly than they have at any time in 50 million years. We measure that from the geologic record. The American people get it. They understand that climate change is real. More than three out of every four Americans believe that climate change is occurring and that doing nothing to reduce future warming will cause a very or somewhat serious problem for the United States-- three out of four. Even the majority of Republicans now acknowledge global warming, with 59 percent saying the climate is changing. When asked, do you think that the world's climate is undergoing a change that is causing more extreme weather patterns and the rise of sea levels, 70 percent said yes. The American people have an extraordinarily diverse and qualified array of expertise supporting those convictions: virtually every major scientific society and agency, our American military and national security and intelligence officials, leading American companies, doctors, and faith leaders. So the truth is winning out, right? The polluters' campaign of deception and misinformation has been thwarted, right? Well, wrong. They are still at it. A network of fossil fuel-backed front organizations with innocent sounding names still propagates counterfeit science in an attempt to cast doubt on the actual American scientific consensus. This network of polluter-paid deceit and denial has been well documented by Dr. Robert Brulle at Drexel University, Dr. Justin Farrell at Yale University, Dr. Riley Dunlap at Oklahoma State University, and others. Dr. Brulle's follow-the-money analysis, for instance, diagrams the complex flow of cash to these front groups--a flow that the polluters persistently try to obscure. Dr. Farrell's quantitative analysis of words written by climate denial organizations revealed a complex climate denial apparatus that is ``overtly producing and promoting skepticism and doubt about scientific consensus on climate change.'' ``Doubt is their product'' is the famous phrase. Dr. Constantine Boussalis at Trinity College and Dr. Travis Coan at the University of Exeter released a new study in December examining more than 16,000 documents from 19 conservative think tanks over the period 1998 to 2013 and found ``little support for the claim that the era of science denial is over--instead, discussion of climate science has generally increased over the sample period.'' Their study demonstrates that in spite of the broken global heat records over the last decade, rising sea levels, and accelerated melting of polar ice sheets, these conservative think tanks have, in recent years, actually increased their polluter-paid attacks on science. The study explains these think tanks ``provide a multitude of services to the cause of climate change skepticism.'' These include: offering material support and lending credibility to contrarian scientists sponsoring pseudoscientific climate change conferences, directly communicating contrarian viewpoints to politicians--which is how we get infected here--and disseminating skeptic viewpoints out through the media. It follows a playbook of fraudulent deception that we have seen before from industrial powers fighting to obscure the harms their products cause, tobacco being a fine example. In 2002, the conservative strategist Frank Luntz summed up the scheme in a memo to the Republican Party, since leaked, titled ``Straight Talk.'' Here is what Mr. Luntz said: Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate . . . The scientific debate is closing [against us]-- He said back in 2002-- but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science. This is the climate science version of the infamous 1969 tobacco industry memo that declared that ``Doubt is our product.'' In her recent book ``Dark Money,'' Jane Mayer describes in-depth the means by which fossil fuel interests put their wealth to use exerting outsized influence on our American political process. First, she describes, they invest in intellectuals who come up with ideas friendly to the industry. Then they invest in think tanks to transform these ideas into ``marketable policies''--stuff they think they can sell. As one environmental lawyer explains, ``You take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank'' which ``hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders.'' Ms. Mayor describes this as the ``think tank as disguised political weapon.'' Not surprisingly, think tanks in the climate denial scheme tend to be funded by fossil fuel interests like ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers or their fronts. The Kochs and their ilk use dark money channels to funnel money through a labyrinth of nonprofit groups that make the full extent of their meddling difficult, if not impossible, to fully determine. The Boussalis and Coan study identifies the Heartland Institute as a particularly important cog in the polluter-funded climate denial apparatus. According to their study: Heartland's shift towards science-related themes . . . dovetails with Luntz's famous ``Straight Talk'' memo. It is therefore not a surprise that for a decade it has organized the annual International Conference on Climate Change (also known as Denial-a-Palooza), which serves as a forum for climate science deniers, or that it [Heartland] made headlines in 2012 after launching a controversial ad campaign which equated climate scientists with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Climate scientists, such as the ones who work at NASA and NOAA, are being equated with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber--very responsible behavior by Heartland, but Heartland gets big bucks from the fossil fuel industry and its front groups for this service. Unfortunately, that is not all. Behind this well-paid conspiracy to fool the American public, which is failing, is a related political effort, which is not. The polluters are losing with the American public, but they still control Congress. Huge sums of dark money are spent on politics, particularly right here in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. As NYU law professor Burt Neuborne has written, ``rivers of money flowing from secret sources have turned our elections into silent auctions.'' How huge are these rivers of money? Each election sets new records. In the 2012 Presidential cycle, the nonpartisan Center for Responsible Politics reported that dark money groups spent over $300 million, with over 80 percent of it coming from Republican-leaning outfits. The torrent of dark money flooded the 2014 midterm elections, making them the most expensive midterm elections in American history. According to the Washington Post, at least 31 percent of all independent spending in that election came from groups not required to disclose their donors-- dark money. That doesn't even count spending on so-called issue ads, which is also not reported. In this 2016 election cycle, dark money spending has broken new records again. These dark money groups, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, ``are more integrated into campaigns than we've seen in the past.'' The Koch brothers' political network alone has vowed to spend $750 million this election cycle. They are through $400 million already and climbing. And the $750 million they have vowed to spend is more than the Bush and Kerry campaigns combined spent in 2004. In our political debate, dark money dollars drown out the voices of average citizens with what has been aptly called ``a tsunami of slime.'' All that money is not spent for nothing. As one secret corporate donor exulted, ``We can fly under the radar screen. . . . There are no limits, no restrictions, and no disclosure.'' The result stinks, and it is polluting our public discourse. The sad part is that it is working. Not one Republican Senator will stand up and address climate change in a meaningful way. I have a bill modeled on what conservative economists and the out-of-office Republican officials who are willing to address climate change all recommend as their solution. I did it their way--not a single cosponsor. In the Presidential primary, it is even worse. One leading candidate has actually declared that ``the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.'' Tell that to NOAA, NASA, the U.S. Navy, and every single American National Laboratory. It is a preposterous statement offered by a person who presents himself as qualified to be President of the United States. Another candidate--this one, I am sad to say, a Senate colleague-- simply shrugs and says, ``Climate is always changing.'' No, not like this. And if you don't believe me, ask NOAA, NASA, the U.S. Navy, and every single American National Laboratory. Yet another candidate who is also a Senator dismissed the solid American scientific consensus on climate change as ``partisan dogma and ideology.'' Tell that to the scientists at NOAA, NASA, the Navy, and every single one of our National Laboratories, that what they are doing is not legitimate science, but it is partisan dogma and ideology. Again, that is a preposterous remark, but they have to say those things because the big fossil fuel money is so powerful in that primary race that they don't dare cross them. The powerful fossil fuel interests have created a beautiful situation. They no longer care which candidate wins the primary because they have schooled them all to climate denial. That is the achievement of dark money, and it is an achievement that is disgracing our democracy and will darken our reputation for decades. Its effect is that we do nothing--exactly what the big polluters want, exactly what the big polluters paid for. It is just sickening what these secretive special interests and their dirty dark money are doing to our American democracy. It is time to wake up, Mr. President. I thank you. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, no one appears to be seeking the floor right now, so I will take the opportunity to speak about our CARA legislation. Since the Senator from Ohio, who has been my partner in this, is now presiding, this is an opportune time to give some remarks. I think like many States, just from the remarks we heard on the floor already, it is not unusual to have a terrible toll at home from opioid abuse and from overdoses. In 2014, 239 Rhode Islanders lost their lives to overdoses. That is more than were killed in automobile accidents, more than were killed in homicides, more than were killed by suicide. Indeed, that is more than all of those categories--automobile accidents, homicides, and suicides--combined. In one small community, Burrillville, RI, the beginning of last year was marked by six opioid overdose deaths. Burrillville is a very small town in northern Rhode Island. There are probably 5,000 people who live there. In one quarter, the opening quarter of last year, to lose six people, to have six police calls to the scene, to have six wakes, six funerals in a community that small--that is sadly emblematic of what is going on all around the country. Rhode Island is not alone. The addiction overdoses are claiming lives, creating tragedy, and destroying families across the United States. Our emergency rooms in America treat almost 7,000 people every single day for the misuse or abuse of drugs. There are 7,000 people who come through the ER doors needing treatment, which, by the way, runs up costs to our health care system. More than 120 people die every day as a result of an overdose. The latest year for which we have figures is the year that Senator Thune just mentioned, 2014--47,000 dead in 1 year. If you leave this building and walk down to the Mall, you will find the Vietnam war memorial. The Vietnam war memorial has about 58,000 names on it. From the entire Vietnam conflict, there are 58,000 names on the Vietnam war memorial. From 1 year of opioid overdose, there are 47,000 deaths. I am afraid it probably went up in 2015. We don't have the figures in yet. Behind this tragedy of death and sorrow lies a terrible failing, which is that, according to the most recent estimates, nearly 9 out of 10 people who need drug treatment don't get it. They just don't get it. When you think of that death toll, you think of the cost and you think of the sorrow. The idea that we are still letting 9 out of 10 people who need treatment not even get it, not have access to it, is a terrible failing. The economic cost of all of this is something we always think about here in Congress. Whether it is from health care costs or criminal justice-related costs or loss of productivity at work, that has been estimated at as much as $70 billion per year. One thing we have seen is that the ongoing substance abuse epidemic does not discriminate by race, by ethnicity, by gender, or by age. Overdose rates are up in both men and women, in non-Hispanic Whites and Blacks, and in adults of almost all ages. The dynamic nature of this epidemic demands that we respond in a comprehensive way--a way that brings together the public health, the public safety, the behavioral health care, the addiction recovery, and other communities. It was out of this recognition, this realization that this pandemic, as some have aptly called it, requires an all-hands-on-deck approach that the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act was born. Starting in the spring of 2014, Senator Portman of Ohio, Senator Klobuchar of Minnesota, Senator Ayotte of New Hampshire, and I hosted a series of bipartisan, bicameral congressional forums addressing various aspects of addiction--from the role of addiction in our criminal justice system, to the special challenges faced by women, by veterans, by young addicts, and the collateral consequences that we impose on people when they are in recovery. We hosted five forums, as the Presiding Officer will well recall, that brought together experts from these various fields to come here from all around the country. This was a national pilgrimage to Washington to highlight best practices and to share success stories from their States. I have more remarks that I will be pleased to make as the day goes on, but I am here managing the floor, and so I will yield the floor to my colleague and fill in again when there is a gap in the proceedings. I yield the floor, and I will pursue this later.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, we are here on this conflict we have over a Supreme Court nominee, which has turned into a considerable, unprecedented fuss, I believe, for a fairly simple reason. The elephant, so to speak, in the room is that the Court has become a political actor under Chief Justice Roberts. The rightwing bloc on the Court delivered politically because it had a 5-to-4 majority. Now their rightwing majority is gone, and Republicans are predictably upset. Justice Frankfurter admonished: But it is not the business of this Court to pronounce policy. It must observe a fastidious regard for limitations on its own power, and this precludes the Court's giving effect to its own notions of what is wise or politic. Well, that was then. The five-judge bloc on the Roberts Court, of which Justice Scalia was an essential part, systematically and predictably pronounced policy in favor of three things: No. 1, conservative ideology; No. 2, the welfare of big corporations; and No. 3, the electoral well-being of the Republican Party. And people noticed. Linda Greenhouse wrote that it is ``impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Republican-appointed majority is committed to harnessing the Supreme Court to an ideological agenda.'' Other noted Court watchers, such as Norm Ornstein and Jeffrey Toobin, agree. As Jeffrey Toobin noted, the pattern of decisions ``has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican party.'' Columnist Dana Milbank observed of a recent decision that ``the Roberts Court has found yet another way to stack the deck in favor of the rich.'' The Court has become so political that Justices Scalia and Thomas have attended the Koch brothers' secretive annual political conference. Just this week, Ms. Greenhouse wrote, ``[T]he conservative majority is permitting the court to become an agent of partisan warfare to an extent that threatens real damage to the institution.'' It is not just the Court watchers who have noticed; less than one- third of Americans have confidence in the Supreme Court. Americans massively oppose its Citizens United decision--80 percent against, with 71 percent strongly opposed. Most tellingly, by a ratio of 9 to 1, Americans now believe the Court treats corporations more favorably than individuals. Even conservative Republicans agree, by a 4-to-1 margin, that this Court treats corporations more favorably than individuals. Let's take a look at the Court's decisions in these three areas: election politics, corporate interests, and the conservative social agenda. In elections decisions, the Court's Republican-appointed majority always seems to come down on the side that helps the election prospects of the Republican Party. The Voting Rights Act, for example, protects minority access to the ballot, and in States that had long histories of discriminating against minority voters, it required preclearance of voting restrictions. In the 5-to-4 Shelby County decision, the Republican-appointed Justices gutted that preclearance requirement. Predictably, the result was almost immediate enactment across many States of voter-suppression laws. The Washington Post described, for instance, the ``surgical precision with which North Carolina Republicans approved certain forms of photo IDs for voting and excluded others.'' Texas, for another instance, allowed gun permits for voting but not State university IDs. And even where these voter-suppression laws ultimately fail in court, Republicans still gain the benefit of fewer Democrats in the electorate while they are litigated. The conservative judges' decisions on gerrymandering are a second example. ``Gerrymandering'' is named after Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry and his efforts to shape the district of a State senator he needed to protect. A clever modern variant of gerrymandering has emerged--bulk gerrymandering--which looks at the whole congressional delegation of a State. This tactic isolates Democrats into small, supersaturated Democratic districts so that majority-Republican districts can be created out of the remainder of the State. By manipulating the districts this way through its so-called REDMAP project, Republicans delivered congressional delegations that didn't reflect the State's popular vote, over and over. For instance, when Pennsylvania voters went to the polls in 2012, Democratic votes for Congress outnumbered Republican votes by a little over 80,000. Pennsylvania also reelected President Obama that year and our colleague, Democratic Senator Bob Casey. But Pennsylvania at that ballot sent a House delegation to Congress of 5 Democrats and 13 Republicans--more votes for Democrats, more Republicans in the delegation by 13 to 5. This was not just a Pennsylvania fluke. In 2012, Ohio voted for Barack Obama for President and returned our Democratic colleague Sherrod Brown to the Senate but sent 12 Republicans to Congress and only 4 Democrats. Wisconsin voted for Obama in 2012 and elected progressive Senator Tammy Baldwin to the Senate but sent five Republicans and only three Democrats to Congress. The Republican organization behind REDMAP bragged of this achievement. I will quote REDMAP's memo: [A]ggregated numbers show voters pulled the lever for Republicans only 49 percent of the time in congressional races, [but] Republicans enjoy a 33-seat margin in the U.S. House seated yesterday in the 113th Congress, having endured Democratic successes atop the ticket and over one million more votes cast for Democratic House candidates than Republicans. This gerrymandering ran wild because in a Supreme Court case called Vieth v. Jubelirer, four Republican Justices announced that they would no longer question whether gerrymandering interfered with any constitutional voting rights. One, Justice Kennedy, left a glimmer of light, but the practical effect was to announce open season for gerrymandering. As the American Bar Association's publication on redistricting has noted, ``The Court's recent decisions appear to give legislators leeway to preserve partisan advantage as zealously as they like when drawing district lines.'' In practice, gerrymandering of Congress squarely benefited Republicans. A third example is campaign finance decisions, the most noticeable being Citizens United, but a constellation of decisions surrounds Citizens United, beginning with Justice Powell's 1978 opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Belloti. The careful work of Republican appointees on the Court over many years to open American politics to corporate spending has conferred obvious political advantage to the Republican Party, and, as many news outlets reported, it was Republicans who cheered the Citizens United decision. So, in elections, it is three for three in favor of the Republican Party. Turning from elections to the conservative agenda on social issues, such as religion and abortion and gun control, let's start with the District of Columbia v. Heller decision, a Second Amendment decision in which this same five-man bloc created, for the first time in our history, an individual right to keep firearms for self-defense. As recently as 1991, this doctrine was such a fringe theory that it was publicly described by retired Chief Justice Warren Burger as ``one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word `fraud,' on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.'' That was the theory which five on the Court adopted. As one author noted, ``Five Justices on the Supreme Court were able to reinterpret, by some standards radically, the Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms as a personal, not a collective right in Heller.'' At the wall separating church and state, the bloc of five chipped steadily away: Christian crosses in public parks, Federal tax credits funding religious schools, Christian prayer at legislative meetings. As constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky summed it up: ``Rather than obliterating the wall separating church and state all at once, the Roberts Court's opinions are dismantling it brick by brick.'' Four decades ago, Roe v. Wade recognized a wall of privacy in the Constitution between the government and a woman's private medical decisions. In this context, the court has long required State laws barring late-term abortions to have an exception to protect the health of the mother. Then the Roberts Court upheld a ban on the procedure that had no exception for the health of the mother. As Justice Ginsburg stated in her dissent: ``[T]he Act and the Court's defense of it cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court-- and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women's lives.'' If the conservative win rate in the Court is striking, the corporate one is even more so. A recent study found the Roberts Court more favorable to business interests than its predecessors, with all five members of the recent rightwing bloc among the top 10 most business- friendly judges in the last 65 years. Chief Justice Roberts was No. 1 and Justice Alito No. 2. Studies showed the Roberts Court following the legal position of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is a de facto organ of the National Republican Party, 69 percent of the time, up from 56 percent during the Rehnquist Court and 43 percent during the Burger Court. Connect the dots. The Republicans are the party of the corporations, the judges are the appointees of the Republicans, and the judges are delivering for the corporations. It is being done in plain view. Many Chamber victories were significant, such as making employment discrimination harder to prove, letting manufacturers and distributors fix minimum prices for retail goods, letting mutual funds advisers include misstatements made by others in the documents they prepare for investors, and even Hobby Lobby, where the Court put the religious rights of corporate entities over the rights of employees. Big corporations hate being hauled into court and having to face juries, and the five Republican appointees protected them by raising pleading standards for victims, letting companies push disputes into corporate-favored arbitration, restricting Americans' ability to press cases of large-scale wrongdoing in class actions, making it more difficult for workers to hold employers accountable for workplace harassment, and making it harder for consumers with serious side effects to sue the drug companies. Now before the Court is a case the five-man bloc has pursued for some time. It was expected that the five would use it to deal a significant blow to the political and economic clout of unions, a great boon for the big corporations. It also looked like the five were teeing up for the fossil fuel industry, a big victory against the President's Clean Power Plan. There was a lot at stake in that fifth vote. There was a lot that was delivered because of that fifth vote. At 4 to 4, the circuit court decision below stands. At 4 to 4, the challenged regulation ordinarily prevails. I will close with the big sockdolager: Citizens United. It was once the opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court that ``to subject the state governments to the combined capital of wealthy corporations [would] produce universal corruption.'' No more. The five judges behind Citizens United opened the floodgates for unlimited anonymous corporate spending in elections. They found that corporate corruption of elections was near impossible, and they caused a tsunami of slime--to use a phrase that I borrow--that we have seen in recent election cycles. Such a brute role for big corporations in our American Government would shock the Founding Fathers who foresaw no important role in our Republic for the corporations of the time. To unleash that corporate power in our elections, the five conservative justices had to go through some remarkable contortions. They had to reverse previous decisions where the Court had said the opposite. They had to make up facts that were then predictably and are now demonstrably wrong. They had to create a make-believe world of independence and transparency in election spending that present experience belies, and they had to maneuver their own judicial procedures to forestall a factual record belying the facts they were making up. It was a dirty business with a lot of signs of intent, and it has produced evil results that we live with every day. All of this-- Republican election advantage, corporate welfare, the conservative social agenda--is because the activists, corporatists, and rightwing bloc had a fifth vote. That bloc of five did more for the far right, for the Republican Party, and for its corporate backers than all of the Republicans in the House and Senate have been able to do. They delivered. Now it is 4 to 4 and that advantage is gone; hence the panic on the Republican side; hence the departure from plain constitutional text. Imagine any other constitutional duty of the President that he failed to do that would not cause uproar and outrage. There would be nobody on the floor here because everybody would have run off to FOX News to get their talking headshot in and talk about what a terrible thing the President had done by violating his constitutional duty. Well, the President has a constitutional duty--he shall nominate. They are in a political pickle, but the Constitution doesn't care about the politics. From the Constitution's point of view, the politics are just too darn bad. The Constitution directs the President to make the appointment, and he should do his job. The Constitution gives the Senate the job of advice and consent to the President's nominee. We should do our job just as the Constitution provides. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here now for the 128th time to urge that we wake up to the ugly changes that carbon pollution is wreaking on our climate. It is happening all around us, and it is happening right now, not in some far-off future. As humans we are terrestrial beings. We live on the land. So naturally we pay more attention to the experience where we live--things such as increasing average temperatures on the land and changes in extreme weather when it hits the land. We don't so much pay attention to what is happening in our warming and acidifying oceans. The oceans are a big deal in climate change. For decades the oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gas emissions. Of all the different places the excess heat goes, 93 percent is into the oceans. What we see in the atmosphere--the temperature changes we have already measured, the changes we are seeing in our habitat and what is happening to the western forest--all of that is less than the remaining 7 percent. A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change found that the oceans have absorbed as much energy just since 1997 as they had in the preceding 130 years--as much in 20 years, less than 20 years, as they had in the preceding 130 years. According to an Associated Press write-up of the study's findings, ``Since 1997, Earth's oceans have absorbed man-made heat energy equivalent to a Hiroshima-style bomb being exploded every second for 75 straight years.'' That is the energy load of heat that has gone into our oceans--a Hiroshima-style bomb exploded every second for 75 straight years. What does all that excess energy mean for the oceans? It means that sea levels are rising, in part due to melting glaciers but also because of expanding ocean water. It is basic physics, explained by the principle of thermal expansion. When the ocean warms, it expands. It can't go down, so it comes up along our shores. We have measured sea level rise in Rhode Island since 1930. Since then, the water level is up nearly 10 inches at the tide gauge at Naval Station Newport, and rates of sea level rise are on the increase worldwide. Since 1993, global sea level has risen at a rate approximately double the average rate observed through the 20th century. It is accelerating. Current forecasts confirm that if we do nothing to curb greenhouse gas emissions over the next decades, the oceans could rise as much as 3 or 4 feet by 2100. Our State coastal management agency predicts that we could see as much as 7 feet of sea level rise in the Ocean State, in Rhode Island, by the end of the century. I hope my colleagues understand that when I come to do this, I am deadly serious about things that are predicted to happen in my State. This week, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that global sea levels are rising at their fastest rate in nearly 3,000 years. That study also estimates that about half of the 20th century sea level rise would not have occurred without global warming. The lead author, Dr. Robert Kopp, an earth scientist at Rutgers University, explained in the New York Times: Physics tells us that sea-level change and temperature change should go hand-in-hand. This new geological record confirms it. Sea level rise matters to my constituents and to all coastal communities. A related study, led by Dr. Robert Strauss, found that approximately three-quarters of the tidal flood days now occurring in towns along the east coast are a result of the rise in sea level caused by human emissions. For example, looking at tide gauge data, 32 flood days were recorded in the decade from 1955 to 1964 at Annapolis, MD, and 34 flood days were recorded in that same period for Charleston, SC. In one decade, there were 32 flood days in Annapolis and 34 flood days in Charleston. Scroll forward to the decade 2005 to 2014, and the number of flood days in Annapolis jumps to 394 from 32--in one decade-- and 219 flood days were recorded in Charleston. Sea level rise brings coastal erosion, and it brings saltwater inundation of coastal marshes and habitats. It amplifies the effects of storm surge and flooding as storms ride ashore on higher seas. It changes flood zones and affects flood insurance for homeowners. These are real problems, and they are serious problems. Dr. Strauss explains in a New York Times article this week: It's not the tide. It's not the wind. It's us. The main culprit is carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere, which again in 2015 reached new record levels. To put a little context on this, for as long as human beings have inhabited planet Earth, we have existed safely in a range between 170 and 300 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, we broke beyond 300 parts per million early last century, and we haven't looked back. We have now exceeded 400 parts per million. Among its harms, this excess carbon dioxide has a particularly damaging chemical effect on our oceans. Oceans, in addition to absorbing 90 percent of the heat, I pointed out, are absorbing about 30 percent of the carbon dioxide--it goes right into the oceans--roughly 600 gigatons since preindustrial times. As all that carbon is absorbed into the oceans, it changes the oceans' chemistry. It makes the oceans more acidic. The chemical reaction is simple, but the effects on the ocean are serious. This chart shows ocean pH--or acidity--over the past 25 million years, and we can see some variation across those millions of years. This is what is projected for the next 100 years: pH drops equals acidity rises. According to a research article published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the rate of change in ocean acidity is already faster than at any time recorded in the past 50 million years. Scientists go back and they can see this in the geologic record. We have broken every record for 50 million years--millions of years before human beings were ever on the planet. This all may sound esoteric, but it has real hometown consequences for Rhode Island, where coastal life defines our heritage, our culture, and our economy. Fishing is big business in my State. Rhode Island's annual farmed oyster production, for instance, is valued at over $5 million. But carbon pollution is changing the very chemistry in which those oysters must survive. Research on the effects of ocean acidification on shellfish and other marine life can barely keep up with a rapidly acidifying ocean--another reason we need more money for research. Change is coming at us faster. We have to speed up the pace of research to understand it. But what we do know is that shellfish, such as mussels, clams, and oysters, make their shells from calcium carbonate, and calcium carbonate dissolves in acidified seawater. Here is how Bob Rheault, executive director of the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association, put it: The only thing we know for sure is that the larvae, in that first 48-hour period before they start feeding, are tremendously susceptible to dissolution. Their energy budget goes negative because they haven't started to feed yet, and if they haven't got enough energy in that egg and they're starting to dissolve, then it takes extra energy to lay down shell, and they sometimes don't make it. Here we see normal, healthy oyster larvae in those first few crucial days of development, compared to larvae growing in more acidic ocean water. NOAA scientists have projected that the world's oceans and coastal estuaries will become 150 percent more acidic by 2100. This could mean disaster for shellfish--a $1 billion industry around the country. U.S. shellfish production is currently expected to see a 10- to 25-percent reduction in the next five decades, according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Again, pardon me for being serious about this, but it is currently predicted that a major industry in my State is going to be knocked down 10 to 25 percent because we are making our oceans acidic with carbon pollution. A study published last year found that Rhode Island's shellfish populations are especially vulnerable. Mark Gibson is the deputy chief of marine fisheries at the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, and he calls ocean acidification a ``significant threat'' to local fisheries. I don't know how many Senators are expected to forget or ignore a significant threat to an industry in their home State because it is inconvenient for lobbyists and for the fossil fuel industry, but I don't think that is a fair thing to ask of me. But acidification is not the only problem for fishermen. In a 2015 survey from the Center for American Progress, 40 percent of fishermen in the Northeast reported catching new fish species they don't usually see in the waters they fish. Rhode Islanders are starting to catch tarpon and grouper, usually tropical fish; our valuable winter flounder fishery is virtually gone; and our lobstermen have to go farther and farther out to sea to find cooler waters where they can catch their lobsters. Among the fishermen surveyed, 80 percent of those who noticed ``warmer water temperatures'' attribute it to climate change. This is new. When I first got to the Senate, if I went down to Galilee--Rhode Island's largest fishing port--and tried to talk to the fishermen there about climate change or ocean acidification, I was lucky if they didn't throw me off the pier. They didn't want to hear about it. But then it started to hit home. Now fishermen come to me and say: Sheldon, it is getting weird out there. Sheldon, this is not my grandfather's ocean any longer. These are men who fished with their grandfathers, who fished with their fathers, and who now have their own boats. They know these waters, and when they say that the ocean has changed and it is getting weird out there, we should listen. They are on the water every day, and they see these changes happen before their very eyes. I hope my Republican colleagues are like those fishermen. I am sure some of them probably want to throw me off a pier for all these talks, but mostly they probably just don't want to hear about climate change. But what I am hoping is that soon they will hear it from the fishermen in their own States, or their farmers or their foresters, and that they will hear it from their State health officials, their State emergency officials, their own State universities, and they will listen. When they do, they will realize the fossil fuel industry has been duplicitous with them and has been leading them away from their own State's best interests. They will learn that the fossil fuel industry lobbyists are false friends as well as greedy ones. We have a clear scientific understanding of the problem. Yet relentless fossil fuel opposition prevents us from moving toward a solution. It is a disgrace, frankly. It is time to pay attention to reality, to the evidence, to what our farmers and foresters, and, yes, our fishermen are telling us. It is time to shut off the toxic polluter-paid politics that cloud this issue and give Washington a dirty name. It is time, indeed, to wake up. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.