Mr. President, this amendment recognizes that climate change is not a hoax, that climate change is a reality, and that we need to do some things together to begin to plan for and prepare for the inevitable consequences and impacts on our infrastructure.
As someone who was in local government for a long time before coming to this body–I was a county executive–I have a sense of what it means for our States, our municipalities, and our county governments to have to plan for and deal with the inevitable consequence, the impacts on our local infrastructure of the coming changes through climate change.
I happen to represent the lowest mean elevation State in America, and our Governor Jack Markell and his able folks in the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control have led a grassroots statewide effort to begin planning for the future impacts of climate change. Because of the combination of subsidence and sea level rise, Delaware will see earlier than many States impacts on vital local infrastructure. So whether it is our sewer systems, our roads, our water systems or other infrastructure, we need to begin to plan now to bake resiliency into the future of our community.
Given the unique and important role that the Federal Government plays in financing infrastructure and in responding to disasters such as Superstorm Sandy that destroyed a lot of the infrastructure in the nearby States of New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut, we need to be mindful of what these costs could be.
The U.S. Department of Defense is already preparing plans to understand how climate change will impact its infrastructure. My thinking is that the entire Federal Government should make responsible, timely, and thoughtful plans to assess and to prepare for prudent mitigation of the future impacts of climate change on our infrastructure. So I am hopeful that this will be among the many amendments that will be taken up, debated, discussed, and passed in the coming hours and days.
I am grateful that we continue to have an open amendment process and the opportunity to discuss and debate the issues in front of us, and I very much look forward to passage of Coons amendment No. 115.