Madam President, I come to the floor of the Senate today to speak about an issue that is of urgent concern to me and should be of urgent concern to all of us.
That issue is global warming, or climate change.
This is a personal issue for me. As the father of three, along with any other parent, I say that my kids are never far from my mind and my heart. This is true for me as a father as well as a United States Senator, where every day I have to ask the question, what kind of example am I setting? What kind of a world are my actions going to lead to, and what sort of a world will I leave my children, and will it be better than the one my parents left to me?
Madam President, last summer I experienced one of the great joys of parenthood, a family trip. My wife Annie and I took our three children, Maggie, Michael, and Jack, and we went to visit one of our nation’s most spectacular places, the mountains and glaciers of Glacier National Park in Montana. There was one hike in particular on our summer trip that I’ll never forget. It was our hike to visit historic Grinnell Glacier. Now if we had taken this hike more than 60 years ago, here’s what we would have seen. Mountains deep in glaciers, thick with ice and snow, covered in the glaciers that gave this national park its name.
Yet, last year as we took a long and winding hike up the trails, we came up and over the last rise, what we saw was noticeably different, strikingly so because most of what is left today of the iconic Grinnell Glacier in the summer is really a chilly pool of water and a largely empty valley floor. You can see the difference in these two pictures, and this is just in one lifetime. Since 1966, Grinnell Glacier has lost half its total acreage. And as we continue to warm our planet, these changes will only accelerate. And my children – our children – won’t just lose the chance to see beautiful glaciers in an iconic national park, but the chance to live in a world as robust and safe and healthy and vibrant as the one their parents were born into.
Madam President, as our global population keeps growing towards nine billion and developing nations keep seeking higher living standards, and climate change accelerates, this is the foundational challenge of the 21st century.
Climate change impacts everything. Human health, agriculture, national security, migration patterns for animals and fish and birds. As parents, as a nation, I think it is both our responsibility – our challenge – and our opportunity to lead the way, to show that prosperity does not need to mean doom for our future.
I also think, in my view, that simply put, there is no alternative to action.
The world where we don’t act isn’t a world of vibrant economic growth. It’s a world with more frequent and extreme natural disasters, with increased droughts and famine, with displaced populations, and cities, even regions – in a few cases even nations – plunged under water.
I represent the lowest mean elevation state in America, the state of Delaware. And rising sea levels, it’s been documented in a broad study led by our Governor’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources; rising sea levels could put up to 11 percent of my home state of Delaware under water by the end of this century.
We know these changes are coming. They’re slow, they’re gradual, they’re cumulative, and so at times hard to perceive, but they’ve already started and will only get more extreme and more expensive the longer we wait to act. The cost of our inaction will be borne by our children in generations to come.
We’re not the only one seeing these impacts. And although the debate over science raged for many years and I think is settled, I’ve also had an opportunity to hear from folks who live well outside the western scientific world but had a profound insight as to what these impacts are and how they’re seen in the world.
Several years ago along with a senior senator friend of mine, our Senator Pro Tem Senator Leahy, I visited the Kogi tribe in the remote Santa Marta Mountains of Colombia. These equatorial mountains have massive glaciers up in the very top of the high mountains but are also right on the edge of the Caribbean Sea. The folks who make up this pre-Colombian tribe, the Kogi tribe, well they don’t have sophisticated technology that monitors and tracks climate change, but as they sat with us, they shared with us what they see as starkly as our best weather monitoring satellites. By observing changes in migratory patterns, in weather, in the snowpack on the glacial mountains that they worship, they see more every year that there is a fundamental change happening in our environment, in our climate, and their purpose in calling us to meet with them was to warn us that climate change is impacting the way of life that’s passed down from generation to generation for centuries in their people, and it’s moved them to speak out to the world, to tell their story, and to urge the rest of us not to hurt Mother Earth and to understand the consequences of the changes we’re making.
Well whether the voices we listen to come from our own children, from our science community, or from remote corners of the world, all of them call us to act, to act in a way that prevents the worst from happening and to ensure that the benefits outweigh the costs.
You know, this isn’t just wild-eyed or rosy-glassed thinking. It is possible for us to make meaningful change in a bipartisan way.
We’ve done it before. Back in 1990, when acid rain was a real and pressing challenge that was threatening the vitality, the vibrancy of many of the lakes and the mountain places in the American West, I remember well that under then-Republican President George H.W. Bush, Congress came together in a bipartisan way and passed the Clean Air Act Amendments.
These were designed to reduce the contributing elements to acid rain, power plant emissions that produce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide that in combination caused acid rain, damaging private property, historic monuments, injuring forests and lakes and ecosystems all over our country. So Congress came together to create a novel, market-based, flexible cap-and-trade program that allowed power plants to find cost-effective alternatives, solutions to limit pollution. And rather than tanking our economy, that cap-and-trade plan to fight acid rain ended up finding new ways to power our country and to improve energy efficiency without so much pollution.
We adapted. We changed. And in some ways, we thrived.
As a study done 13 years later showed, the standards, those standards adopted in 1990, have saved lives at a cost well worth it. $70 billion in health benefits every year cumulatively compared to $1.7 billion in costs. A 40-to-one trade-off that I think most Americans would take any day of the week as a return on investment.
More recently my own state of Delaware and eight of our northeastern neighbors showed how we can act together to begin to curb climate change and grow our economies at the same time. In 2003, a bipartisan group of regional leaders, this time led by New York State’s Republican Governor, George Pataki, built a regional cap-and-trade system similar to that acid rain prevention program I just referenced. But the one in our region was called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative or RGGI for short.
It’s flexible, market-based, and it’s been effective. States choose to cut pollution in a number of ways, from closing old coal-fired power plants, or opening new renewable energy projects, or investing in important and valuable energy efficiency. As the New York Times reported just last weekend, since that program started in 2009, our economies in these regional states have actually grown more than the 41 other states not part of RGGI by several percentage points, while we’ve cut our emissions over four times more than the rest of the nation. We’ve created jobs, we’ve invested in innovation, we’ve cut pollution, and saved millions of families money on their energy bills.
That’s why I think we should feel optimistic about the important steps the Administration has just taken.
The President’s strong standards for vehicle fuel efficiency were a great start. At first, many argued pushing car companies to make cleaner, more efficient cars would end up costing a huge amount of money with little to show for it. But the opposite has happened. We set more aggressive national standards, engineers have gotten to work – they have innovated, they have invented – and America’s leading car companies have met the challenge. And the improvement in fuel efficiency has been dramatic.
Although there is a cost in up-front research and development, it’s really worth it. As drivers save money at the pump, America becomes less dependent on foreign oil, and we all get to breathe cleaner air.
Just last week, the Obama Administration took another step and proposed our nation’s first rules to limit carbon pollution from existing power plants. Although they won’t be final for another year, these limits represent the most significant action that any country has taken to halt the devastating warming of our planet.
They will have real and lasting health benefits.
By cutting power plant pollution over the next 15 years, we’ll prevent 100,000 asthma attacks by children. 2,100 heart attacks. And thousands of premature deaths. That will mean nearly 500,000 fewer missed days of school and work, and will save $7 in health costs for every dollar required of new investment.
Over the long term, curbing climate change will make large, lasting, and meaningful differences, from reduced hunger and heat waves to reducing the spread of infectious diseases or conflict over scarce resources.
Cynics will argue that even with these limits, we won’t stop climate change, and that’s true. They will point out that renewable energy technology isn’t yet ready to fully replace fossil fuels. They will say that America acting alone can’t solve the problem, and that’s true. We need global action, especially from large developing nations like China and India who are on pace to pollute the most going forward.
As an exercise in cynicism, they get a lot of things wrong.
These rules alone, yes, won’t halt our rising seas, but then again no one is claiming they will, alone.
But they are a crucial step, and we owe it to posterity, to our country, to our future to take what action we can, to send a powerful signal to America’s entrepreneurs and engineers, our innovators and inventors, that this is a challenge we intend to take on.
By acting now, we can begin to birth the innovations that will be at the heart of our planet’s clean energy future.
Innovation in America has never stood still. We have done incredible things that even a few years before we might not have predicted.
Remember, just a few years ago, natural gas prices were volatile and unreliable, and solar power was too expensive for most households. Yet in just the last few years, new technologies have flipped those on their head. And we’re seeing remarkable changes. Solar prices have fallen 60 percent in just the last three years, and natural gas is today cheaper than coal, and there are dramatic changes in our energy future going on because of a huge resurgence in natural gas production in this country.
We have every reason to believe that by focusing our greatest minds on this challenge, American ingenuity can change and even save the world.
Madam President, if the United States is going to lead the 21st century, we have to be at the forefront of climate change, of combating climate change, for although we know that meeting this challenge will take global action, the U.S. needs to lead the way.
This is our responsibility. We can’t expect other poor nations to act if a leading, wealthy nation like the United States isn’t willing to take even the most minimal, responsible actions. We are the second largest polluter of greenhouse gases on the planet, only just eclipsed by the Chinese in the last decade.
For more than a century, our economic growth and our strong middle class – built on American innovation and industry – made us the envy of the world, but they have also contributed to putting our planet in a dangerous position. As developing nations work to lift hundreds of millions of people out of desperate poverty, they are looking at us to show that it’s possible.
Also a great but urgent opportunity here lies before us. We have a moral obligation, I believe, to lead because others are looking at competing examples and aren’t waiting around. China, our greatest economic competitor, now and into the future, is itself choking on the byproducts of coal and investing heavily in cleaner air and cleaner energy.
The country that figures out how to prosper without deadly pollution is the country that will dominate the technologies that our world uses and depends on in the decades to come. Are we really going to miss out on this chance to be the country that makes the clean cars, the clean power plants, the clean technologies of the future? I hope no.
We in Congress have the opportunity and the obligation to pull together and to act responsibly as well.
We can pass the bipartisan Shaheen-Portman energy efficiency bill today, create great jobs and make it easy for families to spend less on energy and save money while they are at it.
We can put clean energy on a level playing field by passing the bipartisan Master Limited Partnership Parity Act, of which I am a cosponsor, to stop giving coal, oil, and natural gas a leg up without an even playing field for renewables and energy efficiency.
We can invest in the research that will unlock the energy innovations of the future.
All of this, these are actions we could take today.
There will be costs, but if we act now, they will be far outweighed by the benefits, today and into the future. If we wait, these costs will only grow.
I understand this is a difficult issue politically for us to take on. Many of the most dire consequences of global warming are still into the future. And as I know, as a person who struggles to make long-term delayed decisions, whether it’s investing for retirement or losing the weight my doctor keeps suggesting would help improve my long-term health, humans aren’t really good at taking the small but powerful steps today that over time will lead to a healthier, more secure future.
Even if the costs are low, when the benefits are farther out, it is so hard for us to take action.
But Madam President, what will we say? What will we say when our children ask what did we do when the science was clear, when the options were before us, and when we had the chance? Just as we rightly worry in this chamber about the financial debts we are going to leave to future generations, leaving this debt, leaving the burden of unaddressed, unresolved global warming and climate change to our children and future generations is a debt too deep for us not to address.
We are in danger, if we don’t act, of leaving behind not only a worse off world, but of leaving ourselves a future where we cannot look our children in the eye and say that we stepped up to the greatest global challenge of this century.
What will it mean when my own daughter at some point in the future goes to Glacier National Park with her future family? Will it even have glaciers? How will she explain to them how that amazing national park has changed and what will she say about what this Senate and her own father did to take action?
It is my hope, my prayer, that on that future trip they will reflect on how we found the will, we found the determination, to act together and to change the trajectory of our future, to save it for everyone’s future.