{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://web.archive.org/web/20140221043706/http://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/speeches/inaction-on-climate-change-is-irresponsible-", "Inaction on Climate Change is Irresponsible", "2013-12-11", "2013", "2013-12", "Democrat", "House", "RI", "Sheldon Whitehouse", "W000802", "web.archive.org", null, null, "legacy", "As delivered on the Senate floor\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\tWednesday, December 11, 2013\n            \n\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\tThank you, Mr. President. This is the 52nd consecutive week we're in session that I have come to the Floor to ask us, please, for Lord's sake, to wake up to the damage carbon pollution is already doing to our atmosphere, oceans, and climate; and to look ahead, to use our God-given sense, and to plan for what is so obviously coming.\u00a0\nIn those weeks, I've talked about all different aspects of carbon pollution: its effect on sports and our economy, its effect on oceans and coasts, its effect on agriculture and wildfires, its effect on storms and insurance costs.\u00a0\nI've talked about the measurements -- measurements -- we can already make of the harm already happening: sea level rise, which you measure with a yardstick, basically; ocean temperature, which you measure with a thermometer; and ocean acidification -- the fastest in fifty million years, according to research published in Nature Geoscience -- which you can measure with litmus tests.\u00a0\nI have, I hope, to anyone listening with their logic turned on, thoroughly rebutted the deniers' phony arguments against solving carbon pollution, whether those arguments purported to be based in science, or religion, or economics, or our competitiveness. \u00a0\nI have listed the thoughtful and responsible groups -- from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, from WalMart to NASA, from Ford and GM to Coke and Pepsi, from America's Garden Clubs to just last month our major sports leagues -- who understand the truth about climate change and are saying so.\nI've done my best to expose the calculated campaign of lies that we're up against, and the vast scandalous apparatus of phony organizations and engineered messages that are designed to propagate those lies.\u00a0 I've traced the connections back to -- of course -- the big carbon polluters and their billionaire owners.\u00a0 And I've been obliged to point out that the money of those big polluters and billionaires floods this Chamber, that their lobbyists prowl the outer halls, and that to a sad and disappointing degree this Congress is bought and paid for by that polluter influence.\u00a0\nOne factor we have yet to consider is whether, as an institution, Congress has just become completely irresponsible.\u00a0 Maybe this Congress just can't operate as an institution at an intelligent level.\u00a0 Some Congresses are going to be smarter and more responsible than others -- that's just the natural order of variation.\u00a0 Some Congress is going to be the sorriest Congress ever.\u00a0 Maybe we're it.\u00a0\u00a0\nSome organizations, like NASA, for instance, are very smart.\u00a0 That's why NASA is driving a rover around on the surface of Mars right now.\u00a0 That is a seriously smart organization.\u00a0\nSome organizations take ordinary people and call them to be their very best, to play at a level above their natural talents, to heed a higher calling than their selfish inclinations.\u00a0 At their best, our military and our churches tend to achieve that.\u00a0\nSome organizations, however, take even the most talented people, and drag them down to the lowest common denominator, and stifle the best and bring out the worst in even those very talented people.\u00a0\nWell, I ask people watching: which type of organization do you think Congress is right now?\u00a0 Which type do you think we are?\u00a0\nAs an organization, it is hard to say anything kinder of Congress than that it is now a really irresponsible organization.\u00a0 We couldn't even keep the United States government running.\u00a0 Standard and Poor\u2019s estimated that our Tea Party shutdown foolishness cost Americans tens of billions of dollars, for no gain -- none.\u00a0 We can't sort out the basics of building and maintaining our American infrastructure:\u00a0 our own American Society of Civil Engineers gives our country a D+ for infrastructure.\u00a0\nAnd that's not complicated stuff, yet we flub it; like a football team that fumbles the ball at the snap.\nGet a little more complicated, and Congress seems to get even worse.\u00a0 Let me show you just one health care chart.\u00a0\n[Show International Healthcare Outcomes Chart]\nThis chart shows the average life expectancy in years of a country compared to the cost per capita of health care in that country.\u00a0 Together, they make a pretty good proxy for how a country's health care system is doing.\u00a0 This group here represents most of the OECD member and partner countries\u2014our industrialized international competitors.\u00a0 This is us -- way out here, all alone, spending the most by far, for results that are mediocre at best.\u00a0\u00a0 We would save nearly a trillion dollars a year if we could just get our per capita cost down to what Norway and Switzerland spend, they\u2019re the next two most expensive countries on the planet. \u00a0And we are a trillion dollars a year more, laid out per capita. \u00a0Think of what we could do as a nation, what we could build and invent with a trillion dollars a year if we weren't wasting it on bad healthcare.\u00a0 And bad it is.\u00a0 We get worse results in longevity than virtually any modern economy.\u00a0\u00a0 Look who beats us: Japan, Great Britain, Switzerland,\u00a0 Netherlands, Norway.\u00a0 Germany does, Italy does, Greece does, Luxembourg does.\u00a0\u00a0 They all beat us.\u00a0 Chile -- Chile and the Czech Republic are the two countries we beat for longevity.\u00a0\nLook at the size of that problem, those lives lost, those trillions of dollars wasted -- and then look at the quality of the health care discussion we are having in Congress and tell me that this is not a completely irresponsible organization.\u00a0\nAnd that brings us to climate change.\u00a0 Yeah, it's complicated, when you're trying to predict and model something as complex as what our climate is going to do in the years ahead.\u00a0 But, it is also simple, when you look at the stuff that everyone agrees on, on the stuff that you can measure, the stuff that you'd have to be a nut or a crank or an eccentric to dispute.\u00a0\nNobody responsible -- nobody responsible disputes the principle that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere raises the temperature of the Earth, and that it does so through the so-called \"greenhouse effect.\"\u00a0 A scientist named John Tyndall figured that out at the time of the American Civil War.\u00a0 I brought his musty old paper in here several speeches ago.\u00a0 Its old leather binding was flaking and peeling.\u00a0 When that report was first published, Abraham Lincoln had just been elected President.\u00a0 In all the years since then, this principle of science has always been confirmed and validated.\u00a0 It is not some questionable theory.\u00a0 The greenhouse effect is real.\u00a0 It would not just be wrong, it would be irresponsible to deny that.\nNobody responsible disputes that for over a century our modern economy has run on fossil fuels, and that burning those fossil fuels has released gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.\u00a0 The Global Carbon Project estimates that mankind has pumped about 2000 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since 1870.\u00a0 That's a pretty solid estimate, and I've never even heard anyone dispute it.\u00a0\nSo we know those two things:\u00a0 adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere traps more heat; and we have released an estimated 2000 gigatons -- 2000 billion tons -- of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.\nLet's go on from there.\u00a0\u00a0 It is a known principle of science that a significant portion of that multi-gigaton carbon load is absorbed by the oceans, and that the chemical reaction when that absorption happens into the oceans makes the oceans more acidic.\u00a0 No responsible person disputes either proposition.\u00a0 It\u2019s not some theory, it's something that you can actually do and measure in a lab.\u00a0 Again, it wouldn't just be wrong, it would be really irresponsible to deny that.\nWe also know that the oceans do more than absorb carbon -- they absorb heat.\u00a0 Indeed they have absorbed most of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases\u2013 over 90% of the heat between 1971 and 2010 according to the recent IPCC report.\u00a0 And what happens when the oceans absorb heat? \u00a0They expand.\u00a0 Thermal expansion is a basic physical property of liquids.\u00a0 It can also be shown in a very simple lab.\u00a0 It is not a theory.\u00a0 Again, it would be not just wrong but irresponsible to deny that, too.\u00a0\u00a0\nIt would not just be wrong, it would be irresponsible to deny what those simple measurements and clear principles tell us.\nBut we do.\u00a0 We do.\u00a0 We deny it.\u00a0 Congress won't wake up and address this problem:\u00a0 like those monkeys: see no carbon, hear no carbon, speak no carbon.\nBecause we are so irresponsible, because we deny this reality, we are failing to take precautions, and as a result many people will suffer.\nFor those of us who love this country and are proud of it, and are proud of our government, and want this country and its government to be a beacon of hope and promise and rectitude, it hurts a little extra for the United States Congress to be such a failure.\u00a0 It hurts a little extra that we, in our generation, have driven Congress, the hub of our noble American experiment in democracy, the beating heart of this great republic, down to that low level.\u00a0\nIt is a harsh judgment that this body is an irresponsible failure.\u00a0 But on climate, this Congress got it the old-fashioned way -- it earned it.\nI will close with a final observation.\u00a0 Compare the irresponsibility of this \"see no carbon, hear no carbon, speak no carbon\" Congress with the recent exhortation from Pope Francis.\u00a0 Here is what the Pope said \u2013 I\u2019ll quote him at some length:\n\"There are other weak and defenceless beings who are frequently at the mercy of economic interests or indiscriminate exploitation. I am speaking of creation as a whole. We human beings are not only the beneficiaries but also the stewards of other creatures. Thanks to our bodies, God has joined us so closely to the world around us that we can feel the desertification of the soil almost as a physical ailment, and the extinction of a species as a painful disfigurement. Let us not leave in our wake a swath of destruction and death which will affect our own lives and those of future generations.\u00a0 Here I would make my own,\u201d the Pope continued, \u201cthe touching and prophetic lament voiced some years ago by the bishops of the Philippines.\u201d\u00a0 And he quotes them:\u00a0 'An incredible variety of insects lived in the forest and were busy with all kinds of tasks\u2026 Birds flew through the air, their bright plumes and varying calls adding color and song to the green of the forests\u2026 God intended this land for us, his special creatures, but not so that we might destroy it and turn it into a wasteland\u2026 After a single night\u2019s rain, look at the chocolate brown rivers in your locality and remember that they are carrying the life blood of the land into the sea\u2026 How can fish swim in sewers like the . . . rivers which we have polluted? \u00a0Who has turned the wonderworld of the seas into underwater cemeteries bereft of color and life?'\u00a0\u00a0 Small, yet strong in the love of God, like Saint Francis of Assisi, all of us, as Christians, are called to watch over and protect the fragile world in which we live, and all its peoples.\"\nWhat is our answer to the Pope, to this great Christian leader?\u00a0 In Congress, it's the monkey answer:\u00a0 hear no carbon, see no carbon, speak no carbon.\nWe still have time to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.\u00a0 We can actually do it in painless ways.\u00a0 We can even do it in advantageous ways, in ways that will boost our economy.\u00a0 But we have got to do it.\u00a0\u00a0 We have got to wake up.\u00a0 We simply have got to wake up.\u00a0\nI yield the floor.", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://web.archive.org/web/20140221043706/http://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/speeches/inaction-on-climate-change-is-irresponsible-"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 3.337693866342306, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}