{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/speeches/time-to-wake-up-a-carbon-fee-is-not-a-war-on-coal", "Time to Wake Up: A Carbon Fee is Not a War on Coal", "2014-12-10", "2014", "2014-12", "Democrat", "House", "RI", "Sheldon Whitehouse", "W000802", "www.whitehouse.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "12.10.14\n\t\t\t Time to Wake Up: A Carbon Fee is Not a War on Coal \n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t \n\t\n\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n        \n\t\t\t\t As delivered on the Senate floor\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t Thank you, Mr. President, I am here this evening for \u201cTime to Wake Up\u201d speech number eighty-two.\u00a0\r\nScientists tell us that the evidence for climate change is \u201cunequivocal\u201d, \u201cunequivocal\u201d\u2014not a word often used in scientific writing\u2014and the American people know that climate change is real.\u00a0 In a new poll released by the insurance firm Munich Re, eight out of ten Americans believe the climate is changing. They see it happening right around them. \u00a0\r\nThe American people also know we need to cut our carbon pollution if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change\u2014we can\u2019t keep burning carbon-polluting fossil fuels indiscriminately.\u00a0 Seven out of ten Americans put using more carbon-free energy, like solar and wind, among the best ways to battle climate change.\u00a0\r\nChanging the way we generate power will help cut emissions from the largest sources of carbon pollution in the country, our coal-fired power plants.\u00a0 The Energy Information Administration notes that coal generates less than 40 percent of our country\u2019s electricity, while it generates 75 percent of the carbon pollution from the power sector.\u00a0 The fifty dirtiest coal plants in America emit more carbon pollution than all of South Korea or all Canada. \u00a0\r\nWhich brings us to the \u201cWar on Coal.\u201d\r\nEvery effort to protect the American people from coal pollution has been denounced by the fossil fuel industry and its various mouthpieces as a \u201cWar on Coal.\u201d\u00a0 When EPA proposed limits on emissions from new power plants, you heard, \u201cWar on Coal!\u201d \u00a0When EPA proposed limits on emissions from existing power plants, \u201cWar on Coal!\u201d\u00a0 For mercury limits, ozone limits, particulate limits\u2014always, \u201cWar on Coal.\u201d\r\nMr. President, the War on Coal is a fabrication. \u00a0The denial machine funded by fossil fuel money literally owns, owns the War on Coal.\u00a0 The website WarOnCoal.com is owned by American Commitment, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that has been funded by the Koch Brothers-backed group Freedom Partners.\u00a0 War on Coal; it\u2019s a public relations strategy, a catch-phrase, a gimmick that serves to distract people from the harm coal reeks on us.\r\nDr. Drew Shindell is a professor at Duke University. \u00a0He worked at NASA for two decades. \u00a0\u00a0Last week in the Environment and Public Works Committee, he said, I\u2019ll quote him: \u201cWe hear a lot up here on Capitol Hill about the war on coal; what we forget about is coal\u2019s war on us.\u201d\r\nSo, let\u2019s talk about the War on Coal, so called, versus coal\u2019s war on us. When Republicans talk about President Obama\u2019s War on Coal, they leave a lot out.\u00a0 They leave out that coal companies have shifted to big open-top mines, what is called mountaintop removal, so they can lay off miners and still produce the same amount of coal. \u00a0They leave out that coal simply can\u2019t compete with today\u2019s cheaper, cleaner-burning natural gas.\u00a0\r\nIn 2012, Duke Energy\u2019s own CEO acknowledged that EPA\u2019s proposed climate rule for new power plants was not to blame.\u00a0 \u201cThe new climate rule,\u201d he said, \u201cis in line with market forces anyway. \u00a0We\u2019re not going to build any coal plants in any event. We\u2019re not going to build any coal plants in any event.,\u201d \u00a0he said.\u201c You\u2019re going to choose to build gas plants every time, regardless of what the rule is.\u201d\r\nThat, Mr. President, is \u00a0not a regulatory War on Coal.\u00a0 That is the free market operating.\r\nEPA\u2019s proposed Clean Power Plan for existing power plants is the newest PR front in the imaginary \u201cWar on Coal.\u201d\u00a0 EPA projects that the clean power plan will yield between $55 billion and $93 billion in benefits per year by 2030, compared to $7-9 billion to comply with the rule.\u00a0 That math makes it a winner for the American people.\u00a0 Some War on Coal, what would they expect us to do? Give up $90 billion in benefits for the American people at the high end, in order to avoid a $9 billion compliance cost, again at the high end? $90 billion for the American people, $9 billion in compliance. Who wouldn\u2019t take that deal?\r\nIf the Obama Administration is waging a War on Coal, it has a funny way of going about it.\u00a0 Coal exports grew by 44 percent from 2008 to 2012. \u00a0The Administration keeps opening up federal lands to coal extraction, awarding many leases at below-market rates. \u00a0\r\nIt actually took a federal judge in Colorado to tell the Obama Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service to factor the costs of climate change into their cost-benefit analysis of coal mining leases.\u00a0 \u00a0The federal agencies had looked at only one side the ledger: they counted the economic benefits of mining coal, but not the costs. Some War on Coal.\r\nTwo years ago, the Obama Army Corps of Engineers fast-tracked environmental review of a proposed coal export terminal on the Columbia River in Oregon.\u00a0 Local communities and tribes objected, and the State of Oregon denied the permit for the project.\u00a0\r\nIf that's what a federal War on Coal looks like, somebody didn\u2019t get the memo.\r\nOn the other side, let's look at what coal\u2019s war on us looks like.\u00a0 Evidence that mining and burning coal harms our health and our environment and our oceans is undeniable. \u00a0It\u2019s this other side of the coal ledger that hits home in Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and many other states, and it\u2019s the side polluters want to ignore, and obscure with \u201cWar on Coal\u201d rhetoric.\r\nBurning coal releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.\u00a0 That warms our atmosphere, bringing changes we are already seeing in seasons, weather, \u00a0and storms.\u00a0 There\u2019s a strong association between global warming and the sort of rainbursts that flooded homes and businesses in Rhode Island in 2010, for instance.\r\nCoal burning contributes to the formation of toxic ground-level ozone, which is a cause of the \u201cbad air days\u201d in my home state of Rhode Island.\u00a0 Kids with asthma in the emergency room in Rhode Island are connected with Midwestern power plants that burn coal and pump often unscrubbed emissions up smokestacks designed to move the problem downwind\u2014out of state, out of mind.\u00a0\r\nAnd don\u2019t overlook our oceans, which absorb about a third of the carbon pollution being emitted and most of the excess heat. \u00a0As a result, oceans are becoming more acidic, water temperatures are \u00a0rising, and sea levels are rising across the globe.\u00a0 In Rhode Island, the sea is up nearly ten inches at the tide gauge at Naval Station Newport since the 1930s, when we had our Great Hurricane of 1938.\r\nSo whether you\u2019re a flooded home, or a mom with a child in athsma in the emergency room, or somebody with coastal property facing 10 inches higher seas. There are costs to coal. This is all virtually indisputable, and follows immutable laws of nature.\r\nDamage to coastal homes and infrastructure from rising seas and erosion; asthma attacks in children triggered by smog; forests dying from beetle infestations and unprecedented wildfire seasons; farms ravaged by worsened drought and flooding; these are all real costs to Americans.\u00a0 This other side of the coal ledger counts too.\r\nIt even hits home in coal country, where blowing up mountain tops pollutes streams, and harms folks around the mining operations.\u00a0 West Virginia University has linked the dust thrown up by these mountaintop mines to lung cancer among nearby residents.\u00a0\r\nCoal-fired power plants are the biggest sources of mercury pollution in the United States, and they also emit arsenic, acid gases, and other toxins.\u00a0 Dr. Shindell, who I mentioned earlier, is an expert in atmospheric chemistry and health, here\u2019s what he told the EPW Committee last week, I will quote:\r\n\u201cOf all of the sources of the emissions that lead to poor air quality in the United States, coal \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0burning is the single largest, causing by my calculations about 47,000 premature deaths per year. \u00a0That happens to be larger than the total number of Americans killed in all of the years of the Vietnam War by hostile fire.\u201d\r\nIf you look at the casualties, Mr. President, the federal government isn\u2019t waging a War on Coal. If there\u2019s any war, coal is waging a war on us.\r\nThis is business as usual for the polluter industry and its propaganda apparatus.\u00a0 Coal companies have long fought public health standards, mineworker protections, and compensation for ailments like black lung disease, as well as efforts to address acid rain or reduce toxic pollutants like mercury that cause brain damage in kids.\r\nIn 1989, Southern Company CEO Edward Addison testified that acid-rain controls would increase electricity rates in states with the most coal power by 10 to 20 percent by 2009.\u00a0 Well, we couldn\u2019t evaluate such predictions then, but now we can. \u00a0In the ten states with the most coal, rates actually fell. \u00a0Big Coal\u2019s war on the truth has a long and sordid history.\u00a0\r\nMr. President, I recently had the opportunity to visit West Virginia with Senator Manchin to learn about what coal means to the Mountain State economy.\u00a0 I get it. We need to care about the miners, truckers, power-plant operators, engineers and others who make their living in this industry.\u00a0 It would be wrong to ignore their plight, just as it\u2019s wrong when the coal industry tries to ignore the effects of its carbon pollution.\u00a0\r\nI think we need a carbon fee to correct the market and to slow climate change.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure I\u2019ll hear that\u2019s a War on Coal.\u00a0 It\u2019s not.\u00a0 It\u2019s simple fairness.\u00a0 It means simply paying for the mess you cause.\u00a0 That\u2019s not war.\u00a0 It\u2019s not even punishment. \u00a0It\u2019s just fair accounting\u2014taking both sides of the ledger into account.\r\nWhen people do that, economists and scientists calculate the cost of carbon pollution as what they call the \u201csocial cost of carbon.\u201d\u00a0 The Administration estimates the social cost of carbon at around forty dollars per ton of carbon pollution. Forty dollars per ton. The effective cost to polluters for causing that mess is zero.\r\nMy carbon fee bill would correct that, correct what even economists at groups as conservative as the American Enterprise Institute agree is a market failure, and would then return every dollar of the fee to the American people.\u00a0 That could include transition assistance for coal workers\u2014and assistance for communities far from coal mines, like in Rhode Island, facing these costs of climate change.\u00a0\r\nIt\u2019s also becoming increasingly clear that a revenue-neutral carbon fee will spur innovation, create jobs, and boost the economy nationwide.\u00a0\r\nIt\u2019s time to end the polluters\u2019 holiday from responsibility.\u00a0 It\u2019s time to see through their fanciful \u201cWar on Coal,\u201d and protect those facing the effects of coal\u2019s war on us, and coal\u2019s war on the truth.\u00a0 It\u2019s time to seize the economic benefit of a clean energy economy. It is time to wake up.\u00a0\r\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://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/speeches/time-to-wake-up-a-carbon-fee-is-not-a-war-on-coal"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.460988074541092, "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"}