Time to Wake Up 308: 40 Years After Chafee’s Warning

Mr. President, today marks the 308th time that I have stood on the Senate floor and asked my colleagues to wake up to the reality of climate change.

This marks 308 times that my Republican colleagues have ignored my call to wake up. They even refuse to acknowledge the simple truths that the climate is changing, oceans are warming, sea levels are rising, and that fossil fuel emissions are the major cause. In the last several weeks, one of them has objected each time I sought unanimous consent to pass a resolution affirming these simple truths.

This profoundly disappoints me. In fact, it angers me.

I am angry on behalf of the homeowners in Florida, Louisiana, back home in Rhode Island, and across the country who are paying double or triple what they used to for property insurance because climate change is making floods, storms, and wildfires more frequent and severe.

I am angry that these same families are paying more than ever for groceries due to increasingly frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves, floods, and storms. This is a tragedy. Worse, it is a preventable tragedy. Ignoring it will not make climate change go away; it will leave Americans poorer and American communities more vulnerable and less prepared.

America can do big things, and I believe a challenge of the magnitude of climate change requires congressional action.

And so, here I still am, speaking because I still believe in the power of this body to take action, to serve the people whom we took an oath to serve, and to use the awesome power that our constituents have granted to us to solve the greatest problems facing our country today.

Republican Senator John Chafee, whose distinguished career in the Senate spanned from 1976 to 1999, and who also served as Governor of my state and as Secretary of the Navy, shared my belief. Exactly forty years ago this week, while serving as chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Environmental Pollution, Senator Chafee convened a 2-day, 5-panel hearing on the greenhouse effect, climate change, and ozone depletion. Senator Chafee believed Congress had a role in addressing both the hole in the ozone layer as well as the rising temperatures and global disruptions caused by climate change.

The 1986 Chafee hearing witnesses included scientists and policymakers, among them Dr. James Hansen, who went on to become a leading advocate for decisive climate action; Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, later an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change participant and Nobel Prize recipient; and then-Senator Al Gore of Tennessee. Also testifying were President Reagan's EPA Administrator, Lee Thomas, and Commerce Deputy Secretary, Clarence Brown.

In his opening remarks, Senator Chafee warned of two "critical problems facing the world": first, "the growing use of manmade chemicals" that were significantly depleting the ozone layer, and second the "buildup of greenhouse gases which threaten to warm the Earth to unprecedented levels." These problems had to be addressed, Senator Chafee warned, because "there is a very real possibility that man-through ignorance or indifference, or both-is irreversibly altering the ability of our atmosphere to perform basic life support functions for the planet.'' He asked the scientists to educate the public on the scientific consensus on ozone depletion and climate change, and he urged the government officials to take immediate action to "put the brakes on" these crises and ensure a livable planet for future generations. Notably, the Reagan appointees acknowledged the climate crisis and agreed to take action.

This is not the first time I've brought this chart, the Keeling Curve, onto the Senate floor. As you see, this chart shows the change in atmospheric CO₂ levels over time. Last month, while speaking on the floor, the senior Senator from Wisconsin pointed out that CO₂ levels have naturally fluctuated over many years of geologic time. That's true.

Here's something my Wisconsin colleague left out: for 800,000 years, CO₂ levels never went above 300 parts per million. Then the industrial revolution came, and the level shot past that ceiling, and kept climbing.

This is also not the first time I have come to the Senate floor to speak about the 1986 Chafee hearing. I did so ten years ago, in 2016, to mark the hearing's 30^th anniversary. Then, as now, I saw reason to reflect not only on the reality of the science, and the climate costs accrued since 1986, but also on the shocking transformation of the Republican Party from the 1980s to today.

In June of 1986, a Republican Senator, concerned by the same data I am sharing with you now, and committed to immediate and urgent action, directed a panel of Reagan-appointed officials to outline their plans to address the crisis-and they did so.

At the time, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was approximately 348 parts per million.

In June of 2016, when I recognized the thirtieth anniversary of this hearing, the fossil fuel billionaire-backed Supreme Court had just stayed the Clean Power Plan, EPA's first ever attempt to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. Then-candidate Donald Trump had promised to rescind the Clean Power Plan when he got into office. And the United States House of Representatives had voted to officially denounce a carbon price.

In 2016, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was approximately 404 parts per million.

Today President Trump, approaching the halfway point of his second term, calls climate change a "hoax." His EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin rescinded EPA's greenhouse gas endangerment finding, an action flatly at odds with the science and the law, and celebrated "driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion." Really. And to bring things full circle, earlier this spring, forty years after a senior Reagan Commerce official acknowledged the reality of climate change, today's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a strident opponent of affordable renewable energy, denies the science.

Today, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is north of 430 parts per million. In just four decades, atmospheric CO2 concentration has increased by nearly 25 percent due to fossil fuel combustion.

As climate deniers are fond of pointing out, CO2 doesn't harm or kill people. What it does is trap heat in the atmosphere. And it is that warmer atmosphere that harms and kills people, through more violent extreme weather events, wildfires, and rising seas.

Here you see global average temperatures. In 1986, they were 0.46 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial norm. Now, they are 1.4 degrees above the pre-industrial norm. Now a difference of 0.94 degrees may not sound like much, but it has already had profound consequences for our planet.

In 1986, there were three billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. Last year, there were twenty-three billion-dollar disasters. The LA wildfires destroyed thousands of homes and did tens of billions of dollars in damage.

But you don't have to be directly affected by a climate change-driven extreme weather event or wildfire to already be paying the price for climate change. In 1986, homeowners insurance premiums averaged $156 annually; $468 adjusted for inflation. Today, premiums average almost $2,500-with the largest increases in the highest climate risk areas. In Florida and Louisiana, they average more than $10,000. Off the charts.

Climate change is no longer tomorrow's problem. It is here, today, and whether you admit it or not, we are all already paying for it. Economists estimate that it costs every household an average of around $500 per year, and that's a conservative estimate. In many coastal and wildfire-exposed parts of the country, that average annual cost is already north of $1000. And that hidden climate tax is only rising, year after year. This is what 40 years of inaction following the Chafee hearing have wrought: huge costs and increasing economic dislocation. What was once a scientific issue in 1986 is now an economic issue.

And then there are the politics. In 1986, the hope and determination to tackle climate change was a bipartisan endeavor. Today, climate denial has calcified in the Republican party.

When I got here in 2007 it was a still bipartisan concern. Then the Citizens United decision unleashed a vast fossil fuel-funded armada of front groups that spread climate disinformation and unlimited dark money into our politics.

In 1986, our politics were not awash in dark money and the armada of climate denial groups did not exist. And so this body was able to focus more on the public interest and less on the fossil fuel special interest.

Today, objecting to my calls to this body to recognize the reality of climate change, the senior Senator from Wisconsin has accused me of "subscribing to Chicken Little scare tactics". In 1986, before this building became a House of Mammon, Senator Chafee opened his climate change hearing by noting that "[t]his is not a matter of Chicken Little telling us the sky is falling."

The 1986 Chafee hearing is also illustrative of the power of Congress when, uncorrupted by a deep-pocketed special interest, it decides to act decisively in favor of the public interest.

At the time of the Chafee hearing, severe depletion of the Earth's protective ozone layer was allowing dangerous levels of solar radiation to penetrate the atmosphere. Twin holes in the ozone layer had formed around the north and south poles, and the ozone holes were growing. Scientists worried that absent immediate action, the holes would grow big enough to threaten the survival of life on Earth. That fear is ancient history now. Why? Not because we mocked the scientists for fear-mongering. Because we did as the science advised and phased out the use of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons. In 1990, just four years after the Chafee hearing, Congress passed the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act which required this phase out.

No surprise: the scientists were right, and the phaseout of CFCs worked.

CFCs stay in the atmosphere for decades, so it took years to see the effects of the ban. But beginning in the 2000s, the ozone holes stabilized, then began to shrink. If current policies remain in place, scientists expect a return to pre-1980s levels within the next four decades.

We could yet do the same for climate change. Follow the science, pass a law to implement policies that would reduce and eventually eliminate carbon pollution, remove already-emitted CO2 from the atmosphere, and restore our climate, thereby halting and eventually reversing dangerous sea level rise and the dangerous cycle of ever-worsening storms and wildfires.

Many of us watched the recent Artemis II exploration in awe of the astronauts who traveled farther than any human has gone before, and the ingenuity it took to send them there. Astronaut Christina Koch, speaking from over 200,000 miles away from Earth, made a commitment to future generations:

"We will explore. We will build…We will visit again. We will construct science outposts…We will found companies. We will bolster industry. We will inspire. But ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other."

These words would resonate, I think, with Senator John Chafee. Forty years ago, he said: "It seems that the problems man creates for our planet are never ending. But we have found solutions for prior difficulties, and we will for these as well."

With those words, I salute the memory of Senator John Chafee, whose seat I now hold. He was an inspiring and far-sighted public servant. We need more of them.

I should add that the NASA scientists who made that remarkable voyage possible have no doubts about climate science. Those doubts are precisely co-extensive with the reach of the fossil fuel industry's corrupt political influence.

I yield the floor.