Hillary Clinton-Senate Floor speech 10-29-03 (Calls opponents of S139 "Un-American")

I am proud to rise in support of the bipartisan climate change legislation offered by Senators LIEBERMAN and MCCAIN. I will be brief in my remarks, because I believe that the sponsors of the amendment have eloquently made the full case for the legislation. But this is a very important issue, and I did not want to miss the opportunity to voice my support.

Climate change is greatest environmental challenge that we face. Its effects will unfold over decades and will touch every corner of the globe. I think the time to act is now.

First, I want to briefly touch on the science. Many of the details remain to be filled in, and I support further climate research so we can refine our understanding of how human activities are affecting the climate system. But there is already a strong scientific consensus that supports action now. The most definitive recent reports were issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Research Council in 2001. In brief, the findings of those reports include the following:

No. 1, anthropogenic climate change, driven by emissions of greenhouse gases, is already underway and likely responsible for most of the observed warming over the last 50 years--the largest warming that has occurred in the Northern Hemisphere during at least the past 1,000 years;

No. 2, over the course of this century the Earth is expected to warm an additional 2.5 to 10.5 «F, depending on future emissions levels and on the climate sensitivity--a sustained global rate of change exceeding any in the last 10,000 years;

No. 3, temperature increases in most areas of the United States are expected to be considerably higher than these global means because of our Nation's northerly location and large average distance from the oceans;

No. 4, even under mid-range emissions assumptions, the projected warming could cause substantial impacts in different regions of the United States, including an increased likelihood of heavy and extreme precipitation events, exacerbated drought, and sea level rise;

No. 5, almost all plausible emissions scenarios result in projected temperatures that continue to increase well beyond the end of this century; and

No. 6, due to the long lifetimes of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the longer emissions increase, the faster they will ultimately have to be decreased in order to avoid dangerous interference with the climate system.

[Page: S13501] GPO's PDF These are disturbing findings from the most authoritative scientific sources we have. And the findings are further bolstered by an October 1, 2003, letter to the U.S. Senate signed by over 1,000 leading scientists.

So opponents who argue that we need more study before we act are simply wrong. We need to know more, but we already know enough to take initial steps to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change.

I would add that we are already seeing the effects of climate change. Glaciers are retreating all over the world. In March 2002 the Larsen Ice Shelf on the Antarctic peninsula completely broke off and broke up. The glaciers in the mountains in the tropics are rapidly melting; e.g., the snows of Kilimanjaro will be gone by 2015. One of my staff members took a photo of himself on the summit in 1970 next to a 20 foot high glacier at Uhuru Point; 29 years later his daughter was at the same Uhuru Point and only a trace of ice was left.

We are already feeling the effects of climate change. And the scientific consensus is that unless we act to reduce emissions, the planet will continue to warm over the next century, with widespread and potentially devastating effects. These potential effects include more frequent extreme weather events, the wider spread of diseases such as West Nile, Eastern Equine Encephalitis, and malaria.

As a Senator from New York, I am concerned about coastal flooding if sea levels were to rise, and how that would affect communities on Long Island. I am concerned about how warming will affect the Adirondacks, where tourism and a way of life depend on cold and snow in the winter. I am concerned about impacts on New York farmers. But I am also concerned about impacts in other parts of the country and around the world.

I am in wholehearted support of the effort undertaken by Senators Lieberman and McCain to address this issue of climate change. I have to say I find it somewhat bewildering, this note of fatalism, this sense of pessimism, this defeatism I am hearing from the other side of the aisle.

No. 1, it is a real problem. You can say that it isn't. You can say it over and over again. It is a real problem, and it is a problem that is getting worse because we failed to attend to it.

But what bothers me is this idea that somehow America--the most innovative, creative nation the world has ever seen--cannot cope with this problem. This defeatism, this pessimism, this fatalism that I hear from the opponents is fundamentally un-American.

What Senators McCain and Lieberman have done is to give us a roadmap to doing that. It may not be everything that many advocates would wish for, but it lays out a marker, and, more than that, it fulfills for me the traditional sense of how Americans respond in the face of a difficulty.

This legislation is not only necessary but I think it provides an opportunity. Yes, in the short run there may be some adjustments that are needed, just as there always are when we have to face inevitable or necessary change.

We are confronting the greatest environmental challenge when we talk about global climate change. There can only be one conclusion: Because of human activity, we are warming the Earth.

Some might say, ``Well, it doesn't seem that bad to me,'' or, ``The consequences don't seem that dire.'' But I believe we have disturbing findings from the most authoritative scientific sources that argue otherwise. The most definitive recent reports were issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and by the National Research Council in 2001.

I remind my colleagues that the National Research Council study was requested by the Bush administration. And it fundamentally confirms the results of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

What was the response of the administration? Kill the messenger. Hide the findings. Order EPA to take the information about global climate change out of its review of the status of the environment.

You can deny a problem, you can ignore it, and you can delude yourself that it is not an issue. But I don't think that any longer is sustainable. It is not intellectually honest, and it is not politically defensible.

Opponents who argue that we need more study before we act are simply wrong. Yes, we need to know more, but we already know enough to take initial steps to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change. That is what this legislation proposes to do.

There are so many facts that support the evidence of climate change--whether we talk about the Larsen Ice Shelf on the Antarctic peninsula breaking off and breaking up or whether we talk about the snow at Kilimanjaro.

I want to show this one picture because it is so telling. It comes from the personal experience of one of my fellows who is working with me on my staff. He took a photo of himself on the summit of Kilimanjaro in 1970 next to a 20-foot-high glacier at Uhuru Point. And 29 years later, his daughter was at the same point and there was only a trace of ice left. Maybe people climbed up there and carted the ice off. I don't know. Maybe that became some kind of economic activity that the folks in Tanzania decided to pursue.

That is not what happened. I think what happened is we have evidence in the most dramatic way possible of the effects of 29 years of global warming. The scientific consensus is clear: That unless we act to reduce emissions, the planet will continue to warm over the next century, with widespread and potentially devastating effects. We have heard some of those mentioned already.

I listened carefully to the Senator from Maine talking about the change in everything from sugar maple to the potato crop in her State. I listened to my colleague from Hawaii, where we really began to acquire the evidence and understanding of global climate change.

I worry about disease. I think it is indisputable that we are seeing disease move up in latitude. Diseases such as West Nile, eastern equine encephalitis, and malaria are now found at latitudes that they have never been before.

As a Senator from New York, I am concerned about coastal flooding, if sea levels were to rise, and how it would affect the communities I represent and that my colleague from Connecticut represents at Long Island Sound and along the ocean.

I am concerned about the warming effects on the Adirondacks; I am concerned about the effects on New York farmers; I am concerned about the economy, if we do not act.

What is clear to me is that we have extraordinary economic opportunity. Since when did Americans say in the face of a challenge, Oh, my goodness, we can't admit it, we can't confront it, because we don't know how to deal with it economically?

We could be making money and creating jobs if we took seriously the opportunities for alternative energy and conservation. The fact that we do not is because of the stranglehold special interests who are committed to always producing energy have on this body and on the administration.

Let's be clear, we put out most of the greenhouse gasses from our country and we have the technological know-how, we have the understanding that would enable us to be the leaders in addressing this issue. That is why the bill offered by Senators McCain and Lieberman is so timely. Simply put, we would stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at 2000 levels by 2010.

Think of the energy we would unleash among our entrepreneurs if they got the go-ahead to deal with this challenge. A market-driven system of greenhouse gas tradable allowances would exempt farmers, residences, and auto manufacturers, and that would give us a chance to go forward to try to find solutions to the challenge of addressing greenhouse emissions. We know this cap-and-trade approach can enable cost-effective reductions in emissions. We have seen it in the implementation of the acid rain provisions of the 1990 Clean Air Act. We know that has worked. Why do we turn our backs on what we know works?

[Page: S13502] GPO's PDF It is amazing to me how often the Congress, Capitol Hill, and Washington end up becoming evidence-free zones because people do not want to deal with what the evidence demonstrates. We know the cost for this would be minimal.

Let's be honest. The science is clear. The opportunities are clear. This bill represents a modest and flexible first step. Despite the assertions of opponents, compliance costs will be minimal. The United States needs to regain leadership. We need to take responsibility. It gives a chance, then, to go to the rest of the world to try to build an international consensus. In the absence of some kind of protocol or treaty, we will be choking to death on the emissions from countries such as China and India as their standard of living rises. Now is the time to act. We owe it to our children and our grandchildren and generations beyond.

I thank the two sponsors for giving us the opportunity to go on record on the right side of history.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I have enjoyed listening to this debate either in person or over the television. I will not try to add to it with a plethora of statistics, forecasts, or predictions. Rather, I want to deal with some of the statements that have been made including some we have just heard from the Senator from New York and try to do a little math of a very simple and direct kind and ask a few questions.

First, the Senator from New York said the United States produces most of the greenhouse gasses. My understanding is the correct number is 25 percent of the greenhouse gasses produced in the world as a whole. That is the largest of any single country. It does not constitute most. But it is a plurality and pluralities win elections so that puts us in first place.

Now let us assume for the sake of following this through that we achieve a savings of 10 percent. I am not sure we will. No one is really sure in all of the predictions, dire and rosy, that are made with respect to this legislation how much the savings will be, but we will pick a number easy to calculate, 10 percent. That means, if the laws of mathematics have not changed, we would reduce the world emissions by 2.5 percent because 10 percent of 25 percent is 2.5 percent.

The question then arises, will the rest of the world stay static while we reduce the total by 2.5 percent or will a combination of China, India, Russia, Australia, what have you, increase the total by 2.5 percent so that the net effect in the atmosphere of America doing this is zero. That is a very likely scenario. The net effect of the United States doing this as far as manmade emissions are concerned would be zero. Yes, we could reduce theoretically ours by 10 percent. That would be made up by the rest of the world.

The question arises, how much benefit is there to see to it that the overall world situation is as it is now with the United States producing no significant impact on the total?

The next question, what do we do if we reduce it by 10 percent? How do we do that? Obviously, we will need the power. Indeed, we will need substantially more power between now and the year 2010 if we are going to reduce the emissions that come from fossil fuel to generate the power we will have to go someplace else. There are a variety of places we can go.

One we hear often is we should use natural gas. We should replace coal with natural gas. That is a good idea. But let us understand something right now. We have in the United States currently a shortage of natural gas. As Alan Greenspan pointed out, that is one of our major economic challenges. He also has pointed out, natural gas is the one fossil fuel we cannot import. In order to import natural gas we have to have a pipeline, unless you liquefy it, and that is tremendously expensive, and we do not have the ports available to receive natural gas in liquefied form. The only places we can import natural gas are Mexico and Canada, and we are doing that.

If you look at a geological chart of the United States you find there is plenty of natural gas in the United States, but a very large percentage of that is on public land. Now the people who are telling us we must reduce greenhouse gas, namely the environmental groups, are the same people who are telling us we cannot drill for natural gas in the United States because that somehow will desecrate the public lands. I am not sure the land cares whether there is a drilling rig on it or whether there is a pipeline running across it, but certainly the Sierra Club cares. They say absolutely no drilling for natural gas on public lands.

If we cannot get to the natural gas, we will continue to use coal. Let's use clean coal. We have enough clean coal in the State of Utah to heat, light, drive the city of San Francisco for the next 300 years. We proposed mining that. Clean coal, low-sulfur coal would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Who got very upset at the idea we might start to use clean coal? The Sierra Club. They got President Clinton to declare a national monument right on top of the potential clean coal to make sure there would never be any coal mined from that place because environmentally they do not want any coal mines.

Well, we cannot use natural gas because we cannot get it off our public lands. We cannot use the clean coal in the West because we cannot get it off our public lands. What is our alternative? Nuclear. That will do it. That is what they do in Europe. That is why Europe is in favor of Kyoto because they do not use fossil fuel to generate electricity; they use nuclear power.

So let's have nuclear plants all over the United States in order to produce the 10 percent reduction called for in this bill. Is the Sierra Club ready to endorse and embrace nuclear? They will not let us drill for natural gas. They do not want us to use the clean coal and they absolutely do not want us to build nuclear plants.

All right. Where else do we go? Well, in the West, we get a portion of our power from hydroplants. Dams have been built to store water. And as the water tumbles down the front of the dam, why, we get power. And it is the goal of the Sierra Club, and other groups that are supporting this bill, to dynamite these dams. They want to drain Lake Powell and dynamite the dam.

It is very interesting, if I could make a quick historic aside, when my father was in the Senate, and they were talking about building the Glen Canyon Dam that would produce this power, the Sierra Club opposed it and said: We will never, ever need that much power. But, they said, if for some reason we are wrong, and we should need that power, there is no point in building the dam to provide the power because look at all the coal that is there. The coal is the coal that they moved to make sure would never get mined.

I could embrace the idea of reducing the emissions in a test fashion to see if it did indeed have any impact on global warming if I could see the way clear to produce the power some other way than the way we are doing it now.

I would say to the Senator from Connecticut, who has excellent contacts in the environmental world, if he would go back to those who are supporting this bill and say to them, ``In return for support of this bill, will you agree to drill for natural gas on public lands, to exploit low-sulfur coal where it exists on public lands, and to explore the possibility of more nuclear plants so that we don't become dependent on fossil fuel?'' I might very well be interested in cosponsoring and voting for this bill.

But until those who are driving the debate publicly are willing to address the question of how you replace the sources of power that would have to be eliminated if this bill should pass, I intend to vote against the bill.

HC:But what bothers me is this idea that somehow America--the most innovative, creative nation the world has ever seen--cannot cope with this problem. This defeatism, this pessimism, this fatalism that I hear from the opponents is fundamentally un-American.

Bennett:I will not try to add to it with a plethora of statistics, forecasts, or predictions. Rather, I want to deal with some of the statements that have been made including some we have just heard from the Senator from New York and try to do a little math of a very simple and direct kind and ask a few questions.

Blahahahaha

"No. 3, temperature increases in most areas of the United States are expected to be considerably higher than these global means because of our Nation's northerly location and large average distance from the oceans;"

And citizens of Cleveland Ohio respond: "Yea? Uh Huh? And, the down side would be..."

As a Senator from New York, I am concerned about coastal flooding, if sea levels were to rise, and how it would affect the communities I represent and that my colleague from Connecticut represents at Long Island Sound and along the ocean.

AHHHHHHHHHHH The sky is falling!!!

I had to laugh when she busted this one out.

and I did not want to miss the opportunity to voice my support.

Does she ever miss an opporunity

Oh ok .. I'll go read what the wicked witch of the east has to say now

BRB

"As a Senator from New York, I am concerned about coastal flooding, if sea levels were to rise, and how it would affect the communities I represent and that my colleague from Connecticut represents at Long Island Sound and along the ocean."

I tell ya its all them cows out in the fields farting! New York and L.A. are doomed!

I will be brief in my remarks

Apparently, Hitlery does not understand the definition of brief. She needs to STFU.

I had to wonder who wrote Mrs. Clinton's "speech." Pathetic.

However, I also got the feeling her "speeches" in the Senate are "practice" for her.

She's got a long way to go.

First, the Senator from New York said the United States produces most of the greenhouse gasses

This needs editing...

First, the Senator from New York.... produces most of the greenhouse gasses

As a Senator from New York, I am concerned about coastal flooding, if sea levels were to rise,

But remember, she also added this: We owe it to our children and our grandchildren and generations beyond.

The RATs ALWAYS use the "for the children" in their rebuttals.

Where to begin?

This corrupt pinko . . .

When the anti-American types llike the Clintoons talk about "American" it makes me want to puke.

A bold face lie. The range of tempretures has nothing to do with future emissions levels. The lower 2.5F is from a computer model which is based on worst-worst-worst case assumptions. The 10.5F is based on a computer model with worst-worst-worst case assumption plus assuming that all known negative feedback (things that counteract the warming) don't exist. 'Scientist' just ran that model to see what would happen (and promote fear-monering), not as a prediction. Hillary doesn't have the foggiest idea what the hell she is talking about.

Morning!

Hevn't had a chance to read this yet, but just wanted to let everyone know Zell "Bush Voter" Miller is up defending judicial nominees now.

So it's unAmerican to be wary of the global warming theories?

I think it's unAmerican to be so opposed to national security, but everytime we tell the Democrats how we feel, they whine that they resent being called UnAmerican and unpatriotic just because they are pro-Saddam! haha

Hey Hellary, do all those out of control fires due to stupid environmental laws have anything to do with the temperature increases???

I had to wonder who wrote Mrs. Clinton's "speech." Pathetic

Could it be this person??

"One of my staff members took a photo of himself on the summit in 1970 next to a 20 foot high glacier at Uhuru Point; 29 years later his daughter was at the same Uhuru Point and only a trace of ice was left. "

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