Whitehouse And Moreno Spar Over Resolution To Recognize The Economic Threat Posed By Climate Change

[00:00:00]Um, let me offer you my best wishes for a very, very happy birthday. I might regail you with singing happy birthday order, [laughter] but I have a terrible singing voice and so I will spare the Senate the embarrassment of that particular uh, performance.

[00:00:24]Uh, I'm here today because there's a simple fact that climate change is real.

[00:00:32]Earlier this year, I came to the floor and asked my colleagues to agree on that simple known scientific fact. Well, they could not. So, I returned to the floor several times in hopes that my Republican colleagues could at least agree to some of the simple truths that make up the bigger picture of the reality of climate change. I asked if we could agree that oceans are warming, that sea levels are rising, or that the economic harms of climate change are already beginning to hit and will only get worse going forward. Every time Republicans objected, I do however persist.

[00:01:22]Today's simple truth is this. Climate change portends a cascade of financial market collapses that could destabilize the national and global economies.

[00:01:36]My question today is, can we all agree on that? Well, here is my evidence.

[00:01:44]We know that climate change makes many natural disasters more frequent and or could be either more extreme, including hurricanes, floods, and wildfires. The same wildfires that blanketed much of the Midwest, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic in smoke just last week, resulting in American cities like Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Washington having the worst air quality in the world, worse than cities in India, worse than cities in China. We know that these disasters are expensive. Between 1980 and today, US losses from billion dollar climate disasters totaled over $3.1 trillion adjusted for inflation. $3.1 trillion lost to Americans. And of course, that only accounts for the 431 disasters that cost over a billion dollars each. There are plenty more harms beyond that $3.1 trillion dollars. The trend is projected to continue.

[00:02:59]Modelers for Deote, the corporate consultancy, project that unchecked climate change could cost the global economy 178 trillion 178 trillion US in the period between 2021 and 2070. The US economy is in here as a $36 trillion hit in net present value across that half ccentury span.

[00:03:33]Deote's modelers also predict a global GDP decrease of around 7.6% by 2070.

[00:03:44]Other financial experts have warned that worldwide GDP per capita, GDP divided by population, could decline by close to 20% within the next three decades.

[00:04:00]Indeed, in 2023, the now prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, who had previously served as the governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, testified before the Senate Budget Committee that, and I'll quote him here, estimates suggest that over the balance of this century, climate change could reduce the level of global GDP per capita by 10 to 20% without efforts to limit warming, the equivalent of a decade of no economic growth. He said similar estimates have been found for the United States, very like Deote's projection for the Americas.

[00:04:47]So that's climate risk. Now let's look at what it means for financial risk. an international network of major banks and bank supervisors including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Deutsche Bundus Bank and the Bank of England use this illustration about how climate risk hits financial risk. The direct economic impacts include tanking property values and lower household wealth.

[00:05:21]Tanking property values and lower household wealth then snowball from individual and family impacts into systemic impacts to the financial system at large. This means that climate change could ultimately cause the next systemic financial crisis.

[00:05:44]Financial experts all over the world agree. Dr. Benjamin Keys, professor of finance at the Horton School, testified before the Senate Budget Committee as follows. Climate risk is simultaneously inducing heightened risk of flood, storm damage, chronic inundation, drought, excessive heat, and wildfires.

[00:06:06]There is no avoiding the fact that the increasing risk of large global loss events will mean higher costs for consumers.

[00:06:16]Dr. Sean Becketti, former chief economist at the mortgage giant Freddy Mack, warned of rising sea levels and flooding, triggering large-scale destruction of coastal property values, resulting in an economic shock akin to the 2008 financial crisis and with no expectation that the assets would recover their value.

[00:06:43]Those warnings of Dr. Petti were based only on the risks of what he called coastal property value crash, not on the growing wildfire threat that is creating a similar insurance death spiral out west.

[00:07:01]Specifically, as Dr. Betetti testified.

[00:07:05]You look at the housing crisis of 2007208, it was a long time before property values came back, but they did come back. This is a different type of dynamic where property values are probably physically not able to come back. So this is equity that's lost forever.

[00:07:27]It's extremely difficult to estimate nationally.

[00:07:31]I'm not sure I have enough zeros to do it.

[00:07:37]Fed Chair Jerome Powell testified before the Senate Banking Committee in this Congress that in 10 to 15 years it will be impossible to get insurance or a mortgage in certain coastal and fireprone regions of the country. Imagine what happens to the economy in a region in which insurance and mortgages are no longer available.

[00:08:00]It's global as well. The International Financial Stability Board has warned of the cascade of harms from rising climate risk to increased insurance premiums and reduced coverage to market withdrawal of insurance causing a danger of mortgage crisis and bank insolvencies.

[00:08:24]The warning to the international banking system, buckle up.

[00:08:31]The Economist magazine described a possible $25 trillion hit to global real estate markets.

[00:08:40]That's the kind of thing that is bad for bank solveny and that attracted the attention of the International Financial Stability Board.

[00:08:51]While these impacts are global, they will hit home. As Dr. Bill Frist, former Republican Senate Majority Leader, testified, "Climate change is an economic issue. It affects individuals, families, and businesses of all sizes. The fallout from climate change, from increased droughts and flooding to hotter temperatures and rising sea levels, costs the United States billions of dollars every year. Just yesterday, this article, which I ask unanimous consent to append to my remarks uh from Alistair Marsh entitled, "Pension funds try to come to grips with the scariest global warming scenario in Bloomberg News.

[00:09:41]um quotes an investment research chief at the $300 billion UK retirement assets corporation Standard Life, a company that's been around for 200 years.

[00:09:57]Any investors not thinking seriously about such risks by mid 2028 would quote really be out of the mainstream.

[00:10:07]This is a mainstream concern. And closer to home, JP Morgan has described the impact of any single climate tipping point, and we are approaching several.

[00:10:21]Any single tipping point being breached as quote highly consequential for investors.

[00:10:31]We are not helpless in the face of these warnings.

[00:10:36]Financial experts and banks who look at this professionally agree that adjusting to our climate reality by organizing an early and orderly transition to a lowcarbon economy will avoid costly shocks to the system when a transition away from fossil fuel related assets becomes necessary.

[00:11:01]It's a little bit like landing a plane if you do it gradually.

[00:11:05]It's much safer and smoother. If you crash, it can be pretty painful.

[00:11:13]So, this is a simple truth. It's well documented. We have been warned and warned and warned.

[00:11:22]Unchecked climate change will cascade into danger to the national and global economy.

[00:11:29]So, I ask, can we all agree on that?

[00:11:33]And as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule 22, I therefore ask unanimous consent that the committee on banking, housing, and urban affairs be discharged and the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Senate Resolution 557.

[00:11:47]Further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

[00:11:57]Madam President, >> Senator from Ohio.

[00:12:00]>> Reserving the right to object, [clears throat] let me uh say a few things. One, resolutions like this sound very much mild. It actually just is a bunch of words that basically just says um resolve that the Senate recognizes unchecked climate change poses severe risk to national global economies. Seems what's wrong with that? What's wrong with saying something like that? So, Madam President, let me explain where these kind of ideas go.

[00:12:33]When the Democrats had control of the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate, they had the opportunity to help working Americans, the people who work every day to build this country, the middle class that all of us should be advocating for, the very people that the New England Democrats that I once knew, JFK, etc., would have made their entire party platform about helping working Americans. Instead, what did they do?

[00:13:05]They betrayed working Americans with a wide open border that lowered and suppressed wages. They passed electric vehicle subsidies. Let me walk you through exactly what the Democrats did, taking this kind of resolution to the max.

[00:13:23]They passed a subsidy that gave multi-millionaires the ability to get $7,500 of taxpayer money to lease a luxury imported vehicle.

[00:13:42]$250,000 of the wealthiest Americans got $7,500 each to lease a luxury electric vehicle because my colleagues on the other side of the aisle that that somehow that would solve the issue of climate change.

[00:14:06]Not one single Democrat has ever answered the question, why on earth would you have possibly put forward horrific public policy like that?

[00:14:23]Number two, if you notice the senator from Rhode Island's presentation, there wasn't a single time he mentioned the largest poller on Earth, who happens to be the People's Republic of China.

[00:14:42]We have been enabling the Chinese economy for decades.

[00:14:47]It was this body that normalized relations with China in 2000 that allowed them to come into the World Trade Organization and systematically pollute the planet.

[00:15:00]They are building coal facilities every week while the Democrats when they had control of government were shutting them down.

[00:15:13]You could describe what was just discussed as an absolute China first policy. America last, China first.

[00:15:23]Onethird of all global pollution comes from China. And yet my colleague comes up here to talk about climate change and doesn't say a single word about that country. in fact continues to espouse policies that enable the Chinese. For example, the aforementioned electric vehicle subsidies, most of those batteries that were in those electric vehicles came from Chinese battery manufacturers made with slave wages, slave labor using power derived from the very carbon emissions that you denounce.

[00:16:03]You live in a state that deres its electricity from the worst possible carbon footprint.

[00:16:11]You have electricity that comes over from Canada, propane delivered on diesel trucks because you refuse to build a pipeline from my state where we can give you clean natural gas that would reduce carbon emissions. The hypocrisy goes on and on.

[00:16:31]Then let's talk about recent events.

[00:16:35]My colleague I' I've heard him because I sit where you sit, Mr. President, periodically say the same thing many, many times in my 18 months that I've been here.

[00:16:48]Talks about electric vehicles. We got to get off internal combustion engines. Big policy of the Democrat party. Mr. President, let me give you a little statistic on automobiles.

[00:17:00]If you took every single car, automobile off of the roads of America, nobody could drive a car for 12 months.

[00:17:14]That's nuts. I would suggest that's bad public policy, but follow me on that one. No automobiles on American roads for 12 months.

[00:17:23]the amount of carbon emission that has polluted mostly the Midwest over the last two weeks because of mismanagement of Canada's forest is equivalent to an entire year of carbon emissions from automobiles. Yet, my colleague has not once called into question the fact that the Canadians do not allow our for firefighters to go into their country to help, that they've mismanage the way they coordinate these fire responses.

[00:17:56]They don't have a central entity to control it.

[00:18:01]No comment on the fact that millions of people in my state have been absolutely poisoned with uh carbon pollution coming from Canada. But what does he want? He wants our industries to be collapsed, our industries to be held to a different standard. Not word one word from China and espousing policies like this electric vehicle subsidy for the richest Americans while at the same time there's people flying around in private jets to global conferences to talk about climate change.

[00:18:39]spare me the hypocrisy.

[00:18:42]And for all those reasons and many, many more, I object.

[00:18:49]>> The objection is heard. [clears throat] >> Mr. President, >> Senator from Rhode Island. I'm not going to go through a rebuttal of the factual misstatements to which we've just been treated, but I will add I have objections to the IRA bill as well. We can all have objections to parts of the IRA.

[00:19:14]But the fact is that fossil fuel emissions continue to cause harm. They continue to cause danger. And the warnings that I've described are now very real.

[00:19:25]We can do nothing about it. And that's been the plan in the Senate ever since Citizens United dialed up the fossil fuels industry to influence us with dark money. But if we are going to do something about it, we must start somewhere. And I would recommend that we start with some really simple facts like the ones that I brought to the Senate floor just now. These are serious warnings.

[00:19:49]senators who wish to change the subject or distract us or prevent us from responding in any way to these serious warnings. Well, that's everybody's choice. But I do think these warnings are serious enough that they merit attention.

[00:20:04]So, if you don't like my suggestion, let's do something different. But let's just not sit here and do nothing. I yield the floor. Mr. President,