JOHN CHAFFEE Sen Gov
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6 26 Time to Wake Up #308: 40 Years After Chafee’s Warning
Back before the Republican Party was corrupted by special interests, Senator John Chafee urged Congress to address climate change.
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on the Senate floor and asked my colleagues to wake up to the realities of climate change.
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This also marks 308 times that my Republican colleagues have ignored my call to wake up.
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They even refuse to acknowledge the simple truths that the climate is changing.
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Oceans are warming.
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Sea levels are rising and our fossil fuel emissions are the principal cause.
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In the last several weeks, Republicans have sent someone to the floor to object
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each time I sought unanimous consent to pass a resolution affirming these very simple truths.
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The Senate's record of failure profoundly disappoints me.
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In fact, it angers me.
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I'm angry on behalf of the homeowners in Florida, Louisiana, back home in Rhode Island, and across
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the country who are paying double or triple what they used to for property insurance
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because climate risk is making floods, storms, and wildfires more frequent and severe.
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I'm angry that these same families are paying more than ever for groceries due to increasingly frequent and severe
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droughts, heat waves, floods, and storms.
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This is a tragedy, but worse, it is a preventable
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tragedy. Ignoring it will not make climate change go away.
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It will leave Americans poorer and American communities more vulnerable and less prepared.
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America can do big things. Our history shows that. And I believe a challenge of the magnitude of climate change justifies congressional action.
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So here I still am speaking because I still believe in the power of
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this body to take action to serve the people whom we took an oath to serve
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and to use the awesome power that our constituents have granted us to solve the greatest problems facing our country today.
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This is a significant anniversary.
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Republican Senator John Chaffy, whose distinguished career in the Senate spanned from 1976 to 1999,
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who also served as governor of my state and Secretary of the Navy, shared my belief.
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On a note of personal disclosure, when he and my father both came back from World War II as Marines from the
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Pacific Theater, they ended up as roommates in college.
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So, there's some personal family affection there as well as professional appreciation.
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Well, exactly 40 years ago this week, while serving as chair of the Senate
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Environment Public Works Subcommittee on Environmental Pollution, Senator Chaffy convened a two-day
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fivepanel hearing on the greenhouse effect, climate change, and on ozone depletion.
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Senator Chaffi believed Congress had a role in addressing both the hole in the ozone layer and the rising temperatures
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and global disruptions caused by climate change.
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The 1986 Chaffi hearing witnesses
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included scientists and policy makers among them Dr. James Hansen,
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who went on to become a leading advocate for decisive climate action and served NASA with great distinction.
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Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, later an intergovernmental panel on climate change participant and Nobel
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Prize recipient, and even then Senator Al Gore of Tennessee.
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Also testifying were President Reagan's EPA administrator Lee Thomas and his commerce deputy secretary Clarence Brown.
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In Senator Chaffi's opening remarks, he warned of what he called two critical problems facing the world. First was the
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growing use of man-made chemicals that were significantly depleting the ozone layer. And second was the quote
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buildup of greenhouse gases which threatened to warm the earth to unprecedented levels unquote.
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Those problems had to be addressed, Senator Chaffy warned 40 years ago because, and I'll continue with his
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words here, there is a very real possibility that man, through ignorance or indifference
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or both, is irreversibly altering the ability of our atmosphere to perform basic life
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support functions for the planet.
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He asked the scientists to educate the public on the scientific consensus on ozone depletion and climate change.
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And he urged the government officials to take immediate action to, as he said, put the brakes on
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these looming crises and ensure a livable planet for future generations.
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Notably, Ronald Reagan's appointees acknowledged the climate crisis and agreed to take action.
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This is not the first time I have brought this graph to the Senate floor. This is the
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so-called Keeling curve, well known in science circles.
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This chart shows the change in carbon dioxide concentration in the Earth's atmosphere.
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As you can see, it has accelerated rapidly since 1950.
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Last month, the member who the Republicans sent to
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the floor to object to my statement of the science
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made the point that CO2 levels have naturally fluctuated over many, many years of geologic time. Well, yeah,
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that's true. Here's what that looks like.
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This is 800,000 years ago.
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800,000 years ago. For the last 800,000 years, the carbon concentration in the
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atmosphere has never gone above 300 parts per million. It has varied up and down.
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But something very very different happened when our industrial revolution began and we started emitting massive
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amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases like methane into the atmosphere.
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There it is up like a rocket. The notion that this can be explained by that is just plain preposterous.
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This is also not the first time I've come to the floor to speak about the 1986 Chaffi hearings.
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I did so 10 years ago in 2016 to mark those hearings 30th anniversary.
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Then as now, I reflected not only on the reality of
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climate science, which is virtually undisputed except among those on fossil fuels
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payroll and the climate costs that have occurred since 1986.
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But I also spoke about the shocking transformation of the Republican party from the 1980s to today.
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In June of 1986, a Republican senator concerned by the
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same data that I'm sharing with you now committed to immediate and urgent action.
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He directed a panel of Ronald Reagan appointed officials to outline their plans to address the
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crisis and they did so.
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At that time the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was approximately
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348 parts per million.
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In June of 2016, when I recognized the 30th anniversary of this hearing, the fossil fuel billionaire backed
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Supreme Court had just stayed the clean power plan. EPA's first ever attempt to
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regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
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Then candidate Donald Trump promised to resend the clean power plan when he got into office.
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and the United States House of Representatives voted to officially denounce a carbon price.
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They went to bat to protect the freedom to pollute of their fossil fuel donors.
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In 2016, the concentration of CO2 had climbed from 348 parts per million to
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404 parts per million. These are measurements, by the way, not opinions.
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Today, President Trump, approaching the halfway point of his second term, calls climate change a hoax.
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Hoax.
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His EPA administrator, Lee Zeldon, rescended EPA's greenhouse gas endangerment finding, an action flatly
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at odds with known science and with the law, and then celebrated what he called
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driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion. Really?
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And to bring things full circle, earlier this spring, 40 years after a senior
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Reagan administration commerce official, acknowledged the reality of climate change, today's commerce secretary, Howard
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Letic, a strident opponent of affordable renewable energy, denies the science.
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The Republican party steps backward.
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Today, as I speak, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is north of 430
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parts per million. 348 up to 404, now up to 430.
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In just four decades, atmospheric CO2 concentration has increased by nearly 25%.
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due to fossil fuel combustion.
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As climate deniers are fond of pointing out, CO2 doesn't harm or kill people.
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What it does is trap heat in the atmosphere.
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Enormous amounts of heat.
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And it is that heated atmosphere that harms and kills people through more
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violent extreme weather events, wildfires, and rising seas.
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Here you see global average temperatures.
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Back in 1986, they were 0.46
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degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial norm.
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Now they're 1.4 degrees above that pre-industrial norm.
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That difference nearly a full degree has already had profound consequences
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for our planet.
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For one, our oceans are heating every year by the zetta jewel.
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If you don't know what a zeta jewel is, let me tell you. It has 21 zeros after it.
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You can either call it a billion trillions or a trillion billions.
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It's an enormous number. The entire production and consumption of energy by the human species on planet earth is
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half a zetoule. And because of the heating generated by the greenhouse gases,
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more than 24 zetoules of excess heat go into the ocean every year.
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A multiple of our total energy consumption as a species is absorbed by the oceans. If you want
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to know why they're warming, if you want to know why reefs are dying, if you want to know why fisheries are moving around, if you want to know why seas are rising, if you want to know why storms are
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worsening, there's your answer. Zeta of excess heat into the oceans caused by fossil fuel.
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And all of that has economic costs.
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in this building. I've grown, I suppose, accustomed to the fact that nobody cares about anything that can't be monetized.
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And they only care about it to the extent that it is monetized.
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So, here's the monetization of what all that means.
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In 1986 here, there were three
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one two three three billion dollar disasters in the United States. Last year,
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there were 23 billion dollar disasters.
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The recent LA wildfire alone destroyed thousands of homes and did tens of billions of dollars in damage.
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And guess what happens
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when that kind of damage soarses, insurance moves with it.
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You actually don't have to be directly affected by a climate change-driven extreme
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weather event, a hurricane, or wildfire to be paying the price for climate change.
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Back in 1986, when Senator Chaffy held his hearings, homeowners insurance premiums averaged about $150 annually.
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In today's money, they averaged $470 roughly.
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Today, today, premiums average almost $2500.
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And no surprise, the largest increases are in the highest climate risk areas.
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In Florida and Louisiana, homeowners insurance premiums average
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more than $10,000 and they're predicted to increase,
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doubling, even tripling off the proverbial charts.
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Climate change is no longer tomorrow's problem and it has moved from the science department into the economics
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department. It is here today and whether my colleagues care to admit
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it or not, we are all already paying for it.
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Economists estimate that it costs every household an average of around $500
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per year in heightened climate cost. And that's a conservative estimate. In many
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coastal and wildfire exposed parts of the country, that average annual cost is already north
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of a thousand dollar for household costs.
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