Climate Change

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I have risen on several occasions to bring attention to the challenges confronting our ``we the people'' system of government that President Abraham Lincoln so eloquently described all those years ago as one ``of the people, by the people, and for the people.''

I have talked about the powerful special interests working to corrupt the nature of our Republic, thanks to the unchecked wealth flowing into our political system because of the Supreme Court's series of misguided decisions in Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United, and SpeechNow.org.

Today, I am honored to join with my colleagues from Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Connecticut--organized by my colleague from Rhode Island, who will be speaking in a moment--to show how these same special interests are using their vast wealth and resources to sway national policies and public debate to benefit their interests at the expense of the American people and turn our government into one of, by, and for a powerful special interest. There is no better example of what I mean than the debate surrounding one of the most critical issues facing our Nation and the world today: climate change.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once famously stated that ``everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.'' Well, manmade climate change is a fact. Scientists, universities, and government agencies across the world have all said that manmade climate change is real, that it endangers our planet, and that we need to address it quickly if there is any hope for our future.

Back in 2005, 11 science academies from around the world--including Brazil, Italy, Japan, and Russia--signed a joint letter stating that ``there is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring'' and that ``it is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities.'' Five years later, the Pentagon stated very directly that ``the danger from climate change is real, urgent, and severe.''

Fast-forward 5 more years to 2015, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science warned that ``we face risks of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes'' with potentially ``massively disruptive consequences to societies and echosystems.''

The fact is, we don't really need to turn to our scientists or studies to know that climate change is real; we simply have to look at the world around us. We can see and feel it for ourselves. We saw it when 2014 became the hottest year on record, and then we saw it again in 2015 when 2015 became the hottest year on record. We see it as our forests come under assault from longer fire seasons and insect infestations because the winters are not cold enough to kill the pine beetles. We see it in our waters, our loss of snowpacks, as fishermen fish in ever smaller and warmer streams for trout and salmon, and our farmers face less water for irrigation. We see it in the oceans--oceans that are 30 percent more acidic today than they were before we started burning coal at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The acidic ocean is endangering our sea life, killing coral, and causing a real challenge for our shellfish. We see it in the droughts that hurt our farms and the increasingly powerful storms that regularly devastate communities, businesses, and people's lives.

Why, with all of this proof from the scientific community and with all of the proof and facts directly before our eyes, does such strong opposition remain to the effects of climate change? We know the answer. It is because a powerful, moneyed interest has spun a web of deceit, working for years and continuing to work to undermine mainstream, scientific research and deceive the American people about the dangers and causes of climate change.

These members are part of a special interest that have made their fortunes from fossil fuels. If they acknowledge the realities of climate change, it would suggest that their industry would have to dramatically change in a very short period of time. In fact, according to conventional science, we have to keep 80 percent of fossil fuels in the ground if we are to have any hope of keeping carbon emissions within a range that does not trigger catastrophic consequences. That is why, in the minds of this industry, it is better to lie to the American people than to risk their businesses and fortunes.

We have seen this movie before, when the tobacco industry lied to the American people for decades to discredit the emerging science and evidence that tobacco was killing millions of Americans. And now the fossil industrial complex is lying to the American people, but this time it is not just the health of Americans at risk, it is the health of the entire planet.

The Union of Concerned Scientists published a report last summer which showed that for decades the ``fossil-industrial complex'' knowingly worked to deceive the American public about the realities and risks of climate change. One of the main ways they do this is by funding third-party organizations like think tanks, advocacy groups that produce counter-climate research and make people question which facts and information they can trust. We know this is happening because various studies have revealed the incredible level of coordination between different groups and researchers who always see corporate funding and who all seem to work off the same scripts.

Justin Farrell, a sociologist at Yale University, authored a study last November that examined 20 years' worth of articles, policy papers, and transcripts from 4,500 individuals associated with 164 different groups known to be skeptical of climate change science. Comparing the work of those who had received this special interest corporate funding and those that had not, he found a clear, coordinated effort among the corporate-backed groups that cast doubt on the idea that greater amounts of manmade carbon dioxide endangered our planet. Talking about his study, Farrell said that ``this counter-movement produced messages aimed, at the very least, at creating ideological polarization through politicized tactics, and at the very most, at overtly refuting current scientific consensus with scientific findings of their own.''

We know these groups are backed by special interests. All we have to do is follow the money. That is how we know, for example, that between 1998 and 2015 ExxonMobil donated at least $30 million to groups and organizations whose main purpose was to spread misleading information about climate change. It was discovered in paperwork connected to his paper between 2014 and 2015 alone that Peabody Energy funded at least $332,000 through a subsidiary to groups and organizations involved in attacking climate science and clean energy policies.

As much as the fossil fuel companies have contributed to these efforts over the years, the titles of the masterminds and the kingpins of climate science denial rests with Charles and David Koch. These oil and coal baron brothers, whose estimated $80 billion fortune comes from oil refineries and coal reserves in Texas, Alaska, Minnesota, and elsewhere, control roughly over 4,000 miles of pipeline. These are the same businessmen who have pledged that they and their network of contributors will have spent the better part of $1 billion by the time the polls close on November 8 to try to influence the outcome of this year's Presidential and congressional elections.

Since 1997, the Koch brothers have directly funneled $88 million to think tanks and trade associations, advocacy groups, foundations, and academic and legal programs which deny the existence of climate change.

According to a 2013 study from Drexel University, they are effective at getting their friends to give their money as well. The study showed that most of the other largest contributors to the anti-climate science movement were associated with the Koch brothers. The foundation run by the DeVos family and Art Pope, a retail magnate from North Carolina, are a regular part of the Koch brothers' donor network.

That same Drexel study also shows that as the public opinion about climate change has shifted in recent years, the sources of funding for many of these organizations has become untraceable. On paper, for instance, Koch affiliated foundations have pulled back significantly on visibly funding organizations that deny climate change. It just so happens that funding from other sources, such as Donors Trust, a donor- directed foundation where funders cannot be traced, has risen dramatically at the same time. The traceable funding of this network in DC has decreased, and the untraceable funding has increased. According to its Web site, Donors Trust specializes in being untraceable. Our trust is for those ``who wish to keep their charitable giving private, especially gifts funding sensitive or controversial issues. Know that your contributions to your DonorTrust account that have to be reported to the IRS will not become public information.''

In 2003, only about 3 percent of the denial movement came from Donors Trust, but by 2010, as the Drexel study shows, the foundation responsible for providing a quarter of ``all traceable foundation funding used by organizations engaged in promoting systemic denial of climate change.''

The sources of the denial movement are being laundered so the American people do not have a direct vision of those responsible, but we know from all of this evidence who is responsible. Could it just be coincidence that at the same time the Koch brothers reduce their traceable donations to climate-denying science groups, the amount of untraceable money going to them increases dramatically? Yes, I suppose it is possible, but it would be a very large coincidence.

So we know that the Koch brothers have been prolific contributors to the climate change countermovement over the years, and it is very safe to say that they are continuing to contribute anonymously to the cause of organizations like Donors Trust.

But what is the result of all of this? What has been the return on their investment?

We have seen report after report from groups like the Koch-founded and Koch-funded Cato Institute with titles like ``Apocalypse Not: Science, Economics, and Environmentalism.'' Or how about this one: ``Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn't Worry About Global Warming.''

We know that a grant from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation helped fund a nonpeer-reviewed study which claimed climate change doesn't endanger polar bears.

Now, I do a tremendous number of townhalls--one in every county every year, 36 a year in Oregon--approaching 300 townhalls since I was elected into office. Many of these are in rural areas where people get a lot of their information--well, to put it simply--from web sources and emails and lists that are often directly driven through a rightwing propaganda machine. These are the types of things that the Koch brothers try to spread in order to undermine what is happening before our very eyes. When I talk to my rural townhalls about the challenge, I say: You know what; climate change is impacting you all most of all. It is attacking our forests and our fishing. It is attacking our farming.

I go through the evidence on the ground in the State of Oregon, and people start shaking their head. Yes, they are aware of the pine beetle. They are aware of the longer forest fire season. They have heard about the oyster industry in trouble because of the increasing acidity of the Pacific Ocean. They are aware of how the Klamath Basin has suffered the three worst ever droughts in a 15-year period because the snowpack in the Cascades has changed so much over the last few decades, reducing the amount of irrigation water flowing in to the region and the amount of rain that is falling. They are aware of these things. So then they understand it, and they see the reality. Then there is a glimmer of understanding that the messages spun out by this vast web of denial is false and that they are on the front line. Rural America is on the front line.

Reports and studies funded by the Koch brothers muddy the waters of scientific fact, making it much harder for the average person to sort through and sift through the information that is available and to know what the real story is.

But where we see the Koch brothers' and friends' money paying off the most is the influence they are able to manifest here in Washington, DC. As we work to take on this challenge--the equivalent of an approaching meteor bent on destroying a good portion of the planet--as we work to take it on, they work to make sure we don't take it on, undermining the legislation that is being put forward to incentivize a rapid transition from a fossil fuel economy to a renewable energy economy.

Obviously, an emphasis of pivoting from fossil fuels to renewable energy would undermine the value of the Koch brothers' holdings. It would undermine the value of the fossil industrial complex. So they lie to the American people.

We see one substantial strategy after another. We know that the summer that cap and trade was being debated in 2009 and climate change started to become a focus of tea party rallies, a lot of that was organized by Americans for Prosperity--yet again a Koch-founded and Koch-funded organization.

The issue seeped into townhalls and public forums, with some members of the audiences planted at various events by groups like Americans for Prosperity to raise the issue. Anti-cap-and-trade members of Congress regularly quoted from a study by the Heritage Foundation, another Koch- funded organization. They predicted that the bill would add thousands of dollars to Americans' energy bills and lead to devastating unemployment--claims thoroughly debunked by the Congressional Budget Office. But in the Koch brothers' climate-denier, fossil-industrial complex world, facts don't matter and that our planet is at risk doesn't matter.

They even use piles of letters sent to Members of Congress that falsely claim to come from actual constituents. They worked to build pressure from outside groups, and eventually the Koch brothers and their allies won. The cap-and-trade bill never came up for a vote here in the Senate, even though it had passed the House. That was the type of return on investment the Koch brothers sought. They wanted to use their money and their resources to stop legislation that could have helped the American people and the world begin to reverse recourse on the tragic direction we are headed.

That is not a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That is a government against the people. That is, instead, a government of, by, and for a powerful special interest.

Every one of us here has a public responsibility to act on behalf of our Nation's national interests. We are stewards of the public trust. We are responsible for helping to guide the United States and helping the United States guide the entire community of nations into a future of greater well-being. To do that, we must take back our Republic from the special interests like the Koch brothers who are determined to corrupt our public bodies and our public debates for their own greedy self-interests. We must work together to restore the ``we the people'' government our Founding Fathers envisioned.

I am proud to come here to the floor to join my colleagues from Rhode Island, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. I particularly appreciate my colleague from Rhode Island for organizing this series of speeches to expose the special interests behind the anti-climate science forces and to ensure that, as President Lincoln so eloquently declared on those hallowed fields of Gettysburg, ``Government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this Earth.''

Thank you, Madam President.

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