American Response to Global Warming Inadequate

AMERICAN RESPONSE TO GLOBAL WARMING INADEQUATE -- (House of Representatives - December 16, 2005)

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Schwarz of Michigan). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) is recognized until midnight as the designee of the minority leader.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, in the last week there has been a collection of relatively extraordinary events in the future of not only our country, but the entire planet, when it comes to our ability to maintain a climate to which we have been accustomed, and in fact that climate is now threatened by global warming, and during the last week some extraordinary things have happened that demand comment here in the House.

I have come here tonight to suggest that the U.S. Congress needs to act with vigor and vision to lead the world in dealing with global warming. What precipitates my comments is a collection of scientific information that has become available to the world in the last week, together with the recently concluded conclave of world leaders in Montreal, Canada, that just concluded without meaningful participation by the executive branch of the United States, which I think is most disappointing to my constituents and I think much of America.

So what I want to do tonight is address some of the new science that has come forward just in the last week about global warming and contrast that with the abject failure, unfortunately, of the executive branch of the United States to fulfill the leadership role of the United States, which has historically been on a bipartisan basis as the technological leader of the world, which this chief executive has abdicated in refusing to lead the world to a resolution of the problem of global warming.

If I can first just briefly summarize some of the things that have happened in the last week regarding global warming.

The Goddard Space Science Center, one of our preeminent scientific institutions, in the next few days will announce that 2005 remains on track to be one, if not the, hottest year in global history since records have been kept, which continues a trend of many of the hottest years in recorded history being in the last decade. British scientists this week announced that their records are similar to the findings of the Goddard Space Laboratory.

We are in an unprecedented period of increases in global temperatures. This is confirmed by a huge majority of the scientific measurements. The Earth is warming, and it is warming faster probably than it has been ever in the last 1,000 years, at least. This is new and appropriately disturbing evidence.

The same week, if we read the Wall Street Journal, a publication not known for its certainly being far out there on environmental issues, reported on December 14 that scientists for the first time have documented multiple deaths of polar bears off Alaska, where they likely drowned after swimming long distances in the ocean amid the melting of the Arctic ice shelf. The bears spend most of the time hunting and raising their young on ice flows, but the problem is the ice flows are disappearing.

That leads to the third bit of information that we have received in the last couple of months, which has found that the Arctic ice shelf has melted to an extent previously never seen before in human history and probably never seen before for thousands of years.

These are an amazing continuation, where one cannot open up a newspaper or a scientific journal in any given week and not see a continued cascade, an avalanche of scientific information, nailing down the coffin of any remaining doubt that we are now facing significant global warming as a result of increased concentrations of carbon dioxide, which we all, Republican and Democrat alike, are putting into the atmosphere. We are experiencing this with our own eyes.

If we take a look at a picture here in Glacier National Park, one of our most treasured jewels of our crown of our national park, we have already lost 30 percent of the glaciers in the last 75 years in Glacier National Park. If we look at the Grinnell Glacier, a picture here in 1938, you will see the glacier coming off this cliff band and extending down into the valley. This is 1938, one lifetime ago. In that one lifetime, the lifetime certainly of my mom and dad, we now see the Grinnell Glacier is probably less than 40 percent of its preexisting size. You see this entire area, it used to be a glacier, is now a lake where the glacier has melted.

The sad fact is that when my mom and dad took me to Glacier National Park in my youth, I got to see these glaciers. If this trend, according to scientific evidence continues, at least my great-grandchildren will not be able to go to Glacier National Park and see glaciers because the glaciers will be gone, extinct, period. I suppose some wag would suggest we will have to rename it as ``the Park Formerly Known as Glacier.''

The fact of the matter is that as we speak, the world and the United States is undergoing a significant change from that which we grew up with. Glaciers, polar bears, fields of wheat that support one of the greatest food baskets in the world, where we are going to have significant change in our ability to produce agriculturally in the Midwest.

With irrigated agriculture, the science shows, we just had a conference of this up in Seattle, Seattle is known for our rain, but in fact we depend on irrigated agriculture for a good part of our agriculture, and that irrigated agriculture depends on snow pack. I just returned from a conference in Seattle in the last several weeks where the scientists predicted that our irrigated agriculture in the State of Washington, upon which our apple crop, the best apple crop in the world, depends, will be jeopardized because the snow pack is disappearing. It is projected we will have less than half the snow pack we have had historically in the next several decades, which jeopardizes our apple industry in Washington State and many of our irrigated products. So the disturbing fact is that the scientific evidence is becoming overwhelming.

By the way, it is just not Glacier. I will show you a picture of Argentina, one of the large ice sheets. In 1928, this photograph is of this enormous ice sheet down in Patagonia, in the southern tip of South America. You see in the same picture in 2004, and I was there several months ago, where you can see where these glaciers have been. This enormous ice sheet that existed in 1928 is knew essentially gone, replaced by water where the ice sheet has melted.

These are in very blinks of geologic time that we are seeing these changes take place, in one lifetime seeing these changes take place, and this has never happened before at these rates. We have had ice ages and had melts, but scientists will tell you this has never happened before in world history, as far as we know, with this rapidity to have this enormous change.

Very briefly, the reason it is occurring is that we are putting into the atmosphere gasses that trap infrared radiation. Light comes in. As ultraviolet radiation it can pass through the atmosphere. When it bounces back it is at a different spectrum, at infrared frequencies, and carbon dioxide and methane that comes out of our tailpipes and smokestacks trap ultraviolet radiation.

We look at this chart and it shows levels of COG. These are parts per million, the amount of COG in the atmosphere. We go to pre-industrial times in 1000, it was about 240 parts per million. When we started to burn coal and gas in about 1800 it starts to go up, and in the 1800s and 1900s it goes up dramatically. Now in 2000 we see it is going up like a rocket, and it is projected that by the close of this century we will have parts per million in the 780 to 800 range, at least two times higher than it has ever been in human history. It is predicted to continue to skyrocket after that.

This is a fact. No one, no scientist in the world, disputes these conclusions. Global warming is a fact, and it is a fact that we are responsible for and need to act as leading the world to deal with this problem, to adopt energy technological solutions to this problem, which we can do if we have the same vision that John Kennedy had when we had the first Apollo project. I have introduced a bill to do that.

But in light of this science, what has the Bush administration done? In light of this cavalcade of information demanding a response, what has the Bush administration done to fulfill our destiny to be the leader in the world when it comes to technological innovation?

Well, what it did is it sent an emissary named Watson to Montreal last week to basically tell the rest of the world, when the rest of the world is working together to try to find a solution to global warming, to try to come up with a post-Kyoto agreement that is better than Kyoto, that is fairer, that is more effective than Kyoto, what did the President send our emissary to do? The greatest country in the world, the most technologically-oriented country in the world, the country that has led in the growth of democracy, that led in the effort to solve the problem of the ozone layer, which we have done some very good work in on a bipartisan basis, what did the President's emissary do?

He went to Montreal and told the rest of the world essentially to go fish; the United States was not going to participate in any meaningful discussion to come up with a global solution to this global problem. This is most embarrassing for our country, the greatest country on Earth, to refuse to take any meaningful position to advance some global solution to this problem.

In fact, the President sent our emissary to adopt the posture of the ostrich with the head in the sand and the tail feathers in the air. We should be adopting the posture of the American eagle, leading the rest of the world to a solution of this problem by using the technological creativity with which America has been blessed with for centuries. Instead, our emissary went there like this, where over 200 countries agreed to continue discussions about how to deal with this known problem.

Now, I have to admit there was some small success. The President's emissary on the last day of the conference picked up his papers and literally walked out on the rest of the world, literally walked out on the rest of the world, making this comment which no one to this day understands about walking like a duck, and, frankly, it was relatively embarrassing.

The good news is the administration was so embarrassed by the world's reaction to that and by America's reaction to that following an address by President Bill Clinton suggesting that we need to work in a bipartisan fashion on this issue that the next day apparently they got a cable from the White House, I am assuming, and the emissary walked back and said, well, now, we will at least agree to continue some informal talks. Not real talks, not formal talks that could actually lead to an agreement, but something called ``informal talks,'' which would at least not allow the administration to be humiliated.

This is not good enough to fulfill our mandate as the greatest Nation on Earth. This is not good enough. It does not respect the ability of the geniuses in America who are going to adopt the new energy technologies so that we can continue to grow our economy and solve this problem at the same time. It is well below what we should expect of ourselves and it is well below what we should expect of our President.

We are calling on the President of the United States to finally adopt some measure of teamwork with the rest of the world to solve this problem.

Now, why should we do that? Well, one reason is we put 25 percent of all the carbon dioxide on this graph, where we see it is now skyrocketing, we in America put it in the atmosphere. We are a very small percent of the world's population, but 25 percent of all the COG in the atmosphere comes out of our pipes. So that is one reason why we really as a matter of moral responsibility need to be part of this solution, as does China, and we need to demand that China participate in these talks as well.

But as important, we are the country who is going to develop the new energy sources, clean energy, renewable energy, that are going to solve this problem and not destroy the climate of the Earth, because, frankly, we are the great tinkerers. We invented the light bulb, we perfected the Internet, the jet airplane, a man on the moon. The list needs to go on when it comes to clean energy. If we have leadership we will get that done.

So tonight I would like to say the science is clear, the destiny of this Nation is clear. We need to lead the world forward on global warming, rather than hiding from it. This is not a Nation that cowers in fear and from challenges. And this president ought to understand the confidence that this American country has in doing something about global warming. We hope that it will have a new attitude beginning tomorrow.

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