Alex Padilla: “I rise today because my home State of California is on fire. Nearly half a million acres have burned in the last month…”

“I rise today because my home State of California is on fire. Nearly half a million acres have burned in the last month by the Dixie Fire alone. That is more than 10 times the size of the District of Columbia. It is larger in size than the city of Los Angeles. Thousands of Californians have been forced to flee their homes with only the clothes on their backs and the belongings they can carry in their cars. Entire towns have burned to the ground. As of Sunday, Dixie is the largest single-source fire in California's history. California is not alone. The entire Western United States is on fire. Colleagues, this morning, the IPCC, the world's foremost body of climate scientists, presented a new report. I am hoping you have seen it. There are 195 countries, including the United States, that have agreed on every statement that it makes, and the verdict could not be clearer: Climate change is happening, and we must act now. As the report says, in more than 1,000 centuries, the Earth has never seen a decade as hot as we have seen in the last 10 years. Scientists can show that particular disasters are fueled by climate change. The heat wave that is fueling fires, destroying crops, and sending areas across California into drought--that is on us. Devastating floods from Texas to Central Europe--those are on us. We have pushed our planet to this point, and if we continue to stall, the pace of recordbreaking catastrophe will only increase.…”