On the recordApril 21, 2015
as Americans celebrate the 35th Earth Day this week, I rise for the 96th time--I seem to be coinciding with the Presiding Officer's schedule so he has been treated to his share of these speeches--to urge this body to wake up to the threat of climate change. It is real, not a hoax. It is caused by carbon pollution, and it is already making changes that we are already seeing in the world around us. We must cut our carbon pollution to prevent even bigger climate changes--changes in our atmosphere, oceans, and human habitat-- potentially unprecedented in the history of our human habitation of this planet. Yet the polluters who are producing this problem would have us do nothing. They make money when we do nothing. So we do nothing. The polluters run a racket. They all float onto us the costs and damage from their fossil fuel product--the costs of heat waves, of sea level rise, of ocean acidification, of dying forests, and more. The polluters happily dump those costs onto everybody else. And to keep this profitable racket running, the polluters spend huge sums on lobbying and politics, particularly right here in the Congress. As one author has written, ``rivers of money flowing from secret sources have turned our elections into silent auctions.'' And the polluters get what they pay for. The Republican Party in Congress has become the political arm of the fossil fuel industry.…
