Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I am both pleased and honored that my distinguished friend Senator Feinstein is joining me today to discuss how climate change is affecting our country, from the East to the West, from one of the biggest States to the smallest one. Of course, we are small in size, but we are long on coastline. As the Presiding Officer will understand, as coastal States, Rhode Island, California, and the coastal States along the South Atlantic coasts are on the frontlines of climate change. Sea levels are already rising, and as they do, Rhode Island's coastal communities are having to spend more and more money on resiliency projects to protect their roads, their bridges, their beaches, their water treatment plants, their harbors, and other infrastructure. A 2000 study by our DEM found that 7 of 19 water treatment facilities in Rhode Island are expected to be overwashed by floodwaters driven by climate change. Frankly, just figuring out what this risk looks like is hard for coastal municipalities, so our State's Coastal Resources Management Council developed a project called STORMTOOLS, which allows Rhode Islanders to see how sea level rise is expected to affect their homes, their businesses, their beaches, and their parks. This is a STORMTOOLS-generated map of Upper Narragansett Bay. The blue color you see here is all land. People have homes and businesses and facilities there. All of this blue is now land, but it is land that gets covered by 10 feet of sea level rise.…”