Senator Schatz: America Has an Opportunity to Lead on Climate

Honolulu, HI – Last week, ahead of the Administration’s Clean Power Plan announcement, U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i) spoke on the Senate floor to address questions about the Clean Power Plan and to urge Congress to act on climate change.

To view video of Senator Schatz’s floor speech, click here.

The full text of Senator Schatz’s floor speech follows:

Mr. President, I'd like to talk a little bit about the particulars of the Clean Power Plan and address some of the questions that have been raised by some of the opponents.  And I think the first premise has to be that carbon is an airborne pollutant, that the Clean Air Act doesn't just give the EPA the authority to regulate airborne pollutants, but it actually requires that all airborne pollutants that can cause a public health risk get regulated.  And that's the basis of the Supreme Court decision here.  This doesn't give the EPA the discretion, this doesn't give the Obama administration the discretion to regulate carbon pollution, it requires that they do.  So the only question is not a legal one.  The legal one has been settled.  The EPA is required to regulate, under the Clean Air Act, pollution.  The only question then remaining is, is carbon a pollutant?  And I don't think there is anybody credible in this space that thinks that carbon is not a pollutant. 

I think we're actually making progress over the last six to 12 months.  We have seen a sea change among Republican members of Congress who are I think increasingly concerned about being on the wrong side of history, about being on the wrong side of science, about being on the wrong side of a whole generation of young voters – Republican, Democrat, and Independent – who understand that this is one of the challenges of our generation.  We're seeing some movement; we’re seeing some openness to at least concede that this problem, in fact, exists.  This problem, in fact, exists.

We have this incredible law in the Clean Air Act.  We don't need to pass a new law.  Of course, Senator Whitehouse and I have been working very hard with Senator Boxer and others on a carbon fee, but we also have the tools at our disposal to regulate carbon pollution because like methane and other airborne pollutants, it is causing environmental and health damage.  And so the Clean Power Plan is very simple. It is treating this as though it is the pollutant that it is. 

Originally, there were some, I think, legitimate concerns about how this thing was going to get administered.  Let me give you a for-example.  If you're in a very small, rural state and you are going to regulate not a state's total carbon emissions but an individual power plant's carbon emissions, that's a really tough sell.  Because there are instances where because of legacy infrastructure, because of distance, for instance, in Hawai‘i you have remote and relatively small islands, so it's very difficult to ask the island of Lanai, which is running on diesel-fired generator, or the island of Molokai to, at an individual power plant level, reduce carbon pollution emissions.  That’s just tough.  They can make improvements in efficiency, but they may not be able to meet the standard.  The idea here is that you allow all of it to aggregate.  So what Hawai‘i did was, we have the Hawai‘i Clean Energy Initiative, recognizing that there are going to be some places that are going to have incredible challenges economically and in terms of the financing of the projects, incredible challenges complying at the project level, at the site level, at the generation level.  But if we provide flexibility to states – and I know in California with the cap-and-trade program and in the northeast with the RGGI program – there is a flexibility regionally or within states or energy systems to say, as long as you in the aggregate are making sufficient progress, we're going to allow you to figure out how to make that progress on your own.  These rules we anticipate will provide sufficient flexibility to allow economies to thrive. 

And I'd like to just make one final point on this before hearing from the great Senator from California, and that is that all of the hue and cry, all of the panic, all of the heartburn about what is going to happen to our economy doesn't have to be an abstract question any more.  We have states that are currently exceeding the anticipated thresholds in the Clean Power Plan.  We don't have to imagine what is going to happen to various economies if we comply because we've got states such as California.  We've got the Hawai‘i Clean Energy Initiative.  You know, two years ago, I was on the floor talking about the Hawai‘i Clean Energy Initiative with a 40 percent renewable portfolio standard, and the legislature in the last three or four months just passed the first 100 percent clean energy statute in the United States.  And our unemployment rate is 4 percent, and we have exceeded our previous goals, and California with its cap-and-trade program and all the hue and cry and panic that was caused about what would happen to our economy, California's booming, Hawai‘i is doing well.  People still have their economic challenges, but it's not because of our desire to drive an innovation economy and to try to solve this great challenge of our time.

We can create clean energy jobs.  We can innovate into the future.  America has an incredible opportunity to lead in this space, and I'm so pleased to be part of that innovation and part of that leadership.  We're putting our marker down as a country.

We understand that this is going to take a global effort, but now America has the credibility to lead on climate.  And with that, I yield the floor to the great Senator from California.

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