Global climate change is the most significant environmental challenge facing our country today. The scientific evidence clearly demonstrates the human contribution. According to recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, increases in greenhouse gas emissions have already increased global temperatures, and likely contributed to more extreme weather events such as droughts and floods. These emissions will continue to change the climate, causing warming in most regions of the world, and likely causing more droughts, floods, and many other societal problems.
In the United States alone, emissions of the primary greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, have risen more than 20 percent since 1990. We must develop reasonable solutions to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. That is why I am pleased to be an original co-sponsor of the America’s Climate Security Act authored by Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and John Warner (R-VA). This bipartisan bill presents a practical, economically sound approach to reducing America’s greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent over 2005 levels by 2050.
I have observed in person the dramatic effects of climate change and had the opportunity to be briefed by the preeminent experts. Last year, on a fact-finding trip to Antarctica and New Zealand, I learned more about research being conducted by scientists at the University of Maine. Distinguished Professor George Denton took us to sites in New Zealand that had been buried by massive glaciers at the beginning of the 20th century, but are now ice free. Fifty-percent of the glaciers in New Zealand have melted since 1860 -- an event unprecedented in the last 5,000 years.
The melting is even more dramatic in the Northern Hemisphere. In the last 30 years, the Arctic has lost sea ice cover over an area ten times as large as the State of Maine, and at this rate will be ice free by 2050. In Barrow, Alaska, I witnessed a melting permafrost that is causing telephone poles, installed decades ago, to lean over for the first time ever. In Northern Norway, scientists told me that while some climate changes are the result of natural variability, the global climate is changing more rapidly than at any time since the beginning of civilization due to an increase in greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. According to the Norwegian scientists, over the past 50 years, the average temperatures across the Arctic have risen by nearly twice as much as the global average.
The America’s Climate Security Act covers U.S. electric power, transportation, and manufacturing sources that together account for 75 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The bill achieves the goal of reduced emissions with a “cap and trade” system, similar to the market-based system used in the Clean Air Act to reduce the pollutants that cause acid rain. A cap-and-trade program imposes an upper limit, or cap, on the total greenhouse gas emissions for each year of the program. The EPA then calculates what each participating organization is permitted to emit and provides allowances to each entity to emit greenhouse gases up to its specific cap level. Each entity can trade those allowances with other participants who need them because they will not stay within their cap, or can keep its allowances for future use or sale. I am pleased that the bill also strengthens energy efficiency standards for appliances and buildings, and sets aside credits and funding to deploy advanced technologies for reducing emissions, and helps protect low- and middle-income Americans from higher energy costs.
The time has come to take meaningful action to respond to climate change. The America’s Climate Security Act would help preserve our environment for future generations by providing reasonable emission reduction goals.