Cantwell Responds to Climate Change Denial on Senate Floor: “[We] Cannot Bury Our Heads in the Sand.”

Cantwell Responds to Climate Change Denial on Senate Floor: "[We] Cannot Bury Our Heads in the Sand."

"I hope that some of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle…will talk to our colleague from Wisconsin," urges Cantwell after Sen. Johnson of landlocked state spikes resolution to simply acknowledge the existence of human-caused sea-level rise

WASHINGTON, D.C. - This week, U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, urged her colleagues to take sea-level rise seriously in remarks on the Senate floor.

"[We] cannot bury our heads in the sand while climate change and sea level rise put billions of dollars of infrastructure and millions of Americans at risk," Sen. Cantwell said. "If we want to protect our economy and these communities, we need the data and the science to understand the problem. We need to take the necessary steps to protect our communities and our infrastructure and our economy."

Sen. Cantwell's remarks came immediately after the failure of Senate Resolution 551, which sought to resolve: "That the Senate recognizes the reality of anthropogenic climate change and the role it plays in dangerously raising sea levels." Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who introduced the measure, asked for unanimous consent that it be adopted. But Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) objected, saying "The simple truth is, there's no climate emergency."

In her remarks, Sen. Cantwell urged Republican colleagues to try to change Sen. Johnson's mind. "I hope that some of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle that represent coastal states will talk to our colleague from Wisconsin and encourage him to instead support this legislation," she said.

As evidence, Sen. Cantwell shared examples from Washington state of how sea level rise is already creating problems.

• "Twice right outside of Bellingham, … I-5 has been closed. Okay, why is I-5 closing? Because we've had so much rain and we have so much impact [from] a changing environment that we basically have had to have I-5 shut twice just to clean up from the mudslide."
• "Our Amtrak service that runs all the way from California up to British Columbia, [has] also been impacted by huge slides after rain and after these swollen rivers."
• "Rising [sea levels make] wastewater [more of] an issue. So treatment facilities around Puget Sound and Elliot Bay are increasingly vulnerable to flooding and overflow, threatening the release of bacteria, toxic chemicals and other pollutants into our waterways and our drinking water."
• "Tribes like the Hoh Indian Tribe, the Quinault Indian Tribe, the Quileute Tribe, the Shoalwater Bay Tribe, are all located along the Pacific coast, and the threat of sea level rise has forced them to take aggressive, unprecedented actions to move parts of their reservation to higher land."

Sen. Cantwell also cited a recent Seattle Times article describing work to understand threats to Chinook salmon on the Stillaguamish River.

"In this river alone, Chinook populations are down to roughly 10 percent of their historic levels," said Sen. Cantwell. "So this is really important to us as a state. We want salmon. We want to understand rising sea levels. We want to understand what flooding is going to do to create damage. When are those spawning grounds going to be lost, and when are Chinook survival rates going to continue to drop? We want to know."

Sen. Cantwell noted her bipartisan push to identify how climate change threatens federal government infrastructure. In September 2024, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a new report requested by Sen. Cantwell and Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), on the economic impacts of climate change to the federal government. This report built on an October 2017 GAO report requested by Senators Cantwell and Collins on the same topic.

The report, titled Climate Resilience: Congressional Action Needed to Enhance Climate Economics Information and to Limit Federal Fiscal Exposure, warned that "Available estimates indicate significant projected costs to the economy and the federal government as a result of climate change," and that "the federal government is currently not well-organized to manage this reality."

GAO's work on costs to the federal government followed eye-opening analysis in the Fifth National Climate Assessment that found the cost of climate damages to the entire U.S. economy from extreme weather events is already $1.5 trillion per decade.

"So literally, you're costing taxpayers a trillion dollars because you don't want to adapt or mitigate those impacts," Sen. Cantwell warned.

Video of Sen. Cantwell's floor speech is HERE; a transcript is HERE.