Gore Senate Hearing Video Excerpt & Full Transcript
Matthew McDermott's related post:
Al Gore Tells Senate Committee That We Have Arrived at a Moment of Decision Regarding Climate Change
What follows is a complete, unofficial transcript of today's hearing.
Hearing Transcript
Hon. Al Gore
Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Chairman Kerry: The hearing will come to order. Good morning to all. We are delighted to welcome folks here. We are particularly grateful today and happy to be able to welcome back to this committee not only a visionary leader but an old friend and Senate classmate of mine, former Vice President and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore. It is well known that Al and I have a certain political experience in common. What is less well known is that we also teamed up on the first ever Senate hearing on climate change for the commerce committee back in 1988. And on a sweltering June day some Senate staff opened up the windows and drove home the point, with everyone sweating in their seats during Dr. James Hansen's historic and tragically prescient testimony. We are obviously not going to repeat that gesture today, but I speak for everyone on this committee when I tell you how much we appreciate you being here today, Mr. Vice President, and particularly on a day in what passes down here as tough winter weather.
To the nay‑sayers and deniers out there, let me make it clear that the little snow in Washington does nothing to diminish the reality of the crisis we face.
This is the first substantive hearing of this committee and this Congress, and we are here because 10 months from now we will be negotiating the follow-up to the Kyoto protocol and the world has high expectations for the United States of America. Delegates will be meeting in March and June of this year to prepare negotiating language to be finalized at the conference of the parties in Copenhagen in December. And we need to join them in crafting a new global treaty.
That means there is no time to waste. We must learn from the mistakes of Kyoto and we must make Copenhagen a success. Regrettably and despite committed efforts from Al Gore and many others across the globe we are on the brink of an acute crisis that is gathering momentum daily. The demand for action is. It is no accident that we asked Mr. Gore to testify at the first hearing at this committee. Climate change will be essential to our foreign policy and our national security, and it will be a focal point of this committee's efforts as well.
We are here today for the same reason our top military leaders and intelligence officials have been sounding the alarms. They describe climate change as a threat multiplier, and they are warning that the cost of ignoring this issue will be more famine, more drought, more widespread pandemics, and more human displacement on a massive scale. In other words, our military leaders predict more of the very drivers that exacerbate conflict worldwide and create failed states, which as we all know too well present glaring targets of opportunity for the worst actors in our international system. That endangers all of us. Marine Corps general Anthony Zini, former commander of our armed forces in the Middle East says without action and I quote, "we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll." More immediately as the new administration sets a new tone with the global community, this issue will be an early test of our capacity to ex‑certificate thoughtful, forcefully, diplomatic and moral leadership on any future challenge that the world faces.
We have willing partners in this endeavor, Mexico, South Africa, Brazil, Australia, the European Union, and others have made meaningful domestic climate change policy commitments in recent months. But all of us are still falling far short of what the science tells us must be done. A partnership, led by the University of Pennsylvania, M.I.T., the Heinz Center recently gathered the impact of all the domestic policy protocols that everybody talked about setting out including President Obama's goal of 80% reductions by 2050. What they found was sobering.
If every nation were to make good on its existing promises, if they were able to, there's no indication yet that we are, we would still see atmospheric carbon dioxide levels well above 600 parts per million, 50% above where we are today. This translates into global temperatures at least 4 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and no one in the scientific community disputes that this would be catastrophic. That's why we need more than just a policy shift. We need a transformation in public policy thinking to embrace the reality of what science is telling us. We must accept its implications and then act in accordance with the full scope and urgency of this problem.
Frankly, the science is screaming at us. Right now the most critical trends and facts all point in the wrong direction. CO 2 emissions grew at a rate four times faster during the Bush Administration then they did in the 1990's, two years ago the governmental panel on climate change that shared the Nobel prize with our witness today issued a series of projections for global emissions based on likely energy and land use patterns. Today our emissions have actually moved beyond all of the worst case scenarios predicted by all of the models of the IPCC. Meanwhile, our oceans and forests which act as natural repositories of CO 2 are losing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide.
This is a stronger climate‑forcing signal than expected arriving sooner than expected. Translated into simple terms, it means that all of the predictions of the scientists are coming back faster and to a greater degree than they had predicted.
The result will be a major foreign policy and national security challenge. In the Middle East, more than six percent of the world's population today fights over less than two percent of the world's renewable fresh water. As the region experiences a demographic explosion, the last thing we need is for climate change to shrink an already tight water supply. The Himalayan glaciers that supply water could disappear by 2035. The British government issued a report that two hundred million people may become permanently displaced climate migrants as they call them, ten times the number of refugees and internally displaced people in the world today. The recent study in "Science" predicts that half of the world's population could reach serious food shortages. Perversely, Africa, the continent that has done the least to contribute to the climate change will be the worst affected. Quite simply these conditions will result in a world we don't recognize, a ravaged planet in which all of us would be less secure. More than 15 years ago, Secretary of State Jim Baker spoke eloquently about what he called the greening of our foreign policy, and that's exactly why we are here today. To green it. Vice President Gore and I recently returned from the climate change negotiations in Poland. There we met with leaders of dozens of delegations, ranging from the European community to China, to the small island states. One clear message emanated from every corner of the globe from every meeting that I had and the Vice President will speak for himself. They said to us, "This challenge cannot be solved without the active commitment and leadership of the United States." We need to begin by putting in place a domestic cap in trade program here at home. This will give us leverage to influence other countries' behavior. And as we move towards Copenhagen, we must not repeat the mistakes of Kyoto. Going forward the most important thing that will give success to our diplomacy is how we give words in Rio and reiterated in Poland, those words are shared but differentiated responsibilities among nations in solving this problem.
In Kyoto, people stiff‑armed the discussion and were unwilling to have it and in many ways an earlier decision made in Berlin simply made it impossible to have that discussion, but the landscape has shifted over the past decade. Now China is the world's largest emitter, developing countries will account for three-fourths of the increase in global energy use over the next two decades. A global problem demands a global effort and a global solution, and today we are working toward a solution with a role for developed and developing countries alike.
It is absolutely vital that we achieve that in order to work to build a consensus here at home. Finally, some may argue that we cannot afford to address this issue in the midst of an economic crisis. Just walking down to this hearing room, that was the first question put to the Vice President in the hall.
Vice President Gore will speak to that in his testimony, and I'm confident in the questions. But the fact is that those who pose that question have it fundamentally wrong. This is a moment of enormous opportunity for new technology, new jobs, for the greening of transformation of our economy. We simply can't afford not to act, because it will be far more expensive and far more damaging to our economy in the long run not to. The question is not whether or not we pay for climate change. Listen to General Zenni. If there were a cost‑free way forward, we would take it, but there isn't one and we haven't. The real question is whether we pay now in a way that also helps to break our addiction to oil, strength thens our global system and global standing and catapults us into the 21st century economy with millions of new jobs and a jolt of economic stimulus, or we can pay for it later on, with a massive, unpredictable scale, the currency of environmental devastation, military commitments, human misery and reduced economic growth for decades to come. And while I am aware of the unique perils of this economic moment, I believe that the choice we can't afford is the latter one.
This political season has celebrated the this political season has shown the legacy of a president who called this country not only the last best hope of earth but helped to make it so. After years of being the last place on earth to get serious about our climate, this is our moment and this is an issue that offers us a real chance to live up to the full meaning of that phrase. Again, I thank Vice President Gore for joining us today, and we look forward to hearing his insights and ideas about how this nation could lead the world in crafting a solution to this enormous challenge. Senator Lugar?
