00:00Thank you, Chairman. This hearing is a perfect display of projection, blaming your adversary
00:13for what you are doing. Dark money? Judicial capture? Propaganda? Oh my, the fossil fuel
00:25industry would have nothing to do with those things. The hearing ignores that the fossil
00:30fuel industry has for decades benefited from secret funding to wage war on the American consumer
00:37by making energy more expensive and dirtier. Higher utility bills, worse pollution. Let's
00:46examine the facts. First, money. The fossil fuel industry has spent 10 times more on lobbying
00:54than environmental groups and the renewable energy industry combined. That's not even
01:01counting fossil fuel elections spending. Republican and fossil fuel interests pushed for the Citizens
01:08United decision allowing unlimited election spending by special interests. Second, dark
01:17money. My Disclose Act would require transparency in election spending. We voted on it a half a
01:24dozen times. Every time every Republican voted against it. Third, energy. Renewable energy
01:33is now the cheapest form of energy on the planet. The wind, our sunshine, flowing water and the
01:42Earth's own heat are all free and essentially unlimited fuel sources. Their price, again zero,
01:51does not depend on geopolitical events or international industry cartels beyond our control. As Republicans
02:02hold this hearing today, oil and gasoline prices have climbed in response to strife in the Middle East.
02:09As Republicans hold this hearing today, tens of millions of Americans swelter through a punishing heat
02:16heat wave made both more likely and more intense by climate change caused by fossil fuel emissions. So let's talk about
02:25climate change. By damaging Earth's natural systems, climate change costs Americans money. Lots of money. I suspect that
02:36Americans would be more interested in tackling climate flation than in unspooling yet another conspiracy theory from the fossil fuel
02:45fossil fuel funded fertile swamp of Republican fever dreams. Climate change is raising grocery prices.
02:54Coffee, chocolate, sugar and orange juice are just a few of the staples whose prices have spiked in response to floods, droughts and heat waves made worse by climate change.
03:08Climate change is raising electricity costs. Heat waves, hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and floods raise generation and
03:17distribution costs, raising Americans' utility bills. Heat waves force people to consume more electricity. Air conditioners are running all around Washington today, further raising consumers' electricity bills.
03:33And then there's insurance. This is the big one. Not just because of the added costs for consumers,
03:42but because of the risk that an insurance crisis triggers a deep and lasting recession. Increasingly frequent and severe wildfires and
03:54storms are making property insurance are making property insurance both unaffordable and unavailable in many places.
04:03Texas had the fourth highest average homeowners premiums in the country last year at around $6,000. This year they're projected to increase by another $500.
04:13In Louisiana, premiums averaged almost $11,000 last year. In Florida, they were over $14,000. And those are projected to get far worse.
04:32That's when you can find a company to write coverage. Last year, as chair of the Budget Committee, I investigated how climate change was driving non-renewals,
04:41where your insurance company fires you after you've been a loyal customer for many years because they can't afford the risk of your property.
04:49We found that non-renewals are spiking around the country, up 278% in Florida, 267% in Louisiana, 944% in Chambers County, Texas.
05:08Where insurance becomes unavailable, it becomes impossible to get a mortgage. No insurance, no mortgage.
05:20Without the ability to get a mortgage, property values crash. Unless, of course, you're billionaires swapping mansions back and forth with your excess income.
05:30Rising insurance premiums on their own also cause home values to decline.
05:36And a wide-scale crash in coastal and wildfire-prone home values is likely to trigger a larger economic meltdown, like we saw in 2008.
05:48I'm not the only one saying this. An Economist cover story last year predicted a $25 trillion hit to the global real estate market, the world's largest asset class.
06:02Earlier this year, Fed Chair Powell told the Senate Banking Committee that in 10 to 15 years it will be impossible to get insurance or a mortgage in entire regions of the country.
06:16It's already hitting home. I'll share a few articles, for the record, from the Houston Chronicle.
06:24Inside the costly new reality of insuring a home in Texas. Map. See where extreme weather is pushing up home insurance costs in Texas and the U.S.
06:36Houston Chronicle.
06:38Houston Chronicle again. Texas has a home insurance crisis. These four charts show how it's getting worse.
06:44How much is your Texas home worth if you pay a lot in insurance? Less than you might think.
06:52Wouldn't it be great if colleagues on both sides of the aisle would focus on this, the real danger, rather than attempting to project fossil fuel dark money mischief onto the organizations and elected governments that are trying to protect Americans from climate change?
07:13Climate change is going to impose immense costs on state and local governments. That is indisputable.
07:20Sea level rise and other climate related phenomena are already damaging roads, bridges, ports, water treatment plants, and other essential infrastructure. And it will just get worse.
07:32One emblem of climate change's costs to governments is the proposed Ike Dyke in coastal Texas estimated to cost nearly $60 billion.
07:46Who's going to pay for that? Governments faced with costs like that have a dilemma. Who do you get the money from? Taxpayers?
07:59Do you want to go to taxpayers adding another hit on top of their spiraling insurance premiums and declining home values?
08:08Or do you want to look at the responsible party, the fossil fuel industry?
08:14To put this into scale, Exxon's profits in the last quarter of last year were $900 million per day.
08:27If they had to pay a billion-dollar judgment, they'd be over it by 6 a.m. the next day.
08:34And the oil and gas industry has known about this problem for more than 60 years.
08:38For three decades, they hired their own climate scientists and did their own research.
08:44And their own scientists confirmed that combusting fossil fuels would heat the planet with disastrous consequences for Earth's natural systems, i.e. for all of us.
08:55And then, armed with that knowledge, they lied. They denied the science. They obstructed climate action.
09:04They constructed the most complex and mischievous armada of phony front groups that America has ever seen in order to do so.
09:17The suits that are at issue in this hearing are brought under a variety of traditional state law, tort, public nuisance, and fraud claims.
09:26At their heart, they're about who should pay for the climate damages bearing down on folks around the country.
09:36We Democrats believe that the responsible party, the polluter, the fossil fuel industry should pay.
09:45So does Milton Friedman, by the way. It's econ 101 that pollution and negative externality should be baked into the cost of the product.
09:55Republicans, on the other hand, believe that American families should pay to protect the free-to-pollute business model of their favored fossil fuel industry.
10:08By the way, every time somebody on that side of the aisle says the word energy in this hearing, what they really mean is fossil fuel.
10:17Every time they say the word energy dominance in this hearing, what they really mean is fossil fuel dominance.
10:25It's gotten so bad that the Trump administration actually wrote wind energy and solar energy, which are extremely prevalent and successful in Texas, out of their own definition of energy.
10:41They're not just violating economic principles, they're violating the dictionary.
10:45That's where we're at.
10:46Well, I'm willing to bet that the American people are with us on this one.
