Senate Admits Climate Change is Real (Kind of)

Better late than never: for the first time in American history, the U.S. Senate voted on Wednesday to acknowledge that climate change is, in fact, happening.

It was a promising sign that Congress might finally get its act together, given just one day earlier, President Obama had chastised both Houses in his State of the Union address, saying he would not let them “endanger the health of our children by turning back the clock on our [climate change] efforts.”

But don’t pop the champagne yet: In the same swoop, the Senate rejected two measures that would have placed actual blame on human activity.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) forced the debate by sneaking the climate change clause into the already up-for-a-vote Keystone XL pipeline legislation. The amendment was short and sweet: “The sense of the Senate [is] that climate change is real and not a hoax.” Though merely symbolic, the language Whitehouse planted in the Keystone legislation meant the Senate had to go public on climate change science.

The amendment passed 98 to 1, with only Senator Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) in opposition. A diehard climate change denier, Senator Wicker called it a “political show vote” in a statement to Mashable.

Even Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.)—author of “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future” and the man who once claimed the United Nations had invented the notion of climate change so as to “shut down the machine called America”—voted in favor. However, on the floor of the Senate, he denied that humans were in any way responsible.

“Climate has always changed, and always will, there's archeological evidence of that, there's biblical evidence of that, there's historic evidence of that,” he reportedly said. "The hoax is that there are some people that are so arrogant to think that they are so powerful that they can change climate. Man can't change climate."

But the discussion rapidly veered from reasoned debate to political gamesmanship. Attempting to turn Whitehouse’s trick against him, a second amendment added more aggressive language, a trick to force Democrats to come out in favor of Keystone—that human activity contributes to climate change. It received 59 votes, including 15 Republicans, falling one short of the 60 needed for passage.

“Some Republicans finally went on record saying that man-made climate change is real,” Franz Matzner, associate director of government affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “But what’s their plan to do something about it? Republican leaders still are trying to block any and all solutions.”

An even tougher third amendment dropped all pretense. Leaving out any mention of Keystone, it stated that human activity “significantly” contributes to climate change. This one extra word brought the number of “yeas” down to 50.

Though carbon dioxide pollution here has gone down in recent years, the United States remains the world’s largest per-capita emitter among large economies. Where Congress has refused to act, President Obama has, with certain executive actions and bilateral deal-making with China. The latest pact set a U.S. emissions target of 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

In today’s political climate, Obama will likely have to keep picking up the slack. But as Whitehouse put it, according to The Hill, “It starts by admitting you have a problem.”