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Congressional Daily Record
This section captures a formal floor step rather than a policy debate. It mentions legislation such as Recognizing that climate change portends a cascade of financial market collapses that would destabilize the national and global economies., committees such as Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, members such as Sheldon Whitehouse.
Official title: Unanimous Consent Request--S. Res. 557 (Executive Calendar)
Issued
July 21, 2026
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Download official Senate Record PDFReturn to issue contextMr. President, I am here today because there is the simple fact that climate change is real. Earlier this year, I came to the floor and asked my colleagues to agree on that simple, known, scientific fact. Well, they could not.
Republican colleagues could at least agree to some of the simple truths that make up the bigger picture of the reality of climate change. I asked if we could agree that oceans are warming, that sea levels are rising, or that the economic harms of climate change are already beginning to hit and will only get worse going forward. Every time, Republicans objected. I do, however, persist.
Today's simple truth is this: Climate change portends a cascade of financial market collapses that could destabilize the national and global economies. My question today is, Can we all agree on that?
Well, here is my evidence: We know that climate change makes many natural disasters more frequent and/or—could be either—more extreme, including hurricanes, floods, and wildfires—the same wildfires that blanketed much of the Midwest, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic in smoke just last week, resulting in American cities like Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Washington having the worst air quality in the world—worse than cities in India, worse than cities in China.
We know that these disasters are expensive. Between 1980 and today, U.S. losses from billion-dollar climate disasters totaled over $3.1 trillion adjusted for inflation—$3.1 trillion lost to Americans. And, of course, that only accounts for the 431 disasters that cost over $1 billion each. There are plenty more harms beyond that $3.1 trillion.
The trend is projected to continue. Modelers for Deloitte, the corporate consultancy, project that unchecked climate change could cost the global economy $178 trillion—$178 trillion U.S. dollars—in the period between 2021 and 2070. The U.S. economy is in here as a $36 trillion hit in net present value across that half-century span. Deloitte's modelers also predict a global GDP decrease of around 7.6 percent by 2070.
GDP divided by population, could decline by close to 20 percent within the next three decades. Indeed, in 2023, the now-Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, who had previously served as the governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, testified before the Senate Budget Committee that “estimates suggest that, over the balance of this century, climate change could reduce the level of global GDP per capita by 10-20 [percent] without efforts to limit warming, the equivalent of a decade of no economic growth.” He said, “Similar estimates have been found for the United States”—very like Deloitte's projection for the Americas.
So that is climate risk. Now let's look at what it means for financial
risk. An international network of major banks and bank supervisors, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, Deutsche Bundesbank Bank, and the Bank of England, used this illustration about how climate risk hits financial risk. The direct economic impacts include tanking property values and lower household wealth. Tanking property values and lower household wealth then snowball from individual and family impacts into systemic impacts to the financial system at large.
This means that climate change could ultimately cause “the next systemic financial crisis.” Financial experts all over the world agree. Dr. Benjamin Keys, professor of finance at the Wharton School, testified before the Senate Budget Committee as follows:
[C]limate risk . . . is simultaneously inducing heightened
risk of flood, storm damage, chronic inundation, drought,
excessive heat, and wildfires. . . . [T]here is no avoiding
the fact that the increasing risk of large, global loss
events will mean higher costs for consumers.
Dr. Sean Becketti, former chief economist at mortgage giant Freddie Mac, warned of rising sea levels and flooding triggering large-scale reduction of coastal property values, resulting in an economic shock akin to the 2008 financial crisis—and with no expectation that the assets would recover their value.
Those warnings of Dr. Becketti were based only on the risks of what he called “coastal property value crash,” not on the growing wildfire threat that is creating a similar insurance death spiral out West.
Specifically, Dr. Becketti testified:
You look at the Housing Crisis of 2007/8, it was a long
time before property values came back, but they did come
back. This is a different type of dynamic where property
values are probably physically not able to come back. And so
this is equity that's lost forever. It's extremely difficult
to estimate nationally—I'm not sure I have enough zeros to
do it.
in this Congress that in 10 to 15 years, it will be impossible to get insurance or a mortgage in certain coastal and fire-prone regions of the country. Imagine what happens to the economy in a region in which insurance and mortgages are no longer available.
It is global as well. The international Financial Stability Board has warned of the cascade of harms: from rising climate risk to increased insurance premiums and reduced coverage, to market withdrawal of insurance, causing a danger of mortgage crises and bank insolvencies.
The warning to the international banking system: Buckle up.
The Economist magazine described a possible $25 trillion hit to global real estate markets. That is the kind of thing that is bad for bank solvency and that attracted the attention of the international Financial Stability Board.
While these impacts are global, they will hit home.
As Dr. Bill Frist, former Republican Senate majority leader, testified:
Climate change is an economic issue. It affects
individuals, families, and businesses of all sizes. The
fallout from climate change—from increased droughts and
flooding to hotter temperatures and rising sea levels—costs
the United States billions of dollars every year.
article be printed in the Record and appended to my remarks—from Alistair Marsh entitled “Pension Funds Try to Come to Grips With the Scariest Global Warming Scenario,” in Bloomberg News, quotes an investment research chief at the $300 billion UK retirement assets corporation Standard Life, a company that has been around for 200 years.
Any investors not thinking seriously about such risks by
mid-2028 would “really be out of the mainstream.”
This is a mainstream concern.
climate tipping point—and we are approaching several—any single tipping point being breached as “highly consequential” for investors.
We are not helpless in the face of these warnings. Financial experts and banks who look at this professionally agree that adjusting to our climate reality by organizing an early and orderly transition to a low carbon economy will avoid costly shocks to the system when a transition away from fossil fuel-related assets becomes necessary.
It is a little bit like landing a plane. If you do it gradually, it is much safer and smoother. If you crash, it can be pretty painful.
So this is a simple truth. It is well documented. We have been warned and warned and warned. Unchecked climate change will cascade into danger to the national and global economy.
So I ask: Can we all agree on that?
From Bloomberg News, July 20, 2026
Pension Funds Try to Come to Grips With the Scariest Global Warming
Scenario
(By Alastair Marsh)
Institutional investors are trying to figure out what it
would mean for their portfolios if continually rising
temperatures trigger what JPMorgan Chase & Co. is calling
“climate black swan risks.”
The scenario is one that investors including Allianz Global
Investors and Standard Life Plc say they're taking
increasingly seriously.
It's “something we really need to think about,” said
Hetal Patel, head of sustainable investment research at
Standard Life. The investor plans to do an “initial
development” of its risk management around climate tipping
points next year, he said. That will include running
simulations across the firm's 317 billion ($425
billion) portfolio to see how assets would be impacted.
Any investors not thinking seriously about such risks by
mid-2028 would “really be out of the mainstream,” Patel
said.
Climate tipping points are critical thresholds in the
Earth's interconnected natural systems including air, land,
oceans and ice. JPMorgan's “black swan” analogy reflects
the fact that, though treated as a tail-risk, the impact of
any single tipping point being breached would be “highly
consequential.”
Put simply, they're “the most frightening part of climate
change,” says Antoine Poincare, director general of the
Apave Climate School, which educates corporate executives on
how to manage climate risks.
Long regarded as an outlier scenario, tipping points are
now making their way into portfolio analysis and even
informing financial regulations.
The shift comes as temperatures rise at a dangerous rate.
The world briefly surpassed the critical 1.5C global warming
threshold for the first time back in 2024. The temperature is
now on track to rise by almost twice that level this century,
a trajectory scientists have called catastrophic.
“Funds are asking a very practical question: what climate
tipping points mean for portfolios on real decision
horizons—when markets might reprice, where exposures are
concentrated, and how to plan when the science is uncertain
but the consequences could be abrupt,” says Sarah Kapnick,
JPMorgan's global head of climate advisory and a former chief
scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration.
For now, her analysis indicates that debt markets would be
among the first to take a price hit after illiquid real
assets. Investors would be wise to regularly update their
tail-risk analysis to take the latest science into account,
Kapnick adds. The exercise is difficult for banks, however,
given the time horizon under which they operate, though
mortgage portfolios are a “notable” exposure for longer-
term durations, she says.
While not a tipping point as such, this year's heat waves
signal “a hotter baseline,” Kapnick said. And “when change
accelerates, systems can be pushed toward thresholds faster
than society and markets can adapt.”
Investors “waiting too long to adapt could leave too
little time to respond effectively,” she said.
For institutional investors with long-term horizons like
Standard Life, the question now is “how to protect asset
values” from such risks, Patel said.
Scientists have identified more than a dozen tipping points
which, if breached, can result in abrupt, dangerous and
irreversible damage. Once thresholds have been crossed, it
may take years—and even decades—for the damage to play out.
But it will be too late to reverse.
Examples include coral reefs dying, the Amazon rainforest
turning into savannah and the Greenland ice sheet sliding
into an irreversible melt.
In October, researchers at the University of Exeter said
the world was facing a “new reality” after having hit its
first tipping point, namely the “widespread dieback” of
warm-water coral reefs.
Among tipping points of particular concern to northern
Europe is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation
(AMOC), a system of interconnected ocean currents that
transports warm water from the equator to northwestern Europe
and allows for milder winter temperatures. A breakdown of
AMOC would mean weather patterns as we know them today would
be completely disrupted.
The fallout might include much colder winters in the UK,
for example, with more recent models indicating the potential
for extreme cold spells that could drive the temperature to
20C below zero in London, and result in Arctic sea ice
potentially reaching as far south as East Anglia, home to
Cambridge
University. At the same time, global warming is expected to
continue driving hotter, drier summers, which would raise the
risk of water shortages and lead to profound disruption to
key sectors such as agriculture.
Tim Lenton, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter
renowned for his work on tipping points (including the
scenario above), says the calculus among investors has
changed in recent years.
He says he's been speaking with a money manager that's
decided to divest from assets exposed to the impacts of
certain tipping points as soon as scientists deem the
threshold to have been crossed, and regardless of how long
the impacts take to crystallize. He declined to identify the
firm by name.
“The risk can take time to be fully realized,” Lenton
said. “But if that change is underway and irreversible, you
may choose to reprice now and bring the future into the
present.”
Financial watchdogs are taking note. In the UK, the
Prudential Regulation Authority last year told banks and
insurers to account for climate risks that may be non-linear
and irreversible. The PRA also said that backward-looking
data is no longer a reliable guide for the risks ahead.
AllianzGI, which looks after =600 billion ($685 billion) in
assets from its base in Frankfurt, Germany, is among
investors figuring out how to adapt. Mark Wade, head of
sustainability research and stewardship at AllianzGI, says
it's worth paying close attention to the insurance industry
to gauge how soon asset prices will start to react.
“It will be the insurability and financial tipping points
that arise from the breach of climate and biodiversity
tipping points that really garner mainstream attention,” he
said.
With the physical manifestations of climate change
“already showing up;” Kapnick at JPMorgan says that
investors now recognize “that nonlinear step-changes—and
even policy-driven disclosure—can force repricing faster
than traditional models assume.”
But figuring out how to model such risks represents a
gargantuan challenge for professional money managers.
Mirko Cardinale, head of investment strategy at USS
Investment Management Ltd., which oversees the pensions of
the employees of Britain's universities, says that “any
attempt to really predict when a tipping point is going to
occur is not going to be a very useful exercise.”
However, “what we do know is that there is evidence that
there are some tipping points, like the permafrost thawing,
or even AMOC breakdown, that could tip in the next 1 5 to 20
years,” he said.
For scenario analysis, USS generally focuses on a time
horizon of five to 10 years, Cardinale said. By the end of
that period, USS is alert to the potential for tipping points
to become relevant, he said.
The inability to produce precise time horizons around
tipping points makes them a difficult concept for investors,
said Aniket Shah, global head of sustainability and
transition strategy at Jefferies.
“The climate science community finds it hard give exact
dates, but for investors the time frame really matters,”
said Shah. “Is this is a 10-year story, or 50-year or a 100-
year story?”
Poincare at the Apave Climate School says “it is possible
that we will pass the point of no return this decade, but the
real impacts might not be felt until 50 years from now.”
The lack of progress in fighting climate change, however,
means that some investors now find it necessary to brace for
extreme scenarios, says Justine Schafer, head of climate
modeling at the 1.2 trillion asset management
unit of Legal & General Group Plc.
“There is a sense of some people losing hope that there is
a change coming in terms of an energy transition,” she said.
A slower pace of decarbonization than hoped is leaving some
investors “wanting to prepare for the very, very worst
outcome.”
For investors trying to grasp the implications of tipping
points, part of the challenge is that they dwarf previous
crises, according to Shah at Jefferies.
“Economies and companies adapt to wars and to Covid, and
that adaptation can happen quickly,” he said. “However,
unlike wars and pandemics, the difference here will be that
we have not seen irreversible shocks like this before.”
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I therefore ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be discharged and the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 557; further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Ernst). Is there objection?
The Senator from Ohio.
Mr. MORENO. Madam President, reserving the right to object, let me say a few things.
One, resolutions like this sound very much mild. It actually is just a bunch of words that basically just say:
Resolved, That the Senate recognizes unchecked climate
change poses severe risks to national and global economies.
What is wrong with that? What is wrong with saying something like that?
So let me explain where these kinds of ideas go.
Representatives, and the Senate, they had the opportunity to help working Americans—the people who work every day to build this country, the middle class that all of us should be advocating for, the very people that—the New England Democrats that I once knew—J.F.K., et cetera—would have made their entire party platform about helping working Americans.
Instead, what did they do? They betrayed working Americans with a wide, open border that lowered and suppressed wages. They passed electric vehicle subsidies.
$7,500 of taxpayer money to lease a luxury imported vehicle. And 250,000 of the wealthiest Americans got $7,500 each to lease a luxury electric vehicle because for my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, that somehow would solve the issue of climate change.
Not one single Democrat has ever answered the question: Why on Earth would you have possibly put forward horrific public policy like that?
No. 2, if you notice, in the Senator from Rhode Island's presentation, there wasn't a single time he mentioned the largest polluter on Earth, which happens to be the People's Republic of China.
We have been enabling the Chinese economy for decades. It was this body that normalized relations with China in 2000, that allowed them to come into the World Trade Organization and systematically pollute the planet. They are building coal facilities every week, while the Democrats, when they had control of government, were shutting them down.
colleague comes up here to talk about climate change and doesn't say a single word about that country. In fact, he continues to espouse policies that enable the Chinese.
of those batteries that were in those electric vehicles came from Chinese battery manufacturers—made with slave wages, slave labor; using power derived from the very carbon emissions that you denounce.
possible carbon footprint. You have electricity that comes over from Canada—propane, delivered on diesel trucks—because you refuse to build a pipeline from my State, where we can give you clean, natural gas that would reduce carbon emissions. The hypocrisy goes on and on.
Then let's talk about recent events. My colleague, I have heard him, because I sit where you sit periodically, say the same thing many, many times in my 18 months that I have been here. He talks about electric vehicles: We have got to get off of internal combustion engines—a big policy of the Democrat Party.
Let me give you a little statistic on automobiles. If you took every single car—automobile—off of the roads of America, nobody could drive a car for 12 months. That is nuts. I would suggest that is bad public policy. But follow me on that one: no automobiles on American roads for 12 months.
over the last 2 weeks, because of mismanagement of Canada's forests, is equivalent to an entire year of carbon emissions from automobiles. Yet my colleague has not once called into question the fact that the Canadians do not allow our firefighters to go into their country to help, that they have mismanaged the way they coordinate these fire responses. They don't have a central entity to control it. No comment on the fact that millions of people in my State have been absolutely poisoned with carbon pollution coming from Canada.
But what does he want? He wants our industries to be collapsed, our industries to be held to a different standard—not one word from China—and espousing policies like this electric vehicle subsidy for the richest Americans, while, at the same time, there are people flying around in private jets to global conferences to talk about climate change.
Spare me the hypocrisy.
And for all of those reasons and many, many more, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Curtis). The objection is heard.
The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am not going to go through a rebuttal of the factual misstatements to which we have just been treated, but I will add that I have objections to the IRA bill as well. We can all have objections to parts of the IRA.
But the fact is that fossil fuel emissions continue to cause harm; they continue to cause danger. And the warnings that I have described are now very real.
ever since Citizens United dialed up the fossil fuel industry to influence us with dark money.
somewhere, and I would recommend that we start with some really simple facts, like the ones that I brought to the Senate floor just now.
These are serious warnings. Senators who wish to change the subject or distract us or prevent us from responding in any way to these serious warnings—well, that is everybody's choice. But I do think these warnings are serious enough that they merit attention.
So if you don't like my suggestion, let's do something different. But let's just not sit here and do nothing.
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.