Climate change is real

Dear Friend,

Earlier today, I went to the Senate Floor to declare the obvious: climate change is real, and we are causing its devastating disruptions.

These are the facts. Unless we start to implement policies to curb our carbon emissions and mitigate its impacts, climate change will continue to wreak havoc upon communities across our nation and around the world. That's why I challenged Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to allow the Senate to finally get to work on solutions to climate change.

I hope you can take a moment to watch and share the speech I gave today on the Senate Floor.

VIDEO: U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich calls on the Senate to take action on climate change, February 28, 2019.

President Trump's decision to upend the Clean Power Plan and pull out of the Paris Climate Accord was perhaps the most consequential representation of his inward looking, isolationist vision for America. If Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans keep going along with the president's failure to lead, we will continue down a dangerous path toward very real and very costly climate disruptions.

As an engineer, I am certain that our capacity to confront the challenges that we face, large and small, rests heavily on our ability to make policy that is driven by facts, by data, and by the best available science. The latest science provides us with clear and indisputable evidence that the destructive wildfires, catastrophic hurricanes, and extreme flooding we have seen in just the last couple years are directly linked to human-caused climate change.

The good news is that we already have the resources and the hard working people to do it. In New Mexico, new wind farms and solar plants are moving us in the right direction and creating thousands of new jobs. We need to keep moving toward a reliable, cheap, resilient grid that is 100 percent powered by clean energy technologies invented with American ingenuity and built by American workers. I believe we are up to the challenge if we can finally act on climate.

Sincerely,

MARTIN HEINRICH

United States Senator