Nat'l Endowment for the Oceans: Protecting Our Coastal Economy
As Prepared for Delivery on the Senate Floor
Mr./Madam President, I rise today to urge support for an amendment I am offering to the Water Resources Development Act to establish a National Endowment for the Oceans, Coasts, and Great Lakes.
Our oceans and coasts face unprecedented challenges. Our coastal states badly need this endowment. Water temperatures are increasing. Sea level is rising. Ocean water is growing more acidic. Right now, we are ill prepared to engage in the research, restoration, and conservation work necessary to protect our coastal communities and resources.
The famed ocean explorer Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreckage of the Titanic has said that “a major problem… is the disconnect between the importance of oceans and the meager funds we as a nation invest to not only understand their complexity, but become responsible stewards of the bounty they represent.”
Just how large is the bounty our nation reaps from our oceans?
In 2010, maritime activities like fishing, energy development, and tourism contributed $258 billion to U.S. gross domestic product and supported 2.8 million jobs. Shoreline counties, which include many of our biggest cities, generated 41 percent of our GDP, or $6 trillion—$6 trillion!
Coastal communities are the engines of our economy, and changes in the oceans put that economy at risk. We must find ways of using these resources without abusing them.
Just last month, the Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee heard from scientists and industry leaders from across the country who are deeply worried about threats to our oceans. On the Pacific Coast, ocean acidification is killing off the oyster harvest – a major cash crop for that region. They’re being killed off by sea water too acidic for the larval oysters to form their shells. Live coral in some Caribbean reefs is down to less than 10 percent; bad news for Florida, which usually sees over 15 million recreational dives every year. Think of what those 15 million dives mean for Florida’s economy, not just for the dive boats, but for hotels and restaurants and retailers. Evan Matthews, Port Director for Quonset in my home state of Rhode Island, told us that rising sea levels make port infrastructure more vulnerable to damage from waves and storms. Virtually all of our economy is touched by what goes through our network of ports, and damage to any of them could disrupt the delivery of vital goods not only to coastal states, but to inland states as well.
For all the coastal states, this is really big. We have work to do preparing for changes in our oceans and preventing storm damage. We need to reinforce natural coastal barriers like dunes and estuaries that can help bear the brunt of storm surges and act as nurseries for fish. We need to relocate critical infrastructure, like water treatment plants and bridges, which are now at risk of being washed away. We need to understand how ocean acidification and warming waters will affect the food chain and our fishing economies. And we need to know where the high-risk areas are, so investors can understand the geographical risks.
These are coastal concerns, but they have implications for all 50 states. If you eat seafood or take a beach vacation in the summer, this concerns you. If you’ve purchased anything produced outside the United States and imported through our coastal ports, this concerns you. According to data compiled by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, 75 percent of U.S. imports in 2011 arrived on our shores through our ports, so they probably should concern you.
The National Endowment for the Oceans, Coasts, and Great Lakes can help coastal states and communities protect more habitat and infrastructure, conduct more research, and clean more waters and beaches. The need is great and we must respond.
This amendment would just authorize the National Endowment for the Oceans, Coasts, and Great Lakes. When we’ve figured out how to fund it, the Endowment would make grants to coastal and Great Lakes states, to local governments, to planning bodies, to academic institutions, and to nonprofit organizations, to learn more about and do a better job of protecting our coasts and oceans. It would allow researchers to hire technicians, mechanics, computer scientists, and students. It would put people to work strengthening or relocating endangered public infrastructure. It would help scientists, businesses, and local communities work together to protect our working oceans. And it would protect jobs by restoring commercial fisheries and promoting sustainable and profitable fishing.
How great is the need? A few years ago NOAA received $167 million for coastal restoration projects through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. More than 800 proposals for shovel-ready construction and engineering projects came in, totaling $3 billion, from Alaska to Florida to the Carolinas to Maine. But NOAA could only fund 50 of the 800. The National Endowment for the Oceans will help us move forward with more of these projects to protect our oceans and drive our economy.
We will continue to take advantage of the ocean’s bounty, as we should. We will trade, we will fish, and we will sail. We will dispose of waste. We will extract fuel and harness the wind. We will work our oceans. Navies and cruise ships, sailboats and supertankers, will plow their surface. We cannot undo this part of our relationship with the sea. What we can change is what we do in return.
We can, for the first time, give back. We can become stewards of our oceans – not just takers, but caretakers. And we must do this sooner rather than later, as changes to our oceans pose a mounting nationwide threat. As Dr. Jeremy Mathis of the University of Alaska said recently, “This is going to be a shared threat…. [I]t’s not unique to any one place or any one part of the country. And so we’re going to have to tackle it as a nation, all of us working together…. Whether you live along the coast of Washington or Rhode Island, or whether you live in the heartland in Iowa, this is going to be something that touches everybody’s lives.”
Today, I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this amendment to authorize the National Endowment for the Oceans, Coasts, and Great Lakes. It will not obligate any funding. We’ll figure out later an appropriate way to fund it. But help our nation take this important step protecting our oceans and coasts; protecting the jobs they support through fishing, research, and tourism; protecting the stability of our national economy, which depends on ports and maritime activity; and protecting the property and the lives of the millions of people who live and work near the sea.
You can help us become, as Dr. Ballard said, “responsible stewards of the bounty [the oceans] represent.”
For those who are not sure, let me add another consideration – a Senate consideration. This Endowment, together with funding, was part of a negotiated package with billions of dollars in benefits to the Gulf States. For reasons not worth discussing here, but with fault on both sides, the agreement was broken. If you believe people should keep their word around here, and agreements forged in the Senate should stick, then I’d ask you just on that grounds to support this partial repair of that broken agreement.
I yield the floor.
Next Article Previous Article
