Date: 2025-08-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00028882
CLIMATE CHANGE
SENATOR SHELDON WHITEHOUSE ... JULY 10TH, 2025
Forbes Breaking NewsS Sheldon Whitehouse Issues (br> Epic Warning On Effects From Climate Change
SENATOR SHELDON WHITEHOUSE ... JULY 10TH, 2025
Forbes Breaking NewsS Sheldon Whitehouse Issues (br> Epic Warning On Effects From Climate Change
Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFDXKMsZiTM
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
Peter Burgess
Transcript
- 0:00
- President, the Senator from Rhode Island. Thank you. First of all, thank you,
- Senator Marowski. I rise uh today for the 300th time with
- my trusty increasingly battered time to wake up chart to try to rouse this
- chamber to the looming dangers caused by fossil fuel pollution. I'm not sure
- whether this is a triumph of persistence or an exposition of failure or
- a little bit of both. I will say that Speaker Pelosi, who I admire immensely,
- has called out my persistent and relentless work on climate. But on the
- other hand, it's hard given our peril not to feel a bitter sense of failure about where we are.
- The arc of these speeches has gone from climate science and warnings through
- effects in oceans and specific localities, particularly red state localities, to the political obstruction
- 1:07
- that went toxic in 2010. And then from that political obstruction
- through to the climate denial apparatus behind it, and behind that to the dark money and the creepy billionaires who
- have been driving the obstruction. and then exploration into the essentially
- covert op of climate denial and dark
- money and Supreme Court capture. Um, and the result is that we've been
- through some eras along the way. Era one would be the science era which lasted
- for quite a long time. And by the way, God bless the scientists, they got it right. Even the Exxon scientists got it
- right. And then that era ended and the era of climate politics began. And that
- is what has been the bitter failure. We have badly let down our people with the
- 2:02
- failure in Congress to do anything significant about climate. And as the
- result of that failure, we've now entered the era of consequences when the stuff that was so predicted is now
- starting to actually happen in people's lives. So I want to focus today on how
- and why we are where we are in this era of wellpredicted consequences and political failure. And that takes us to
- this covert op that I briefly described. It is entirely possible that history
- will show that the three most consequential disasters for America in our lifetimes
- where the capture of the Supreme Court by right-wing billionaires, the influx into our elections of floods of
- corrupting special interest dark money, and the success of the fossil fuel
- climate denial operation at blockading solutions to the fossil fuel emissions
- 3:04
- crisis. It is entirely possible that fossil fuel interests were the driving force behind
- all three disasters. Indeed, it is likely.
- What makes these disasters the three worst is that their damage will be
- lasting and perhaps even irreoverable.
- And our common failure in all three disasters as Democrats was showing up
- too late. Each of these disasters was a victory for the insidious political forces
- behind the court's capture, behind the corrupting dark money operation, and behind the climate denial fraud.
- Remember, those disasters didn't happen. They were done. And much of the work
- done by those insidious political forces was covert and clandestine. But there
- were plenty of signals of what was going on to anyone paying attention. If you paid attention to the court capture
- 4:05
- scheme and the dark money operation and the climate fraud, you'd quickly notice
- the overlap of the shadowy political forces behind all three. You'd notice
- the common thread, fossil fuel. Think of all three special interest
- campaigns as a single covert operation. A covert op run against America by
- forces within our country. An enemy within of creepy billionaires, fossil
- fuel interests, and far-right foundations determined to impose on the country a
- bladed and unpopular vision that they could never achieve democratically.
- up against a covert power seizing plant like that, you need to move fast. You need to engage early. If you wait too
- long, you'll show up too late. Why did we always show up too late? It wasn't
- 5:00
- because these disasters were minor matters. A captured Supreme Court puts an entire branch of government under
- hidden political control with no electoral remedy to its bad decisions
- thanks to lifetime appointments of the captured justices. Capture of our Supreme Court has caused lasting damage
- already deforming our constitutional order. The same interests always winning
- is observable as is the statistical improbability of that and it degrades
- faith in the court. Capture rocks the court from within. a billionaire gifts
- program to reward the most amendable justices with lifestyles of the rich and
- famous twisted the court into knots as it tried to prevent facts from coming
- out, even potential tax cheating, and to defeat any real ethics code. That is all
- a devilish and rotten business in a great republic.
- 6:02
- As to dark money, well, dark money influence has corrupted Congress. And
- dark money political spending denies citizens, American citizens, the basic
- information they need to do their constitutional job of policing the public square.
- Knowing who's out doing what, to whom is essential.
- Well, the donors and the candidates and the party leadership, they all know
- the players in the game. Donors don't spend billions without making sure the politicians know. It's America's
- citizenry that is left in ignorance. What citizens do see and feel is that
- they're not being listened to. They don't matter so much anymore. Not when tens of millions of dollars of secret
- funds can be dumped into an election by a billionaire. Politicians are drawn to
- the money inevitably. Remember the famous saying, 'Money is the mother's milk of politics.'
- 7:07
- Climate denial fraud may be the worst of the three. Climate denial fraud success
- may have cost us our children's futures. The looming physical catastrophes made
- inevitable by fossil fuel pollution damaging Earth's natural systems.
- They're first prefigured economically in insurance markets. And it's happening.
- Insurance markets are seeing what is coming. Unlike fossil fuel, the
- insurance industry can't lie about our future. Insurers are under a fiduciary
- obligation reinforced by trillions of dollars in bets to predict future risk
- honestly and well. And they are telling us that an economic storm is co coming
- driven by climate upheaval. The leading edge of that economic storm
- 8:00
- is already upon us in homeowners property insurance markets melting down in Florida and other coastal and
- wildfire risk areas. were heading into that storm unprepared while being lied
- to at industrial scale. Three terrible things were done. Much of
- the scheme was covert, but there was plenty to see. So, what went wrong?
- I'd say that my party fell into a rut. We too often allowed pollsters to determine our priorities. There are uses
- for polluter for pollsters in politics, but pollsters should not set priorities.
- Politicians worth their salt should set their own priorities using their own judgment based on their own interactions
- with their own constituents and their own powers of foresight and anticipation.
- Those capacities are important in politics. Depending on polls can make those
- capacities flabby and weak. Polling also depends on getting the questions right.
- 9:04
- When pollsters aren't asking the right questions, it leaves massive blind spots. I have seen polling presentations
- supposedly telling us what we should care about that didn't even ask about climate change pollution or dark money
- corruption. Plus, polling is inherently backward-looking,
- at least back to the time the survey was taken, obviously, but truly well before that, into the lived experience of the
- poll's audience from previous months and years that informed their answers to the poll. So, polling is reverse Gretzky. It
- tells you where the puck was. How often have we been told in the Senate that issue isn't very high up in
- importance to voters? What a dumb and irresponsible way to think. That way of
- thinking suffers from a huge readiness problem. By the time a captured Supreme
- Court reveals its v its bad effects in voters lives, it's too late. The court
- 10:03
- is captured. By the time dark money influence invades elections, it's too
- late. Dark money, the sin that makes possible all the sins dark dark money pays for is devilishly hard to root out.
- And climate change, climate change is physics. Once that fossil fuel pollution
- unleashes natural forces that will destroy our climate safety, they are not
- always possible to call off. It's too late. The lesson here, if you wait to
- fight until the polls tell you an issue is important, the battle can be over before you show up.
- Republicans big donors want lower taxes for the rich, freedom for polluters to pollute for free, less safety regulation
- of business. None of those results is politically popular. So, Republicans use polling as a tool to manipulate and move
- public opinion. The purpose is dynamic. Democrats think of polls like goalposts.
- 11:04
- Show me where the goalposts are and I'll kick my policy football through those goalposts.
- Static. Being static fails us. When danger looms, it's irresponsible to wait
- until everybody sees the danger to give warning. If it was your house on fire, would you wait around for your family to
- wake up and ask for your help? Of course not. And when you're up against strategy,
- particularly covert strategy, you have to fight strategy with strategy. You have to prepare, not wait around.
- And third, if you're always meeting voters where they already are or were,
- they'll begin to notice over time that you never have anything new to say, that they never learn anything from you, that
- you're not a leader but a follower of polls. That sense of political listlessness
- quietly sinks in and informs the political refrain. Republicans are shameless. Democrats are spineless.
- 12:05
- Look now at the climate mess we are in. We are sailing toward economic catastrophe kicked off by collapsing
- insurance markets followed by physical catastrophe as Earth's natural systems
- collapse. The fossil fuel polluters who caused this mess aren't penalized.
- They float instead on an economic subsidy in the US of $700 billion per
- year. That subsidy comes from getting to pollute for free, a violation of basic
- economic market principles. That $700 billion annual subsidy roughly reflects
- the annual damage fossil fuels cause. a $700 billion dollar negative externality
- as economists would say that should be baked into the price of the product. But
- Republicans in Congress desperately protect that $700 billion subsidy for
- 13:05
- their fossil fuel donors. Think of how that subsidy motivates the
- fossil fuel industry in politics. to protect a $700 billion annual subsidy.
- Would you spend say seven billion dollars a year in politics defending the
- pollute for free subsidy? 7 billion a year to defend $700 billion a year. At
- that rate, fossil fuels political operation is likely the most profitable facet of the entire industry.
- So they have an immense well-funded covert purposeful operation
- and we wait until the posters tell us the public is alert to it before we do
- battle. Ridiculous. How do we recover? How do we recover
- from all the years we skated to where the puck was and ignored the massive fossil fuel covert op because the public
- 14:04
- hadn't seen it yet? Well, first we had better get on it. We'd let a lot of sand
- run through the hourglass as we doawled and we lost a lot of credibility from missing those fights. On climate, we
- have to face facts. The facts are grim and the stakes are high.
- The corporate consulting firm Deoy has estimated a $220
- trillion difference in global GDP by 2070
- depending on whether we succeed on climate thereby generating $40 trillion
- of global economic growth or continue failing and take a global 180 trillion
- economic hit. The spread is $220 trillion dollars and deoit's not the
- lone voice. The Potum Institute is warned of a 38 trillion annual hit to
- 15:00
- global GDP by midentury. Predictions of multi-trillion dollar hits abound and
- the International Financial Stability Board just warned the global banking se sector to buckle up. The warnings focus
- on insurance, mortgage and real estate markets. The Economist magazine has reported a looming $25 trillion hit just
- to the global real estate sector. Fed Chair Powell testified earlier this year before the Senate Banking Committee that
- climate change will make insurance and therefore mortgages unavailable in
- entire regions of the United States. Voter uh voices at Alians and AON have
- warned that climate change threaten to upend their entire industry.
- The former chief economist to Freddy Mack told the budget committee last Congress how insurance
- becomes unavailable making mortgages unavailable driving down the value of
- 16:02
- your home. Similarly, when insurance premiums, if
- you can get insurance, but if the premiums double or triple, then property values fall as the carrying costs of
- your home dramatically increase. Average insurance cost in Florida $14,000 a year
- predicted to double, triple, or quadruple. What does that do to the home price? Together, the chief economist
- said the crisis in insurance availability and affordability can cascade into a 2008 style economic
- meltdown that clobbers the entire economy. Many of these warnings use the
- word systemic, boring sounding word, but perhaps the most dangerous word in the
- economic lexicon. It means the whole system gets hit, not just the particular
- sector like 2008 or worse 1929.
- 17:00
- Everyone suffers as the economy implodes. The way out from this danger is clear
- and simple. It can't continue to be free to pollute. There must be a global price
- or penalty on carbon emissions. Nothing else works. Not after the time we've
- wasted. We have squandered every other option. Polluter pays
- is not just the right thing to do morally and economically and environmentally.
- It's our last lifeboat. And it's a lifeboat the fossil fuel industry is trying to sink even after
- pretending for years that that was the solution they wanted. Big surprise. They
- lied. Hydrocarbons and lies are their twin products.
- Our best prospect on carbon pollution right now is the European Union's carbon
- border adjustment mechanism called the CBA. It's a tariff on the emissions associated with carbon intensive goods
- 18:04
- like steel and aluminum that are imported into the EU. Our scenario for
- success, if we still have one, is that the EU sticks to its guns and doesn't chicken out. The UK honors its
- commitment to join the CBAM. The two economies, by the way, just coordinated
- carbon prices, a key step. and Australia and Canada and Mexico and
- other economies follow suit. There's actually even a sliver of Senate Republican interest in a US carbon
- border tariff. A price on carbon pollution in international trade at last moves
- things. It begins to offset fossil fuels global multi-trillion dollar free to
- pollute subsidy. It aligns market incentives properly and it creates a
- revenue proposition. A revenue proposition for pollution reduction and carbon capture technologies, boosting an
- 19:04
- innovation pathway to climate safety that presently does not exist.
- Dark money corruption got us into this pickle. And the way out there is also
- clear and simple. Pass the damn Disclose Act. require that donors over 10 grand into a political race show the public
- who they are. No more front groups and shell corporations. The dark money
- battle is a race against time to stop the dark money influence operation
- before it gets its claws so deep into all three branches of government that
- the whole system is too corrupted to care how badly voters want transparency.
- When that disclosure bill passes into law, the public will feel immediate relief. People will notice the political
- class beginning to turn its attention back to voters rather than to the billionaire donors and the corporate
- poller elite running the foul dark money operation. In political ads, the tsunami
- 20:06
- of slime will diminish as real entities would have to own political messages.
- Many players behind the tsunami of slime will actually back off because once
- voters understand who's behind a message, sometimes like they get the joke and you can't go forward any
- longer. And even if they don't back off, at least someone can be accountable for the slime and lies that permeate our
- politics. Less special interest money, less slime and lies, less secrecy, voters heard
- again. You might call it morning in America.
- Fix dark money and you break the grip of fossil fuel. Look at what fossil fuel,
- dark money gets the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress to do for
- them every day. Right out of the gate, day one of his regime, Trump issued an
- 21:02
- executive order that took wind and solar power out of the definition of energy.
- Forget the politics. That doesn't even comport with the dictionary.
- Trump's Interior Department set out to kill offshore wind, halting the permitting process, even attempting to
- stop projects under construction. Trump's energy department choked off loans and funding for the development
- and deployment of lowcarbon technologies and proposed slashing research budgets at our national labs. Trump's
- Environmental Protection Agency, now better called Polluter Protection Agency, illegally terminated billions
- for clean energy projects around the country. It set up California's Clean Air Act vehicle emission standards to be
- killed by the Congressional Review Act, a gambit first floated by fossil fuel
- industry lawyers in an op-ed in the polluterrun Wall Street Journal
- editorial page. And to pull this off, my Republican colleagues even went nuclear,
- 22:04
- overruled the Senate Parliamentarian. The Trump EPA announced it will repeal
- rules limiting air pollution from power plants and vehicles. Reverse the 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions
- endanger humans. Suspend the collection of emissions data. They don't even want
- the data. and eliminate the social cost of carbon, the rule that quantifies that $700
- billion in fossil fuel emissions harm in Congress because bad things happen
- here as well. Republican, Here's my favorite. Republicans undid our fee on excess methane emission.
- You have to know that this fee only applied to emissions exceeding the
- industry's own industry standards. And half of those methane leaks could be
- eliminated at no net cost since methane, natural gas, if not leaked, can be sold.
- 23:07
- So, Republicans in Congress took the side of the industry's worst
- leakers to relieve them of having to pay for their mess.
- And just last week, Republicans passed Trump's mega bill, a manyheaded hydra turning the power of government to help
- fossil fuel billionaires throttle their clean energy competition.
- This will kill thousands of jobs, seed dominance of clean energy to China,
- drive consumers electric prices way higher, and turbocharge the carbon pollution that's already making
- insurance, groceries, and electricity more expensive. There's one simple goal behind all of
- this. Help Republicans fossil fuel donors to sell more oil, natural gas,
- gasoline, and diesel. Every electric car that's never produced means one more
- 24:03
- internal combustion engine that will spend years consuming their gasoline. Every solar array or wind turbine that's
- never built will mean more of their natural gas combusted to produce electricity. It doesn't matter to the
- creepy billionaires that the ownership costs of an EV are already less than those of a combustion engine car or that
- solar power is now the cheapest form of energy there is. All that matters is the
- narrow self-interest of the polluting fossil fuel industry that funds and controls the Republican party.
- Every indication is that the fossil fuel industry dark money operation orchestrated the Republicans's energy
- agenda. Every indication is that they have burrowed into the executive branch
- and are running it from the inside. Russell vote for instance running OM has
- spent essentially his entire career on fossil fuels dark money payroll.
- 25:03
- His counsel there is Mark Paleetta from that infamous painting of the court
- fixer Leonard Leo, billionaire donor Harlon Crowe, and their pet Supreme
- Court Justice Clarence Thomas from the court capture operation.
- Which brings us to the captured court, the court that Dark Money built. Freeing the Supreme Court from its captured
- state will not be easy. Too many justices are willing participants in the capture scheme. If the Supreme Court
- justices wanted to redeem their court, they could have done it already. They could do it on their own any day. But
- captured is as captured does they don't want to. It matters on climate. A
- rejuvenated court would take the evidence of climate harm seriously. Over and over the court that dark money built
- has favored fossil fuel interests. For instance, it threw out the clean power plan, saving industry tens of billions
- 26:02
- in compliance costs and allowing more than a dozen years of continued pollution.
- Let's say that $700 billion fossil fuel subsidy number is close to right.
- If the clean power plan would only have shaved 10% off the harm,
- that one decision cost Americans nearly $1 trillion in
- pollution harm. That's worth capturing a court for if you're the fossil fuel industry. The
- court created the major questions doctrine to give the fossil fuel industry a legal weapon to stop future
- climate regulations. The court withdrew the Chevron doctrine, taking away from experts in the regulatory process the
- benefit of the doubt. In all these cases, the fossil fuel industry got free
- legal services from Republican attorneys general,
- undoubtedly grateful for their fossil fuel political funding. What a rotten misuse of that badge of office.
- 27:05
- To reform the court, Congress will have to act on two fronts. One is to require a proper ethics code for the court,
- including the essential elements of proper legal process, actual factf finding and neutral decision-making, not
- complicated stuff. Rule of law is based on those two principles. The justices
- shield themselves from both. The present court and its political defenders pretend that fixing this is impossible,
- but it's not. Every state supreme court faces the issue of administering a
- proper ethics code for itself and every single one has figured it out. Forget
- impossible. It's not even hard. The problem is that the justices or
- certain of them enjoy being the only nine people in government immune from
- proper ethics scrutiny. Look at that billionaire gifts program and you might
- 28:00
- see why. They violate an ancient principle so ancient it's in Latin. Nemo judex in
- sua. No one should judge their own case. As an ethics scholar recently put it,
- it's a conflict of interest to judge one's own conflict of interest.
- The public is ready for more than just real ethics. However, the present court's legacy of scandals, destruction
- of precedent, doctrinal leaps, false factf finding in casing cases, and
- striking striking patterns in what interests always win is damning.
- Add the unhealthy secrets around who chose justices and why, and around the billionaire's campaign of gifts to
- amenable justices, and around tax mischief related to those gifts, and it is a mess. The public is ready for term
- limits and turnover. A court rejuvenated with regular turnover with its secrets
- disclosed and a proper ethics procedure going forward is a court that can again merit the confidence of the American
- 29:05
- people and perform the judicial function honorably. So, can we win a pathway to
- climate safety, rid our politics of dark money, and liberate a captured court?
- Yes, we actually can. But it won't be easy. The successful
- fraud of climate denial, the insidious corruption of our politics by dark money, and the special interest capture
- of the court, all are political prizes that will be defended to the death by
- the fossil fuel industry. the fossil fuel funded infrastructure of front groups that propagates the climate lies
- that laers and funnels the dark money and that captured and now casets and
- guides the justices will be fighting for its very survival. The front groups are
- many but like keys on a piano they are part of a larger instrument a fossil
- 30:01
- fuel instrument of secret influence and corruption now operating our government from within. That instrument must be
- defanged to revive American popular democracy.
- In this battle, yes, we have disadvantages. The infrastructure built for Republicans by their fossil fuel
- billionaire backers is immense. They can run media operations that drown us out.
- They have unlimited money. They plan years in advance. They've whipped the Republican party into exceptional battle
- discipline. Don't get me wrong, we have some super talent on the Democratic
- side, but it's ballet dancers against centurions. Ballet dancers may be better athletes
- than centurions, but 100 centurions against 100 ballet dancers will end predictably.
- We don't have much muscle memory for fighting either. The recent Democratic administrations have tended to be
- conflict averse. We've been less aggressive, lambs versus wolves. The
- 31:03
- wolf doesn't much fear the bite of the lamb, and they don't much fear us.
- Imagine Winston Churchill trying to defend Britain without radar or Spitfires or his war room under the
- streets of London. Proper defense infrastructure can be outcome determinative, and we haven't
- had that. We do have one big advantage. The whole crooked apparatus of the
- right-wing fossil fuel billionaires depends on secrecy to work its evils. We
- don't have to match fossil fuel front group for front group, propaganda
- mouthpiece for propaganda mouthpiece, lie for lie, even dollar for dollar. It
- doesn't have to take 7 billion dollars on our side. Our cause can win by
- shining a bright light on their mischief and their motives.
- 32:00
- Americans love solving mysteries, love to hear what Paul Harvey called the end of the story. Fossil fuel has to lie and
- connive and hide behind masks to win. We can be truth tellers and win. People
- don't like being lied to. The truth, that's our superpower.
- Even with that superpower, it's still not going to be easy. We have to face that there's some real work ahead of us.
- I was a prosecutor. You've seen the TV shows. Prosecutors investigating gangs build careful diagrams of all the gangs
- members, showing who reports to whom and who's connected to whom and what phone numbers and addresses we have and what
- evidence we've got and where they get their guns and where they distribute the drugs. All of that goes up on the
- corkboard because you have to know your adversary. Intelligence agencies do deep research
- into the personnel of opposing services. Know your adversary. We don't. Until recently, few Democrats
- 33:01
- even knew who Leonard Leo was, the top operative of the billionaire's court capture scheme. Most Democrats couldn't
- pass a basic test of what front groups are arrayed against us. That's not the
- fault of individual members of Congress. We've just had no war room to organize the information. No offense coordinator
- to plan strategy. No batters book to tell us who can't hit inside pitches. No
- corkboard to pin up the gang information. Corporations do better research on
- rivals when prepping a corporate takeover than we did trying to defend our country
- from this political takeover. The idea of a real-time anti-fraud
- climate cleanup operation center calling out the lies, following the money, and
- spotlighting who's behind the front groups may seem beyond our reach, but it's not. The military has had openters
- for years. You've seen the Hollywood versions with the TV screens up on the walls and the satellite feeds and the
- 34:05
- drone feeds coming in. The RAF back in World War II had a
- simpler one during the Battle of Britain with those little ships and plane models being pushed around with the long sticks
- on the big map table. Radar told the RAF war room when to
- scramble the Spitfires, where to send them, and what enemy to expect when they got there. We haven't built that. No
- radar, no Spitfires, no war room under London. But we can
- remember those three evils. The fossil fuel industry's climate denial fraud,
- the capture of the Supreme Court, that dark money infiltration of our politics.
- They didn't happen. They were all done very deliberately using an armada of
- front groups and carefully scripted fakery. It is best to think of it all as
- 35:05
- a single beast. A beast that is now burrowed in and is
- running the government for Trump. It's a takeover
- by a shadow government working for right-wing extremists and fossil fuel polluters.
- If we don't see it for what it is and call it out for what it is, how can we
- warn people of what's happening? And if we don't warn people of what's happening, how could we possibly believe
- we have done our duty in this moment of peril?
- Climate change makes this a battle with a ratchet.
- There are some things you just can't come back from. The ratchet has clicked and there's no
- return. So, it is urgent. It is time for us all to wake up
- and