For more than a decade, Senator has called on Congress to act on the threat of climate change
Washington, DC – U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, last night delivered his 300th speech urging Congress to wake up to the threat of climate change and to break the fossil fuel industry’s stranglehold on the levers of the federal government.
“It is entirely possible that history will show that the three most consequential disasters for America in our lifetimes were 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 crisis,” Whitehouse said on the Senate floor.
Whitehouse detailed the fossil fuel industry’s long-running covert operation to profit off the American people while damaging the economy and wrecking the planet. He also outlined the multiple failures – including a badly broken campaign finance system – that allow polluters to keep controlling the Republican Party and escaping accountability as a new era of increasingly dire climate consequences dawns. Whitehouse highlighted the interconnection between the fossil fuel industry’s longstanding climate denial operation, the dark-money corruption of Congress, and the billionaire-funded scheme to capture the Supreme Court, and point a way forward to an America freed of those dangerous interferences in our democracy.
“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? 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’s urgent. It is Time for us all To Wake Up. And fight,” Whitehouse’s speech concluded.
Whitehouse’s office released a video reflecting on his long fight to get the planet to climate safety. Whitehouse delivered his first speech in the series on April 18, 2012. His battered “Time to Wake Up” chart is believed to be the most-used chart in Senate history.
Text of Whitehouse’s as-delivered 300th “Time To Wake Up” speech is below.
I rise 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 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.
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 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 well-predicted consequences and political failure. And that takes us to this covert op that I briefly described.
It is entirely possible that fossil fuel interests were the driving force behind all three disasters; indeed, it is likely.
Our common failure in all three disasters as Democrats is 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.
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 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 blighted and unpopular vision that they could never achieve democratically.
Up against a covert power-seizing plan 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 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 rots the Court from within; a billionaire gifts program, to reward the most amenable 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’s all a devilish and rotten business, in a great republic.
As to dark money: dark-money influence has corrupted Congress, and dark money political spending denies 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. 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 mothers’ milk of politics.”
Climate denial fraud may be the worst of the three. Climate denial fraud’s 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 are first prefigured economically, in insurance markets. And it’s happening. Insurance markets are seeing what’s 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. They’re telling us that an economic storm is coming, driven by climate upheaval.
The leading edge of that economic storm is already upon us, in homeowners’ property insurance markets melting down in Florida and other coastal and wildfire risk areas. We’re headed 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 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; when pollsters aren’t asking the right questions, it leaves massive blind spots. I’ve 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 beyond that, into the lived experiences of the poll’s audience, from previous months and years, that informed their responses. Polling is “reverse-Gretsky” — 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 bad effects in voters’ lives, it’s too late. The Court 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 money pays for, is devilishly hard to root out.
Climate change is physics; once that fossil fuel pollution unleashes natural forces that will destroy our climate safety, they’re 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 see polling as a tool to manipulate and move public opinion. The purpose is dynamic.
Democrats think of polls like goalposts: show me where they are and I’ll kick my policy football through the 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.
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 are 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.”
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 U.S. of around $700 billion per year.
That subsidy comes from getting to pollute for free, a violation of basic economic market principles. That $700 billion roughly reflects the annual damage fossil fuels cause; a $700 billion “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 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, $7 billion a year in politics defending the pollute-for-free subsidy? $7 billion a year to defend $700 billion a year? At that rate, fossil fuel’s 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 pollsters tell us the public is alert to it before we do battle? Ridiculous.
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 hadn’t seen it yet?
First, we’d better get on it. We’ve let a lot of sand run through the hourglass as we dawdled, 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 Deloitte has estimated a $220 trillion-dollar 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, and Deloitte is not the lone voice. The Potsdam Institute has warned of a $38 trillion annual hit to global GDP by mid-century. Predictions of multi-trillion-dollar hits abound, and the international Financial Stability Board just warned the global banking sector to buckle up.
The warnings focus on insurance, mortgage, and real estate markets. The Economist magazine has reported a looming $25 trillion dollar 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. Voices at Allianz and Aon have warned that climate change threatens to upend their industry. The former chief economist of Freddie Mac told the Budget Committee last Congress how insurance becomes unavailable, making mortgages unavailable, driving down the value of your home.
Similarly, when insurance premiums – if you can get insurance – double or triple, property values fall as the carrying costs of your home dramatically increase. Average insurance costs 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 warning in the economic lexicon. It means the whole system gets hit; not just the particular sector. Like 2008 — or worse, 1929 — 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’ve 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 “CBAM”). It’s a tariff on the emissions associated with carbon-intensive goods like steel and aluminum imported into the E.U. Our scenario for success, if we still have one, is that the E.U. sticks to its guns and doesn’t chicken out, the U.K. 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 even a sliver of Senate Republican interest in a U.S. carbon border tariff.)
A price on carbon pollution in international trade at last moves things: it begins to offset fossil fuel’s global multi-trillion-dollar free-to-pollute subsidy; it aligns market incentives properly; and it creates a revenue proposition for pollution reduction and carbon capture technologies, boosting an 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 $10,000 into a political race show the public who they actually 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 polluter elite running the foul dark-money operation.
In political ads, the tsunami of slime will diminish, as real entities would have to own their political messages.
Many players behind the tsunami of slime will actually back off, because once viewers understand who’s behind the message, they get the joke and you can’t go forward any longer. And 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 could 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 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 low-carbon 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 emissions standards to be killed by the Congressional Review Act; a gambit first floated by fossil fuel industry lawyers in an op-ed in the polluter-run Wall Street Journal editorial page. To pull this off, my Republican colleagues even went nuclear; 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, here’s my favorite, Republicans undid our fee on excess methane emissions. You have to know that this fee only applied to emissions exceeding the industry’s own industry standards; half of those methane leaks could be eliminated at no net cost, since methane, natural gas, if not leaked, can be sold. So, Republicans in Congress took the side of the industry’s worst leakers to relieve them of having to pay for their own mess.
Just last week, Republicans passed Trump’s megabill, a many-headed hydra, turning the power of government to help fossil fuel billionaires throttle their clean energy competition. This will kill thousands of jobs, cede 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 is 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 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’ energy agenda.
Every indication is that they have burrowed into the executive branch and are running it from the inside. Russell Vought for instance, running OMB, has spent essentially his entire career on fossil fuel’s dark money payroll. His counsel there is Mark Paoletta, from that infamous painting of the Court-fixer Leonard Leo, billionaire donor Harlan Crow, 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, at any time. 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. It threw out the Clean Power Plan, saving industry tens of billions in compliance costs and allowing more than a dozen years of continued pollution. If the $700 billion fossil fuel subsidy number is close to right, and if the Clean Power Plan would have only shaved 10% off the harm, that one decision alone cost Americans nearly $1 trillion in pollution harms. That’s worth capturing the 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.
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 fact-finding and neutral decision-making, not complicated stuff. Rule of law is based on those two practices. 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 the billionaire gifts program and you might see why. They violate an ancient principle, so ancient it’s in Latin: nemo judex in sua causa. 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 fact-finding in cases, and striking patterns in what interests always win — is damning. Add the unhealthy secrets — around who chose justices and why, and around the billionaires’ campaign of gifts to amenable justices, and around tax mischief related to those gifts — and it’s 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 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 launders and funnels the dark money, and that captured and now cossets 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 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, as recent Democratic administrations have tended to be conflict-averse. We’ve been less aggressive, lambs versus wolves. The 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 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 on our side. Our cause can win by shining a bright light on their mischief and their motives.
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 truthtellers, and win. People don’t like having been lied to. The truth — that’s our super power.
Even with that super power, it’s still going to be a battle. 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 gang’s 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 cork board 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 even knew who Leonard Leo was, the top operative of the billionaires’ 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 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 cork board to pin up the gang information. Corporations do better research on rivals when prepping for a corporate takeover, than we did trying to defend our country from this political takeover.
The idea of a real-time, anti-fraud, climate-clean-up operations 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 op centers for years; you’ve seen the Hollywood versions with the TV screens up on the walls and the satellite feeds and the 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 pushed around with the long sticks on that big map table. Radar told the RAF war room when to scramble the Spitfires, and 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’s best to think of it all as a single beast. A beast that has 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? 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’s urgent.
It is Time for us all To Wake Up. And fight.
