This week, on the big stage of the U.S. Senate, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) gave his hundredth and historic “Time to Wake Up” speech to Congress. These sold-out shows all center around one theme: the need to act on climate change.
Senator Whitehouse is one of the nation’s strongest and most committed advocates for the common-sense position that we have a moral obligation to future generations to act on climate, and that our prosperity today is tied to efforts to fight climate change and build a clean energy economy. As his number one fans, we couldn’t agree more. With that in mind, we went through each of his 100 amazing speeches, which should really be bound and sold as a book, and compiled his top-ten greatest hits.
10. Time to Wake Up: Environmental Protection Was Once a Top Priority of Republicans
Senator Whitehouse reminds us that environmental stewardship was once a top priority of the Republican Party. Climate denial and policies that protect polluter profits are a relatively new among its priorities. As recently the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, Republicans worked with bipartisan majorities to pass and strengthen some of our greatest environmental safeguards--the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and Endangered Species Act.
“Conservation and stewardship were once fundamental principles of American conservatism … the Conservative ideal included a commitment to the interests of future generations. Today, under a relentless barrage of unlimited corporate spending in our elections--much and perhaps most of it by polluters--the interests of future generations have taken a back seat to the interests of oil companies and coal barons.”
9. Time to Wake Up: The Campaign to Mislead the Public on Climate Change
Here, Senator Whitehouse discusses the history of corporate campaigns to create scientific disinformation that keeps profits rolling in. Just as the tobacco companies fought the science on their products’ dangers for human health, the fossil fuel industry funds disinformation campaigns to create doubt about their products’ consequences for our climate.
“Fossil fuel companies and certain right wing extremists have cooked up a well-organized campaign to call into question the scientific evidence of climate change. The paid-for deniers then manufacture an interesting product--they manufacture uncertainty--so that the polluters who are also doing the paying can keep polluting”
8. Time to Wake Up: Conflicting Voices from Oklahoma
In this speech, Senator Whitehouse calls out the Senate Republicans’ most ardent opponent of climate action: Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma, who also happens to be the chairman of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee.
"The senior Senator from Oklahoma, our chairman of the Environmental and Public Works Committee … maintains that human-caused climate change is a hoax. He thinks it is arrogant to say that humans could cause the climate to change. What’s really arrogant is, Mr. President, thinking we can ignore the laws of nature—the laws of physics, the laws of chemistry, the laws of biology."
7. Time to Wake Up: American Corporations are Taking Climate Change Seriously
While Congress fails to act on the greatest challenge of our time, Sen. Whitehouse shows us that out in the real world many of the largest corporations on earth are taking action on climate for practical reasons. Companies like Coca Cola, Lockheed Martin, Mars and Walmart recognize the risks of climate change to their bottom lines and are altering their business models to prepare.
“Major corporations—even those with large carbon footprints—are taking voluntary action to lower their own carbon output. Some are joining broader efforts to support policies that reduce carbon emissions. Some of our largest and most sophisticated companies are even factoring the economic burden of climate change into their own accounting and their own long-term planning”
6. Time to Wake Up: Citizens United Crushed the Debate on Climate Change
Senator Whitehouse points to the Supreme Court’s devastating Citizens United decision as a key moment, because it opened the floodgates of unlimited election spending by fossil fuel companies into our political system.
“The effect of Citizens United on our politics is pretty plain to see. … A few very wealthy individuals in the fossil fuel business, huge polluters, are now such big players in our politics that they rival our national parties. Small wonder that is hard to have an honest conversation about carbon pollution in the Senate, and most of it is hidden.”
5. Time to Wake Up: GOP Falsehoods, Fallacies, and Fantasies on Climate Change
Here, Senator Whitehouse strikes out a well-known logical fallacy promoted by climate deniers -- that CO2 is naturally occurring, and that it can’t be threatening because it is found in nature. To that absurd argument, Whitehouse responds:
“Arsenic is found in nature. But in the wrong concentration, and in the wrong places, it is nevertheless still dangerous. And the principle that carbon dioxide warms the atmosphere dates back to the American civil war. It is not ‘late breaking news.’ It is sound, solid, established science.”
4. Time to Wake Up: Republicans Outside of Congress Support Action on Climate Change
In this speech, Whitehouse points out just how out of touch Republicans and tea party members of Congress are--even with their own party. You know that’s true when a survey conducted for the League of Conservation Voters shows that “53% of Republicans under 35 would describe a politician who denies climate change is happening as ‘ignorant, out of touch or crazy.’ ” Despite that, “Republicans in Congress refuse to get serious.”
3. Time to Wake Up: Climate Science Obstructionism
Here, Senator Whitehouse makes a compelling analogy. In Congress, carbon pollution is very much like Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter. “Carbon pollution is ‘the pollution that shall not be named.’ Climate change, the harm that is caused by that pollution, is ‘the harm that shall not be named.’ ” If you name it, you need to deal with it--and by refusing to acknowledge that carbon is a pollutant too many members of Congress think they can get away with ignoring it.
2. Time to Wake Up: Economic Costs of Carbon Pollution
Senator Whitehouse walks through a little economics 101 by explaining the concept of “externalities.” That’s when an economic transaction has an effect on others who are unrelated to the buying or selling. Carbon pollution, along with massive amounts of conventional pollution from burning fossil fuels has a host of externalities with serious consequences for our air, water, and climate. “We now know how much harm carbon pollution is causing. We see the costs all around us in storm-damaged homes, flooded cities, in drought-stricken farms, raging wildfires, in dying coral and disappearing fish, in shifting habitats and migrating diseases, in changed seasons and rising seas, in vanishing glaciers and melting icecaps.”
1. Time to Wake Up: Republicans Side with Polluters over the Public on Climate
In his greatest hit, Senator Whitehouse says what we all are thinking when we hear climate deniers repeat the same tired line over and over again: “I’m not a scientist!” Whitehouse’s simple yet devastating rebuttal? “If you’re not a scientist, all the more reason to listen to the scientists.” 97% of climate scientists recognize that human activity, including burning fossil fuels, is exacerbating global climate disruption.