Sheldon Whitehouse: Democrats and activists “too polite” in fight against “malevolent” fossil fuel giants

This story is part of the 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now

The Democratic party and the climate movement have been “too cautious and polite” and should instead be denouncing the fossil fuel industry’s “huge denial operation,” the US senator Sheldon Whitehouse said.

“The fossil fuel industry has run the biggest and most malevolent propaganda operation the country has ever seen,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in an interview on Monday with the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now. “It is defending a $700-plus billion [annual] subsidy” of not being charged for the health and environmental damages caused by the burning of fossil fuels. “I think the more people understand that, the more they’ll be irate [that] they’ve been lied to.” But, he added, “Democrats have not done a good job of calling that out.”

Whitehouse is among the most outspoken climate champions on Capitol Hill, and on Wednesday evening he delivered his 300th Time to Wake Up climate speech on the floor of the Senate.

He began giving these speeches in 2012, when Barack Obama was in his first term, and has consistently criticized both political parties for their lackluster response to the climate emergency. The Obama White House, he complained, for years would not even “use the word ‘climate’ and ‘change’ in the same paragraph.”

While Whitehouse slams his fellow Democrats for timidity, he blasts Republicans for being in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, an entity whose behavior “has been downright evil,” he said. “To deliberately ignore [the laws of physics] for short-term profits that set up people for huge, really bad impacts—if that’s not a good definition of evil, I don’t know what is.”

The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s trade association, says on its website that “API and its members commit to delivering solutions that reduce the risks of climate change while meeting society’s growing energy needs.”

Long before Donald Trump reportedly told oil company CEOs he would repeal Joe Biden’s climate policies if they contributed $1 billion to his 2024 presidential campaign, Republicans went silent on climate change in return for oil industry money, Whitehouse asserted. The key shift came after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which struck down limits on campaign spending. Before that, some GOP senators had sponsored climate bills, and John McCain urged climate action during his 2008 presidential campaign.

But Citizens United, Whitehouse said, “told the fossil fuel industry: ‘The door’s wide open—spend any money you want in our elections.’” The industry, he said, promised the Republican party “unlimited amounts of money” in return for stepping away from bipartisan climate action: “And since 2010, there has not been a single serious bipartisan measure in the Senate.”

Whitehouse said that after delivering 300 climate speeches on the Senate floor, he has learned to shift from talking about the “facts of climate science and the effects on human beings to calling out the fossil fuels’ massive climate-denial operation”.

He said: “Turns out, none of [the science] really matters while the operation is controlling things in Congress. I could take facts from colleagues’ home states right to them, and it would make no difference because of this enormous, multibillion-dollar political club that can [punish] anyone who crosses them.”

Most Republicans even stay silent despite climate change’s threat to property values and other traditional GOP priorities, Whitehouse said. He noted that even the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell—who is not known for his climate bona fides, he said—testified before the Senate in February that in 10-15 years there will be whole regions of the country where nobody can get a mortgage because extreme weather will make it impossible to afford or even obtain insurance.

Democrats can turn all this to their advantage if they get “more vocal and aggressive,” Whitehouse argued. “The good news is that the American people hate dark money with a passion, and they hate it just as much, if not more, in districts that went for Trump as in districts that went for Biden.”

Democrats also need to recognize “how much [public] support there is for climate action,” he said. “How do you have an issue that you win 74 [percent] to 12 [percent] and you don’t ride that horse as hard as you can?”

Whitehouse said he was only estimating that 74 percent figure, but that’s exactly the percentage of Americans who want their government to take stronger climate action, according to the studies informing the 89 Percent Project, the Guardian and other Covering Climate Now partner news outlets began reporting in April. Globally, the percentage ranges from 80 percent to 89 percent. Yet this overwhelming climate majority does not realize it is the majority, partly because that fact has been absent from most news coverage, social media and politicians’ statements.

Democrats keep “getting caught in this stupid doom loop in which our pollsters say: ‘Well, climate’s not one of the top issues that voters care about,’ so then we don’t talk about it,” said Whitehouse. “So it never becomes one of the top issues that voters care about. [But] if you actually go ask [voters] and engage on the issue, it explodes in enthusiasm. It has huge numbers when you bother to engage, and we just haven’t.”

Nevertheless, Whitehouse is optimistic that climate denial won’t prevail forever. “Once this comes home to roost in people’s homes, in their family finances, in really harmful ways, that [will be] motivating in a way that we haven’t seen before around this issue,” he said. “And if we’re effective at communicating what a massive fraud has been pulled on the American public by the fossil fuel industry denial groups, then I think that’s a powerful combination.”