A Wake-Up Call on Climate, Costs and Corruption

Welcome to Inside Climate, a podcast from the staff of Inside Climate News. Ahead of Climate Week NYC, Inside Climate host Jake Bolster speaks to U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and asks why so many Democrats are leaning away from climate messaging at a time when the fossil fuel industry’s influence is dramatically reshaping federal policy. They discuss the upcoming midterm elections, the courts and recent actions in Venezuela. And the senator weighs in on whether bipartisan permitting reform can be achieved with this Congress.

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JAKE BOLSTER

You know him as the loudest—and often lone—voice in Congress when it comes to the health of the planet.

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

Simple fact, climate change is real.

JAKE BOLSTER

Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has stood on the Senate floor for over a decade, warning about the dangers of climate change.

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

I rise 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.

JAKE BOLSTER

When he’s not talking about climate change in Congress, he’s often highlighting the political influence of the fossil fuel industry.

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

We’re here today because fossil fuel-funded climate disinformation and obstruction is directly causing systemic financial risks to the economy and to the federal budget.

JAKE BOLSTER

To kick off New York City Climate Week, this is a special episode of Inside Climate. I’m Jake Bolster. I’ll speak to the senator about the upcoming midterm elections and messaging on climate:

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

I think, you know, you got to talk about the costs and you got to talk about the corruption.

How he would like to see the Supreme Court reshaped:

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

 I have a bill for term limits, 18 years, retroactive, so you start to refresh the court right away.

And what’s really delaying bipartisan action on permitting reform in Congress:

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

The problem has not been my Republican colleagues in the Senate on this. They’ve actually, sometimes, been quite helpful. The problem has been in the executive branch. The problem has been cabinet members who break the law to hurt clean energy and help fossil fuel.

Our full conversation, next, on Inside Climate.

A Conversation With Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse

JAKE BOLSTER

OK, Senator Whitehouse, thank you very much for joining us.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

Great to be with you. Thanks for having me on.

JAKE BOLSTER

Sure. So I wanted to start with the midterms, which are only a few weeks away. And in 2020, climate change was an issue that likely cost Republicans the election, according to one analysis, but major Democratic think tanks like Searchlight Institute argue that the first rule of solving climate change is don’t say climate change. Do you feel like this is a winning strategy for Democrats heading into the midterm or is this going to backfire?

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

I don’t think it’s a winning strategy. I think it’s a huge lost opportunity. We actually did polling, for instance, in Texas that showed that 92 percent of Texans are concerned about the cost of homeowners insurance. 66 percent of them connect that problem to climate-driven extreme weather. So this is red state, oil patch Texas, and you’ve got more people concerned about the cost of homeowners insurance than own homes in Texas, which shows how big an issue this has become. And fully two-thirds of voters ascribe it to climate-driven extreme weather. So the public is a mile ahead of where the Democratic think tankery and consultant class is. Similarly, here’s a good one. In Florida, 46 percent of Trump voters think that Florida’s home insurance crisis is caused by climate-driven, sorry, climate change causing extreme storms and hurricanes.

JAKE BOLSTER

Wow. 

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

Even used the double climate change word, and it’s still with nearly half of Trump voters. So yeah, we’re missing a big, big opportunity. We’ve never told the story well. Biden refused to mention villains, and in the early stages there weren’t immediate costs. Well, we’re through those. Home insurance, groceries, all sorts of costs are way up that can be strongly attributed to climate change, and the public’s already there as the polling numbers just showed. And we’ve got these two horrible villains, the climate-denial fraud operation that the fossil fuel industry runs and the dark money corruption operation that the fossil fuel industry runs. And wow, how does that not become a good story that candidates can successfully tell?

JAKE BOLSTER

Previously, I think you’ve described Democrats’ and environmental groups’ messaging as crap on climate change. What’s a better way forward on this issue?

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

I think, you know, you got to talk about the costs and you got to talk about the corruption. Interestingly, cost and corruption are also the two big buckets for Democratic message, at least in the Senate, coming into November. So it’s actually really aligned with what we say our key messaging themes are, and you really can’t beat it. I mean, when a family gets that dreaded notice of non-renewal and has to go shopping for a new policy, everything gets disrupted and they end up paying more for less, that’s a big deal in a family’s life. If the premium doubles or triples, that’s a really big deal. You start with a big number and you go up 50 percent, 100 percent, it’s serious and people are ready to respond to that argument. Jolly, our Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Florida, is running hard on this very theme.

JAKE BOLSTER

I was about to ask, are there other places or races where you see candidates who are successfully linking climate change with those other themes?

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

Yeah, you know, it’s a little bit of a geographically sequestered concern. Florida is obviously first and worst, but the Carolinas, we’ve got races in North Carolina and South Carolina, and they’ve got huge coasts that are having huge problems. So it depends on where you go to address the problem. But even in Iowa, it is a very, very big issue because of the derechos and the hailstorms. You’ve got big companies leaving the state, you’ve got a 36 percent increase pending, you’ve got a doubling in the last several years. It’s something that Iowa farmers are talking about to each other.

JAKE BOLSTER

Yeah. I mean, the scale of the problem, it just touches every part of the country. So let’s talk a little bit now about what might happen after the midterms. If there are significant losses for Republicans in November, do you think that some members of the party might break from Trump and address energy affordability and climate issues in a more bipartisan way, or is meaningful change going to have to wait for another election?

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

I think the pressure from a good Democratic message that points out the villains and points out the corruption can really sting and cause people to back away from being so subservient to their fossil fuel overlords. I think that the cost issue, particularly in the home insurance space, which cascades into mortgages—no home insurance, no mortgage—and it then cascades into property values. And guess what state lost the most property value last year? Florida. So it’s actually happening in real time, down the cascade. All of that economic power becomes highly politically salient, and then people like the results. One poll shows that Americans, 74 to 10, think that polluter corporations should be made to pay for the cost of their pollution. How do you walk into a fight, 74 to 10 in your favor, and chicken out?

JAKE BOLSTER

So what would you do? So if Democrats regain control of the Senate and you might be next in line to lead the Senate Judiciary Committee or the Environment and Public Works Committee, what’s the first oversight hearing you’re going to hold in either of those roles?

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

Well, let’s not jump ahead too much, but I do think that we are now at a stage in the climate battle where things have narrowed to a fairly small focus. The success of the fossil fuel denial fraud operation and dark money corruption operation have caused us to drive by a lot of highway exits that could have helped. Now we’re at a point where it is lethal to any chance of climate safety for the fossil fuel industry to keep its free-to-pollute business model. Wrong morally to pollute for free. It’s wrong economically to pollute for free. It’s wrong environmentally to pollute for free. And from a climate perspective, it’s now fatal if we let them continue to pollute for free. 

So back to that 74-10, we’ve got to go meet the public where they are and figure out ways to make the big polluters pay for the cost of the harms that they’re causing. And whether that’s with a price on pollution or whether that’s with the social cost of carbon or there are a lot of different ways to do that, but we’re now at the tipping point where it’s either free to pollute for the fossil fuel industry and we fail as a society at protecting ourselves and our next generation’s climate safety, or we fix this and we fix it now and we fix it by making the economic adjustment so that they’re not polluting for free any longer.

JAKE BOLSTER

So let me ask you then about Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, this case before the Supreme Court, because I think that gets at a lot of what you’re talking about here. And just to lay out some background, so this is a case before the Supreme Court. They’re going to hear it in October, and it could decide whether state courts have the jurisdiction to hear climate damage lawsuits against energy companies. These are lawsuits that are brought by, in this case, the county of Boulder, but cities and states across the U.S. are doing this, and they’re suing fossil fuel companies for economic damages associated with the rising costs of fixing the fallout of a wildfire or a hurricane or these other disasters that are associated with climate change, and they would want fossil fuel companies to pay instead of having that burden fall on taxpayers. 

I don’t think we’re going to get a decision on this case until 2027, but what do you see as the role of Congress if the Supreme Court is ruling in the favor of fossil fuel companies? What does that do for this movement you’re talking about?

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

Well, let’s start with just a quick run through the history of the Supreme Court in ruling for fossil fuel companies. I take the position that this is a court that has been captured by special interests, by right-wing billionaires, and that it was primarily fossil fuel special interests and right-wing billionaires that did it.

And the first thing that they did was to open up dark money in our elections, which the fossil fuel industry pounced on and instantly shut down bipartisanship on climate change. Until Citizens United, there was steady bipartisanship in the Senate on climate change. From the day of that decision forward, bipartisanship was dead. So the Supreme Court helped kill legislative solutions to the climate crisis. Then they went to the Obama Clean Power Plan and they went and they threw that out in kind of an unprecedented, weird decision, but they put it to death. And with that, they put a stake into a regulatory solution to the climate crisis, which leaves us now with the litigation solution to the climate crisis. And that is the last pitched battle we’re going to have. And every indication is that the Supreme Court is going to obey, once again, the interest of the fossil fuel industry and the right-wing capture crowd that tells them what to do through these little flotillas of amicus brief that they file when they care about the outcome of the case and which they always win when they file.

It’s right in that lineup of first the Supreme Court killed legislative solutions with dark money, then they killed regulatory solutions with the Clean Power Plan case and the major questions doctrine and now this gives them a chance to kill off the other solution that allows for accountability.

What we need to do is to legislate very clearly, in such a way that the Supreme Court can’t weasel its way around what we have done with various doctrines of this, that or the other, that we make it clear enough that this is now the law, polluters have to pay their way, and when we get there, then I think we’re in clear shape. But obviously the fossil fuel industry is going to be spending hard and using the filibuster to try to make sure that we can’t do that.

JAKE BOLSTER

So there are still legislative options at the federal level, even if this case is ruled in favor of the fossil fuel companies?

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

Yeah. I mean, we could do this simply by law, and if the law is clear enough, it’s hard for the Supreme Court to butt in and get in the way. What we will have to do is figure a way around a Republican filibuster. The Republican party is, these days, essentially the political wing of the fossil fuel industry, so they’ll do whatever they’re told by the fossil fuel industry. So we have to plan on filibuster and how do we work through that and around that? And there are ways to do it that are beyond the scope of this interview that involve parliamentary questions like the quorum call and this, that and the other. It’s doable, but we have to plan to do it, execute the plan, and proceed with discipline and effort.

JAKE BOLSTER

I wonder how something like the Climate Superfund laws in Vermont or New York play into that. Is there utility in having a handful of states with these laws or does it have to come from the federal leve?

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE 

Oh, it absolutely is useful. They’re so-called laboratories of democracy. And of course, knowing what the situation is with the Supreme Court, the fossil fuel industry and its stooges, even at the Department of Justice now, the Trump Department of So-called Justice, are suing to block those laws from going into effect, even at the state level. So the fossil fuel political weaponry is being deployed against those laws, and that could be the next awful thing that the Supreme Court does.

JAKE BOLSTER

Earlier, you were talking about the corruption that’s stemming from the fossil fuel industry, as you called it, and how difficult it’s made lawmaking in Congress. You’ve spent a decade on the Senate floor calling the fossil fuel industry’s political influence corruption. What about that has worked and what do you feel like has fallen short?

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

I think what fell short was, first of all, I was too often alone, but when an issue is not immediately salient to a voter, when it’s not actually affecting them in their day-to-day life right now, then it’s way, way easier to spin and lie about.

And the fossil fuel industry has done a really magnificent job of false narratives, fake science, the whole nonsense of trying to give people a way to think that they don’t have to do anything about climate change, that it’s a someday problem. Well, it ain’t a someday problem any longer when Florida’s insurance market is collapsing and 92 percent of Texans think that this is a cost problem for their families. So it’s real, and it’s just a matter of now, I think, connecting those dots. I think talking about the corruption very specifically also helps. 

Can I give an example?

JAKE BOLSTER

Sure.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

So Trump wants everybody to think that he wants to block wind because he hates windmills and that he’s mad about it because of his stupid Scottish golf resort. No, that is not what is happening here. What is happening here is that the Trump blockade of low-cost clean energy that would otherwise be on the grid serving customers, when it’s not there, that forces the electric grid to climb up the generation stack to more and more expensive units to meet that same demand.

And those more expensive units are fossil fuel units. And the most expensive unit running at any given time usually sets the price for the whole grid, not just for its electrons, but for every electron on the grid at that time. So the jump in cost when you go to a more expensive fossil fuel unit is huge for rate payers, and all of that money goes to the fossil fuel industry because they’re the marginal units that now run that wouldn’t beforehand. It is a huge corrupt money pump out of public’s pockets and into the pockets of Trump’s big fossil fuel donors. Now, when people get their electric bills and they see them going up and they’re mad about it, if they’re just mad at the electric company, we have not done our jobs. If they understand that they were set up to pay more so that their money could go to Trump’s big fossil fuel donors, that’s a really powerful corruption story and it has the added advantage of being true.

JAKE BOLSTER

Right. To go back very quickly to the Supreme Court and how you’re saying it’s captured by fossil fuel interest, how important is it to you for there to be some sort of Supreme Court reform? Should Democrats be looking at expanding the court if they win control of Congress or regain the presidency in the future?

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

I think that there are two things that we need to do. One is the Supreme Court needs to have a proper ethics program. It is ridiculous that the highest court in the land, our temple to the rule of law, won’t abide for itself by the most basic tenet of rule of law, which is fact finding. What happened? They won’t ask Justice Thomas what happened in his conversations with his wife about the January 6 case. What happened with his tax payments to the IRS for the income that he failed to disclose on his judicial forms from the forgiveness of the $270,000 motor coach loan?

JAKE BOLSTER

And I’m sorry, just who’s not asking really quickly?

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

Nobody is asking. I mean, the public is asking, I’m asking, but there’s no entity in the Supreme Court that gets to ask, right?

If you complain about something that I have done as a senator, there’s a Senate Ethics Committee, and they will go out and do fact finding. If a judge on a court of appeals you think has done you wrong, you can file a complaint and there’s an investigation if it’s credible, and there’s fact finding about what actually took place. The only place in all of government in which there’s no fact finding when there’s an ethics concern is the nine members of the Supreme Court. It is ridiculous. So we need to fix that. And then I have a bill for term limits, 18 years, retroactive, so you start to refresh the court right away.

JAKE BOLSTER

OK, so I have a question here about Venezuela. Back in January, you and five other senators opened an investigation into whether oil and gas companies got advanced notice of the military action in Venezuela. Now that deal’s been signed, a hundred-year concession on 65 billion barrels of reserves with the Pentagon holding an equity stake in the company running it. Does that make your investigation more urgent or does the deal itself answer the question you were asking?

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

No, it makes it even more essential that we understand all of this. What the deal, as it comes together, looks like is that we went in and essentially took over Venezuela, running it through the same administration as Maduro, just the next person down, sending off the person who actually won the election and the Nobel Peace Prize so she doesn’t get to come in and run the country that elected her, and then seized Venezuela’s oil reserves for ourselves and created a choke point for Venezuela because so much of its revenue comes from those reserves. So we can make Venezuelan government dance to our tune by turning up and down the spigot of their oil reserves. 

It looks like an old-fashioned colonial-era raid where you go in for the bauxite, you go in for the copper or the gold, you go in for the oil, and you just control the government and take it over. So what the oil industry knew about that and when they knew it becomes even more important because if they were complicit in this, even beforehand, that’s a very different story than if Trump just went ahead and did it and then said, OK, fait accompli, now we’ve got this, here’s what I need you to do.

Those are two different stories. They’re both bad stories for the fossil fuel industry, but it’s way worse if they were complicit from the very beginning, rubbing their hands in the background saying, yes, yes, yes, go get us that oil. We’re with you.

JAKE BOLSTER

Another congressional topic here, we have permitting reform. So we write a lot about it at Inside Climate News, energy of all kinds, and we hear a lot about energy, we need more energy on the grid online faster. And there’ve been attempts at permitting reform in Congress under the second Trump administration, but a lot of deadlines have passed, most recently in August, and now there’s a goal to get it done in September. You’ve said the holdup is Republicans and it’s the administration. What does the administration have to do differently for you to support permitting reform?

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

Well, first, we have to get to a bill, and Senator Heinrich and I are in negotiation with Chairman Capito and Chairman Lee of Environment Public Works and Energy, respectively. And I would say that the negotiations are going well. I think we’re, I hope, within a week or two, perhaps, of being able to wrap it up and have something to show to our colleagues. And if it’s a good bill that frees up a lot more energy, particularly low cost energy, then I think it can get a strong bipartisan vote. 

The problem has not been my Republican colleagues in the Senate on this. They’ve actually sometimes been quite helpful. The problem has been in the executive branch. The problem has been cabinet members who break the law to hurt clean energy and help fossil fuel, who lie that the clean energy is more expensive than the fossil fuel, or at least when they’re on Fox News or X, they don’t lie when they’re in court because they know they’ll get busted, so they shut up then, but they lie about it everywhere else. And you now even have the Department of War, so-called, blocking wind turbines that would be automatic, where there’s five judges, including a Trump judge, blew up the so-called national security theory of why offshore wind had a problem. And so the offshore wind units that we fought over are now going forward, but they’re still blocking even inshore wind.

How does an inshore, land-based wind farm in, let’s say, Iowa create a national security risk? It’s not even at the border. So the lying, the illegal obstruction, all the mischief that they’re doing for their fossil fuel donors, that we need a strong signal, is going to stop.

JAKE BOLSTER

Yeah. I wish we had more time because I’d love to hear about how your Republican colleagues have been helpful because we don’t often hear about bipartisan action on this sort of thing. But for our final question, I just wanted to ask about Climate Week. This is an event that’s been going on for a while, but it’s starting to feel, at least to me, a little more performative than actually substantive. What needs to change to make this event more meaningful and impactful?

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

It remains to be seen. I think a lot of climate stuff has been performative all along. My least favorite word in the climate space is ambition. I’m sick to damn death of people’s ambition. Action is what we need, not some damned ambition that may never come to pass. 

So are we serious? Are we going to end the free to pollute business model? Are we taking seriously the potential economic catastrophe of the cascade from insurance failure to mortgage failure to property values crash, a word from the chief economist to Freddie Mac, not me, crash, to a full-on economic recession? Are we changing the narrative so that we’re talking about costs and talking about the corruption and the villainy of the climate denial fraud and the dark money operation? If we’re doing those things, then we’re finally making some ground. But if it’s just a big cocktail party chat where people talk about climate this and climate that and don’t actually do stuff, then you’re right. Then it’s a big fat waste of time.

JAKE BOLSTER

All right. Well, I think that’s all we have time for, Senator. Thank you very much for joining us.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

JAKE BOLSTER

Take care. 

Closing Credits

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