NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas - NBC on Earth: Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse

Episode Date: April 22, 2018

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) delivers a weekly speech on the Senate floor urging action on climate change. He speaks to Chief Environmental Correspondent Anne Thompson about his efforts.

Carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is changing the atmosphere and oceans. We see it everywhere. Mr. President, I'm here today for the 99th time to remind us... ...here for my 164th time to wake up speech... ...as I give my 200th time to wake up speech... ...time to remind us that we are sleepwalking our way toward a climate catastrophe and that it is time to wake up. It's six years and counting for Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

Every week the Senate has been in session, he's given a speech on climate change on the Senate floor. From the Capitol Hill office of U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, I'm Ann Thompson. This is NBC on Earth. Hi. Sorry to keep you waiting. Senator, it's nice to see you. There's been a certain amount of activity. You've had a busy day already and it's only two. And it's only two. But it's great that you're here and I appreciate it very much. Senator, first of all, let me ask you, what spurred this quest, this desire to give a speech every week about climate change? Well, you have to go back 202 Senate weeks and remember where we were. We had passed cap and trade in the House. The Senate, despite having a Democratic majority, had just walked away from

that legislation. We had done nothing. The White House, under the President, had decided that they had had enough controversy, and they walked away from the issue. And you couldn't get them to put the words climate and change in the same paragraph. Until the Georgetown speech that President Obama gave, there was a long, long drought. And in that period, scientists, environmentalists, people who cared about this issue, were getting extremely frustrated that nobody seemed to care. So I started speaking about it, and in all of the turbulence around the Senate, the only way you can really make sure you stay on something is to bake it into your schedule.

So I told my staff every week, no excuses, we do remarks on the Senate floor. And that's how it came to be. You have given more than 200 speeches on climate change. Yeah. And nothing has happened. Well, some things have happened. But Congress has a move. Nothing big has happened.

So have you failed? So far, in the sense of we don't have a significant piece of climate legislation. But what's happened around Congress is that things are continuing to move despite us. And the situation of the, for want of a better word, climate denial apparatus is becoming increasingly difficult. And climate denial apparatus is becoming increasingly difficult, and climate denial island is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. The corporate support is growing. Municipal and state support is growing in a lot of different ways. International support moves forward, notwithstanding what Trump has done to the Paris Agreement. And of course, on the economics side, the renewables are just romping

in terms of the way prices are going. So, you know, we're getting there, and I hope that my efforts will be effective whenever the day comes that we do what we need to do, which is to put a proper price on carbon, and having brought that day forward. Until we know when that happens, it's hard to make a final judgment as to whether these speeches have been useful or not. What is it that you want Congress to do? What the economists virtually universally tell us, and what essentially every Republican who has thought the climate change problem through to a solution has come to, is that there needs to be a price on carbon pollution. The International Monetary Fund says that the subsidy for fossil fuel in the United States is $700 billion, billion with a B, dollars every year. That's

very hard for renewables to compete with. You put a proper, fair price on carbon pollution, and suddenly the whole power of the market moves in favor of protecting our planet. So to me, that's the best solution, and it's the one that Republicans seem to be most willing to accept. Opponents say putting a price on carbon is really putting a tax on carbon. You can call it a tax. The difference is this. A tax is ordinarily designed to fund the government. A carbon fee, which is fully rebated back to the public, is hard to treat as a tax. You're lifting perhaps as many taxes as you're imposing. But more importantly, you have to send a true market signal. You can't be a free marketeer and think that this particular industry is entitled to a

$700 billion annual subsidy. This idea has gotten some pretty impressive Republican support. Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is behind it. Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has endorsed it. And Baker and Schultz. There's an array of them. So why don't congressional Republicans do something about it? The grip of the fossil fuel industry on Congress is still really, really powerful. Despite the protestations of the big oil company CEOs that they know climate change is real, they know their product is causing it, and they support a price on carbon, the exact opposite is actually true here in Congress.

What they support is a political and electioneering establishment that will punish anybody who takes them seriously about supporting a price on carbon. They're saying one thing to the world. They're saying a very different thing to Congress. And, of course, the Koch brothers and their Americans for Progress, their whole political operation is still 100% dedicated to making sure that their pollution is protected. So what impact then are your speeches having on moving your colleagues away from that grip of fossil fuel money? Well, it varies, of course, colleague to colleague. I think for some colleagues, they're a complete thorn in their side and they wish I'd shut up and go away.

Other colleagues, Republicans, have said to me, please keep doing what you're doing. When the moment comes, it's going to be important. I can't help you right now, but you're doing the right thing. Can you name names? No, that would be violating important courtesies and confidences. Tell me about the theatrics of when you give these speeches. We see on the camera, we see you there speaking. Is anybody listening? Is anybody in the Senate chamber when you speak? It varies. The Senate chamber, just as a general proposition, unless you're in the middle of the end of a vote, when everybody's piling in to get their vote counted, it's almost always empty,

just as a matter of course, no matter who's speaking and no matter on what subject. That's what all this television apparatus does for us, is that people are watching on screens, not only in the Senate, but across Congress. So the room is often quite empty, but that doesn't mean that there's no audience. Is that a lonely feeling? It can be a very lonely feeling. Do you want at times to give up? There have been times when I've had some real bouts of very dark frustration. But I think I made a simple decision that until we have a serious climate bill on the floor of the Senate,

I'm going to keep doing this. And that's a pretty easy decision to keep. What would you say to critics who say after 200 and some speeches, all you've really done is produce a whole lot of hot air? Well, I think you'd have to talk to other people, folks in the scientific community who are feeling very beleaguered and beaten by particularly the Trump administration, who like the fact that I do things like science experiments on the Senate floor. People in the environmental community who don't feel that they're being heard enough by Washington to know that there's a regular voice saying this means a lot to them.

To a lot of people, just having a voice calling out in the wilderness is a very important reassurance and a very important signal. And it's for those people that I will keep doing this. How important is the environment to your home state? Rhode Island is called the ocean state. that I will keep doing this. How important is the environment to your home state? Rhode Island is called the ocean state. If you look at the map of Rhode Island, Narragansett Bay spears right up through the center of the state and creates a number of islands.

We turn into an archipelago based on the present projections by our state university, our coastal council, and our federal NOAA organization by the end of the century. I am quite determined to do everything that I can to make sure that the very map of my state is not changed by carbon pollution on my watch. You spoke about the power of fossil fuel money in politics. But isn't it true about money in general? For example, OpenSecrets.com says you've gotten $178,000 from members of the League of Conservation Voters. What influence does that money play in your speeches? Well, I'm doing this anyway, so it really doesn't. I appreciate their support

and enthusiasm. But when you put that up against $450 million that the Koch brothers have pledged to spend in this coming election alone, which isn't even a presidential year, the 800-some million dollars that they spent in the last election, it's pretty clear that one is a trickle and the other is a flood. And it actually plays out in the way in which the Senate has handled this issue. Before Citizens United, I served three years in the Senate, and for all of those three years, there was constant bipartisan activity on climate change. Bipartisan hearings, bipartisan legislation, bipartisan conversations. Then came Citizens United, which was the terrible decision

that opened up the floodgates to all this dark money. And from that day forward, in January of 2010, no Republican has come onto a single serious piece of legislation to limit carbon dioxide emissions. The fossil fuel industry wanted that decision, asked for that decision, anticipated that decision and executed on it instantly. And when you're putting in two election cycles over a billion dollars into elections, that's a big deal. How is it any different, though? Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe takes, I think, $348,000 from oil and gas interests. You're taking $150,000 in this 2018 cycle from League of Conservation voters. I mean, aren't you just both espousing the positions that the people who give you money

have? Perhaps, but that's not where the battle was being fought. The $450 million is being spent through so-called independent outside groups that are dropping $10, $15 million ad buys into races. It's not the direct contributions so much, because those are policed and disclosed to a very significant degree. It's this huge dark money operation where the first a person sees of it is on their home TV screen, and it's, you know, Iowans for puppies and peace is the nominal group that's telling everybody that Senator so-and-so is a terrible crook who hates your job and hates puppies and hates daffodils and is a wicked human being who you should vote against, and then they vanish and you don't know who they are.

Behind that is something, and it's something big, and it plays in the millions of dollars, not in the thousands of dollars. And they have the ability not only to do that, but to threaten to do that. And the combination of the ability to spend money in the millions while protecting your anonymity and the ability to threaten to do that is what has silenced the Republican Party on climate change. So what is it going to take to get that bipartisan cooperation back again? Continued public pressure and the relentless march of fact. You know, five years ago, it was a little bit different in terms of what people in Arizona are actually seeing and measuring for drought and temperature. Idaho and Wyoming, the forests have fallen back to the pine beetle. Seas continue to climb on shores.

Storms have battered Houston's coasts. You can go around the country, and it's now at the point where farmers, foresters, fishermen have started to experience the change that scientists warned them about. And you can go to every single state in the union and go to the state university, the home state university, Kansas State, Iowa State, Idaho State, I don't care where, and they will not just be telling you about climate change, they'll be teaching it. And that, I think, has been a big, big change. If you look at just current events, we're living climate change in real time. Ten named hurricanes, six category three or greater. We've got Greenland is now melting faster than any time in the last four centuries.

And NOAA says that high tide flooding will be an everyday occurrence by the end of the century. If that isn't enough to get people aware, what is it going to take? It's that tipping point when today has to be the day that you risk the wrath of the fossil fuel dark money empire. On any given day, you can know all the things that you just said, and you can postpone until tomorrow your day of reckoning with them. And so day after day, week after week, month after month go by, and there is never that moment of reckoning and moment of decision. That's one of the things that elections are for, and if we see youth

turn out in the coming election the way it's expected, I think there'll be a pronounced message in that, because young people have no doubts about this. Is there something to learn from the young people of Parkland High School to apply what they've done on gun control, apply that to climate change? I think what is to be learned is yet to be learned, which is what matters when young people show up in big numbers in an election. The original Obama election was huge numbers of young people, and it made a very big difference. If in 2018, young people come out, whether it's because they're concerned about racism, whether it's concerned about sexism and Me Too, whether it's concerned about guns being fired by madmen in our schools, or whether

it's because they're concerned that this is an administration that cares zero for our environment and is ignoring climate change. Pick your reason. When they come out, it changes things. You are giving these speeches today in an environment where the president has pulled the nation out of the Paris Agreement. Kind of, yeah. The EPA administrator has said he wants to repeal the Clean Power Plan.

He has essentially erased climate change from the EPA website. He even questions man's role in changing the climate. So how are you going to succeed in this kind of political environment? Well, the Republican Party is going to have to own all that behavior in the coming election. And one way to succeed is to simply take back the House and the Senate

and start governing responsibly. That is a pretty simple way to succeed. The other is just to stay open with your colleagues, engage your colleagues, so that as soon as it's politically feasible for some of them to move, we don't waste a week in getting ready. And the outside pressure is still building. You know, there's a counter pressure from this huge fossil fuel dark money establishment. But that doesn't make the pressure of fact, of public opinion, of young voters, of science, of your home state university, of the experience of your farmers, of the experience of the local weather forecasters. All of that begins to pile up. And I think we're at a very tippy balance point. And it wouldn't surprise me if

we had a serious climate bill in a year. By not doing anything, has Congress made itself irrelevant on this issue? I think by not doing anything, Congress has done a good deal worse than make itself irrelevant. Bear in mind that we're the nation that from the days of John Winthrop through Ronald Reagan, who adopted his famous term, we've held ourselves up to the rest of the world as a city on a hill. We have held to the world that the power of our example matters and that it's a more important thing in the history of the world than any example of our power, to paraphrase President Clinton. The idea that with the whole world looking, with global consequences from our inaction, we are snarled up by a single, big, fossil fuel special interest, that's more than making ourselves irrelevant.

It's making ourselves embarrassing. You've spent today, you sent a letter to President Trump today asking him to take another look at the behavior of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and how he has spent taxpayer money. What have you uncovered? Well, of course the rhinoceros in the living room is that the guy is holding an office for which he's completely unfit

because he doesn't intend to do the duties of the office. He's there as an intruder doing the behest of the fossil fuel industry and completely ignoring the public health and environmental duties he swore to uphold. So that's the big rhinoceros in the room. On the other side, he's traveling around with three times the so-called security entourage of any of his predecessors. He's traveling first class wherever he goes outside of the regulations of the department. He's built himself this very bizarre privacy phone booth for $40,000 taxpayer dollars. He appears to have spent way beyond what he's allowed for improving his personal office. He got his private accommodations paid for

essentially by lobbyists with a $50 per day fee to him, but the rest on a lobbying couple that does energy work. He has used staff on official time to do real estate work for him in Rhode Island, in Rhode Island, in Washington. He races around to restaurants with his lights and sirens going as if he's the president of the United States. He's a man who has taken the trappings and powers of office and lost his grip entirely as to the kind of way in which Americans expect you to treat yourself and to treat their taxpayer dollars. Is what he's doing illegal?

That is something that inspectors general and prosecutors will probably ultimately look at once they get the full picture. Is it wasteful? It's enormously wasteful and it's enormously disrespectful and grandiose. Is it time for Administrator Pruitt to go? Oh, absolutely. It was time for him to go on day two of his administration. But it's kind of an odd thing that it's all of these personal and ethical things about the way he's conducted himself in office and the way he has been self-serving in office

that are now driving all of this, when right over here in plain view is the fact that the entire purpose of his office holding has been to serve the exact industry that he's most supposed to regulate. Back to his policies, he said as Oklahoma Attorney General that, and he believes it as the EPA administrator, that the EPA has overreached on the issue of climate change. You're a former state attorney general, a former U.S. attorney. Is there any legal basis for that argument, in your opinion? Well, let's look at the three pieces to it. One, the United States Supreme Court has declared carbon pollution to be an air pollutant, period. The decision was called Massachusetts versus EPA. It's done. It's the law of the land. Two,

EPA itself has looked at carbon pollution and said, not only is it a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, it is a dangerous pollutant. And Pruitt knows enough about the science to know better than to try to undo what is called the endangerment finding. So he has let the endangerment finding stand because it is factually untouchable. And then you look at the Clean Power Plan itself and the extent to which it is really largely voluntary and leaves it up to states to reach their own means of finding their best way to comply to make this safe for America and the world. You know, in one case, it's the law of the land.

In the second, it's the law of the agency, and he doesn't challenge it. And in the third, it's the law of the land. In the second, it's the law of the agency, and he doesn't challenge it. And in the third, they work directly with states in as light and accommodating and cooperative a way as they could. I don't see that there is a way that you can both honor the law of the land, as the Supreme Court has said it, honor the endangerment finding of the EPA as he has left it, and regulate with any lighter of a touch than the previous administration did. How rate Scott Pruitt as EPA administrator? Oh, classed by himself. Absolutely unique in terms of not even caring to dangle a fig leaf in front of what he is doing to the agency and to the public health and welfare.

In a class by himself because of his policies or because of the way he is handling the office? Well, both. He's certainly in a class by himself in terms of being the most anti-environmental person ever to hold this office. I mean, I think back to the legendary EPA administrator Jim Watt, who was kind of a disaster, and there was Administrator Gorsuch, who left in terrible scandal. He's got them completely topped on the environmental side. On top of it, he has engaged in this personal grandiose

behavior that I think would have gotten any other cabinet official fired. Why don't you think the president demands he step down? Because he has behind him this massive fossil fuel industry. He's the prize of the fossil fuel industry for putting up with Trump. Which concerns you more, his policies or the way he's behaving? Well, the way he's behaving is kind of an ongoing affront to people all across the country,

to people who pay their taxes, to the people who expect folks in high office to behave in a certain respectful way, to the people around them. But in the long run, as soon as he's gone, and as soon as an administrator who behaves themselves appropriately is put in place, that problem is solved. The problem of the horrible environmental policies carries a long tail, because if you don't prevent harm now, it can last through years, even through decades. And that's why the dangers of him in office are so dire. Well, and his number two is now before the Senate, or his proposed number two, Andrew Wheeler, who's a coal lobbyist.

A coal industry lobbyist. The one who was in the room with the coal magnate, Bob Murray, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, when he handed him the plan that he wants the Trump administration to follow, get out of the Clean Power Plan, get out of the Paris Agreement, stop regulating ozone, stop enforcing cross-state air pollution restrictions. I mean, it's almost madman type behavior, but there it is. What's at risk if all of that comes to pass? Well, let's go to Rhode Island. My state does not pollute a lot, but we're downwind of the big Midwestern coal plants. So they burn coal and the effluent goes up smokestacks, some of which have been built very high just to get that pollution up into the air and away in prevailing winds from the home state. The problem is it comes

over Rhode Island. It bakes into ozone under sunlight. And we end up with days in Rhode Island in which the drive time radio as you're going into work in the morning is saying, today's a bad air day, folks. If you have an infant, make sure he stays indoors. If you're elderly, you should stay indoors. People with breathing difficulties should stay indoors. Kids with asthma end up in the emergency room. That's a real consequence for Rhode Islanders. And there's nothing that we can do about it because it's all coming in from out of state. We depend on the EPA and an administrator who cares about us to make sure that we're protected from bad air days when people are supposed to stay indoors and when children get run into the emergency room for asthma attacks.

And you don't think that Scott Pruitt cares about Rhode Islanders? Could not care less. I'm fascinated. I mean, I realize you're from Rhode Island. I Could not care less. I'm fascinated, I mean I realize you're from Rhode Island. Yeah. I grew up in Massachusetts so I have some appreciation of what you have but you're an attorney, you're not a scientist. So where does this determination come from? Well I'm married to a scientist. That'll do it. Yeah. My wife is a marine scientist. And in my career, I've over and over again worked with scientists on public health issues. If I had the brain for it, I would like to be a scientist.

Second best is a lawyer, I guess. But I really appreciate the work that scientists do. I really appreciate the importance of telling the truth about things. You know, at the heart of this conflict is a battle between truth and science and power and lies. And if you care at all about America and about governance, the idea that we are in a situation in which power and lies

can persistently defeat science and truth, that's an affront to a lot of very, very good and brave men and women who for years sacrificed, bled, and died to make America that city on a hill. So it's not about lobsters or polar bears or even beaches. For you, it's ultimately about the truth? It's about lobsters, polar bears, beaches. It's about jobs and success in the new emerging green economy.

But above all of that, I think it's also about what is our country? Who are we as a people? How does this democracy that so many people fought to leave to us, how does that operate in our hands in this generation? Why is it that we tolerate the victory of power and lies over science and truth? Thank you. For more on this story, you can go to NBCNews.com. I'm Anne Thompson, and this is NBC on Earth.