Has the Climate Movement Been Too Polite? This Senator Thinks So.

[Celerity]

US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse called on Democrats to stop enabling the fossil fuel industry’s “malevolent propaganda operation.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/has-the-climate-movement-been-too-polite-this-senator-thinks-so/

https://archive.ph/7O2PK


US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat from Rhode Island, speaks during an interview on Capitol Hill on July 8, 2025, in Washington, DC.(Oliver Contreras / AFP)

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,” 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 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 burning 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.”

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[tazcat]

1. Sen Whitehouse has been calling the evil doers be it oil or scotus for a long time - Battle on good Sir!!!