It’s no coincidence
Grover Fugate is Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s guest at President Obama’s State of
the Union address. Fugate, director of the state Coastal Resources Management
Council (CRMC), is one of Rhode Island's most vocal climate hawks. Recently,
Fugate declared that sea-level rise in Narragansett Bay could exceed 6 feet by
the end of the century. A shocking proclamation given that most of the public
is just learning of the 3- to 5-foot increase announced last year.
It’s not a prediction
Whitehouse would challenge, however. The Democratic senator is one of the most
outspoken climate champions in Congress. In recent months, he has delivered
impassioned weekly speeches from the Senate floor, expounding on environmental
degradation taking place across a warming planet.
Between 5 and 15
minutes in length, videos of the speeches are candy for YouTube
political-policy fans and information-hungry environmentalists. Whitehouse
pushes for solutions and calls out the deniers in Congress.
The off-kilter
global ecosystem, he says, portends unknown damage. The price of inaction far
outstrips the cost of mitigation. Skeptics, Republicans and their corporate
backers are regularly skewered as climate antagonists.
“There is a rear-guard
action in this building led by polluters to try to prevent us from taking
action on this. But we have to face the fact that the deniers are wrong; they
are just plain dead wrong,” Whitehouse said during a Dec. 5 meeting of the
Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
The speeches deliver
current and dramatic research not mentioned in the mainstream discussion on
climate change. In a Dec. 12, 2012 speech called “We are Sleepwalking Through
History,” Whitehouse noted that the planet's carbon dioxide concentration has
increased 50 parts per million since 1980, and is now well outside its range
from the last 800,000 years.
Oceans are absorbing a million tons of carbon an
hour, resulting in a 30 percent increase in ocean acidity — an increase faster
than any time in the past 50 million years.
Whitehouse also
describes global and local impacts of climate change, such as during Hurricane
Sand the unearthing of vehicles from the 1930s and '40s buried at Misquamicut
Beach in Westerly.
His staff explained
that Whitehouse gives the speeches because of frustration caused by “the
barricade of special interests and climate-change deniers blocking action on
this issue in Washington.” Speaking on the Senate floor, spokesman Seth Larson
said, allows Whitehouse to keep the climate-change debate alive and “to force deniers to either hide or come to the
floor with their extremist views.”
And if they haven’t
yet elevated discussion nationally or in D.C., the speeches may have raised
Whitehouse's environmental standing, landing him a co-chair position on the
Senate and House Task Force on Climate Change with Rep. Henry Waxman, D-New
York.
The committee will seek input from industry on both sides of the issue:
oil, coal and gas companies, electric utilities, automakers, defense
contractors, insurance companies and universities. The outcomes may result in
more recommendations than laws, but Whitehouse is committed to the cause. The
speeches on YouTube and C-Span will continue.
“As long as it takes to break through that
barricade of special interests and get something done,” Whitehouse said.