On April 18th, 2012, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse delivered the first in what was to become one of the—if not the—longest-running series of speeches in congressional history. This was toward the end of Barack Obama’s first term, and Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, thought that the President wasn’t doing enough, or really much of anything, to fight climate change. “There were years at a time when the Obama Administration wouldn’t use the word climate and change in the same paragraph,” Whitehouse recalled recently, in a Zoom interview from his office. “And so I made the decision—rather than get jostled around by whatever the current events of the week were, every damn week I was going to do a speech on climate.” He had a poster made up showing the Earth as seen from space. Next to the planet, the poster said “TIME TO WAKE UP” in boxy white letters.
Whitehouse continued to deliver his (more or less) weekly “Time to Wake Up” speeches through Obama’s second term and Donald Trump’s first. He’d prop his increasingly battered sign on an easel and, addressing a mostly empty Senate floor, talk about the latest developments in climate science, the latest climate-related disasters, and Congress’s continuing inaction. “Congress is still doing nothing,” he noted in his two-hundred-and-second speech, delivered in April, 2018.
When Joe Biden took office, in January, 2021, Whitehouse gave up his weekly speeches. “Biden was making a lot of positive noises about taking climate stuff seriously,” Whitehouse said, explaining the move. But he suspected it might be temporary. When the Smithsonian called to ask him to donate his poster to its collection, he demurred: “I said, ‘Thank you, but I just may need it again, so I’m going to hang on to it.’ ” In February, 2022, he pulled his sign out of storage. “Sure enough, the Biden Administration was pretty spongy,” he said. “And so I went back to the speeches again, not weekly but regularly, to try to jostle them along into a better stance.” In the summer of 2022, Congress passed—and Biden signed—the first major piece of legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, the Inflation Reduction Act (I.R.A.), which authorized hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of tax credits and grants to promote clean-energy development. Nevertheless, Whitehouse continued to occasionally trot out his sign in 2023 and 2024.
On July 9th, Whitehouse is scheduled to give his three-hundredth “Time to Wake Up” speech. Depending on how you look at things, the timing couldn’t be better or it couldn’t be worse.
Trump 2.0 has treated climate action with the administrative equivalent of a bunker-buster bomb. The White House has tried to obliterate not just the federal programs aimed at reducing emissions but state and corporate efforts as well. It has demolished many government programs that support climate science and has shuttered many climate-related websites, including the one devoted to National Climate Assessment reports, the next edition of which, due in 2027, it has tried to cancel.
Meanwhile, the Administration has been showering the fossil-fuel industry with love. This started the day of Trump’s second Inauguration, when he issued an executive order declaring an “energy emergency” and pointedly left wind and solar off the list of “energy resources.” Just about every week since has brought a new billet-doux to the industry: the huge tax-and-spending bill Trump signed last week is, as Mark Gongloff, a Bloomberg Opinion editor, put it, “larded” with new tax breaks for fossil-fuel producers, including an expanded tax break for using captured carbon dioxide to pump more oil. “It’s hard to imagine a less-deserving recipient” of taxpayer largesse, Gongloff wrote.
Between the Administration’s executive actions and the provisions of the tax bill, a catalogue of all the climate-busting moves of the past six months would run to hundreds of entries. (Climate Backtracker, a website run by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, currently lists a hundred and ninety-six steps that the Trump Administration has taken to “scale back or wholly eliminate federal climate mitigation and adaptation measures.”) Some of the most consequential climate backtracking moves Republicans have made since January include:
Cancelling fees for methane leaks
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas—in the short to medium term, many times more powerful than carbon dioxide—and under the I.R.A., oil and gas companies that failed to curb methane leaks were going to have to start paying a per-ton fee. In February, Congress voted to eliminate the rules that the Biden Administration had drawn up for administering the fees, and, under the bill Trump signed last week, the start date for the charge was put off for a decade, meaning that the methane-reduction effort seems dead for the foreseeable future.
Eliminating the I.R.A. tax credits for clean energy
Among the many tax credits that Congress recently voted to repeal or phase out are credits for wind- and solar-energy production, for clean-energy investment, for purchasing electric vehicles, and for making home energy-efficiency improvements. Researchers at Princeton University have calculated that the bill will increase the U.S.’s emissions by almost two hundred million metric tons per year by 2030. And researchers at the Rhodium Group have estimated that, in the same time frame, the bill could raise energy costs for households by almost two hundred dollars a year. “This bill will strand thousands of energy projects under development, jeopardize billions of dollars in private investment, and kill hundreds of thousands of good-paying American jobs,” the Coalition for Community Solar Access said, in a statement, the day the Senate passed its version of the legislation.
Revoking California’s waivers
Under a provision of the Clean Air Act, California has the power to set vehicle-emission standards that are stricter than federal regulations. Exercising this power, the state had decided that all new cars sold there after 2035 would have to be at least partly electric-powered, and many other states had announced plans to follow California’s lead. But, in May, Congress voted to overrule the so-called California waiver. It’s unclear whether the move was legal—California and ten other states have sued to block the overrule—but the turmoil, on top of the repeal of the federal electric-vehicle tax credit, seems likely to significantly slow E.V. sales.
All this is happening, of course, as global temperatures continue to rise. Last year was the hottest year on record. Global temperatures for the first three months of this year were very nearly as high as last year’s, even though, in the meantime, the world had entered a so-called La Niña phase, which typically brings cooler weather. In late March, Arctic sea ice reached a record-low extent for the end of the winter, and, in February, Antarctic sea ice reached a near-record-low minimum for any time of year. According to a recent study in the journal Earth System Science Data, warming is accelerating: between 2015 and 2024, the planet heated up at a rate of .27 degrees Celsius—half a degree Fahrenheit—“a rate that is unprecedented in the instrumental record.”
The other day, Whitehouse was still working on the details of his three-hundredth speech. Offering a summary, he said, “We’ve now entered the era of consequences of our climate negligence. The stuff that the scientists predicted is actually starting to happen, and now that it’s so real and immediate, we should consider how it is that we failed so badly.”
Asked how effective any wake-up call that’s been repeated three hundred times could be, he replied, “I think that the work that I’ve done has made a real, if incremental, difference. The problem is that it’s up against the massive apparatus of corrupt influence that the fossil-fuel industry runs, and that now controls the Republican Party. And it’s really hard for any one person, even a U.S. Senator, to succeed at disabling that.” ♦
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