Exclusive: Whitehouse wants Democrats to abandon Biden's "tepid tone" on climate
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Democrats must shift from former President Biden's "tepid tone" on climate change to a more aggressive stance to persuade voters, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said Tuesday at an Axios House event at Climate Week NYC.
Why it matters: Whitehouse — the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee — is among those in his party who think climate can be a winning pocketbook issue as insurance premiums rise and other financial impacts surface.
Driving the news: "We haven't lifted this issue up into the political space," said Whitehouse, who has spoken more than 300 times on the Senate floor about climate impacts. "We need to recover a little bit from the tepid tone that the Biden administration tended to operate in."
- Biden officials focused on "green jobs and polar bears" instead of directly criticizing the role that oil and gas companies played in influencing the climate debate through "dark money" campaign donations, he said.
- "What we have is the biggest fraudulent operation in American history, the climate-denial operation running next to one of the biggest corruption operations in American history — the dark money fossil-fuel influence operation," he added.
President Trump — who has repeatedly castigated climate-change efforts, including in a UN speech Tuesday — makes the debate have an "actual central-casting quality of true villainy," he said.
Zoom in: Whitehouse said Democratic polling of voters in Texas — a state that Trump won handily in 2024 — showed that rising insurance premiums are resonating with voters.
- "If your home insurance cost goes up 10%, that's like $1,000 or more dollars — that's a big deal," he said. "If peanut butter goes up 10%, that's a different thing."
Whitehouse also touted a judge's decision on Monday overturning the Trump administration's decision to issue a stop-work order for an offshore wind project off Rhode Island's coast.
- But he said he remains troubled about the industry's overall development.
- "It's going to go through a stall because it's hard to move through the regulatory process with an administration that's determined to stop you," he said.
