How arrogant - how very far from humility - would be the self-satisfied, smug assurance that God, a tidy-up-after-us God will come and clean up our mess? Hope for a nanny God, who will with a miracle grant us amnesty from our folly - that's not aligned with either history or the text of the Bible.
Sheldon Whitehouse
We pay for power plant pollution through higher health costs.
The Founding Fathers built our judicial system to withstand the special interest pressures that beset the political branches of government.
The fossil fuel industry has been a particular disgrace, polluting our politics as well as our planet.
The science-denial machinery is a serious adversary, and it has a big advantage over real science: it does not need to win its dispute with real science; it just needs to create a public illusion that there is a dispute.
When I deliver the message to a cross section of Rhode Island that democracy is broken because special interests have relentless power - which prevents politicians from compromising despite popular support on an issue - I don't have any pushback.
The Constitution provided no protection against corporations; the Constitution has a blind spot for them.
Rhode Island works hard to reduce air pollution in our communities. We passed laws to prohibit cars and buses from idling their engines and to retrofit school buses with diesel pollution controls. But there is only so much a single state can do, particularly against out-of-state pollution.
It's pretty clear that Americans have a strong interest in knowing who's trying to influence their vote in elections.
If Republicans start losing their seats because they're climate deniers, that is a very salutary signal.
Consumers recognize, and don't like, corporate lying.
We would like the rest of the world to look up to American democracy. So when there is this kind of folly taking place, it makes it difficult for other rational nations to look up to American democracy.
Putting a price on carbon pollution is one of the best things we can do to stem the tide of climate change.
Across our small globe, dawn sweeps each morning, lighting cities and cottages, barrios and villages. Whoever and wherever you may be, you can step out into that morning sunrise and know, from our American example, that life does not have to be the way it is for you.
Every week in the Senate, I give a speech telling my colleagues it is time to wake up to the reality of a changing climate.
If you look at the casualties, the federal government isn't waging a War on Coal. If anything, coal is waging a war on us.
According to the IRS, the wealthiest 400 Americans, who earned an average of roughly $270 million in 2008, paid an average tax rate of just 18.2 percent that year. That's about the same rate paid by a single truck driver in Rhode Island. It's not right, and we need to restore fairness to our tax code.
If Republicans want to defend the rights of corporations and billionaires to spend unlimited, secret money in campaigns, then they should say so.
In many ways, the rotten effects of dark money are seen less in what we do than in what we don't do.
No one has a First Amendment right to lie to a federal agency in order to claim an improper tax status in order to avoid legal disclosure requirements on political spending and thereby receive undue tax benefits. That's a criminal false statement and possibly a fraud.
I believe that the role of president of the United States is vastly different from the role of candidate and that the Donald Trump of the campaign will not succeed as president.
Implementing the so-called 'Buffett Rule' would restore some badly needed fairness to our tax system.
Protected free speech has boundaries, and one boundary is fraud.
The big polluters are confident in their grip on Congress. They have basically achieved control of the Republican Party, and as a result, they are basically able to block action in Congress that the public needs and the country deserves.
It would be a sorry world in which corporations engaged in fraud could pull the screen of the First Amendment over any investigation of their scheme.
I suspect that a lot of the frustration people feel about government would feel a lot better if we had corporate influence out of our politics and were running a democracy like the founding fathers intended.
Each generation in this country gets the responsibility of being the ambassadors for this American democracy that our parents and grandparents fought, bled, and died for.
Frankly, we should have an ARPA-O, an Advanced Research Projects Agency for oceans research, to match DARPA for defense and ARPA-E for energy. And we should have an Oceans and Coasts Fund to match the upland- and freshwater-directed Land and Water Conservation Fund.
Too many members of Congress seem willing to give corporate polluters, many of whom happen to be major political donors, a free pass to poison the air.
I'm not running for the U.S. Senate because I think Lincoln Chafee is a bad man.
When you don't have accountability, there's no limit to the things that people will say. One of the restraints on the vitriol and the filth that so often is part of the American political debate is that candidates have to stand by their ads.
A courtroom is supposed to be a place where the status quo can be disrupted - even upended - when the Constitution or laws may require, where the comfortable can be afflicted and the afflicted find some comfort, all under the shelter of the law.
We are Christian and Jewish and Muslim and Hindu and none of the above. We are gay and straight. We are black, brown, white, and innumerable combinations. We are young and old, female and male, with and without disabilities, urban and rural, and liberal and conservative. Every one of us is an equal American.
Not only will a carbon fee reduce carbon emissions, it will force big polluters to pay for the damage their pollution does to public health and the environment, generating billions in new revenue for the American people.
I think people really understand that clean air and clean water and not having factories dumping their emissions into the atmosphere and into the rivers and into the sea has been a very good thing for America. EPA stands watch for very important principles that go all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt.
At a time when the United States is handing out tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, corporate jet owners, and millionaires and billionaires, it is ludicrous that we would even be looking at Social Security and Medicare as a solution to our debt crisis.
When Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell first proposed the grants that now bear his name, he envisioned a way to help students attend our country's wonderful colleges and universities, so they could share in the American Dream.
You can measure the warming oceans with a thermometer. You measure sea level rise with a yardstick. You can measure the dramatic increase in acidification with a simple pH test, and you can replicate what excess CO2 does to seawater in a basic high school science lab.
Whatever the motivation of the 'Wall Street Journal' and other right-wing publications, it is clearly long past time for the climate denial scheme to come in from the talk shows and the blogosphere and have to face the kind of an audience that a civil RICO investigation could provide.
The fossil fuel industry has taken control of, and powered up, architecture and methods originally built by the tobacco industry and others to attack and deny science.
Republicans aren't cowards. Many will take the side of climate principle in a fair fight. But it is asking a lot of them to take a principled stand on climate when they don't see one corporate friend ready to help them.
If the American people make their voices heard and put enough pressure on Congress, we can restore fairness in our economic system, do what's right for the middle class, and show that Congress can stand up to special interests.
To be clear, I don't know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don't have enough information to make that conclusion. Perhaps it's all smoke and no fire. But there's an awful lot of smoke.
Is keeping Big Oil happy with subsidies from the American people more important than addressing our deficit? Should a billionaire who makes a multi-million-dollar gift to a museum receive more tax bang for his charitable buck than a middle-class family who gives to their local church?
The dreadful decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission was the culmination of the Republican appointees' careful work to open American politics to corporate influence.
When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn't just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms.
We've seen too often what happens when wealthy and powerful industries gain excessive influence over the agencies that regulate them. The capture of the Minerals Management Service at the Department of Interior contributed to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Educating our children and giving them the skills they need to compete in a global economy is a smart investment in our country's future.
Millions upon millions of secret spending by the fossil fuel industry that was unleashed by the disastrous 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision - this money not only fuels the campaigns of many candidates; it also represents a threat to those who don't toe the polluter line on climate change.
The Heartland Institute is about as biased as they come, and it's funded by the likes of Exxon and the Koch brothers. This is the same group that took out billboard space to compare people who understand climate change to the Unabomber.
