It is plain old-fashioned wrong when people lie and trick other people.
— Sheldon Whitehouse
Society is indeed better off when we share knowledge with one another and have open debates about the issues in the public arena, with the hands and motives of the players identified.
Legislation to level the playing field for working families is dead on arrival in the Citizens United Congress.
Regulators owned and controlled by industry are not the American way.
America's exceptional nature confers upon us responsibilities. We are not exceptional because we say so; we are exceptional because, over and over, we do exceptional things - things like what Generals Marshall and MacArthur accomplished putting Europe and Japan back on their feet after World War II.
The fossil fuel industry maintains a science denial operation and a political influence operation designed to do just that. What's good for their business is more important to them than what's good for America.
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.
I, for one - despite being a pretty solid climate hawk, I am extremely sympathetic to West Virginia and its coal-country needs. I lived there for a year. I've seen it. And the same for Wyoming, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky. They all have parts of their state where that really matters.
Our American history reflects a long-standing tension between people and power. In fact, all government everywhere does. But our American form of government solved the problem, better than most, of moderating this tension between people and power.
Getting past the influence of the fossil fuel industry will take courage, especially on the part of the Republican majority whom they so relentlessly bully and cajole. But we must do it.
I think a lot of the people who voted for Donald Trump were frustrated. And what they thought was, OK, government is broken. Therefore, we're going to send in this incendiary character. And he's just going to going to bust it all up, and we'll see what happens.
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.
As a Senator from Rhode Island, I wish that once - just once - the fossil fuel industry and their paid-for PR machine would concede that burning their product causes real harm to other people.
The American Republican Party is the last political bastion of the fossil fuel industry - now so in tow to the fossil fuel industry that it cannot face up to the realities of carbon pollution and climate change.
Protected free speech has boundaries, and one boundary is fraud.
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.
My father's politics did not influence mine. In fact, we disagreed on a fair amount of stuff.
From lying about climate change, to undermining programs that make up our social safety net, to opposing laws that reduce gun violence, to fighting marriage equality, the Kochs' tentacles infiltrate all parts of America's public debates.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the Internet economy, information is everything: The more a company knows about a consumer, the more carefully it can tailor its advertising to that customer, and the more revenue it can generate in return.
When I was first elected to the Senate, I was fortunate to be appointed to the Intelligence Committee. There, I saw up close the dedication and commitment of the men and women of our intelligence agencies.
Senators who once supported common-sense legislation have gone silent as stones under the threat of the polluters' spending.
My thesis is that government is not, in fact, broken. It's just listening to the wrong people, and it's listening to all of this quiet influence. So it's a very robust operation that operates kind of under the surface.
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.
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.
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.
The worst blows to humanity from carbon pollution may come at us from the oceans.
The Founding Fathers built our judicial system to withstand the special interest pressures that beset the political branches of government.
Putting a price on carbon pollution is one of the best things we can do to stem the tide of climate change.
I'm not running for the U.S. Senate because I think Lincoln Chafee is a bad man.
In many ways, the rotten effects of dark money are seen less in what we do than in what we don't do.
Juries are the constitutional institution designed to protect ordinary citizens against the wealthy and powerful.
In the international contest of ideologies, it is not assured that ours will win; we have to earn the winner's laurel generation by generation. One way we earn it is by living our values as the world watches.
America has long stood before the world as an exceptional country.
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.
Muzzling our leading scientists benefits no one.
The Constitution provided no protection against corporations; the Constitution has a blind spot for them.
The best way to shine a light on all of this 'dark money' flooding into our elections would be for Congress to pass legislation requiring all organizations to disclose their political spending in a timely manner.
The fossil fuel industry has been a particular disgrace, polluting our politics as well as our planet.
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.
If Republicans start losing their seats because they're climate deniers, that is a very salutary signal.
Addiction is a tough illness, and recovery from it is a hard but noble path. Men and women who walk that path deserve our support, encouragement, and admiration.
The power the fossil fuel industry exerts over Congress is polluting American democracy, the propaganda it emits through its front groups is polluting our public discourse, and, of course, its carbon emissions are polluting our atmosphere and oceans - it's a triple whammy and a disgrace.
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.
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.
