Transcript

Time to Wake Up | US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse | TEDxProvidence

[Music] thank you and good afternoon everyone I am going to spend my time with you this afternoon talking about climate change and I hope tell you two things that you may not know about climate change I think we have a fairly common understanding of what's going on with climate change we burn fossil fuels the carbon dioxide goes up into the air it increases the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that warms things up on the planet and we have a cooling system on the planet called the ocean and the oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the climate change heat that we've added to the planet at a rate of better than a Hiroshima atom bomb per second thing so they're warming up and when things warm they expand so that takes me to the first thing that we have to look at which is our home state of Rhode Island this is Rhode Island two hundred and forty years ago and if he went back another two hundred and forty years from the Narragansetts and the Wampanoags were here it would have looked just about the same the map of Rhode Island is very distinctive if you look carefully at my Wilson's of Wickford tie you can see the outline of the map of Rhode Island on it right now so let's take a look up close at the northern part of Narragansett Bay you'll see Warwick to our right and if you look closely you can see the airport to the far right and then you see the river going up into Providence which is at the top of the map and then down is Warren and Bristol on the left and as I said that's kind of with the state that part of the map has looked like for century after century after century well because of sea level rise NOAA and our Coastal Resources Management Council and our University of Rhode Island have gotten really good at predicting what is going to happen in this century and this is their prediction for the end of the century everything that is blue on that map was land and is now water so if you look at Warwick neck you see that Warwick neck is now Warwick neck Island and you go across to that big blue area that's now Barrington Barrington becomes Lake Barrington I guess down here in Warren and Bristol you can see how Papa squash is now gone and it's broken up into a number of islands Rhode Island has become a new archipelago by the end of this century something a girl born today at women and infants will see in her lifetime if you move south down the bay you get to Newport on the right and jamestown on the left and you can see that there are similar changes that we are to expect in that part of our state as well there's the change jamestown becomes not one island but three and as you'll see where the bridge connects Newport to Jamestown you have to go through water to get to the bridge so you'll need a bridge to get to the Newport Bridge on Jamestown Newport itself the western end of Newport breaks off entirely becomes a new island off of that is little Castle Hill Island a new island on the new island and across our coasts this is the type of change that we are now told to expect go up to Providence and this was what was expected for Providence before the latest NOAA estimates add added 20 inches to their estimate of global sea level rise before under the latest estimates this is what downtown Providence comes to look like and if you close in on City Hall you see that that gondola ride may be something that you need and it will take you right to the top of the stairs of City Hall and then you can come on in and weather this becomes more like Venice or where they have to abandon it it's a very significant problem or do we do Holland and build dikes around Providence so that's the first point this is going to hit home in Rhode Island in amazingly consequential and new ways the second is what the hell was going on where I come from in Congress about this and why is so little going on well when I got to the Senate it was 2007 and in the years that I was first there 2007 2008 and 2009 every single one of these Republican senators was on a climate change bill we had a robust conversation we had a lot of energy we had bipartisan hearings bipartisan bills we didn't get anything completed but we were on the path to good legislation the way you'd expect Congress to take on a big issue and then it came to a shuddering halt what happened what happened was the decision of the United States Supreme Court called citizens united and from that moment forward things changed citizens united allowed the biggest special interest in the country including the fossil fuel industry to spend unlimited amounts of money in politics and money in politics looks a little bit different than just money it looks like political weaponry and here's a picture of a Soviet May Day Parade weaponry display in a similar way the fossil fuel industry rolled out 501 C 4 's and super PACs and shell corporations and front groups and they even created a group called donors trust whose whole purpose is to hide the identity of a donor who wants to make contributions into the system the effect of that was basically this if you could imagine a echo cardiogram ticking away with good work happening with all those six bipartisan senators and then after January of 2010 after that decision flatline not one Republican senator has been willing to sign on to one significant piece of carbon dioxide reduction legislation these are some of the groups that make that possible they not only help support that political effort the weaponry that is directed and the threats behind the weaponry that is directed at our political process but they also propagate the phony science of climate denial we're all hearing a lot these days about fake news folks climate denial was the original fake news and many of the people who propagated that original climate denial fake news have now moved into the larger business of fake news more generally now those aren't just individual institutions they're connected this is a graphic done by a professor named Robert Breughel at Drexel University who's made it his academic field of study to figure out how this all works to follow the money and draw the diagram and show the network and as you can see this looks rather like a web one of the things we're learning is that there are defectors from this web who are beginning to tell their story about what goes on inside of it one was reported in The Washington Post recently this was a person who said they had to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation but what they said to the Washington Post reporter was there's a whole web of organizations out there who are designed to do this and their purpose is to create a cacophony of voices so it doesn't sound like it's all coming from one place and not just the fossil fuel industry itself through all those different front groups and another one came out his name is Jerry Taylor I've gotten to know Jerry he's a very brave and very intelligent and very conservative person he used to be the number two person at the Cato Institute one of those groups and he was their lead on climate denial and he learned two things while he was working for the Cato Institute the first was he discovered to use his words that a lot of the scientific narratives that I was offering were really dodgy and as a professional and as honest man that made him increasingly anxious and he found out also that on the economic side you could not find an academic economist who studies climate change who argued against climate action not one single one he has said this publicly and he started his own Institute to work on conservative solutions to climate change but it shows what we're up against now on our side we've got some pretty cool people I love Pope Francis he wrote an entire encyclical about climate change and is one of the most moving documents I've ever read just last week he said we all have a responsibility here all of us small or large a moral responsibility and we have to take it seriously history will judge the decisions so I press on as best I can taking my little time to wake up sign to the Senate floor every week it's getting increasingly dog-eared and beat up as I pass through my hundred and eightieth speech but you cannot stop science and facts and increasingly my colleagues are getting more and more anxious about being held down by that web of climate denial and political threat and I really want you to know that this is not partisanship in Washington the fossil fuel industry has done a very good job of going after only Republicans to beat them into submission to make it look like it's partisan but you remember those faces from 2007 2008 2009 many of them are still there John McCain campaigned for president on the Republican ticket with a terrific climate platform this is old-fashioned special interest special pleading the kind of thing the Legislature's have seen for years but with the new extraordinary made a parade of political artillery backing it up that citizens united unleashed so we can change that this is not something that is doomed to the partisan Wars of Washington we can change this and with any luck in the months ahead you will see a dramatic change thank you for giving me this chance to share these thoughts with you [Applause]