Whitehouse climate speeches over the decades
Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has been speaking out about climate change for decades
- Around the country, Democrats have been backing away from talking about climate change.
- Whitehouse seems like the only Democrat remaining that’s still trying.
- It’s worth it to keep trying, he said, because the risks are so high and, he thinks politically, it’s actually “a winning issue that my party has just gotten wrong and overlooked.”
On Aug. 7, 2025, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse gave his 300th “Time to Wake Up” speech about the dangers of climate change.
“It’s hard, given our peril, not to feel a bitter sense of failure about where we are,” he said.
Since then, he’s given at least seven more of these speeches. This session alone, he’s sponsored more than 30 bills on environmental protection. And he warns about the dangers of climate change almost every day on his social media channels.
Climate change has long been a priority of the left. But lately, Whitehouse seems like the only Democrat remaining who’s still trying.
“The Democrats have been running away from this issue,” said J. Timmons Roberts, a professor of environmental studies at Brown University.
He’s not sure why they’re backing away. Maybe they are preoccupied with other issues, he said, such as the Iran war and immigrants’ rights. Or maybe they think that Democrats should stop talking about climate – a group Whitehouse calls “climate hushers.”
This group includes Matthew Huber, a professor of geography at Syracuse University, who argued in an opinion piece for The New York Times that climate change fuels polarization and that Democrats should stop talking about it in order to win back the working class.
But Whitehouse has taken to social media to address this line of thinking, saying in posts that it’s wrong “about pretty much everything.”
In a recent interview for Political Scene, he said it’s worth it to keep trying because the risks are so high. And he thinks that, politically, it’s actually “a winning issue that my party has just gotten wrong and overlooked.”
Do people care about climate change?
Addressing climate change under the Trump administration is “brutal,” Roberts said.
“It’s hard to know where to start,” Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said. “They’ve pretty much torn up federal agencies. Attacked budgets and staffing and expertise. They’ve undermined climate science. They’re spreading propaganda and lies about climate science. They’re boosting the fossil fuel industry, attacking clean energy. It’s just from every possible angle.”
Yet around the country, Democrats have been backing away from talking about climate change. Many rising Democratic stars, such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, speak more about affordability than climate action. And Roberts thinks that even historically climate-friendly politicians, such as Sen. Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts, who he said has been “legendary” in the climate fight, have lately been quiet on the issue.
Their silence seems to correlate with polls showing that climate ranks low, or falling, on people’s priority lists. Regular Pew Research Center surveys consistently find that climate is near the bottom of people’s priority lists. An April poll from the center found that support for the United States prioritizing renewable energy development over fossil fuels has declined from 79% to 57% in the last six years – and it even declined among Democrats. And a compilation of YouGov polls show that 4.5% of Americans currently rank climate change and the environment as the most important issue for them, down from a high of 16.6% in December 2021.
Roberts said that people do care about the issues – the 2025 Rhode Island Life Index survey found that 62% of Rhode Islanders say that climate change is a serious problem in their community. But it’s not always at the top of people’s priority lists because things like the economy and crime can take precedence in voters’ minds.
Climate hushers, Whitehouse argues on social media, fall into the problem of “poll-chasing,” where they ask what voters think and parrot that back instead of leading on an issue. Instead, he and Roberts said, politicians themselves can raise the salience of climate change.
“Democrats can drive this public opinion if they choose to,” Roberts said. “These issues don’t just happen by themselves. There’s a whole theory on what drives public opinion, and there’s some great research on environmental sociology that says that it comes from party elites. That the opinion on climate change doesn’t just happen by itself; it’s really what are the politicians talking about that drives public opinion.”
Plus, Whitehouse suggested in the interview that when people connect the dots between climate change and their lives, the issue skyrockets in priority to them. He mentioned a poll he often cites that found 92% of voters in Texas are worried about home insurance, a higher amount than were worried about health care, and that 66% of Texas voters connected their home insurance concern to climate-driven extreme weather.
Why is Whitehouse still trying?
Climate change, along with what he sees as political corruption from fossil fuel companies funding legislators, is Whitehouse’s top policy issue because of its urgency and how it’s intertwined with everything else.
“It’s already in your increased grocery prices. It’s already in your increased electricity prices. It’s already in your increased home and auto insurance prices. So if you want to deal with those big cost increases, you’ve got to face the facts about what fossil fuel emissions do,” Whitehouse told Political Scene. “We’re in kind of a gradual stage of this economic distress, but there’s every prediction that this goes really bad all at once.”
It’s not that climate change is more important than issues such as wars or rights, but that it’s the context in which everything is happening, said Cleetus, of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“Yes, there are many pressing challenges, geopolitical challenges, that are making news headlines,” Cleetus said. “Climate change is not stopping for the politics. It’s here. It’s the background condition that’s exacerbating a lot of the acute challenges people are already facing.”
And it’s not some abstract, future problem either, Whitehouse said. While states such as Florida and Texas may be seeing the brunt of the home insurance crisis, Rhode Island won’t be far behind. He’s afraid of another insurance meltdown in the state, like the Rhode Island Share and Deposit Indemnity Corp. collapse in 1991.
Whitehouse argues that voters are ahead of politicians on this issue. And Roberts is optimistic that lawmakers will come around, too, especially if the midterms don’t go Trump’s way.
“I think the pendulum is about to swing back, and people, I mean this, people do care about this issue over the long haul,” Roberts said. “We need people like Sheldon Whitehouse who are continuing to talk about it.”
