Taylor Swift’s Wedding Guests Don’t Know Ceremony Location — Yet
Rhode Island
Whitehouse has given 300+ climate speeches. Why he’s still trying
Whitehouse climate speeches over the decades
Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has been speaking out about climate change for decades
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.”
Rhode Island
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s 1st Choice for Wedding Was Rhode Island: Why They Pivoted to NYC
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce initially had their sights set on a marvelous coastal wedding, multiple sources exclusively tell Us Weekly.
“Taylor and Travis really wanted their wedding in Rhode Island, and June 13 was the date, but security wouldn’t have worked because it could get out of hand with that kind of scale of an event,” an insider says.
Though everything was initially being planned in Rhode Island — where Swift, 36, has a mansion in the lavish Watch Hill neighborhood of Westerly — the insider notes the pop star had booked multiple venues from coast to coast on different dates.
According to the source, “Ocean House [in Westerly] was planned at one point, and then plans changed to New York.”
The insider, meanwhile, tells Us that Swift’s security “had to assess all the venues to see what made sense.”
“Rhode Island wasn’t great because the nature of the access and the perimeters were too difficult to secure,” the source explains. “So the main issue with Rhode Island ended up being security.”
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Getty Images
“Everything was being planned in Rhode Island,” added a source. “And so many people wanted to come that plans had to change because it became bigger.”
Swift and Kelce, 36, are now rumored to be tying the knot at Madison Square Garden in New York City over the July 4 holiday weekend. While the exact location and date of the nuptials have not yet been confirmed, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani appeared to hint at the wedding taking place in the city during a June 15 press conference earlier this month.
“I am fully confident in the work of the NYPD, as well as our state partners, in delivering that safe experience,” he told reporters. “We are the biggest city in the country. We are used to big events, and we are incredibly excited for the [World Cup]. We know it coincides with the Knicks’ [NBA] Finals run. We know it coincides with July 4, America 250, Taylor Swift’s wedding — all happening at the same time — and we are so excited to welcome the world here.”
Additionally, a permit was filed with NYC in June, the mayor’s spokesperson Dora Pekec confirmed to Us after The New York Times reported on a permit to close the streets surrounding MSG from July 2 to midday July 4 for an event on July 3.
City sources also confirmed to Us that the Street Activity Permit Office (SAPO), which issues the permits, is in touch with the NYPD regarding a possible influx of street and pedestrian traffic.
Though Swift and Kelce’s Rhode Island wedding plans fell through, the “I Knew It, I Knew You” singer’s Watch Hill mansion had an uptick in action last week when security was spotted swarming the area. A group of unidentified women were reportedly seen on the balcony wearing matching robes — three in black and one in white — sparking speculation about a bachelorette party.
A woman who appeared to be Swift’s childhood friend Abigail Anderson Berard was also seen on the property with her 2-year-old son.
Meanwhile, Travis celebrated what was perceived as his bachelor party in Los Angeles and San Diego. The Kansas City Chiefs tight end and his brother, Jason Kelce, as well as Travis’ teammate Patrick Mahomes and others, were spotted at a Chris Lake concert, a Dave Chappelle comedy show, a night out at the members-only Bird Street Club and more.
Swift and Kelce began dating in the summer of 2023 and got engaged in August 2025.
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Journal Staff
Rhode Island Energy is currently installing advanced smart meters for all electricity customers. Clean energy and environmental advocates have championed advanced metering for decades because the systems enable incentives for conservation, solar integration and energy storage. The primary vehicle for realizing these benefits is Time-Varying Rates (TVR).
Unlike legacy meters, advanced meters track when electricity is used, not just how much is used. TVR encourages customers to shift heavy usage, like running a clothes dryer or charging an electric vehicle, to off-peak overnight hours when wholesale power is cheap and cleaner. This flattens the grid’s peak demand, brings down wholesale energy costs for everyone and reduces our reliance on polluting “peaker” power plants.
The Rhode Island Public Utility Commission (PUC) is charged with balancing the interests of utility customers with value to utility shareholders. It sets the formulas by which the utility is compensated.
The primary means the utility is compensated is based on a Return on Equity invested (ROE) that is predetermined by the PUC and currently set at 9.275%. Rhode Island Energy’s capital investments are funded through roughly 51% equity (shareholder capital) and 49% debt. For every $100 million the utility spends on infrastructure, about $51 million is financed via equity, allowing shareholders to collect an annual pre-tax profit of 9.275% on that portion, or roughly $4.73 million. The more the utility spends, the more their shareholders earn.
At a cost of over $188 million for the new meters, Rhode Island Energy shareholders will collect nearly $9 million a year in profit for 20 years from the equity portion of that investment alone, while also saving money on labor by eliminating the need for truck based drive-by meter readers.
But advanced metering was supposed to benefit ratepayers as well as the utility. Though the meter expenditures were approved by the PUC in 2023 and the meters installations are expected to be completed by the end of this year, it is expected to take until at least 18 months after the meter rollout is completed to implement the billing system infrastructure needed to enable Time-Varying Rates.
The upgrades that deliver more profit to the utility bottom line was fast tracked, while the investment needed to implement the primary benefits to ratepayers is being slow walked. Why weren’t the software upgrades and hardware deployment run in parallel?
Right now, the PUC is weighing a huge general rate case (Docket No. 25-45-GE). Rhode Island Energy has proposed aggressively hiking its profit margin, seeking to raise its ROE from 9.275% to 10.75% and expand its equity share from 51% to 57%.
In their 2022 advanced metering filing, Rhode Island Energy suggested the new infrastructure would yield $729 million in benefits over 20 years. So far, the utility is seeing plenty of that benefit on its bottom line, while ratepayers have mostly seen higher costs. The PUC should reject the utility’s requested rate increases, preserve the current rate structure, and insist that Time-Varying Rates be fully operational before any further rate changes are considered.
Fred Unger is a retired energy project developer and clean energy advocate based in Providence.
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