On May 20, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) strolled to the Senate floor with a resolution asking his colleagues to agree on a “simple truth:” that climate change is real.
It wasn’t the first time he’d done this. Whitehouse first introduced the resolution in December 2025 and tried to get it passed last January. Nearly every week since, the Senator has taken the resolution to the floor, asking, “Climate change is real. Can we agree on that simple truth?”
Apparently not. After Whitehouse’s most recent attempt, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) objected “with a smile on my face,” he said. Johnson proceeded to recite a popular playlist of fossil fuel talking points to counter the argument that climate change is a problem worth tackling.
“I don’t deny climate change. Climate change is real. It has always changed; it always will,” said Johnson. “I certainly am not going to subscribe to any resolution that would cause policy here to spend trillions — misspend, waste, trillions of dollars on a fool’s errand trying to hold back the tides.”
Whitehouse did not sound surprised.
“I would only advise my friend from Wisconsin that he just might want to consider running his argument by the University of Wisconsin before trotting it out on the Senate floor,” he replied.
Whitehouse keeps doing things like this. For years, he has been one of Congress’s most relentless climate voices, delivering more than 300 “Time to Wake Up” speeches on the Senate floor about climate change and the fossil fuel industry’s political power.
Lately, that persistence has taken a more targeted form: pressing the Trump administration over its extraordinary new favors to the oil and gas industry; investigating its decision to exempt Gulf drilling from endangered species protections; and pushing a
