Whitehouse BURIES GOP Senators With Their Own TRILLION-DOLLAR Mess

本站添加: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]If we im go down this road, how much will your utility bill go up? How much gas prices will go up? We need to actually talk more honestly about that. If we spend $50 or however much it takes to make the United States carbon neutral by 2050, how much will it lower world temperatures? Senator, that depends on the rest of the world. We create harmonized incentives to reduce >> in the tooth fairy?

[00:00:26]No, sir. Do you believe in the Easter Bunny? No, sir. Do you believe that Jimmy Hoffa died of natural causes?

[00:00:33]Almost exactly 5 years ago, I sent around this binder to all of my Senate colleagues in which I compiled some of the most compelling warnings about the economic risks associated with climate change.

[00:00:49]Last week, I sent your staffs an updated version of the binder.

[00:00:55]Here it is.

[00:00:57]As you can see, the warnings keep piling up.

[00:01:01]Have fun with the light reading. What's up, everybody? Major retired Mitchell here and Earth Day was first held on April 22nd, 1970. It started in the United States as a massive grassroots movement led by Senator Gaylord Nelson, who wanted to bring national attention to growing environmental disasters like oil spills, polluted rivers, toxic air, and unchecked industrial damage. Now, keep in mind at the time there were no real federal environmental protections.

[00:01:26]There was no EPA. There was no Clean Air Act as we know it today. So, Earth Day was created to raise public awareness about environmental destruction and to pressure politicians to take action, while uniting people across political lines around protecting the planet. And it worked.

[00:01:44]Around 20 million Americans, that's roughly 10% of the United States population at the time, took to the streets, campuses, and communities all across the country. And that momentum led directly to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act.

[00:02:02]At its core, Earth Day was about and still is one simple idea, holding power accountable for what it does to the planet and protecting the systems that keep us all alive. Look at our national debt.

[00:02:15]One thing that stands out is how much of it was incurred as a result of exogenous shocks to the economy.

[00:02:23]Consider the 2008 financial crisis, which blew up the financial security of families and businesses across the country and reduced government revenues for a decade. Deloitte predicts the differential between being responsible and reckless about climate could sum to more than $220 trillion globally between now and 2070.

[00:02:44]>> [snorts] >> Some of these warned-of risks are already upon us.

[00:02:47]Already climate-related natural disasters increase federal spending on disaster assistance, flood insurance, crop insurance, and other programs we fund.

[00:02:56]But this is just the beginning. It will certainly get worse, much worse, particularly if warming exceeds 1.5°.

[00:03:04]We are on a bad trajectory. Earth Day was never about celebration. It was about accountability. And what Senator Sheldon Whitehouse just laid out shows exactly how that accountability has been buried by money, influence, and denial.

[00:03:18]This isn't politics anymore. This is survival. And we're running out of time to get it right. And honestly, on Earth Day 2026, there may not be a more fitting message than what Senator Sheldon Whitehouse just laid out.

[00:03:31]Because this is exactly what accountability is supposed to look like.

[00:03:35]And it's the urgency he spoke with and the compassion he led with for environmental justice that really set the stage for this entire debate.

[00:03:45]Because once he got going, it was over.

[00:03:48]It's time for us all to wake up and face the problem before coastal cities flood with water or southwest cities can't get water.

[00:03:56]I hope we can fend that off with action if we snap into focus on the danger. We need to head off climate change at the oil spigot.

[00:04:06]That means taking on the fossil fuel industries increasingly desperate lies and it's well-funded political juggernaut that does such evil in this building.

[00:04:20]We know how to solve this problem.

[00:04:23]We just don't do it because fossil fuel fingers creep through so many corners of the capital.

[00:04:31]He basically strapped the GOP's environmental agenda to a spanking machine and started cranking the wheel, landing surgical precision strikes one after another after another. And what did they all have in response? Lindsey Graham talking about gas prices, John Kennedy asking witnesses if they believe in the Easter Bunny. Yeah. That's what they've got. That's the level of seriousness that we're dealing with. And Sheldon Whitehouse made them pay for it.

[00:05:03]And this is where it all comes full circle. Earth Day was about building protections, clean air, clean water, holding corporations accountable. And now we're watching those same protections get chipped away, rolled back, weakened so corporations could cut corners, dump more pollution, and walk away with the profit while the rest of us deal with the damage. That was the whole reason Earth Day existed in the first place. And look at where we are now.

[00:05:33]Rising temperatures, drought conditions, out here in Colorado and across Southwest, we didn't even really have a winter. No snowpack, record highs, trees blooming early. Nobody knows what this summer is going to look like. That's not normal. That's the warning. And while all of that is happening, the people pushing this agenda act like it's nothing. Like we've got time. Like there's no urgency. But we don't get to escape this. Regular people don't have rockets to go start a colony on the moon. We don't have backup plans. We don't get to leave to Antarctica when things go bad. We're the ones who live with the consequences. And that's exactly why what Sheldon Whitehouse is saying matters. Because if we don't act now, if we don't if we keep ignoring this, delaying this, pretending this isn't happening, then yeah, at some point it's not going to be a debate anymore. It's just going to be reality.

[00:06:29]And this is where you have to zoom out and really look at what's going on.

[00:06:33]Because this isn't just about one policy or one debate. This is about a mindset, a worldview. We're watching legislators actively try to roll back protections to a time before the Clean Air Act, before the EPA, before we even acknowledge that poisoning our air and water was a problem. That's not progress, and that's sure as hell not good stewardship of the land. And they're doing it in the face of every warning sign imaginable. Rising seas, melting ice caps, dying glaciers, record temperatures, oceans changing, entire ecosystems under stress. We can see it. We can measure it. We're living in it. And still they push forward.

[00:07:13]Because to them this isn't about life.

[00:07:16]It's not about the planet. It's not about the future. It's all about the profit. And when profit becomes the only thing that matters, everything else becomes expendable, including us. That's the part people don't want to say out loud. We are approaching a point where some of these changes don't just get fixed with policy or elections. They become permanent, irreversible, the kind of damage you don't come back from.

[00:07:44]That's the edge we're standing on right now. And it is the exact opposite of what Earth Day was meant to be. Earth Day was about protecting life, about recognizing that some things are bigger than politics, bigger than profit, bigger than ideology. And the question now is simple. Are we going to follow Sheldon Whitehouse's advice? Are we going to live up to that? Or are we going to keep pretending this isn't happening until it's too late? And that, ladies and gentlemen, is an absolute fact. Sappers clear the way, airborne all the way.