Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse on Democrats’ Failures—and Opportunities for a Climate Comeback
The Rhode Island climate hawk’s prescription for a sidelined Democratic Party: name fossil fuel corruption, localize the impacts and use cost-of-living pain to rally voters.

By Aidan Hughes
August 18, 2025

Seven months into President Donald Trump’s second term in office, the environmental movement has suffered a rolling wave of defeats.

From the proposed repeal of the EPA’s key “endangerment finding” for greenhouse gases to the Big Beautiful Bill’s accelerated phaseout of wind and solar tax credits, the current administration has sided with the fossil fuel industry in its quest for “energy dominance” and sought to undo many of the movement’s most prominent accomplishments.

Shut out of power in both chambers of Congress and the White House, Democrats have been unable to stem that tide of environmental setbacks.

Amid those losses, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) delivered his 300th “Time to Wake Up” speech in mid-July. It was the latest in a series of climate speeches dating back to 2012, the topics of which ranged from the need to regulate methane emissions to the environmental impacts of “court capture” by dark money groups.

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