The Environmental Protection Agency under the Bush administration "has simply not lived up to its name or its mission," Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, told a full Salomon 101 on Monday afternoon. Whitehouse also addressed both national politics and local issues and praised Brown for its environmental initiatives.
The Bush administration "has let politics govern policy and put blind ideology before scientific fact," Whitehouse said.
Whitehouse is a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which last week held a hearing on the request by 16 states, including Rhode Island, to set their own regulations for vehicle tailpipe emissions, according to a Jan. 25 press release from Whitehouse's office.
The 16 states account for half the U.S. population and more than 30 percent of vehicles on American roads. In 2005, California set new emissions standards that will affect cars built in 2009 and afterwards. If the states adopt California's new standards, as much as 392 million metric tons of emissions could be cut by 2020, the press release said - the equivalent of removing 74 million of today's cars from the road for a year and potentially saving the country $25.8 billion of gasoline.
But in December the EPA denied the states' request. In response, the EPW, led by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., introduced a bill on Jan. 24 that would "direct the EPA to reverse its decision," according to a Jan. 25 Washington Post article. Whitehouse commended Brown on having achieved in 1991 "one of the lowest energy densities and carbon footprints of universities of its kind." He also recognized other University efforts, such as recycling about 35 percent of solid waste materials and reducing energy consumption in building projects, purchasing fuel-efficient vehicles and delivering 90 percent of food left on dining hall trays to a local pig farmer, "resulting in what I'm sure must be among the happiest pigs in New England," Whitehouse said to laughter from the audience.
He also praised the recently launched Community Carbon Use Reduction program, which aims to reduce emissions to 42 percent below 2007 levels by the year 2020 for existing buildings.
Climate change should be of special concern to Rhode Islanders, Whitehouse said, because of the state's extensive coastlines and its economic reliance on the ocean. Narragansett Bay's annual mean winter temperature has increased about 4 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 20 years, Whitehouse said, dramatically affecting the region's ecology and economy. For example, some fish species that live in warmer water are replacing cold-water fish that are more commercially valuable, weakening the state's economy.
But global climate change could have a far more serious effect in the state than endangering certain species of fish. Rising sea levels could destroy many cities and towns, Whitehouse said.
"Barrington would be submerged," he said. "Downtown Providence, just blocks from where we sit, would be underwater."
To illustrate the astonishing speed of climate change, Whitehouse spoke of his trip to Greenland with other members of the EPW committee. Whitehouse said he saw a glacier in an ice fjord "melting so quickly that if you stand next to it for merely an hour you can actually watch it move." He added that the glacier moves twice as fast today as it did twenty years ago.
Despite his criticism of the current administration and his grim visions of the globe's future, Whitehouse was optimistic about Congressional efforts to address environmental issues, citing the Warner-Lieberman America's Climate Security Act - which he called "an historic piece of legislation." The bill would reduce greenhouse gas emissions in this country by 70 percent in the next 40 years.
Whitehouse also stressed the economic repercussions of environmental legislation. He said the "clean-tech sector" was projected to produce 50,000 new jobs in the next two years, and urged an increase in federal investment in climate change research. The Climate Security Act includes a cap-and-trade system which "will force polluters to pay for the costs of pollution," Whitehouse said.
Looking ahead, Whitehouse said America needs a new president "who will lead this country to action, so we can address this problem before it's too late."
He publicly supports Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., in the 2008 presidential election. His support, Whitehouse told The Herald, is personal: "I have a long, long association with her." He added that he had "many close friends in common" with the Clintons.
According to Clinton's presidential campaign Web site, Whitehouse is the co-chair of her campaign in Rhode Island. In 1994, then-President Bill Clinton nominated Whitehouse to be the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island, according to Whitehouse's Web site.
He said that Hillary Clinton is also well equipped to deal with what he called the "Bush overhang" - problems created by the current administration that will burden the next.
"I'm anxious that things will go seriously, seriously wrong in the early days and months of the new president's tenure," Whitehouse told The Herald. "I was very comfortable supporting (Clinton). I thought she was very, very capable in terms of being able to withstand whatever the Bush overhang threw at the next president."
Whitehouse replied with an enthusiastic "Oh, yeah" when asked whether Clinton agreed with him on climate change reform.
"Every Democratic candidate is fantastic on this," he added.
Whitehouse's lecture opened a week-long series on campus called Focus the Nation, part of the nation-wide movement of the same name that is a "national teach-in on global warming solutions for America," according to the organization's Web site. The week's events, run by the student group emPOWER, are a "big kick-off for the semester," said Danielle Dahan '11, who organized the Focus the Nation week at Brown. The week includes panels and discussions about climate change issues from corporate, religious and economic points of view, as well as a "green fair" and a symposium.
