About a dozen students and a few adults formed a circle around U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., Monday night in the Rhode Island School of Design's Tap Room for a 45-minute discussion about energy policy.
"The story at home is a good story," Whitehouse said, sitting casually on a stool. "The story nationally is a little more problematic."
Whitehouse said the Republicans recently elected to Congress, with a few exceptions, were "climate deniers."
Those who ignore climate change present a "loser economic argument" because the failure to act now will cost more in the future and would allow other countries to gain technological advantages over the U.S. in the production of alternative energy technologies, he said.
"Trying to get ahead of that is much to our economic interests," Whitehouse said. "But in the same way that they don't believe in climate change, they don't believe in economics."
When asked why Republicans so rarely support alternative energies from a perspective of national security, Whitehouse was frank.
"They've made a very clear choice that they're going to side with the strong industrial interests, and not the national security community."
Whitehouse, who serves on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, among other assignments, gave the group a brief report on the state of the oceans.
"We're punishing our oceans in so many different ways," he said. "Ocean acidification is one, and pollution is another."
In Rhode Island, oceans are expected to rise by eight to 12 inches by the end of the century according to conservative estimates, he said.
Whitehouse said he is working to garner approval to set up a National Endowment for the Oceans, which would distribute money to study and restore the nation's oceans and other bodies of water.
The initiative, which he called bipartisan, is his biggest project right now in the Senate and comes at an important time, he said.
"The rate of change that is being witnessed is faster than the ability of science to model from historical data," Whitehouse said, which is all the more reason to devote more resources to studying environmental changes.
Whitehouse predicted that environmental changes could soon cause international conflicts, as flows of rivers change and no substantial treaty exists to stop countries from waging warfare by means of pollution affecting other countries.
When asked by a RISD student what young artists could do to help the environmental cause, Whitehouse encouraged connecting art and design to the issues in a way that frames the debate constructively.
"Climate change is somewhat complicated," Whitehouse said. "If only someone could just display it in a way that's simple and convincing."
Whitehouse recalled that in trying to persuade Pakistani officials to pursue the Taliban within their borders, one of the pivotal turning points came when the Pakistanis came to see their situation in the context of a picture of a Pakistani girl being whipped by the Taliban.
"In the viral world that we live in, it can be very little things," he said. "There's a sort of guerilla potential there to find it and grow it and sort of get it out there."
Students should also vote if they want to help the cause, Whitehouse said. He attributed much of the ground gained by Republicans in Congress last week to low youth turnout compared to the turnout of young voters in 2008 for President Obama.
The event was organized by the Rhode Island Student Climate Coalition, a network of local college environmental activists.
