Sen. Whitehouse: Majority Leader Reid happy with climate push

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said the Senate’s top Democrat is a fan of his efforts to raise the profile of climate change.

“Just the other day, the majority leader, Harry Reid, stopped me as I was going by and said, ‘Sheldon, I really appreciate the attention you're bringing to climate change and carbon. You're doing us all a real service by doing that.’ I hear it regularly,” Whitehouse tells Inside Climate News.

Whitehouse has, over the past year, been giving weekly Senate floor speeches on climate change and the need for stronger action to address it.

And he recently launched a bicameral climate task force with Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.).

Whitehouse, in the interview, reiterates calls for creating a cost to emit carbon, which could be done through a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax.

But those ideas don't have anywhere near enough traction on Capitol Hill to advance. Indeed Reid, despite the "attaboy," has not brought climate legislation to the floor in over four years.

The cap-and-trade and energy plan that former Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) crafted, lacking votes, never made it to the floor in 2010.

Climate advocates, however, are also trying to create political space for what are expected to be new executive actions from President Obama during his second term.

Whitehouse also describes the common Senate ritual of making a speech to a largely empty chamber.

“One of the odd things about being a senator is you get used to giving speeches in a very lightly populated Senate chamber. But what you learn to appreciate is that even though there may be only a few colleagues in the room either waiting to speak or presiding or finishing up their remarks, the TV network [C-SPAN] is going to [broadcast it] to all the staffers who are watching and listening ... on the monitors in their offices,” he said in the interview with Inside Climate News.

“So although you don't actually see your audience in front of you, you have quite a big audience. And of course we try to push this out beyond the immediate Senate community to the media and environmental community and the scientific community,” Whitehouse said.