Happy Earth Day, Contrarians! Today, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and U.S. Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) will hold a press conference to support the reintroduction of their the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act. Trump’s war of choice in Iran has given Big Oil companies a permission slip to increase prices at an exorbitant amount. Congress has an obligation to curb this type of profiteering to protect Americans.
Now, Sen. Whitehouse joins Jen expose the connection between the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, Trump appeasing his fossil fuel donors, and the stifling of putting clean energy on the grid.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse represents Rhode Island in the U.S. Senate, where he champions policies to uphold American leadership in the world, protect our planet in a changing climate, and hold the powerful accountable.
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor in Chief of the Contrarian. We are delighted to have back with us Senator Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island. Welcome, Senator!
Sheldon Whitehouse
Thank you, Jen. Great to be with you again.
Jen Rubin
It is lovely. We are recording this late in the day on Tuesday, but it will air on Earth Day tomorrow. You will, along with Ro Khanna, are going to be reintroducing a measure that you have presented before. Tell us about that.
Sheldon Whitehouse
The predicament we’re trying to solve is that American consumers watch their gasoline prices skyrocket. When international problems drive the world oil price up. We did this before. when the war criminal Putin invaded Ukraine, and that sent world oil prices soaring, and American oil companies that had no connection with Ukraine or any of that in their supply chain nevertheless took the moment to Raise their prices with the world market. And the result was—I’m not speaking, exaggeratedly here, this is a factual, literal thing—the largest corporate profits ever reported. And I think it was $120 billion. It’s an enormous, enormous number.
So, Ro joined my excess profits clawback bill at the time. And here we are again with another international conflict that is causing Americans to experience dramatically increased gasoline and diesel prices. And a lot of that It’s diesel and gasoline. Pumped. In America, piped in America, refined in America, and trucked in America to American gas stations. Nothing changed in their costs. Of the oil companies, but when they see the international price go through the roof, they all agree automatically to do the exact same thing and raise all their prices, and so we are going to see another huge, huge surge of excess profits into the big oil, and Trump isn’t going to do anything about it, because this is another way that he pays back his donors. Yeah. So, it’s up to Congress to press to claw back some of that excess profit and get it back to the Americans who paid it at the pump.
Jen Rubin
Today is a good time, I guess, to take stock of how much damage this administration has done. In terms of dismantling regulations with the help of the Supreme Court, hollowing out EPA, Is there some way of quantifying this? How much time we’ve lost in the global warming? Is there some way that you can approximate how much damage these people are doing?
Sheldon Whitehouse
You know, it’s hard to do. I would, one number that comes to mind is that the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden Clean Energy Initiative, was estimated to add 520 520 gigawatts of excess clean energy by 2030. So all of that would have provided clean energy that would have displaced fossil fuel. And so you lose 520 gigawatts of fossil fuel pollution.
I can’t put an emissions number on that, because it depends on what the source is that gets taken off the grid for the clean energy, but one point that’s very much worth making in this space is that when Trump blocks clean energy from getting on the grid. That fails to displace. the more and more expensive fossil fuel units that make up what they call the generation stack. So as demand goes up, up the stack they go to more and more expensive units, bring in the clean energy, and you don’t have to go to the more expensive units, because the demand doesn’t go that high, because the clean energy met it down here. So, customers save money, there are fewer emissions. And everybody’s happy, except, of course, big oil, because those units aren’t running, they’re not dealing oil to them, and so they lose money, so they’re the big winners in Trump’s fossil fuel scheme to suppress clean energy on the grid.
Jen Rubin
And China is as well, since they now dominate in the EV and solar panel business, and would love nothing better than to sell it all over the world.
Sheldon Whitehouse
Yeah. They’re mercantile planners trying to make themselves the place to go to buy clean energy appliances, clean energy vehicles, clean energy supplies, solar, all of it. Every place that they get ahead of us and get technical advantage. is probably one day a lost sale from an American company to a Chinese company, because they’ve run ahead of us in the marketplace.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. Again, with reference to Earth Day, the New York Times had an unbelievable leak of memos from the Supreme Court detailing the evolution of the so-called shadow docket. And wouldn’t you know, it had to do with an area that you’re very familiar with. And what you see is John Roberts pushing, conniving, changing the standard of review in order to set up the Supreme Court as the ultimate determination of energy regulation. Were you surprised at all by that? Did that confirm your hunch that he is really, not the, balls and strikes guy he made himself out to be?
Sheldon Whitehouse
Yeah, I don’t know how many speeches I’ve given, in which I said that Citizens United was a decision basically by and for the fossil fuel industry, and that the dark money that it unleashed powered the fossil fuel industry to be able to squelch all the climate legislation that had been percolating through the Senate, and that the marriage between the climate denial and corrupt dark money operation of the fossil fuel industry, and the capture of the court and the services that the captured court was delivering to it were one and the same, that they were directly connected.
So, it was a kind of bitter vindication to see that Roberts essentially start The Shadow Docket, break all the rules, do something that was unprecedented, and he does it very explicitly to protect the financial interests of the fossil fuel industry. He talks about the irreparable harm of them.
Maybe, maybe in the future, having to start planning for the six-year-out deadline of the Clean Power Plan. Not a word. Not a word about the immediate climate harm of all the emissions, about the problem that EPA was trying to solve. It was a absolutely single-minded focus on only one thing, and that was how the fossil fuel industry was doing. And what it had said in its pleadings, and how to make them happy, and there was actually some pretty good research at the time.
I think the costs to the industry were going to be about $8 billion. But the savings to the public in cleaner air, less healthcare costs, less environmental damage, were minimum gonna be $30 to $40 billion, so four to five times as much, and that’s the minimum, which could be a good deal much more in savings, so… just to watch them with their blinders on, snuffling away at what matters to the fossil fuel industry, and paying no attention to any other fact that pertains to that discussion, it was… I mean, I hope they’re embarrassed.
Jen Rubin
I would hope so. I think they’re past that, unfortunately. There are so many aspects of hypocrisy that are tied up in that, and I think one is the one you identified, which is when the government doesn’t get to do something, or the government is doing something bad to the fossil fuel industry, that is irreparable harm. But people being sent to CECOT in El Salvador, or the firing of an independent agency, and oh, no, no, no, no, no harm there, no harm there.
Sheldon Whitehouse
Now, they’re very selective about what harms they are willing to look at, and that tracks, you know, their little munchkin, Lee Zeldin, over at EPA right now, who is—again, this is not an exaggeration—I’m not saying this for rhetorical purposes, he actually took out of the cost-benefit calculation that EPA must do by law the harm of fossil fuel pollution. Just, we’re not going to count that. We’re going to count cost to the industry, but the harm that the pollution causes, we’re just going to assume that that is zero, and we’re going to get there by not bothering to ask about it or count it. So, what do you do when you’ve got somebody who’s willing to be so obviously, phony and dishonest?
Jen Rubin
Exactly. Again, we’re recording this on Tuesday afternoon. Mr. Warsh, who wants to replace Mr. Powell at the Federal Reserve, wouldn’t answer a lot of questions. He wouldn’t answer who won in 2020. He wouldn’t answer whether he had invested in Trump operations. He wouldn’t answer whether Mr. Epstein had helped him on any of his investments. How does someone expect to be placed on the Federal Reserve and not answer those kind of basic, fundamental questions?
Sheldon Whitehouse
I think it’s because that Trump and his rather thuggish, administration, hold our Republican colleagues in thrall or in fear. And so, they think that they can just Line up the votes. on Warsh. We have Senator Tillis, Willing to break with his colleagues. He is not running for re-election. So they can’t hurt him… Politically, and he simply dug his heels in that the, sketchy, if not phony. investigation into the Federal Reserve and the subpoenas that were issued in that context. Which judges found to be fake and phony and a means of misusing the prosecutorial process to put pressure on a political figure to do what the president wants, which is to lower interest rates. You know, he took a look at that whole mess and said, well, until that crap stops. I’m a yes vote on Warsh, but I’m not voting for him until that crap stops. So, they’ve got a bit of a obstacle to getting worse. confirmed in the person of Tom Tillis. But over and over again, Trump nominees who can’t answer those questions and won’t answer those questions go scooting through the relevant committee and, voted for by all the Republicans on the floor. They simply have no, like, gag reflex for who they won’t confirm. Or very little, like Matt Gaetz for Attorney General. Okay, great, that one. Low bar.
Jen Rubin
And by the way, one of the questions that was too hard for him to answer was whether he would defend the independence of, for example, Lisa Cook, who is trying to be railroaded off the Fed. He claimed he’s not a constitutional lawyer, so therefore he has no views on the matter. It’s… Right. quite a performance. Last question for you. As we sit here again, Donald Trump, appropriately enough on a Tuesday, has pulled a major taco. He has decided that, he will not and the ceasefire, even though the Strait of Hormuz remains under blockade, and in fact. Don’t restart the war until the talks are finished, one way or the other, and of course.
Sheldon Whitehouse
With no deadline, just indefinitely.
Jen Rubin
Yes. Why do we ever open up the Strait of Hormuz? Seriously, what is he going to give them in order to alleviate this international global energy crisis? Entirely of his making?
Sheldon Whitehouse
Yeah. And as the Iranians, and particularly the Revolutionary Guard, keep their chokehold on the Straits of Hormuz, you’re seeing some really significant disruptions in the economic system, in the transportation system, first in Europe, because they’re closer, but it’s hitting us as well. Flights being canceled, fuel unavailable, airplanes not able to get off the tarmac, costs going through the sky. And, at this point, you know, you’ve seen gasoline and diesel go way up. There was a pause, the cost didn’t fall, they just plateaued for a bit, while the markets held out hope. that this was going to be solved, that the straits were going to reopen.
Now, without that, I suspect we’ll see another big surge, and already in many states, gasoline is over $4, diesel’s nearly $6. So, you know, this is a brutal situation for Republicans coming into a November election with a president who doesn’t care about them. doesn’t understand the situation in Iran at all well, has the mental disposition of a toddler. And seems perfectly happy to destroy the Republican Party around him in his kind of mad day-to-day quest to find a way to move, but it’s really gonna get pretty ugly pretty soon, and so then what does he do?
Does he flip the script yet again and say, okay, now I’m back to threatening to bomb you into the Stone Age? I think what we’ve seen here is the power dynamic in these negotiations, shift from Trump’s expectation that he held all the cards and the Iranians would collapse. To his slow and gradual realization that they actually had cards. And that they’re playing hardball, and actually they feel that they have the cards because of all the economic pressure they can create. So now it’s the Iranians who look like they’re the dominant party in this negotiation, and Trump just folded right in front of him and said, okay, we’re not gonna bomb you for indefinitely, you get to keep the straits closed, all the pressure on us remains, none of the pressure on you of imminent bombardment remains. It’s hard to see how… That’s a successful transaction for the United States of America or for our allies in Europe.
Jen Rubin
I think along the way, he’s going to trade, and this is just supposition, the opening of the Strait of Hormuz for his agreement to lift sanctions. And we will be in a far worse position than we have been for probably the last 20 years or so, and it will make the JCPOA look like a draconian plan to eviscerate Iran, and the first ones to applaud will be Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton. But we have a ways to go, so we’ll see if that works out or not.
Sheldon Whitehouse
Yeah, but today was not a good day for Donald Trump in his Iran mess.
Jen Rubin
No, it was not. But it’s always a good day when we get to speak with you, so thanks so much, we appreciate it, and have a wonderful Earth Day.
Sheldon Whitehouse
Thank you, Jen. You too.
Jen Rubin
Take care. Bye-bye.
