Senate

Senate Dems: GOP needs climate change ‘day of reckoning’

by Jordain Carney - 03/13/15 11:34 AM ET

Senate Democrats slammed Republicans Friday over their climate change tactics.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said Republicans have “no plan” to tackle climate change.

{mosads}”Republicans in Congress have no plan to address climate change and cannot even bear to utter the words. Even worse, the majority leader [Mitch McConnell] wants to impose on states his irresponsible plan for congressional action,” the Senate Democrats wrote in a USA Today op-ed. “The Republican Party in Congress has become the political arm of the fossil fuel industry.”

Reid and Whitehouse were among Senate Democrats who blocked an override of President Obama’s veto of the Keystone XL pipeline earlier this month. Republicans have pledged that they will try to attach the pipeline to a larger bill.

The Democratic duo compared denying climate change to tobacco companies that suggested their products wouldn’t make people sick.

“There is a massive political and public relations operation being run by the fossil fuel industry to create false doubt and plant phony questions to delay their day of reckoning so they can keep making money,” they said. “It’s the same game, and in many cases the same people, that Big Tobacco used for years to raise doubt that its products make people sick.”

Reid and Whitehouse said that Republicans are increasingly out of touch with Americans’ views on climate change.

More than 80 percent of Americans believe that climate change is at least partly caused by human activity, according to a poll by Stanford University, The New York Times, and Resources for the Future released earlier this year.

“As the evidence becomes clearer and clearer, and the American people move farther away from the deniers, the Republican Party must have its own day of reckoning, when it will finally again be able to address — or even mention — climate change,” the senators said. “That day can’t come too soon.”

Tags Harry Reid Sheldon Whitehouse