Democrat Senator claims fossil fuel industry is undercutting weather forecasting – Watts Up With That?

Guest “Just when you thought Democrats couldn’t get any dumber” by David Middleton

Whitehouse: ‘I Can’t Prove It’, But I Think Fossil Fuel Industry Getting Trump to Undercut Weather Forecasting

By Ian Hanchett 10 Jul 2025

On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) stated that he “can’t prove it” but believes that the fossil fuel industry is trying to get the Trump administration to undercut weather forecasting because “They know that when people talk about the weather and give weather warnings, they’re going to talk about climate change now.”

[…]

Breitbart

How can a person become this stupid? Does this total fracking moron not realize that accurate weather forecasts are critically important to oil & gas operations, particularly offshore operations?

Well, it appears that it is very easy to be this STUPID when you’re Sheldon Whitehouse. Stupid, corrupt, vindictive and, did I mention stupid?

Climate Policy Enemies List

Whitehouse has delivered more than 200 speeches on the Senate floor dedicated to climate change and other environmentalist topics. ⁹ He has accused some in the energy industry of acting like “thugs” who “own the joint” (meaning the U.S. Congress), and has declared government officials who oppose him to be “stooges” of the energy industry. ⁹

In a May 2015 opinion piece in the Washington Post, Whitehouse advocated a federal lawsuit against the energy industry using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. ⁴ Originally designed for and used in criminal cases to prosecute the mafia, RICO has a civil-lawsuit component that has since been applied to corporate targets such as cigarette manufacturers. Whitehouse admitted he did not “have enough information” to know whether “racketeering activity” had actually occurred with the energy industry, but speculated the civil discovery in a RICO lawsuit might uncover the evidence. ⁴ In March 2016, then-U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced she had referred Whitehouse’s RICO concern to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). ¹⁰

In July 2016, two months after the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands sent a subpoena demanding private internal research records, communications, and donor information to libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), Whitehouse led a group of 19 U.S. Senate Democrats in a two-day series of floor speeches denouncing CEI and many other free-market think tanks, with Whitehouse saying the research organizations were part of a “filthy thing in our democracy.” The Senate campaign was aimed at passage of a Congressional resolution that would have called on the non-profit groups to cooperate with “active or future investigations” of their climate-policy positions that might be launched against them by federal or state law enforcement officials. ¹¹

The CEI president responded, saying Whitehouse had become the “new Sen. Joe McCarthy,” and that it “is unhealthy for democracy and abusive when members of Congress create an enemies list based on policy positions.” ¹¹ A joint letter sent to all of the Democratic Senators from 22 targeted think tanks stated: “Your threat is clear: There is a heavy and inconvenient cost to disagreeing with you. Calls for debate will be met with political retribution. That’s called tyranny. And, we reject it.” ⁵

Whitehouse demanded a more-serious pursuit of a RICO case in 2018 and complained that Democrats still “haven’t done the basic due diligence prosecutors do putting an org chart together against a criminal enterprise.” ¹²

Influence Watch

Related