Newsmaker

Every Friday, we choose an alum who has been making headlines—for better or for worse.
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Sheldon Whitehouse ’78:
talking climate, for a change

Every week for the past 50 weeks, Sheldon Whitehouse ’78 has made a speech about climate change on the floor of the US Senate.

“I rise today, for the fiftieth time, to urge my colleagues to wake up to what carbon pollution is doing to our atmosphere and oceans,” the Rhode Island Democrat said on November 13. “Once a week. Fifty weeks. Every week. Why? Why do I do this? Well, first, because it’s real. It’s happening.”

The speeches are "deeply researched and beautifully crafted," ranging in tone "from morally outraged to deeply wonky," Bloomberg reports in an article headlined "One Senator's War Against Climate Change."

Whitehouse delivers the lectures "with passion—to a mostly empty room," the article contineus. "But 100 years from now, when our grandchildren look back and try to understand what we were doing while the world burned, these speeches may well be some of the most famed rhetoric of the age."

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