Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) is someone who has a high opinion of himself — which is not based on a whole lot of anything.
He’s like Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) — they both think they’re something because they like to use whiteboards. They think they have “fans” because they’ve managed to snooker some folks on the left into thinking they’re doing something on those whiteboards other than just performance art. But most people mock such silliness.
Sen. Whitehouse is known for something else as well — the controversy a couple of years ago about his alleged membership in an alleged all-white beach club. After tripping all over himself, he eventually claimed he wasn’t a member (after the controversy took off), although his family was and his wife was a shareholder. He said he wasn’t going to ask them to leave the club. The club tried to claim they had non-white members but because they wouldn’t reveal their membership, there’s no way of verifying that. Whitehouse admitted to belonging to another club — a “sailing club” — that “lacked diversity.” Even the BLM has called on him to cut his ties with the beach club.
So when a Heritage Foundation economist, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who is the director of the Center For Energy, Climate, and Environment, took Whitehouse and just curb stomped him during questioning, it was something to behold. She’s been the chief economist of the Labor Department, the equivalent to the chief economist of the Treasury Department, and chief of staff to the Council of Economic Advisors. So she brought a lot of experience and intelligence to bear and Whitehouse was just seriously outmatched in every way.
Whitehouse asked Furchtgott-Roth about Heritage’s corporate donors, trying to connect the Foundation to the Koch Brothers and fossil fuel companies. Furchtgott-Roth went to town on him, explaining that he and his family seemed far more connected to fossil fuels than was the budget of the Heritage Foundation. She also got in a glorious shot about the beach club.
“I don’t have the benefit of being able to rely on a family fortune made in the Minnesota gas business, or having my spouse’s family fortune come from United Gas,” Furchtgott-Roth said. “And The Heritage Foundation is a club that anyone can join, not just white people. During 2021, it had hundreds of thousands of individual, foundation, and corporate supporters representing every state in the United States.”
Furchtgott-Roth explained that 82 percent of their donations came from individual donations. Only one percent of their money came from corporations, completely doing in Whitehouse’s argument about the Kochs. That’s such a ridiculous argument to pull out, anyway, particularly because Democrats have all kinds of rich corporate donors, indeed probably far more than the Republicans. But leftist Democrats pull it out all the time.
Furchgott-Roth schooled Whitehouse on every issue he spewed out, including on renewables.
“You wrote, for instance, in a Forbes column last year that renewables actually increase global emissions. Do you stand by that comment?” he said.
Furchtgott-Roth explained the piece.
“Yes. Because they’re made with coal-fired power plants in China. I did explain that if renewables were the wind turbines and solar panels are made and batteries are made with coal-fired plants in China,” she said. “I did explain that if these were made with emissions-free energy such as nuclear power, then the benefits to the environment would be much greater. But many environmentalists who are in favor of renewables are against dense emission nuclear power, and therefore making these renewables often raises emissions.”
Yet Whitehouse and the Democrats don’t want to admit what she just said about all the costs of renewables, and in what ways they hurt the environment.
When Whitehouse questioned her about the human component of climate change, she was ready for him again. She pulled out a book and waved it.
“Yes. Scientists disagree on the human component of global warming,” she said. “And in this book, ‘Unsettled’ by Steve Koonin, who was under secretary of energy under President Obama, and who taught for 30 years at CalTech and has a PhD in physics from MIT, he says that, ‘It is uncertain how much human activity affects global warming. The case is unsettled,’ and I’m no better scientist than he is.”
That left Whitehouse with nothing, and he quickly tried to duck out with a lame response, “Well, thank you very much. It’s notable that that is the position that the Republican Party intends to stand by.”
What a wonderful response by Furchtgott-Roth. She shows how you can successfully push back against the ridiculousness of the Democrats. She also shows that being smart and prepared is a great thing. But the biggest thing that she showed is what hypocrites Whitehouse and the Democrats are on every level on these issues.
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