Putting a price on carbon pollution is one of the best things we can do to stem the tide of climate change.
I think a lot of the people who feel out of step with contemporary society or feel that they've been left back economically or feel disaffected and are drawn to the Republican Party, they are looking for a news source that will tell them something they would like to hear and then is reassuring, emotionally rewarding, and confirming.
Any patient who has a serious illness requiring multiple doctors understands the frustration of lost medical charts, repeated procedures, or having to share the same information over and over with different doctors and nurses.
When I deliver the message to a cross section of Rhode Island that democracy is broken because special interests have relentless power - which prevents politicians from compromising despite popular support on an issue - I don't have any pushback.
I've met students across Rhode Island who rely on Pell Grants. They work hard, play by rules, and are doing everything they can to get the education they need for the jobs of tomorrow.
If we believe in an all-powerful God, then we must then believe that God gave us this Earth, and we must in turn believe that God gave us its laws of gravity, of chemistry, of physics. We must also believe that God gave us our human powers of intellect and reason.
We would like the rest of the world to look up to American democracy. So when there is this kind of folly taking place, it makes it difficult for other rational nations to look up to American democracy.
Every week in the Senate, I give a speech telling my colleagues it is time to wake up to the reality of a changing climate.
The fossil fuel industry has taken control of, and powered up, architecture and methods originally built by the tobacco industry and others to attack and deny science.
Legislation to level the playing field for working families is dead on arrival in the Citizens United Congress.
Muzzling our leading scientists benefits no one.
In the Internet economy, information is everything: The more a company knows about a consumer, the more carefully it can tailor its advertising to that customer, and the more revenue it can generate in return.
My thesis is that government is not, in fact, broken. It's just listening to the wrong people, and it's listening to all of this quiet influence. So it's a very robust operation that operates kind of under the surface.
Most every young man either takes inspiration from his father or wishes he could. I was fortunate in that I could.
According to the IRS, the wealthiest 400 Americans, who earned an average of roughly $270 million in 2008, paid an average tax rate of just 18.2 percent that year. That's about the same rate paid by a single truck driver in Rhode Island. It's not right, and we need to restore fairness to our tax code.
When Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell first proposed the grants that now bear his name, he envisioned a way to help students attend our country's wonderful colleges and universities, so they could share in the American Dream.
The 'Wall Street Journal' is quite irate that I rank them with industry front groups and cranks denying climate change. But they have a record whenever industrial pollutants are involved. Look at the 'Journal''s commentary on acid rain, on the ozone layer, and on climate change.
When we breathe it in, soot can interfere with our lungs and increase the risk of asthma attacks, lung cancer and even premature death. The smallest particles can pass into the blood stream and cause heart disease, stroke and reproductive complications.
When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn't just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms.
I am gravely concerned about climate change.
We must unequivocally reject any cuts to Social Security or Medicare benefits.
As a lawyer, as a former prosecutor, and as a son and grandson of foreign-service officers who tried to represent American democracy in foreign and dangerous places, the idea that this crowd of crooked fossil-fuel types is able to take over and run our democracy like we are a banana republic - I find that repellent.
When counting on learning from innovation, there are great successes but also failures. The Wright Brothers invented the aircraft and started an amazing process of innovation, where we now have planes that carry 500 passengers. Along the way there were some silly looking vehicles that crashed early on.
Not only will a carbon fee reduce carbon emissions, it will force big polluters to pay for the damage their pollution does to public health and the environment, generating billions in new revenue for the American people.
As a co-founder of the Defend Social Security Caucus in the Senate, you can count on me to continue to stand up for our seniors and fight any back door efforts to cut benefits.
It would be a sorry world in which corporations engaged in fraud could pull the screen of the First Amendment over any investigation of their scheme.
Health IT helps save lives now lost due to preventable medical errors, from incorrect diagnoses and needless infections to drug mix-ups and surgical mishaps.
Regulators owned and controlled by industry are not the American way.
I think a lot of the people who voted for Donald Trump were frustrated. And what they thought was, OK, government is broken. Therefore, we're going to send in this incendiary character. And he's just going to going to bust it all up, and we'll see what happens.
We are here to do God's work. He's not here to do ours.
The power the fossil fuel industry exerts over Congress is polluting American democracy, the propaganda it emits through its front groups is polluting our public discourse, and, of course, its carbon emissions are polluting our atmosphere and oceans - it's a triple whammy and a disgrace.
The fossil fuel industry maintains a science denial operation and a political influence operation designed to do just that. What's good for their business is more important to them than what's good for America.
Climate change may not be the most important issue to every American, but strong majorities do consider it a major problem, and they aren't likely to take seriously a candidate who denies the science and who is plainly in the pocket of the polluters.
How arrogant - how very far from humility - would be the self-satisfied, smug assurance that God, a tidy-up-after-us God will come and clean up our mess? Hope for a nanny God, who will with a miracle grant us amnesty from our folly - that's not aligned with either history or the text of the Bible.
Is keeping Big Oil happy with subsidies from the American people more important than addressing our deficit? Should a billionaire who makes a multi-million-dollar gift to a museum receive more tax bang for his charitable buck than a middle-class family who gives to their local church?
At a time when the United States is handing out tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, corporate jet owners, and millionaires and billionaires, it is ludicrous that we would even be looking at Social Security and Medicare as a solution to our debt crisis.
A lot of the Citizens United problem could be solved if we knew where the money came from for all these ads. The companies create these entities with fake names - like 'Citizens for Nice Puppies' - which means that the sources of the money are unaccountable.
I, for one - despite being a pretty solid climate hawk, I am extremely sympathetic to West Virginia and its coal-country needs. I lived there for a year. I've seen it. And the same for Wyoming, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky. They all have parts of their state where that really matters.
A courtroom is supposed to be a place where the status quo can be disrupted - even upended - when the Constitution or laws may require, where the comfortable can be afflicted and the afflicted find some comfort, all under the shelter of the law.
You can measure the warming oceans with a thermometer. You measure sea level rise with a yardstick. You can measure the dramatic increase in acidification with a simple pH test, and you can replicate what excess CO2 does to seawater in a basic high school science lab.
Millions upon millions of secret spending by the fossil fuel industry that was unleashed by the disastrous 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision - this money not only fuels the campaigns of many candidates; it also represents a threat to those who don't toe the polluter line on climate change.
If you look at the casualties, the federal government isn't waging a War on Coal. If anything, coal is waging a war on us.
I think that it's very, very hard for the NRA to continue to defend the position that people who are on the terrorist watch list should be allowed to buy firearms in this country. That's their position. I don't know how they stand by it.
The science-denial machinery is a serious adversary, and it has a big advantage over real science: it does not need to win its dispute with real science; it just needs to create a public illusion that there is a dispute.
Too many members of Congress seem willing to give corporate polluters, many of whom happen to be major political donors, a free pass to poison the air.
Each generation in this country gets the responsibility of being the ambassadors for this American democracy that our parents and grandparents fought, bled, and died for.
If Republicans start losing their seats because they're climate deniers, that is a very salutary signal.
Implementing the so-called 'Buffett Rule' would restore some badly needed fairness to our tax system.
We've seen too often what happens when wealthy and powerful industries gain excessive influence over the agencies that regulate them. The capture of the Minerals Management Service at the Department of Interior contributed to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
