U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) took to the Senate floor 7 May to warn his colleagues of the threat the warming climate and plastic pollution poses to the world’s oceans and fisheries.
“In the 10 minutes that it takes me to give this speech, the oceans will absorb 4,000 Hiroshima detonations' worth of heat,” Whitehouse said. “That is why seawater off the Florida Keys hit jacuzzi temperatures. That is why measuring devices along our coasts show a foot of sea level rise already. That is why fish species are moving about and fisheries are collapsing. That is why the world's coral reefs are bleaching out – over 80 percent of the world's reefs hit in the last ocean heating surge caused by fossil fuel.”
Whitehouse’s remarks come shortly after his trip to Busan, South Korea, for the tenth annual Our Ocean Conference, a gathering of international stakeholders to discuss marine conservation and threats to global waters. Whitehouse was the only representative of the U.S. government at the conference; U.S. President Donald Trump did not send any federal officials to participate in discussions.
“I was the entirety of the United States delegation. You’re looking at it. One-hundred percent of the entire U.S. delegation. Ordinarily, many executive branch officials come. In this case, not one executive branch official attended from the United States. Of course not: this administration is nothing more than hirelings of the fossil fuel industry, and the conference – of course – addressed the harm that fossil fuel emissions are doing in the oceans, and the harm that petrochemical plastics are doing in the oceans,” Whitehouse said.
Under the second Trump administration, the U.S. government has severely curtailed spending on climate-related programs. One of Trump’s day one executive orders called for terminating the “Green New Deal,” and the government has worked swiftly to comply, even going so far as to wipe climate-related terms from government websites. The administration’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2026 includes massive cuts to the agencies most directly involved in climate research, chopping USD 1.3 billion (EUR 1.1 billion) from NOAA’s overall budget and cutting the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by more than 50 percent.
“Over the last four years, government spending aggressively turned against the American people and trillions of our dollars were used to fund cultural Marxism, radical Green New Scams, and even our own invasion. No agency was spared in the Left’s taxpayer-funded cultural revolution,” U.S. Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought said of the proposed cuts.
In recapping his trip to the Our Oceans Conference, Whitehouse called on his colleagues in Congress to take action to address the many challenges facing the world’s oceans, especially plastics pollution.
“Large ocean plastic waste ends up in the bellies of whales, indigestibly, killing them,” Whitehousesaid. “Ghost gear made of plastic goes about its lethal business with no fisherman ever retrieving the catch, just killing, killing, killing. Pretty much every sea bird consumes plastic, lodging in its belly, starving its young of real food. Small creatures consume tiny particles; bigger creatures consume the small creatures; we consume the bigger creatures; and now we find plastic particles in mothers’ breast milk, in human brain tissue samples, even in rain drops over Colorado. Unless we change direction, there will be soon be more plastic by weight in the oceans than the weight of living fish in the world’s oceans.”
Whitehouse spearheaded the Save Our Seas 2.0 Act, which authorizes federal efforts to clean up marine debris.
