Washington, DC – U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Chairman of the Budget Committee and a senior member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, announced today that his guest for this year’s State of the Union address will be Frank Carini, co-founder and senior reporter of ecoRI News. President Biden will deliver his State of the Union address on Thursday, March 7 at 9 p.m.
“Frank’s clear-eyed writing on the dangers climate change poses to the Ocean State should be essential reading. He has fearlessly called out the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to mislead Rhode Islanders and, along with his wife Joanna, created an outlet for exceptional investigative reporting on local environmental issues,” said Whitehouse. “I hope to hear President Biden lay out the climate stakes in his address and formulate a battle plan to fight the fossil fuel industry’s lies and its well-funded political obstruction campaign. We’ve made big strides over the last three years, but there is no time to waste in the race to save our planet.”
Frank Carini and Joanna Detz co-founded ecoRI News in 2009. ecoRI News is a nonprofit organization dedicated to reporting on environmental and social justice issues in Rhode Island and southern New England. Carini’s weekly column, “A Frank Take,” has shined a spotlight on climate denial and fossil fuel front groups, generational frustrations over climate inaction, and the destructive consequences of climate change, including the oceans’ declining health and the dangers of plastics pollution.
Senator Whitehouse is leading the work in Congress to advance smart solutions to address climate change, position Rhode Island as a leader in the clean energy economy, clean up the oceans, and hold the fossil fuel industry accountable. Whitehouse shaped the major climate components of Democrats’ historic Inflation Reduction Act, which is expected to push the U.S. from a 25 percent to 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Whitehouse has led the introduction of legislation establishing a price on carbon and instituting a carbon border adjustment, which would give American companies a step up in the global marketplace while steering the planet toward climate safety. He has also crafted policies to curb profiteering by oil companies and combat the influence of fossil-fuel money in politics.
