The Week in Climate Hearings: A Cold, Frozen Mess

At 8 pm EST on Thursday, January 29th, Greenpeace USA is hosting a panel on its new report, Bad Neighbor: Energy Transfer's Pattern of Pollution and Violations.

The death toll from the fossil-fueled winter storm is now at least 46, including three boys who died in Texas, whose senators are both climate deniers; five deaths in Tennessee, whose senators are both climate deniers; six deaths in Maine, which has one “concerned” Trump-backing senator; eight deaths in Louisiana, whose senators are both climate deniers; and eleven deaths in New York, whose senators both abetted the Trump-Musk coup last March on behalf of carbon capitalists.

The U.S. Senate, getting a late start this week because of the monster storm, is convulsed with the six FY2026 appropriations titles which have a due date of this Friday, January 30th.

Even as thousands of masked ICE and CBP thugs were terrorizing the people of Minnesota, members of Congress convinced themselves they could settle on a bipartisan deal to accept the Trump Department of Homeland Security status quo—including $10 billion for ICE and $18 billion for CBP. Democratic leadership in the House and Senate had lined up a bloc of their members to vote through the carefully negotiated legislation in the name of reasserting Congress’s Article I powers, a frankly admirable goal.

But the Trump regime’s daylight execution of Alex Pretti, soon after the similar execution of Renée Good, has thrown the plans of Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer, both of New York, and their top appropriators Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), to find some accommodation with their Republican counterparts Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La., no relation), Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), Rep. Tom Cole (R-Ok.), and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), into the dustbin of history.

The only right action for Congress now is to take the first steps to end Trump’s reign of terror.

All senators should vote against proceeding to any appropriations bills until there is accountability and justice for the victims of the DHS terror campaign. Before proceeding with any appropriations, Congress needs to:

• Rescind the $170 billion in multi-year funding for immigration enforcement that was granted to the Department of Homeland Security in the corporate-backed One Big Brutal Bill Act.

• Directly investigate the shooting deaths of Silverio Villegas González, Isaias Sanchez Barboza, Keith Porter, Renée Good, and Alex Pretti, and the 53 other deaths that have occurred in ICE and CBP custody in the past year.

• Impeach and remove DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Deputy White House chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller.

Only then should Congress take up the remaining appropriations bills, righting the fiscal ship of the United States.

In contrast, all Schumer is demanding is a mechanism that allows the DHS deal to pass with minimal “reform” adjustments.

Meanwhile, Senate committees have a few hearings scheduled this week. The hearings of most interest to Hill Heat readers are on Wednesday.

At 10 am, Secretary of State Marco Rubio testifies before the Foreign Relations Committee on U.S. policy towards Venezuela. It is unclear if he will attempt to provide a principled gloss on Trump’s repeated insistence that the U.S. staged the coup solely to take Venezuela’s oil.

Also at 10 am, Environment and Public Works hosts construction and energy interests to discuss federal environmental review and permitting processes. Witnesses include Bechtel scion Brendan Bechtel, LiUNA president Brent Booker, American Petroleum Institute lobbyist Dustin Meyer, Solar Energy Industries Association CEO Abigail Ross Hopper, and National Association of State Energy Officials president David Terry.

At 2 pm in the afternoon, the Homeland Security investigations subcommittee led by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) holds a hearing looking at the Palisades fire, one year later. The hearing is the culmination of a conspiratorial investigation led by Johnson and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), inspired by Republican reality-TV actor-turned L.A. mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, into whether there was a wildfire still smoldering in the days before the Palisades inferno broke out, but not into the culpability of climate polluters.

And at 3:30 pm, the Veterans Affairs committee interviews V.A. Secretary Doug Collins, who blamed the murder of Pretti, a VA nurse, on “state and local officials’ refusal to cooperate with the federal government to enforce the law and deport dangerous illegal criminals.”