There’s a tendency in Washington to think of climate change as a coastal issue. It’s the coasts, after all, where melting ice caps will turn into flooded communities, and it’s the coasts where voters tend to back the party willing to do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Democrats.
But there’s at least one Midwestern Democrat challenging that assumption, and he has the cumulus qualifications to back it up. As a former local TV weatherman, Rep. Eric Sorensen of Illinois runs in part on the issue of climate change; his campaign logo prominently features the silhouette of a wind turbine. He points to family farmers struggling to adjust to changing growing seasons and fiercer storms, to more frequent tornadoes and deeper floods.
In addition to chitchatting about the weather, and Project 2025’s plans to ax the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Sorensen sat down with Roll Call this summer to discuss what it’s been like, as a gay man, to see recent Republican attacks on LGBTQ rights.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Q: People tend to think of climate change as a coastal liberal issue, not something that resonates with Midwesterners. Is that changing?
A: So here’s the thing: Those people, they’ve never been to Kewanee or Freeport, Illinois. As the trusted source of information for 20 years in my district, as the meteorologist, I talked about changing climate in a different way.
For me, it wasn’t about polar bears. It’s not about sea level rise. It’s about what’s happening outside people’s windows, and specifically, what’s happening with our family farmers. These people have been left out of the solution for so long.
When you learn about the prevalence of suicide among family farmers, it’s going up at an alarming rate. If you’re a family farmer, and you’ve been on that farm for six, seven, eight generations, you’re having a harder time today than your grandparents did. And so it isn’t about politics. It’s never been about politics with respect to changing and extreme weather.
For me, it is about doing what’s right, making the smart decisions that are going to affect our kids and our grandkids. And you know what, if we continue to have an argument over how much the climate is changing, how much humans are even causing it, it doesn’t solve any problems. And we don’t have any time.
Q: What are your thoughts on the Project 2025 suggestion to break up NOAA and commercialize the National Weather Service?
A: Well, I have incredible respect for the people who work at NOAA, at the National Weather Service, and being the ranking member on the [House Science, Space, and Technology Committee’s] Space Subcommittee, within NASA as well. We have to make sure that the federal government is investing in science. We can’t leave it up to private industry to make up for all of the advancements that we’ve made with respect to weather.
I would also push back against this because the value of the National Weather Service is incredible. It keeps us safe. It puts out the tornado warning, which sounds the siren, which put me in my own basement before a tree fell down [this summer].
Q: What happened with that tornado?
A: My house was without power for three days, but we didn’t have injuries and fatalities. My mom and dad’s house in Wisconsin was hit by a tornado this year. The sirens went off, and the National Weather Service protected my parents.
Also, we have to put faith in the folks at NOAA to help us understand how the whole atmospheric system is changing, because it’s changing before our eyes. And we need to know the context, we need to have the data so we can make the best decision.
Q: After years of growing acceptance of LGTBQ people, we’re seeing things like Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law and Republicans campaigning against trans rights. Do you think the backlash is getting worse?
A: I mean, just looking at the number of pieces of legislation in statehouses all over the country, it’s going up. People feel like their rights are going to be taken away. You know, I live right on the border of the state of Iowa, which enacted one of the tightest restrictions on abortion rights in the country, and women are having to travel into the state of Illinois for their health care. So this is the front lines, and what we have to ask ourselves going forward is whether or not individual freedoms and liberties are going to come in front of political ideology.
People in my district want to get along with their neighbors, and they also understand our neighbors can be different from one another. I’ve got senior citizens that live in front of me, I’ve got a veteran that lives over here, there’s a gay couple living in my house, and I have Black neighbors. We’re all different, but that’s what makes us great.
When my partner, Shawn, and I go out to dinner, people know there’s a gay couple that are having dinner right there, but we don’t necessarily notice when a trans couple is having dinner because they look like a straight couple. And so I think a problem we have in Congress today is we don’t have a trans person that sits on the floor of the House, and I do hope that Sarah McBride is able to break that barrier [in Delaware] to be the first trans member of Congress so she can sit at the table with Republicans as a real person.
Q: Let’s talk more about the weather. People in D.C. are obsessed. Why do you think that is?
A: It is so hot and humid, the atmosphere is unstable all the time. You know what, maybe it’s because we’re all unstable individuals working in Congress (laughs). But actually, it changes on a dime here.
I still give a lot of weather forecasts to people back home, but now I have an additional responsibility, because whenever there’s going to be flights in and out on a fly-in or fly-out day, I get Signals and texts and phone calls from other members of Congress that say, “Hey, what does Denver look like? What’s O’Hare gonna be? What about Houston and Dallas?” You know, every hub.
Quick hits
Last book you read? Anthony Fauci’s book, “On Call.”
In politics, can the ends justify the means? Democracy is an experiment, and no matter how much work we put into it, we’re going to get the work out. We have to understand what’s ahead of us in this election. We’re going to elect a president who’s going to be the leader of our country for our nation’s 250th birthday. So I would say yes.
One thing on your office walls? Photographs that my grandpa took when he was in the United States Navy serving in World War Two.
What do those mean to you? He took pictures of the Capitol in the 1940s, not knowing that his grandson was going to be one of the people working there. He never saw where I am today, but the six black-and-white photos on my wall are a reminder that my grandpa and my dad, they raised me right.
Your least popular opinion? My least popular opinion in this Congress is that climate change is real. I’m the only meteorologist in Congress, but also I believe it takes people working across the aisle to get meaningful change.
The post In the Quad Cities or DC, Eric Sorensen is happy to talk about the weather appeared first on Roll Call.
