To the Editor:

Re “It’s Not Too Late to Learn From Our Mistakes,” by Nicholas Kristof (column, Sept. 3):

The answer to why Congress doesn’t act on climate change is simple political hydraulics.

The Supreme Court let unlimited money into politics. The fossil fuel industry has unlimited money and, according to the International Monetary Fund, a multi-hundred-billion-dollar subsidy to protect. The fossil fuel industry used its unlimited money (and related threats) to capture the Republican Party. Climate change then became “partisan” and untouchable.

It’s actually not that complicated.

The Supreme Court’s Republican appointees got in the habit of doing what they were told by the forces that appointed them (which include the fossil fuel industry, which asked for the Citizens United decision), and in a fateful combination of obedience and political ignorance, they wrecked our politics.

Before Citizens United there were multiple bipartisan climate bills every year; afterward, none.

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

NEWPORT, R.I.

The writer, a Democrat, is a United States senator from Rhode Island.