Bringing Republicans to the Climate Change Table - The New York Times - 0 views
-
What accounts for this remarkable collective turnaround, unique among political parties around the world, even as climate scientists have accumulated greater evidence of how humanity is dangerously altering the planet?
-
As it turned out, a well-financed push by fossil fuel interests to deny climate science dovetailed smoothly with the burst of anti-government anger that gave rise to the Tea Party from the depths of the Great Recession.
-
For the angry supporters of the Tea Party, opposed to government spending in almost any form, the prescription is anathema. “If you decide climate change is real, there must be a role for government to combat it. So the only way out is to deny it exists,” Mr. Karpinski said.
- ...11 more annotations...
-
This shift has made it impossible to pass any legislation through Congress to help deal with the problem. That has forced President Obama to adopt a different approach
-
After the 2010 defeat in the Senate of the so-called cap-and-trade strategy, which was originally a Republican idea, Mr. Obama has taken to using the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory powers under the Clean Air Act, circumventing Congress entirely.
-
Is it possible to turn the Republican Party around?It won’t be easy. Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell of Kentucky are wedded to defending a declining coal industry and advancing the interests of oil companies, most clearly in their support for the Keystone pipeline. Many of the party’s lawmakers and presidential candidates get a lot of money from people like the Koch brothers, who have multimillion-dollar contributions for anybody who will stand against efforts to curb the use of fossil fuels.
-
there is more than money to the story. For many Republicans, climate change poses an existential quagmire. “To them it sounds like, ‘Everything we’ve been doing since the Industrial Revolution is going to kill us; the response must be a big government response and, by the way, it has to be international,’” said Mr. Goldston.
-
even Senator McCain has now walked away from his previous self, mocking President Obama for “saying that the biggest problem we have is climate change.”
-
climate change denial has never been particularly strong among street-level Republicans. Recent polls find that even conservative Republicans believe the climate is changing and humans are, to some extent, to blame.
-
Straight denial is getting tougher as the scientific consensus strengthens. And China’s efforts to cut emissions have defanged the argument that it is pointless for the United States to act alone.
-
In this context, the Obama administration’s strategy of using the Clean Air Act to force emissions cuts could help change the politics.
-
“Some Republican governors will start taking action because the alternative is for the federal government to impose something,” Mr. Goldston said. “This will change the politics
-
Mankiw, George W. Bush’s former top economic adviser, argues that putting a price on carbon emissions — the preferred prescription of economists across the political spectrum— could fit well within the Republican canon.
-
“People are afraid this is an excuse to raise taxes and expand government generally,” Professor Mankiw said. “We need to convince them this not a tax increase but a tax shift,” using revenue from a carbon tax to reduce, say, the Social Security payroll tax, while keeping the overall tax burden roughly the same.