Republicans appear ready to cast off their label as the party that sidesteps or denies climate change.
Republicans appear ready to cast off their label as the party that sidesteps or denies climate change.
That doesn’t mean the GOP will embrace President Joe Biden’s agenda — quite the opposite — but the evidence suggests lawmakers are investing new energy into formulating a Republican response to the crisis, at least on paper.
“American Conservation Coalition Action led 33 groups in a letter urging GOP leadership that they expect the House to pass bills that address a warming planet & boost domestic energy production.”https://t.co/uoMwLmuuhE pic.twitter.com/DYAQeBPyKf
— Christopher Barnard (@ChrisBarnardDL) January 30, 2023
Via Wash Times: “The climate is changing, and Americans of all backgrounds want effective, commonsense solutions,” the groups wrote. “We look forward to your leadership in streamlining onerous regulations holding back all energy development, encouraging clean energy innovation, bolstering domestic supply chains, and unleashing the power of American energy producers to compete on the world stage against the likes of China and Russia.”
Under new Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the lower chamber’s Energy and Commerce Committee is updating its leadership roster and the names of relevant subcommittees to highlight the revamped GOP agenda, which specifically emphasizes the ties between climate and energy policy, writes Jeremy Dillon.
For example, Rep. John Curtis of Utah, who heads the Conservative Climate Caucus, will serve as vice chair of the newly named Energy, Climate and Grid Security Subcommittee (formerly the Energy Subcommittee).
“We believe that our energy solutions are climate solutions and that addressing climate change is absolutely a prime priority,” Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state told Jeremy. That’s in line with McCarthy’s own efforts to craft a GOP climate strategy before last year’s midterms.
Some Republican lawmakers are promoting measures to boost deployment of renewable energy and sequester carbon through tree planting (while others are stuck on the hoax thing). But overall, the GOP agenda is still one that promotes the use of fossil fuels without benchmarks for reducing climate pollution, writes Emma Dumain.
“Republicans have moved from denial to an acknowledgment of climate change,” Alex Flint, a former Republican congressional staffer who now leads the conservative group Alliance for Market Solutions, told Emma. “They have not yet articulated clear climate goals, and their proposals are inadequate to address the risks associated with climate change.”
Party members have also decried efforts to consider social and environmental factors in investment decisions as “woke capitalism,” and just this week one of the Senate’s top Republicans, John Barrasso of Wyoming, peddled a debunked conspiracy theory that Russian President Vladimir Putin is funding U.S. environmental groups, as Scott Waldman reports.
The bottom line: The GOP wants to appease climate-conscious voters and powerful business interests that want the party to act on climate. But they don’t want to impose any of the sweeping federal mandates or spend the kind of money many experts believe are necessary to stave off the worst of global warming.
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Related:
Watch: Morano & James Taylor debate GOP climate activists at FreedomFest
The GOP’s Carbon Capture Dodge – The GOP’s ‘Expensive futility & greenwashing boondoggle’ – Steve Milloy: “However you slice it, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is an expensive futility and greenwashing boondoggle masquerading a policy alternative for managing the climate hysteria via technology.”
Watch: Morano on TV: Republicans have to challenge the climate narrative or you will get the ‘Green New Deal light’
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Excerpt from Green Fraud: Why The Green New Deal is Even Worse Than You Think
Excerpt: Page 296:
Utah senator Mitt Romney has been “looking at” carbon (dioxide) taxes as a GOP alternative to the Green New Deal. “I would very much like to see us reduce our carbon emissions globally, and we’ll see if this might help,” Romney said in 2019.
A small number of GOP members of the House are also seeking political cover on climate and pushing a sort of Green New Deal–lite version. Republican representative Matt Gaetz of Florida is supporting a different “Green Real Deal,” and GOP senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee supported a “Manhattan Project” on climate and energy that would force Americans to move to more costly and unreliable alternative energy sources. South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who has a long history of waffling on climate, has hinted that he is on board with “solutions” for climate change. “Climate change is real, the science is sound and the solutions are available,” Graham said.
GOP House minority leader Kevin McCarthy of California intro- duced a bill “to put the GOP on the map on climate” in order to appeal to the young voters that many polls show are more woke on climate change.
Climate skeptic Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com lamented that some in the GOP are in “appeasement” mode on climate. “There are many who would gladly try to appease climate alarmists by throwing around limited amounts of taxpayer dollars on various boondoggles to make it look like they take the matter seriously.”
Some GOP members of Congress are pushing carbon dioxide capture and storage and promoting “clean” energy, but as of 2020, the plans do not include targets to reduce emission. Geologist Viv Forbes calls it the “carbon capture con.” Forbes wrote, “The idea is to capture carbon dioxide from power stations and cement plants, separate it, compress it, pump it long distances and force it underground, hoping it will never escape.”
Forbes added, “Carbon-capture-and-storage tops the list of silly schemes to reduce man-made global warming….Regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide is best left to the oceans and plants— they have been doing it successfully for millennia. The only certain outcome from CCS is more expensive electricity and a waste of energy resources to do all the separation, compressing and pumping.”
Former president Trump and some GOP legislators even promoted the planting of one trillion trees by 2030 as part of their environmental plan. The New York Times explained that Trump is all in on tree planting. “The idea of planting one trillion trees had one enormous political advantage: It was practically sacrifice-free, no war on coal, no transition from fossil fuels, no energy conservation or investment in renewable sources of power that Mr. Trump loves to mock,” the New York Times reported in 2020. “Trump never uttered the phrase ‘climate change’ in his [tree planting] pledge. He described it instead as a plan ‘to protect the environment.’”
Chopping Down Tree Claims
Tree planting is not without controversy however.
“Settled Science?! Trees Both Cause & Solve ‘Global Warming’?!” read the headline at my Climate Depot website. “Plant or Not Plant Trees to Fight ‘Global Warming’?! It’s All So Confusing!”
There are many conflicting scientific studies on the climate impact of planting trees. Here is a small sampling of opposite claims about trees:
- “Planting a Trillion Trees Could Be the ‘Most Effective Solution’ to Climate Change, Study Says” —CBS News, 201923
- “Why Planting Some Trees Could Make Global Warming Worse” —Christian Science Monitor, 201624
- “Want to Fight Climate Change? Plant 1 Trillion Trees” —Live Science, 201925
- “We Can’t Just Plant Billions of Trees to Stop Climate Change” —Discover magazine, 201926
- “Best Way to Fight Climate Change? Plant a Trillion Trees” —AP, 201927
- “Planting Trees Will Not Slow Global Warming” —Cli- mate News Network, 201928
- “Climate Change: Planting New Forests ‘Can Do More Harm Than Good” —BBC, 202029And the tree-planting craze may face other problems as well. “Where are one trillion more trees going to be planted?” the Com- petitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell asked. “There are major areas of deforestation globally, but quite a bit of that land is now used for farming. Cities occupy other deforested areas. In this coun- try, the problem in our National Forests is far too many thickets of small trees.”
The biggest issue that Republicans who want to appear nice and green on climate have is the language that they use. They need to stop claiming climate is a “problem” or that climate change needs a “solution.” Words matter.
They can offer massive spending increases and push technology to attempt to reduce emissions, but they should not concede to the narrative that climate is a “problem.” Having worked in Washington for nearly thirty years, there are times when I frankly couldn’t care less how much-increased funding some in the GOP want to give to boondoggles like carbon capture. I understand that spending money in D.C. is bipartisan, and there are very few in Congress who actually care how much money the government spends.
The GOP climate “solutions” gang obviously thinks they need some kind of cover to avoid being labeled a climate “denier.” Many Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians loathe being seen as “evil deniers,” and they are prepared to avoid that label however they can. In town hall meetings and the social circles around the Washington establishment, they want to fit in, not to be seen as toxic climate deniers who are against “the science.” Their spouses or kids may be pressuring them not to be “deniers.”
If they appear “reasonable” on climate they’re going to be better liked.
My advice to those skittish Republicans is use phrases like “the way forward” or “regardless of your views on climate, our plan is environ- mentally friendly.” But they must avoid claiming that tree planting “solves” climate. If they continue to fall into that claptrap, they are engaging in the same unscientific nonsense the Left does when it claims UN treaties and the Green New Deal “solve” climate change. If the climate-woke Republicans continue to talk of “solving” the climate “problem” it makes them look like they are capitulating, and they appear like nothing more than pandering politicians.
The way forward is to promote free-market environmental policies that make environmental sense regardless of your view on climate change. If some GOP politicians need political cover on climate change, they will inevitably try to spend all the money they can on environmentally friendly legislation, but they should be persuaded to at least not fall into accepting the alarmist narrative.
Energy advocates need to be unapologetic about the moral case for cheap abundant fossil fuels. They need to follow Trump’s example of praising the benefits of U.S. energy dominance. They need to be relentless in pointing out the inane anti-energy views of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on energy.
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End Green Fraud Excerpt.
Daniel Horowitz: “Republicans [should] finally stop accepting the pseudo-science and moral premise of the left’s climate agenda. If COVID didn’t teach them the lesson about industry experts and scientific consensus being used to fundamentally transform our lives, create monopolies, and centralize power, then nothing will. COVID should serve as the Great Reset of the two-decade GOP mistake of accepting climate fascism.” … Carbon capture is the perfect political issue, because it allows Republicans to feign triangulation with the greenies while enriching an industry that could never naturally thrive on its own without government mandates, marketing, subsidies, and regulatory capture. … The worst thing we could be doing now is validating the left’s premise about climate and carbon and pushing expensive ideas built upon those fallacies.” …
“Just as with COVID, Republicans have largely accepted the false premise behind the global warming agenda, which is depleting our quality of life, crushing our freedoms, and making everything expensive. They merely object to the extreme to which Democrats are taking it. However, once you accept the premise, you lose the argument, which is why Republicans have joined in with climate regulations on appliances, green energy mandates and subsidies, and ethanol for years. Now, with so much of the scientific premise being exposed as a scam, just like the COVID vaccine and mask $cience, it’s time to reverse every “climate” policy rooted in the premise of carbon being a pollutant.”
