Links tagged “gop”

Shellenberger: "Late in the hearing, Representatives Sean Casten of Illinois and Jared Huffman of California, both Democrats, used the whole of their allotted time to claim that I am not a real environmentalist, that I am not a qualified expert, and that I am motivated by money.

Had I been given a chance to respond, I would have noted that: I have been a climate activist for 20 years; my new book, Apocalypse Never, has received strong praise from leading environmental scientists and scholars; the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently invited me to serve as an expert reviewer; and that I have always been financially independent of industry interests.

But I wasn’t given the chance to say any of that. After Casten and Huffman lied about me, Rep. Garret Graves asked the committee’s chairperson, Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida, to let me respond. She refused and abruptly ended the hearing."

Shellenberger’s views and his status as a critic of climate change “alarmists” are being embraced by House Republicans, who invited him to testify as their witness at a hearing Tuesday afternoon held by a special climate committee. He pushes ideas that go beyond what other pro-nuclear advocates and Republican supporters propose, envisioning a smaller role, if any at all, for other zero-emission energy sources such as renewables and for technologies to eliminate pollution from fossil fuel plants such as carbon capture.

“Conventional wisdom is we need a mix of nuclear and renewables,” Shellenberger told the Washington Examiner. “There is no technical or economic reason for that.”

"In total, 10 top GOP lawmakers are backing the group’s American Climate Contract, the coalition announced Monday. In addition to McCarthy, its backers include Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, the top Republican on the House Energy Committee, and Rep. Garret Graves of Louisiana, the top Republican on the House select climate panel." ...

"The ACC’s policy plan, released in April, calls for the United States to advance policies that “move toward a goal of global net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.” It lays out support for four policies: investing in energy innovation, modernizing infrastructure, supporting conservation measures that store carbon, and engaging globally to reduce emissions."

Rather than benefiting the environment, large-scale tree planting may do the opposite, two new studies have found. One paper says that financial incentives to plant trees can backfire and reduce biodiversity with little impact on carbon emissions. A separate project found that the amount of carbon that new forests can absorb may be overestimated. The key message from both papers is that planting trees is not a simple climate solution. ...

They point to the fact that in the Bonn Challenge nearly 80% of the commitments made to date involve planting monoculture plantations or a limited mix of trees that produce specific products such as fruit or rubber. ...

In the US, even President Donald Trump has rowed in behind the Trillion Trees Campaign.

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Settled Science?! Trees both cause & solve ‘global warming’?! – GOP climate pandering seeks to plant billions of trees

Marc Morano, founder and executive editor of the ClimateDepot.com, explained during an interview at CPAC, “The idea behind a carbon tax and carbon dividend seems to be that it would somehow be less bureaucratic because you would have the price on carbon instead of regulations.” Morano continued: 
"But once you give the federal government a massive new power like this, you are giving it a blank check for the future. This is really just another scheme to raise costs and it’s dead on arrival. Whatever might be passed, will be reinterpreted by judges and it will become a massive new tax to go after the energy sector. This dividend proposal is really about redistributing wealth. The fact that the heroes of this movement are Baker and Schultz is very telling because they were the liberal establishment Republicans in the Reagan White House. They were not movement conservatives."

Excerpt: "Policywise, what [EPA Administrator] Andrew Wheeler is doing is phenomenal. Policywise, what Donald Trump is doing is phenomenal," said Marc Morano, director of communications at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, who has questioned climate science for years.

"Policywise, what they're doing is phenomenal and unbelievable and beyond anything we could have hoped," he said. "It truly is."

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Politically, CEI's Myron Ebell doesn't think it's useful for conservatives to cede the debate because he said McCarthy's efforts won't convince voters who want the federal government to address climate change to vote Republican.

"If local environmental groups or local media in their districts start looking into these bills and start giving them publicity in the local media, they're going to have a hard time explaining themselves because we've conceded that global warming's a problem, and we've got a plan which will do nothing to address it," Ebell said.

"So I think it's not a well-thought-out way to proceed on this issue, and I doubt that they're going to get very much positive spin out of it with voters," he said.