Climate Science Finds Foothold Among Conservatives

Pittsburgh Business Times:

A conservative politician who believes free enterprise is the ubiquitous answer isn’t all that special. But what about a conservative politician who’s dedicated his efforts to combating the risk from climate change? That’s special enough to have earned Bob Inglis an invitation to speak at PennFuture’s “Creating America’s Clean Energy Hub” conference later this month.

To be fair, Inglis isn’t a politician anymore. The founder of the Energy and Enterprise Initiative at George Mason University was a six-term Republican Congressman from South Carolina who lost his re-election bid to a Tea Party candidate in 2010. He’s since refocused on getting conservatives to accept climate change as fact and encouraging innovation in energy to combat its risk.

The answer, he says, is a tax swap — instead of an income tax, let’s have a carbon pollution tax. Remove all energy subsidies and make the entire cost of each fuel transparent to consumers.

“I believe that the cost crashes from the innovation would power an energy revolution faster than any government mandate or fickle tax incentives,” he said.

I talked with Inglis last week about his organization’s mission, the presidential race, and his reception in the business world.

The mission statement of the Energy and Enterprise Initiative says you don’t subscribe to an apocalyptic view of climate change. What does that mean?

“That the end is near, that we are done for and that emergency action is necessary. That tends to really drive away conservatives because conservatives dismiss it as fear mongering. What we prefer to do is to say the science is clear ­— there’s a very real risk that we’re running and doesn’t it make sense to reduce that risk? We’re talking reasonable risk avoidance rather than rhetoric that the sky is falling, we need to turn off all the lights right now.

We really want a lot of energy — we want more not less. More, not less, mobility. More, not less, comfort in our homes. We have to figure out a way to have much more energy so that people in the developing work can enjoy (its benefits).”

Do you believe the tax swap alone will fix the problem or is that a flash point to get the conversation going?

“That is the solution. It’s not as serious as clumsy government incentives. Setting the economics right — making it so that there’s a true cost comparison between fuels. Right now, there isn’t.

Two things distort the market place: government subsidies, mostly for wind and solar but also true of fossil fuels. The second is when fuels aren’t accountable for their hidden costs and those hidden costs aren’t made apparent. There’s a real distortion.

We believe that the individual consumer, in enlightened self interest and in an accountable marketplace, is the driver for innovation.

In South Carolina, electricity is so cheap I don’t have a solar water heater on my roof because it doesn’t make any sense to call up a solar water heater installer. But if I knew what coal powered electricity is really costing me —in health cost and climactic cost — I’d be looking for a solar water heater installer. Not because anybody gave me incentives. Rather, just (realizing) that power’s expensive and one third of my electricity bill is hot water.”

Inside Climate News:

A group of young Republicans has set out to achieve what some might say is an impossible goal: Over the next two years they’ll try to persuade their party to craft and support legislation that would reform the nation’s energy system and set a path toward a future free of fossil fuels.

“We want to show conservatives that this truly is an issue that affects us, affects our families and our businesses,” said Michele Combs, a 45-year-old legislative consultant who founded the group.

The organization—Young Conservatives for Energy Reform, or YCER—joins a small but growing number of like-minded groups and individuals who hope to revive a voice that has been lost in the Republican Party, one that’s focused on curbing, not expanding, fossil fuel production. 

At last week’s GOP convention in Florida, the Evangelical Environment Network teamed with the Florida Wildlife Federation to buy billboard ads touting prominent Republicans’ concerns about climate change, including Ohio Governor John Kasich. In July, a group called the Energy and Enterprise Initiative was formed to bring Republicans and libertarians together to find free-market solutions to the climate change problem. Former Rep. Bob Inglis, a South Carolina Republican, is heading the initiative out of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication.

“A lot of conservatives don’t believe that there are climactic costs” to burning fossil fuels, said Alex Bozmoski, the initiative’s director of strategy and operations. “It’s only prudent to acknowledge that the continued, unabated emission of greenhouse gases poses a risk for current and especially future generations.”

YCER’s leaders have deep roots in the Republican Party. Combs, the group’s president, was a 1989 national “Young Republican of the Year,” and Brian Smith, a 32-year-old Air Force Veteran and chair of the Midwest chapter, is a former co-chair of the Young Republicans National Federation, a training ground for party leaders since 1931. Both support Mitt Romney’s presidential bid, even though his energy platform favors more fossil fuels and less environmental regulation. 

Combs said YCER won’t take individual Republican politicians to task for their climate change skepticism or push for specific policy solutions—at least not immediately. They also won’t make climate change science a key part of their agenda.

“Our position on climate change is that it really shouldn’t be a litmus test for Republicans,” said Smith on a call with reporters last month. “We want it to be an issue that Republicans can talk about.”

E&E News:

The R Street Institute has its offices in Dupont Circle, above a shop that specializes in used books and “sort of vintage” fashions.

The newly minted conservative think tank’s headquarters is compact and youthful looking. A wall is devoted to depictions of its small staff as characters from the animated sitcom “South Park.” Another has a flock of black construction paper seagulls flanking a framed Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing Florida’s move to privatize disaster insurance for hurricanes.

An opposing wall spells out the group’s three-part mission statement in black letters: “deep focus, broad coalitions, rapid response.”

This has been the group’s mission since before it spun off from the Heartland Institute earlier this year. But it is difficult to reconcile a call for “broad coalitions” with a think tank that famously equated climate change belief with the Unabomber in a billboard above a major Chicago expressway.

R Street President Eli Lehrer said during a recent interview that the split was amicable.

“We’re a different organization for a reason,” he said. “But at the same time, we’re still a conservative organization that believes most of the same things that Heartland does.” The two groups both favor more limited government with more power concentrated with states rather than the federal government. But R Street is not in lock step with its more-famous parent on everything.

“We’ll be moving in some other directions,” Lehrer said.

One of these most notable departures is on climate change. Heartland has linked itself inextricably in the public mind with climate skepticism, sponsoring the International Conference on Climate Change where advocates from all walks of life meet to question the scientific underpinnings of man-made climate change. The group also sponsors the so-called Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, which publishes articles by skeptical scientists as a counter to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

R Street, which also has offices in Columbus, Ohio; Tallahassee, Fla.; and Austin, Texas, doesn’t plan to wade into climate science — something Lehrer says is better left to universities and research labs. But the new think tank, which devotes 60 to 70 percent of its time to insurance-related policy work, has begun to chart its own course on climate change policy. Among other things, Lehrer briefly attended a meeting last month (Greenwire, July 11) held at the headquarters of the American Enterprise Institute to discuss the possibility of a carbon tax.

The gathering drew attention because conservatives in the past few years have shied away from any effort to price carbon dioxide emissions, but Lehrer cautioned that R Street’s support for such a policy would depend entirely on how it is constructed. The next Congress is expected to take up legislation to overhaul the tax code as soon as next year, and a carbon tax could be part of that package as long as it does not lead to a net tax increase, Lehrer said.

“If it’s a true tax and regulatory swap, I don’t see any reason why conservatives wouldn’t support it,” he said.