There is no such thing as a Republican politician who reads the New York Times.
That’s the obvious takeaway from the events of August 2, as the GOP-controlled House cast a symbolic vote against the concept of a carbon tax just hours after the Times published an op-ed written by Republican-appointed former EPA administrators William Ruckelshaus, Lee Thomas, William Reilly and Christine Todd Whitman calling for such a tax, and otherwise for the GOP to join President Obama in taking aggressive action to reduce carbon emissions before it’s too late.
One wonders why Ruckelshaus (the very first head of the EPA, as appointed by leftist EPA creator President Richard Nixon), Thomas, Reilly and Whitman even bothered to write this op-ed. After all, they are calling upon Republicans to embrace policy.
Has it not been finally proven that the Republican Party — the party I belonged to for fifteen years — no longer cares about policy? And, to ask the even more obviously rhetorical question: do they not realize that in 2013, “Republican environmentalist” is as much of a logical falsehood as “clean coal”?…
Put yourself in the shoes of a right-wing Republican, elected official or not. You’ve been listening to Rush Limbaugh for twenty-five years now. You’ve been told, day in and day out, that climate change is a “hoax” concocted by Al Gore, ultra-liberal scientists, and Northeastern elitist RINOs or “Republicans in Name Only” (including Whitman, someone Limbaugh assailed for years on his program) in order to do little more than swell the size and scope of the federal government. You’ve had it drilled into your head, over and again, that progressives want to control the energy you use and the very car you drive.
Are you going to listen to anyone who says we should take climate change seriously, especially when they say it in the New York Times, a publication you have been taught to view as the church of secular humanism and left-wing political radicalism?
Of course not.
I’m a bit surprised that Salon, Grist, Climate Progress and other reality-based outfits are making such a big deal of this op-ed. It’s not that the piece is bad. In fact, it’s quite eloquent about the need for Congress to get going on cutting carbon:
That approach helped us tackle major environmental challenges to our nation and the world: the pollution of our rivers, dramatized when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire in 1969; the hole in the ozone layer; and the devastation wrought by acid rain.
The solutions we supported worked, although more must be done. Our rivers no longer burn, and their health continues to improve. The United States led the world when nations came together to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. Acid rain diminishes each year, thanks to a pioneering, market-based emissions-trading system adopted under the first President Bush in 1990. And despite critics’ warnings, our economy has continued to grow.
Climate change puts all our progress and our successes at risk. If we could articulate one framework for successful governance, perhaps it should be this: When confronted by a problem, deal with it. Look at the facts, cut through the extraneous, devise a workable solution and get it done.
The problem is, from a political standpoint, it’s a nothing-burger. If you’re a Congressman or Senator whose only goal is to gratify Charles and David Koch, you’re not going to care about what these former EPA administrators have to say.
The fact that the GOP cast this recent vote rejecting even the concept of a carbon tax less than a year after Superstorm Sandy smashed through the Northeast speaks volumes. As Secretary of State John Kerry noted earlier this year, the science is screaming at us to take action. Yet too many in Congress are wearing earplugs.
The Washington Post’s Stephen Stromborg nails it:
You’re not going to see a shift on climate policy in the GOP until and unless entities with actual influence on the right begin to make the case for climate action.
When Roger Ailes writes a piece in the Wall Street Journal saying that Republicans need to knock it off with climate denial and pass strong legislation that puts a price on carbon and commences America’s long-overdue shift to clean energy, then maybe we’ll get somewhere. Until then, don’t hold your breath waiting for red-state Republicans to go green –since you might turn blue first!
D.R. Tucker is a Massachusetts-based freelance writer and a former contributor to the conservative website Human Events Online. He has also written for the Huffington Post, the Boston Herald, ClimateCrocks.com, FrumForum.com, the Ripon Forum, Truth-Out.org, TheNextRight.com, and BookerRising.com. In addition, he hosted a Blog Talk Radio program, The Notes, from August 2009 to June, 2010. You can follow him on Twitter here: @DRTucker.
“If you’re a Congressman or Senator whose only goal is to gratify Charles and David Koch, you’re not going to care about what these former EPA administrators have to say.”
Exactly. That’s what the Republican Party is all about. Helping the rich get richer, now, at all costs. The sooner the rest of the folks wake up to that fact, the less worse off we are going to be.
This is why we need to have more than two poltical parties. Each party has staked out their policies that they are going to use as their litmus tests. If you don’t pass them, you are not going to get support. So a conservative person is forced to support the “pro-life stances” of anti-abortion and destroying the environment. While the Liberals must advocate for a smaller military and military interventionist foreign policy. Why is having a multi-party system such an “anti-American” idea? Just because we had Federalist and anti-federalist factions in the beginning of the Republic doesn’t mean we only have two sides to every issue.
There are 2 basic issues with this thesis. One is that the GOP is unscientific in rejecting Anthropologic Global Warming Arguments and that opposition is based on polluter promotions. That is a broad generic assumption and a political ploy rather than a scientific assessment. http://news.yahoo.com/global-warming-activists-seek-purge-deniers-among-local-162304794.html
Meteorlogists’ opinions could not be more apparent.
Secondly is the matter of carbon tax itself – an issue riddled with fraud and market collapse in thge EU. http://joannenova.com.au/2013/08/jo-nova-talks-on-2gb-about-carbon-credits-and-the-forced-market-that-is-called-free/
As a side note, I believe it is fairly clear that fraud in the presentation ( the Danes squealed on a switch in UN position papers ) and a perception in the developing world of a bias favouring polluters ( ! ) led to the collapse of talks in Copenhagen.
Opit — the GOP is unscientific in rejecting the scientific evidence of anthropogenic global warming. Basic principles of physics and chemistry — the physical properties of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — do not change, cannot change, and are not matters of opinion.
You’re also wrong in your claim about “meteorologists’ opinions” as mentioned in the propaganda outlet The Daily Caller, which is not a legitimate source for news or facts. The American Meteorological Society accepts the global scientific consensus that human activity is the primary driver of climate change, including the vast majority of accredited meteorologists.
You are also misinformed on carbon taxes — there are many different market-based carbon policy frameworks already successfully operating around the world, and you haven’t noticed that none of these policy responses have led to collapse. The EU carbon market was the first attempt to use a market-based approach to reducing carbon emission, it is still in operation and has provided valuable data in understanding how best to construct and regulate such market-based frameworks, and how to guard against ever-present corruption and greed. British Columbia’s carbon tax is working quite well.
OPIT
Using your logic if a marketplace is full of corruption, fraud, and illegalities that lead to market collapse then we should be rid of that system, then you must also be wanting to be rid of the NYSE, the derrivitives market, the big banks, NASDAQ, the housing market, etc.
Nixon may have been left of the nutcases in the GOP today but it is a misconception that he was in any capacity a supporter of environmental protection.
He created the EPA so that it would be an executive branch thereby having greater control over the agency, via appointees, etc., certainly not out of concern for the planet – he could see the writing on the wall and reacted.