Bringing Republicans to the Climate Change Table
Yet 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.”
“McCain was a champ,” said Gene Karpinski, head of the League of Conservation Voters, which tracks Congress members’ stance on environmental issues. “He would go around the country and talk about climate change. Even when he was the nominee, he didn’t walk away. But when a member of the Tea Party ran against him in the 2010 primary, he went south and never came back.”
.. 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.
.. 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.
.. And China’s efforts to cut emissions have defanged the argument that it is pointless for the United States to act alone.
.. “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.