What Kind Of Nightmare Hybrid Could GOP Produce If Slightly More Attached To Climate Reality?

[hatrack]

EDIT

GOP climate positions, historically, have swung wildly in response to changing political conditions. Just over a decade ago, Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich sat together on a couch talking about their shared commitment to “take action to address climate change,” setting out to “spark the innovation we need.” John McCain ran for president in 2008 on a cap-and-trade program, and Lindsay Graham supported a bill to do just that in 2009 before defecting dramatically. (Fossil fuel companies who’d backed the legislation and convinced green groups to let them weaken it to the point that it would have kneecapped the EPA also pulled out abruptly.) The internal logic isn’t hard to spot in hindsight: At the beginning of the Obama administration, climate legislation seemed inevitable, so Republicans and their donors in the fossil fuel industry came on board to make it as toothless as possible. Once it no longer seemed inevitable—lacking enthusiasm from the public and the White House both—they each withdrew their support, and Koch Industries–backed GOP insurgents found a more potent political strategy stoking ire against both cap-and-trade and the country’s first Black president through the Tea Party.

Ten years on, there are still a few members of the old guard of each party holding out hope for some mythical bipartisan compromise on climate through market-based solutions. Neither the Democratic nor the Republican politicians of this persuasion seem to have much sway in Washington or even over a Biden campaign that, under pressure from its left and amid a painful recession, has ditched the older establishment climate talk of carbon markets to focus on green jobs. Despite a number of nonstart bills introduced over the last year, the bipartisan, centrist Climate Solutions Caucus is a shell of its perennially useless self, its moderate Republican figurehead—Florida Congressman Carlos Curbelo—having lost his seat to a Democrat in 2018. If it was ever truly docked, the hope for a grand bargain on carbon pricing in the United States has long since sailed.

Several suggestions have been floated for what might replace it. John Kerry—a member of the Sanders-Biden unity task force on climate—is holding out hope for a slightly different kind of bipartisan unity with a project called World War Zero. The idea is to bring together military officials, retired politicians, and celebrities from both sides of the aisle in a bid to win over conservative skeptics through a series of talks, in part around the idea of the climate crisis being a national security threat. The Economist recently speculated that a post-climate-denial GOP, under the leadership of moderate Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, could embrace its century-old ideals about conservation and land stewardship. Anti-environmentalism isn’t so core to the GOP that it wouldn’t be up for negotiation in the event of Trump losing, especially as the oil and gas industry continues to shrink and other segments of big business embrace the good P.R. from appearing to be forward-thinking on climate.

EDIT

What all of this suggests is that, while bipartisan compromise on climate may be possible, it could also prove just as dangerous as the Republican denialism of old. It’s all too easy to imagine some new and cursed grand bargain between Democrats and a post-Trump GOP on climate. Having agreed that climate change is an urgent threat to national security, Congressional Democrats would win a loophole-filled national renewable portfolio standard in exchange for beefed-up border security. The Department of Energy would continue to support U.S. fossil fuel producers to provide so-called energy security to Eastern Europe through natural gas exports, all the while running climate-resilient military bases fully on renewable energy. A lucrative government procurement contract would pay Elon Musk to start making electric tanks, as Tucker Carlson runs nightly segments that a do-nothing Biden administration isn’t doing enough to stop hordes of climate refugees from flooding into the American Heartland. Possibilities abound.

EDIT

https://newrepublic.com/article/158543/threat-gop-accepts-climate-change

[Boomer]

1. Pretty predictable

No administration of either party will make the sweeping changes necessary to effectively deal with climate change. At best they'll fight over band-aid solutions. Substantive changes would result in citizen uprisings, so it isn't going to happen.

[Calculating]

2. The real shame is that we probably could have done something about climate with the Covid Money

All the money being spent on the Covid issue could have had us well on our way to a new green economy.