Freedumb! GOP Strategists Gather To Debate What To Do (If Anything) About Climate Breakdown
Earlier this summer, conservatives and libertarians packed Washington, D.C.’s Globe Theatre for a debate on how — or whether, even — Republicans should fight climate change. On one side were analysts from the Heartland Institute and Heritage Foundation, two climate skepticism groups convinced the Right should never support a tax on the carbon dioxide Americans emit for free.
Theirs is also the position of the Republican Party, whose leaders openly question the science behind global warming, and argue a carbon tax “would devastate an already struggling American economy.” Which is why Andrew Moylan, from a national think tank called the R Street Institute, wasn’t certain how the right-leaning Globe Theatre crowd would react to his debate position: that a carbon tax could in fact make the U.S. more prosperous.
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Some green thinkers are also skeptical. Even if conservatives like Inglis and Moylan are successful in getting Republicans to embrace a B.C.-style carbon tax, Grist writer David Roberts is unsure how much good it would do for the climate. “It’s just a fantasy that we can limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees with nothing but a [carbon] tax,” he recently wrote. In his opinion fixing the climate demands a massive societal shift akin to wartime mobilization.
But the “large-scale government intervention” needed to enable that shift is anathema to the current Republican worldview. “It is today’s hyper-conservatism,” Roberts believes, “that is ultimately going to have to change.” Moylan from the R Street Institute agrees that a carbon tax “isn’t going to do a tremendous amount in and of itself to reduce global emissions.” Even so, he argues, adopting the policy would be an “important symbolic gesture.”
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http://www.salon.com/2013/09/05/climate_change_is_tearing_gop_apart_partner/singleton/
