Louisiana Rep. Garret Graves, who after much wrangling with leadership earlier this year for “a better way to apply Republican principles” to climate change now serves as the top ranking Republican on the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, was profiled in the New Yorker last week.
“People are awakening,” he says in the interview, noting the awakening is slow. “Raise the words ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming,’ and everyone goes to their corners.” In contrasting how he might approach his climate message with people ideologically right of center versus left, he emphasizes the importance of “meeting people where they are.”
In a recent hearing on the business costs of climate change, he remarked: “”This is a key issue that we must aggressively address… Let’s be clear the status quo, what we have done historically for decades is absolutely inappropriate. It doesn’t properly prioritize, it is not the process that responds to the urgency that we’re facing. As you well know, we can reduce, as we’ve had witness after witness testify before this committee, we could cut all emissions from the United States today, every bit of emissions, and we’re going to continue to see changes in our weather. We’re going to continue to see seas rise.”