This week’s edition of Climate Week En Review is brought to you by my cat Fluffy, proud member of the EcoRight and firm believer that laps are not for laptops but for her leisure.
This week’s must read: A slow thaw: Republicans inch towards action on global warming (The Economist) “Republican orthodoxy on climate change can seem unassailable. The party platform pooh-poohs climate change as ‘far from this nation’s most pressing national security issue’ and opposes any carbon taxgenerally thought to be the most market-friendly way of reducing emissions. But the odd crack is showing.”
Majority rules: Sixty-eight percent of Americans, including majorities in all 50 states and all 435 Congressional Districts support requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax and using the money to reduce other taxes by an equal amount (what the EcoRight calls “revenue neutral”) according to Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications. A newly released set of interactive public opinion maps shows the vast support for carbon tax policy. (We encourage you to click around the various questions and see the results for yourself.)
As reported by Adam Aton from E&E News in an article (sorry, paywall) he wrote this week: “64 percent of adults in [Rep. Steve] Scalise’s fossil fuel-rich district would support a carbon tax, and respondents in House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) districts would support it by the same margin.”
Change of heart: Citing rising concerns from national security experts and uncertainty for business interests, North Carolina’s Sen. Thom Tillis said in a recent Spectrum News interview “there are a lot of reasons” to address climate change. “We have to come up with several strategies to recognize reality: the climate changes.” Calling “both extremes wrong,” he pointed to the “coalition of people in the middle who want to solve the problem.” While Tillis indicated GOP resistance to climate action stems from “a noble concern” over the impacts those solutions would have on state and district economies, he said “if the U.S. wasn’t in the discussion about tackling climate change, we’d be a very different world and we’d be in a lot greater danger.” In calling for a “multidimensional solution,” he called for keeping the U.S. “on the forefront of trying to come up with a solution…But it has to be solution that the global players play a part in. I could see in future trade agreements, that the whole idea of your impact on the environment being a part of the terms.” Be sure to check out the full interview.
Shout out: Have you met our spokespeople? They embody what it means to be EcoRight. Our team is so proud of their tenacity and spirit. They come from all walks of life and regions of the country. They have been published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Des Moines Register, Texas Tribune, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Deseret News, and Orlando Sentinel, just to name a few. With the pace at which they get bylines, they make it look easy, but it is not. The majority of op-eds submitted never get published, particularly if the author isn’t a household name. But when the message is a good one, editors take note and make space. Anyway, cheers to our spokespeople.
That’s it for me (and Fluffy) this week. Until next time…