This week’s must watch: Conservative Leadership Council founder and CEO Ted Halstead‘s TED talk: A climate solutions where all sides can win
This week’s must other must watch: Rising conservative voices call for climate action (PBS NewsHour)
In eco-right climate news:
Two Republican members of the New York delegation signed onto the so-called Stefanik climate change resolution. Rep. Peter King and Rep. Dan Donovan are the latest to add support to this measure, which calls for economically viable climate solutions. The bill now has 20 cosponsors.
In remarks made at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy commencement, President Donald Trump almost made our jester of the week when he boasted that he’s “loosened up the strangling environmental chains wrapped around our country and our economy, chains so tight that you couldn’t do anything – that jobs were going down. We were losing business. We’re loosening it up.”
Republican governors Charlie Baker (Massachusetts) and Phil Scott (Vermont) wrote a letter to Trump asking him to keep the U.S. in the Paris climate accord. “The impacts of climate change have already been felt in our states,” Baker and Scott wrote. “These impacts threaten the people of our states and put an intense burden on our economies.” They cited that carbon pollution can be cut “in a way that creates jobs, makes our states more competitive, and makes us leaders in the clean energy economy.”
Optimistically speaking, Alaska’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski predicted “brighter lights out of the administration in terms of where they see the focus on climate initiatives,” after the U.S. signed onto a statement prepared by the Arctic Council last week reiterating the need for climate action.
Three elder Republican statesmen two staunch advocates for market-based climate solutions and one surprising convert who spoke to the serious threat posed by climate change made recent eco-right news. As you saw in the video clip above, former Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz called efforts to reduce carbon dioxide a matter of “the marketplace.” As a member of Halstead’s Conservative Leadership Council, he has advocated for a carbon dividend plan that would assess a carbon fee on polluters and rebate Americans with the revenues.”You don’t have to rely on any fancy science to figure out that the globe is warming,” he added. “That is a fact. But if you have a question about it, why don’t you take out an insurance policy? Because the consequences are considerable.” Shultz’s call for a carbon dividend is echoed by another former Secretary of State and fellow CLC member, James A. Baker III. “If we battle across partisan lines on the remedy to climate change, then there is an excellent possibility that nothing will happen,” Baker said at Princeton University last week. “This country works best when the two sides of our polity can find middle ground on issues. I know that doing just that is very hard given our political environment in which many consider compromise to be a dirty word. As with so many other challenges confronting our country today, this hyper-partisan divide is keeping us from finding a way forward.”
And finally, in written testimony prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Director of National Intelligence, former Indiana Sen. Dan Coats, who during his time in elected office rejected climate science, wrote that climate change “is projected to fuel more intense and frequent extreme weather events that will be distributed unequally in time and geography. Countries with large populations in coastal areas are particularly vulnerable to tropical weather events and storm surges, especially in Asia and Africa.” Coats provided the caveat that the agency does not “adjudicate the science of climate change” but “rel[ies] on US government-coordinated scientific reports, peer-reviewed literature, and reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is the leading international body responsible for assessing the science related to climate change.”
For sharing with Trump a fake Time magazine cover supposedly from the 1970s warning of the impending ice age, this week’s climate jester is deputy national security adviser K.T. MacFarland.
Keep up the good fight, eco-right!