Conservative green groups want to break Democrats’ hold on climate policy.
Their goal is to bring a delegation of Republican policymakers to this year’s United Nations climate talks, known as the Conference of the Parties or COP. Those talks typically last two weeks, during which nations’ negotiators broker deals on implementing the Paris deal. The space outside the negotiating rooms, though, has developed into what feels like the world’s largest climate change trade show.
The U.N. climate conference is “absolutely” a place where Republican lawmakers could engage, said Sarah Hunt, co-founder and CEO of the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy, which describes itself as a crosspartisan policy group.
That’s because what Republican lawmakers are trying to do with legislation “is create the right marketplace [and] open it up with the right signals to allow for innovation, for new technologies to go to market that solve this problem,” Hunt said. Prior to co-founding the Rainey Center, Hunt launched clean energy and climate programs at the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Niskanen Center.
Hunt spoke to the Washington Examiner on the sidelines of the latest round of U.N. climate talks in Madrid in December. She was one of several conservatives working in climate and clean energy who attended the U.N. conference, many for the first time, to scope out how best to bring Republicans to the global table on climate policy.
Several conservative clean energy think tanks, from the United States and abroad, also hosted the first-of-its-kind Climate and Freedom Colloquium alongside the Madrid talks. Plans are already in the works to hold a larger Climate and Freedom Summit this year in Glasgow, Scotland, to coincide with this year’s climate talks there.
Hunt said she is looking to bring a delegation of Republican state lawmakers to Glasgow. Heather Reams, executive director of the right-leaning Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, said she is hoping to bring a group of federal Republican lawmakers.
But Reams said she’d likely have to curate a specific experience for Republican lawmakers in order for them to get the most out of the trip.
“I don’t think this conference is set up for Republicans,” she said in an interview in Madrid, where she was attending the talks for the first time. “I think it’s not focused enough to help Republicans go from ‘Climate change is real’ to ‘How do we have market-based solutions to do this?’”
That could be in part because many Republican lawmakers don’t think the U.S. needs to be a party to the Paris climate agreement. They agree with President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the global deal, and they’re not sure U.S. leadership in the way the Obama administration had outlined is necessary, especially since they don’t think other countries are doing as much as the U.S. to cut emissions.
The Paris Agreement framework, however, shouldn’t be a barrier for Republicans to participate at the U.N. conference, said Paul Bledsoe, strategic adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute who worked on climate change in the Clinton White House.
“The major elements of the Paris Agreement, that it’s voluntary and that it includes all nations including China and other developing nations, that architecture was insisted on by Republicans themselves in reaction against Kyoto,” Bledsoe said, referring to the pre-Paris global climate deal.
Bledsoe also said Republican lawmakers “have a lot to offer” on technology and “bring a lot of credibility with the private sector.”
Republicans, though, still don’t get the same obvious political benefit as Democrats for attending the climate talks.
For example, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used her leadership of a delegation to the Madrid conference as an opportunity to create political contrast on climate change. Her main message was Democrats in Congress are “still in” the Paris deal, even though Trump and Republicans are not.
Pelosi said she had asked Republicans on the House select climate committee to join her in Madrid, but they declined her invitation.
It isn’t surprising to Reams why Republicans would reject Pelosi’s invite.
“I can see why Nancy Pelosi’s invitation to attend would be not as enticing as something that would be focusing on areas where I think Republicans have questions — questions about how this is done, how other nations are doing it that are like the United States,” she said.
Reams envisions a trip for Republican lawmakers to Glasgow or a future U.N. conference that would include meeting with nations using market-based policies to cut emissions and those experiencing sea level rise and other effects from climate change, as well as talking with international businesses and financial institutions about their climate investments.
“I think that’s where Republicans are going to say, ‘Aha,’” Reams said, adding she’d then challenge the lawmakers to think about what their alternative to the Paris Agreement would be and what legislative actions they’d support in the U.S.
That’s also where meetings like the Climate and Freedom Colloquium could come in. The one-day colloquium in December alongside the Madrid climate talks was a first-time meeting of free market think tanks around the world focused on climate and clean energy. It was hosted by the Fundacion para el Avance de la Libertad, a Spanish think tank, and co-hosted by the U.S.-based Reason Foundation and the Clean Capitalist Leadership Council.
The meeting featured a discussion on several novel clean energy and climate policies, including proposals for climate change free trade agreements and “clean asset bonds and loans” that proponents say would function like municipal bonds to help leverage investment in clean energy infrastructure.
Supporters say those concepts offer free market alternatives to what has traditionally been floated to address climate change, such as a carbon tax, emissions trading schemes, and clean energy tax credits.
“Clean free market policies not only allow Republicans and moderates to walk into the climate space safely. They will own the space,” said Rod Richardson, president of the Grace Richardson Fund and co-chairman of the Clean Capitalist Leadership Council.
The colloquium in Madrid, which was sold out within 24 hours, was “just a warmup,” Richardson said, adding the groups are already planning a summit this year in Glasgow to coincide with the U.N. climate talks there in November.
More generally, he hopes the proposals he and other free market think tanks are working on will allow Republican lawmakers, starting to talk more publicly about addressing climate change, to feel comfortable getting more specific about policy approaches they’d support.
