Republicans who want to combat climate change say their party should avoid the temptation of rejecting the progressive “Green New Deal” without proposing an alternative.
“If the Green New Deal goes down in flames and gets totally discredited, the climate issue is still out there,” said Josiah Neeley, energy policy director at the R Street Institute. “You still have to come up with ways to deal with it.”
The Green New Deal resolution introduced Thursday by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass. — with more than 70 House and Senate co-sponsors — contains several nonbinding goals to transform the U.S. economy to fight climate change.
It calls for 100 percent clean, renewable, and zero-emission electricity, and the elimination of carbon emissions from other major sectors of the economy — manufacturing, buildings, transportation, and even agriculture.
The resolution proposes massive public investments in clean energy infrastructure such as light rail and weatherized buildings.
The plan calls for guaranteed government jobs, universal healthcare, and making every residential and industrial building more energy-efficient.
But because it contains no actual policies to get there, leaving that work for later, Republicans should fill in the gap with their own prescriptions, party leaders say.
“Republicans could point to the Green New Deal and say these people are socialists, it’s stupid and bad,” said Shane Skelton, who was an energy policy adviser to former House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. “But that’s not the best route, because it’s not thoughtful and doesn’t give you a platform.”
That’s especially true as polls show Republicans growing more concerned about climate change and noticing the impact the global warming is having on extreme weather events.
“When you go into campaign season, it’s always better to say I have a better solution to your problem that will hurt you less and help you more than to say you don’t have a problem, and I don’t want to talk about it,” Skelton said.
So far, leading Republicans aren’t listening to that advice, viewing the Green New Deal, with its creep into non-climate-related issues and focus on government intervention, as a way to paint Democrats as too extreme.
The Green New Deal is the “first step down a dark path to socialism,” said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, in a statement to the press Thursday.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., mockingly urged Democrats to call a vote on the Green New Deal.
“Americans deserve to see what kind of solutions far-left Democrats are offering to deal with climate change,” he tweeted Friday.
George David Banks, President Trump’s former international energy adviser, said he expected the White House to adopt similarly combative language.
“This is gift to the president just because of how far left some of the socioeconomic points are,” Banks said. “I can’t imagine him not taking advantage of that politically. It’s a target-rich document.”
Ocasio-Cortez and Markey say their Green New Deal represents the ambition of the required action and argue Republicans would pay the price for deriding it.
Markey, at a Thursday press conference. called climate change “one of the top issues that candidates on either side will have to answer” in the 2020 election.
Ocasio-Cortez was more explicit.
“I don’t think we lose elections by addressing climate change,” she said. “I don’t think we ever have, and I don’t think we ever will.”
Banks said the approach of the Green New Deal to “throw the kitchen sink” at fighting climate change pressures Republicans, especially in suburban districts and coastal ones exposed to sea-level rise.
“If you are looking at developing a national climate policy, there are components of the Green New Deal I would support in principle,” he said. “The majority of their climate policy reflects a centrist position.”
For example, Banks and other Republicans said members could use a potential infrastructure bill to implement some of the proposal’s goals.
Possible measures could include: improving energy efficiency in publicly funded projects, modernizing the electricity grid to accommodate the use of more wind and solar, rebuilding transmission and distribution lines to make them more resilient to severe weather events and wildfires, and accelerating the deployment of electric vehicle charging stations.
Republicans also generally support spending on research and development, and could do more.
Congress by bipartisan margins has provided the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, with record funding during the Trump administration.
ARPA-E is a program that funds innovations in energy technology that are too early for private sector-investment, such as improvements in battery storage and floating offshore wind turbines.
Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, the top Republican of the Energy and Commerce committee, promised last week during a hearing focused on climate change to cooperate on “a bipartisan path forward to tackle this important issue that confronts not just our nation, but the world.”
He said a “longer conversation about the Green New Deal is necessary” and outlined potential areas of cooperation, such as measures to boost zero-carbon advanced nuclear energy, a far-off technology that supporters say is more viable because it’s smaller, containing less fuel and energy, and would operate with less risk of accidents.
Republicans are also eyeing more funding and incentives for carbon capture research and development that could trap emissions at fossil fuel or industrial plants, and store it under ground.
Barrasso introduced a bipartisan bill Thursday that would require the government to facilitate the construction of pipelines to transport the captured emissions so it could be used for commercial purposes, which would help the technology be more economically viable.
The Green New Deal leaves the door open for carbon capture — and nuclear — to contribute to a “net-zero” emissions future, after some initial doubts that it would.
While these innovations are a key component of avoiding the worst climate outcomes, they don’t go far enough, the United Nations’ climate change panel said in a report last year.
In the U.N.’s estimation, the solution includes putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions, a linchpin policy that most economists view as the most efficient way to combat climate change
The Green New Deal does not mention carbon pricing, leaving an opening for centrist Republicans such as Reps. Francis Rooney of Florida and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania who have co-sponsored carbon tax legislation.
“We should entertain the competition of ideas, not duck it, and engage substantively because this is ground that conservatives can win on,” said former Rep. Bob Inglis, founder of republicEn.org, and a former six-term congressman from South Carolina.
