Environmental groups are trying to figure out whether the 15 Senate Republicans who voted this week that humans contribute to climate change were demonstrating a desire to work on reducing emissions or giving themselves political cover.
The roster of Republicans who voted for North Dakota GOP Sen. John Hoeven’s amendment to legislation authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline includes a number of senators up for re-election in 2016, a general election that is expected to bring more Democratic voters to the polls than the 2014 midterm races.
The 15 Republicans who backed Hoeven’s amendment will be in environmental groups’ address books in hopes of pushing those lawmakers into backing up the symbolic vote they took by advocating policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions that scientists blame for warming the planet.
“Until these politicians actually embrace and accelerate our transition to a clean energy economy, fueled by renewable sources like wind and solar, votes like these are just window dressing,” Karthik Ganapathy, a spokesman for climate advocacy group 350.org, told the Washington Examiner.
But some are wondering whether policy can result from what observers have called a shift in how the party publicly addresses climate change.
“I think there are a lot of people who are looking for a rational place to be here, and we want to create the room for that debate. Now, there’s a time to have a fight about election politics and there’s a time to have a fight about what the right policy approach is,” Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, told reporters.
The Hoeven amendment was milder than one sponsored by Schatz, which said humans “significantly” contribute to climate change. Five Republicans voted for the Schatz measure: Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Susan Collins of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mark Kirk of Illinois. Kirk and Ayotte are both up for re-election in 2016 in what are expected to be competitive races.
All five also supported the Hoeven amendment. So too did a number of senators who will need to defend their seats in 2016: Portman, John McCain of Arizona, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul of Kentucky, who might have presidential aspirations.
While Republicans put the climate change amendments up for a vote, they would have liked to have had more time to get their positions in order. They didn’t have that luxury when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., brought Keystone XL to the floor for the new majority’s first bill, where the open amendment process he promised gave Democrats their chance to put the GOP on record.
“It puts a number of people on record and really gives the party a pretty safe way to take a position,” Eli Lehrer, president of the conservative R Street Institute and a promoter of a carbon tax, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s a complicated issue, and a lot of Republican senators are not under any real pressure from their own constituents to say anything.”
Polls back that up. Exit polling conducted by Edison Research during the 2014 election showed it was the most divisive issue between Democratic and Republican voters, as 86 percent of Democrats said climate change was a serious problem, compared with 31 percent of Republicans.
A Senate GOP aide said Republicans were already working on policies to reduce emissions and criticized Democrats for offering “messaging” amendments when they had a chance to put forth substantive proposals. The aide referred to a bipartisan energy-efficiency amendment Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, offered, which passed 94-5.
But some conservatives think the party should push back on prodding from Democrats and their allies. Michael McKenna, a GOP energy lobbyist, told the Examiner that the Hoeven vote “placed people in a horrible spot. We need to do better.”
“At some point we need to make a direct, explicit, fact-specific argument on the science,” McKenna added. “It would lay out facts that are counter narrative but well-sourced. Meaning counter to the narrative that we know everything there is to know about global warming.”
The votes came as some Republicans have increasingly come to view the party’s relative silence on climate change as untenable.
Republican staff held a closed-door meeting with a pollster who tried to present them with strategies to promote their own solution to climate change, but the suggestions offered were straight from the Democratic playbook. Meanwhile, offices have invited conservative groups such as the R Street Institute and the Energy and Enterprise Initiative — led by former Rep. Bob Inglis, R-S.C. — to discuss free-market approaches to reducing emissions.
Lehrer, speaking of the 15 Republicans who voted for Hoeven’s amendment, said, “I don’t see a sea change here. But you are seeing some clarity that the Republican Party is taking some of these issues more seriously than they have in the past.”
Environmental groups said those developments are welcomed.
“It’s becoming crystal clear that American voters simply will not allow a climate denier to ever again hold national office, so it’s no surprise that Republicans are changing their tune, holding secret strategy meetings, and trying to come up with an actual position besides ‘I’m not a scientist,'” Ganapathy said.
