Republicans warm to climate change, offer alternative solutions from nuclear power to carbon capture

House Republicans are making climate change part of their agenda, as they offer up alternative plans to the Green New Deal. Lawmakers have been mobilizing on the issue as part of the Energy, Climate, and Conservation task force, unveiled last year by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Read the full story on The Washington Times website here.

House Republicans are making climate change part of their agenda in 2022 after years of being labeled naysayers on environmentalist policies.

The climate issue is typically championed by the left but some congressional Republicans are carving out conservative solutions to cut greenhouse gas emissions, including expanding nuclear and hydroelectric power.

Democrats often balk at those solutions, rejecting nuclear power because of its toxic waste and hydroelectric because of its impact on ecosystems.

Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, one of 17 members on the House GOP-led task force on energy, climate and conservation said they are offering smart government solutions, rather than big government solutions.

“My colleagues on the left are interested in bigger government,” Mr. Johnson told The Washington Times. “We’ve seen that has not been an effective way to combat carbon. Europe is not meeting its carbon goals, even though they’re overwhelmingly using big government solutions.”

Usually cautions on climate change policy, Republicans have been more likely to mock the far-left Green New Deal than promote alternatives to combat global warming.

But some Republicans are sticking their toe in the climate change pool with proposals they say transition the economy to clean energy while simultaneously enhancing U.S. global competitiveness.

Last year, Republicans launched the Conservative Climate Caucus, a group of over 60 lawmakers from every House committee. The caucus was founded by Rep. John Curtis of Utah.

Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee also unveiled a package of clean energy solutions that would promote the development of carbon capture technology and update the licensing process for renewable hydropower projects.

Though carbon capture has been plagued by technological and financial failures, governments around the world are increasingly giving it another look. President Biden and top Democratic lawmakers agreed to a higher tax credit for industrial carbon capture projects as part of their $1.75 trillion social welfare and climate bill, which ultimately died in the Senate.

One of the other GOP proposals was the creation of an Energy Department program to reduce methane emissions from flaring and venting during oil and natural gas drilling.

The plan, known as the Securing Cleaner American Energy, was promoted as an alternative to the far-left Green New Deal that would give the U.S. economy a dramatic and rapid environmentalist makeover.

“Our plan is a much better agenda to protect the environment, jobs, and our national security than their unworkable pie-in-the-sky mandates that will halt economic opportunities for millions of Americans,” the committee’s Republicans said in a statement.

John Tures, a political science professor at LaGrange College, said the real-life effects of the increased severity of natural disasters are waking the public up to the impact of climate change, and pressuring Republicans to respond.

“The public is starting to recognize that things are just not normal when it comes to the climate,” Mr. Tures said. “The storms, floods, and natural disasters are becoming unnatural, and that’s gotten some Republicans to realize business as usual can’t go on. This will start costing people.”

Democrats don’t trust the GOP‘s climate agenda.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who is one of the most liberal members of Congress, said it’s hard to take the GOP‘s newly minted initiatives on climate seriously due to past defiance of the issue.

“In the past, they have rebuked climate change,” Ms. DeLauro said in an interview. “They don’t believe in it, so it sounds as if it doesn’t square with trying to move forward to address the energy and climate crisis.”

Republicans are far from marching in lockstep on climate change and many in the GOP recoil from the more extreme elements of the liberal agenda.

In a September tweet, Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, Georgia Republican, said that climate change and “climate justice” were made up.

“No amount of taxes that anyone can pay is going to change the climate and that is just the truth,” she said. “That’s not made up like climate change and climate justice.”

Rep. Thomas Massie, Kentucky Republican, last week called global climate change a “fairytale” that served as a membership requirement for the Democratic Party.

But other such as former Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina, who is now the executive director of the conservative climate change advocacy group RepublicEN, said the entire party needs to take climate seriously if it wants to win elections.

“When Republicans lost control of the House, it dawned on Kevin McCarthy that he would never be speaker without winning suburban districts, and you can’t win suburban districts with a retro-position on climate change,” said Mr. Inglis.

Aside from suburban voters, climate change is a winning issue among young conservatives who are pushing for more federal action on environmental protections.

“It’s a totally generational issue,” said Benji Backer, the 23-year-old founder of the environmental advocacy group American Conservative Coalition. “We don’t really care about the politics of it. We have our conservative beliefs. We have our liberal beliefs depending on who we are as young people. We just want to do something about climate change.”

A 2020 Pew Research Center poll found that younger Republicans broke from their party on prioritizing climate change.

Americans between ages 18-39 who affiliated with the GOP felt the federal government wasn’t doing enough to mitigate the issue, and they were more likely than older Republicans to acknowledge that climate change was exacerbated by human activity.

About 29% of younger conservatives felt that the humans were worsening the issue, compared to 16% of Republicans from the Baby Boomer generation.

The survey was conducted between April 29-May 5 and surveyed 10,957 U.S. adults. It had an error margin of 1.4%.