From fact to fiction: A GOP journey
Republican leaders bow to corporate pressure in changing narrative on climate
WASHINGTON — The campaign ad appeared during the presidential contest of 2008. Rapid-fire images of belching smokestacks and melting ice sheets were followed by a soothing narrator who praised a candidate who had stood up to President George W. Bush and “sounded the alarm on global warming.”
It was not made for a Democrat, but for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who had just secured the Republican nomination.
It is difficult to reconcile the Republican Party of 2008 with the party of 2017, whose leader, President Donald Trump, has called global warming a hoax, reversed environmental policies that McCain advocated on his run for the White House, and last week announced that he would take the nation out of the Paris climate accord, which was to bind the globe in an effort to halt the planet’s warming.
The Republican Party’s fast journey from debating how to combat human-caused climate change to arguing that it does not exist is a story of big political money, Democratic hubris in the Obama years and a partisan chasm that grew over nine years like a crack in the Antarctic shelf, favoring extreme positions and uncompromising rhetoric over cooperation and conciliation.
“Most Republicans still do not regard climate change as a hoax,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist who worked for the presidential campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. “But the entire climate change debate has now been caught up in the broader polarization of American politics.”
Yet when Trump pulled the United States from the Paris accord, the Senate majority leader, the House speaker and every member of the elected Republican leadership were united in their praise.
Those divisions did not happen by themselves. Republican lawmakers were moved along by a campaign carefully crafted by fossil fuel industry players, most notably Charles D. and David H. Koch, the Kansas-based billionaires who run a chain of refineries as well as a subsidiary that owns or operates 4,000 miles of pipelines that move crude oil.
Republican leadership has also been dominated by lawmakers whose constituents were threatened by policies that would raise the cost of burning fossil fuels, especially coal. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, always sensitive to the coal fields in his state, rose through the ranks to become majority leader. Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming also climbed into leadership, then the chairmanship of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, as a champion of his coal state.
Trump has staffed his White House and Cabinet with officials who have denied, or at least questioned, the existence of global warming. And he has adopted the Koch language, almost to the word. On Thursday, as Trump announced the United States’ withdrawal, he at once claimed that the Paris accord would cost the nation millions of jobs and that it would do next to nothing for the climate.
‘The turning point’
It was called the “No Climate Tax” pledge, drafted by a new group called Americans for Prosperity that was funded by the Koch brothers. Its single sentence read: “I will oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue.”
The effort picked up steam the next year after the House passed what is known as cap-and-trade legislation, a concept invented by conservative Reagan-era economists.
The idea was to create a statutory limit, or cap, on the overall amount of a certain type of pollution that could be emitted. Businesses could then buy and sell permits to pollute, choosing whether to invest more in pollution permits, or in cleaner technology that would then save them money and allow them to sell their allotted permits.
The House passed the capand-trade bill by seven votes, but it went nowhere in the Senate — Obama’s first major legislative defeat.
Unshackled by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and related rulings, which ended corporate campaign finance restrictions, Koch Industries and Americans for Prosperity started an all-fronts campaign with television advertising, social media and cross-country events aimed at electing lawmakers who would ensure that the fossil fuel industry would not have to worry about new pollution regulations.
Their first target: unseating Democratic lawmakers such as Reps. Rick Boucher and Tom Perriello of Virginia, who had voted for the House cap-and-trade bill, and replacing them with Republicans who were seen as more in step with struggling Appalachia, and who pledged never to push climate change measures.
Obama feeds the movement
After winning re-election in 2012, Obama understood his second-term agenda would have to rely on executive authority, not legislation that would go nowhere in the Republican-majority Congress. And climate change was the great unfinished business of his first term.
To finish it, he would deploy a rarely used provision in the Clean Air Act of 1970, which gave the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to issue regulations on carbon dioxide.
The result was the Clean Power Plan, which would significantly cut planet-warming emissions by forcing the closing of hundreds of heavy-polluting coal-fired power plants.
Starting in early 2014, opponents of the rule — including powerful lawyers and lobbyists representing many of America’s largest manufacturing and industrial interests — regularly gathered at the national headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They drafted a long-game legal strategy to undermine Obama’s climate regulations in a coordinated campaign that brought together 28 state attorneys general and major corporations to form an argument they expected to take to the Supreme Court.
They presented it not as an environmental fight but an economic one, against a government that was trying to vastly and illegally expand its authority.
Attorneys general step in
Republican attorneys general gathered in West Virginia in August 2015 for their annual summer retreat, with some special guests: four executives from Murray Energy, one of the nation’s largest coal-mining companies.
West Virginia’s attorney general, Patrick Morrisey, led the session, “The Dangerous Consequences of the Clean Power Plan & Other EPA Rules,” which included, according to the agenda, Scott Pruitt, then the attorney general of Oklahoma; Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general; and Geoffrey Barnes, a corporate lawyer for Murray.
That same day, Morrissey would step outside the hotel to announce that he and other attorneys general would sue in federal court to try to stop the Clean Power Plan, which he called “the most far-reaching energy regulation in this nation’s history, drawn up by radical bureaucrats.”
Pruitt quickly became a national point person for industry-backed groups and a magnet for millions of dollars of campaign contributions, as the fossil fuel lobby looked for a fresh face with conservative credentials and ties to the evangelical community.
After the litigation was filed, Murray Energy sued in the federal court case as well, as had been planned.
In April 2016, the Supreme Court indicated that it would side with opponents of the rule, moving by a 5-4 vote to grant a request by the attorneys general and corporate players to block the implementation of the Clean Power Plan while the case worked its way through the federal courts.
Trump stokes the fires
When Trump decided to run for president, he did not appear to have a clear understanding of the nation’s climate change policies. Nor, at the start of his campaign, did he appear to have any specific plan to prioritize a huge legal push to roll those policies back.
However, it did not go unnoticed that coal country was giving his presidential campaign a wildly enthusiastic embrace, as miners came out in full force for Trump, stoking his populist message.
Trump took on as an informal campaign adviser Robert Murray — chief executive of Murray Energy.
Trump, who had never met Pruitt before his election, offered him the job of EPA administrator — putting him in a position to dismantle the environmental rules he had long sought to fight in court.
Murray Energy — despite its enormous clout with Trump and his top environmental official — boasts a payroll with only 6,000 employees. The coal industry nationwide is responsible for about 160,000 jobs, with just 65,000 directly in mining, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
But these voices did not have clout in Washington, either in Congress or at the White House, when it comes to energy policy.
Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen Bannon, backed by Pruitt, told the president that pulling out of the deal would mean a promise kept to his base.