It’s time for conservatives to speak up on climate change

Bob Inglis, the executive director of republicEn, believes that human-caused climate change is real and that the federal government should take decisive action to address it.

Inglis, who served two stints as a U.S. congressman from South Carolina, also believes that conservatives should say such things more often in public.

It’s the latter stance that distinguished Inglis from many of his peers in public office and that spurred him to found republicEn, an initiative to educate Americans about free enterprise solutions to climate change.

“My observation is, politicians are afraid of the people they represent,” Inglis told me when we met in Houston last week, as part of his ongoing efforts to rally support for the cause.

But when it comes to climate change, Inglis continued, Republicans can’t afford to keep silent.

As recently as 2008, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was so concerned about climate

change that he filmed a commercial with San Francisco liberal Nancy Pelosi — then, as now, the chamber’s speaker — about the need for the two parties to come together on the issue.

“We don’t always see eye to eye, do we Newt?” asks Pelosi in the ad, sponsored by former Vice President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection.

“No,” says Gingrich, seated next to his Democratic colleague on a loveseat in front of the United States Capitol building.

“But we do agree our country should take action to address climate change.”

Shortly after the commercial’s airing, though, Barack Obama was elected president and — not coincidentally, from Inglis’ perspective — Gingrich’s message changed. He began describing the ad itself as one of the “dumbest” things he had done in recent years.

The issue of climate change quickly polarized Republican primary voters. Inglis paid the price for his position.

He was unseated in the 2010 Republican primary by Trey Gowdy, who decided not to run for re-election in 2018 and recently joined President Donald Trump’s legal team as an outside advisor.

Still, a majority of Americans agree with Inglis about the need for action. A new survey from the Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of voters — and slightly more than half of millennial Republicans — think the federal government should do more to fight climate change.

Inglis finds Republicans’ head-in-the sand attitude self-defeating for the party — as well as counterproductive for all of us aware we’re just temporary stewards of the planet. In the absence of conservative proposals to slow climate change, the left has successfully monopolized the debate, even though their proposals may not be to everyone’s liking.

Inglis’ view is that we should harness the power of the free enterprise system through a carbon tax — a fee that the government imposes on companies that burn fossil fuels based on the amount of carbon emitted — rather than trying to regulate emissions directly or incentivize alternative energy.

“The consensus among the scientific community about the cause is very strong, but the consensus among the economic community about how to solve it is even stronger,” Inglis said. “You can’t find an economist that wouldn’t tell you that the first thing to do is the carbon tax.”

“If they’re conservative, they want it to be revenueneutral,” Inglis continued. “If they’re progressive, they don’t necessarily care about that. But both would agree you want it to be border-adjustable,” meaning that imports would be subject to the carbon tax, in order to avoid putting American businesses at a competitive disadvantage in global markets.

Only 31 percent of older Republicans would like to see the federal government take more action on climate change, according to the Pew survey. And since a majority of Republican elected officials are older, this generational divide has stark implications for our policymaking, if not the future of the planet.

In fact, Donald Trump may seem like the voice of his generation when it comes to climate change.

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” tweeted Trump in 2012 — on the day Obama was elected to a second term as president.

Since being elected president himself, in 2016, Trump has continued to scoff at the concept of human-caused climate change, as well as the suggestion that he should take the issue seriously. His administration last month announced that it plans to officially withdraw from the Paris climate accord next year.

In light of public opinion polling, that’s a decision that may cost Trump in the general election. Americans may disagree on the best approach to climate change, but denial is not a popular approach among voters on either side of the aisle.

And after what Inglis describes as a “lost decade” for climate change efforts, Republican leaders who saw the ouster of reform-minded conservatives in the 2010 Tea Party wave as a cautionary tale should consider the possibility that things have changed.

For his part, Inglis has no regrets about calling for climate action, even if it might have led to his ouster from office. After all, he said, our country asks people to die on literal hills sometimes.