Jim Hansen: Climate Change is the GOP’s worst nightmare
Many conservative politicians have been among climate change deniers, but ignoring the science will led to something the GOP dreads even more — big government.
So argued Jim Hansen, who since 1988 has been in the forefront of the issue, first as a NASA scientist and more recently as a free-agent activist, in an interview Thursday.
After an ill-fated, and it could be argued ill-conceived, attempt to pass climate legislation in the first year the the Obama administration there has been little traction on the issue. The federal Environmental Protection Agency is delaying its rules on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and the new Department of Energy energy efficiency standards for appliances are also being delayed.
And that’s okay with Hansen, who says he sees the solution coming in a different form, a carbon tax, and from a different place — the right of the political spectrum.
“It has to be a carbon tax and it really has to come from conservatives,” Hansen said. The reason is that the tax has to be market-based and revenue neutral.
“That money has to be given back to the public on a per capita basis so all legal residents of the country get an equal amount and that way the person who does better than average in limiting their carbon footprint would make money and then everybody in the country becomes an environmentalists whether they want to or not,” Hansen said.
“The fundamental fact is that as long as fossil fuels appear to the public to be the cheapest energy we are going to keep burning them,” Hansen said.”Fossil fuels are not the cheapest energy they only appear to be because they are subsidized.”
California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer and Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, have introduced a bill that would create a carbon tax, but that doesn’t make Hansen happy.
“As usual the Democrats are going to take some of the money, 40 percent of it,” Hansen said. “Conservatives have to put ta foot down and say you can’t use this as another excuse to make government bigger. Democrats have a problem they can’t keep their hands off our wallets.”
The reason Hasen is so adamant is by his calculation if the government keeps 40 percent most people will end-up paying more for energy than they get back. “It is important that all the money go to the public, so get this push from below,” he said.
What of the general reluctance from anyone — and we mean just about anyone — on the GOP side of the aisle to take up the issue since Arizona Sen. John McCain and South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham abandoned their 2008 efforts to fashion bipartisan legislation?
“If they continue to pretend that human-made climate change is a hoax, eventually you get to the point where nature makes it clear it wasn’t a hoax and then the public demands the government do something and that’s the worst nightmare for conservatives,” Hansen said.
“It would allow the government to take over and do things by fiat, which not in anybody’s interest in my opinion, because the government never, seldom, makes the right choices,” Hansen said. “Let the market make the choices, which is a conservative approach.”
Mark O’Connor near his home in Lyneham. Photo: Rohan Thomson
