More than 20 years ago, a top Republican Party communications adviser wrote a memo that essentially told the GOP how to make Democrats look like fearmongers.
The adviser was Frank Luntz, the topic was global climate change, and the problem was to keep Republicans from looking like they didn’t care about the environment. Luntz advised the GOP to create doubt about climate science and say, “we must not rush to judgment before all the facts are in.”
“You need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate,” Luntz wrote.
So, they did.
Denial became the GOP’s response to global warming despite growing certainty among scientists and the growing realization among military and defense officials that climate change threatens national and international security.
By 2007, a committee of recently retired generals and admirals published a report assessing the national security implications of global warming. They concluded climate change is a “threat multiplier” that could trigger the failure of weak governments and instability in some of the world’s most volatile regions. By 2014, the recognition that climate change is a threat multiplier appeared in various Pentagon and national security reports.
By 2022, the national security publication Defense One argued climate change was the “main threat” rather than a threat multiplier. It proposed that the defense community champion a “whole of society hyper-response.” But GOP opposition blocked the few Democrat-sponsored attempts to do something, including establishing a carbon tax.
Today, the science is as settled as science ever gets. It has been well documented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s most authoritative organization of climate scientists. It’s also well documented that scientists working for ExxonMobil and other big oil companies concluded in the 1970s that global warming is real and caused by fossil-fuel pollution.
The weather has validated the warning. Fifteen of the 16 warmest years on record have occurred since Lunt wrote his memo in 2001. Since the 1980s, every decade has been warmer than the previous one. The rate of sea-level rise has doubled since 1993. From 1980 to 2022, weather and climate disasters in the United States caused nearly $2.5 trillion in damages.
Unfortunately, Republicans are still getting bad advice. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, reportedly sent a memo to every Republican in Congress advising them to disregard the latest “alarmist report” from the IPCC, which warned the world is still not on track to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
Meanwhile, House Republicans are vowing to chisel away at the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) and its $370 billion investment in clean energy, the most significant act of Congress to address climate change. Congress passed it without a single Republican vote. Instead, House Republicans passed their first bill of the current session, including a proposal to cut $27 billion from the law’s clean-energy funds. They warned of more cuts to come. They called their bill “the first bite of the apple,” and “just the beginning.” However, such attempts are “dead on arrival” in the Senate which is controlled by Democrats.
Ironically, red states will be among the IRA’s biggest beneficiaries. Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma and Kansas were the leading states in wind power last year. Texas, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina are among the top states for clean energy jobs. A Politico analysis found about two-thirds of the clean energy projects announced since the IRA became law are planned in Republican congressional districts. Republicans control nine of the top 10 congressional districts with existing or planned renewable energy manufacturing plants.
As the Democratic National Committee put it, the GOP “voted no, took the dough.”
It’s well past time for Republicans in Congress to accept a few realities:
· Climate change is a real and present danger to domestic well-being and national security
· It’s getting worse: Left unaddressed, its consequences will be catastrophic
· It doesn’t care whether its victims are Republicans or Democrats
· Our response must be guided by science because politics do not guide science
· They should leave the IRA untouched rather than tearing it down simply because it was a Democrats’ bill
In 2019, Frank Luntz acknowledged, “I was wrong in 2001,” and his advice then is “not accurate today.” He said that the American people want the federal government to do more about climate change, and they want to know not just the consequences of doing nothing but also the benefits of action.
Republicans apparently have not received that memo.
William S. Becker was a senior official at the Department of Energy under Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, working as central regional director who administered energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies programs. Before that, he directed research for the Republican Caucus in the Wisconsin State Senate and was the executive assistant to Wisconsin’s Republican Attorney General, the late Don Hanaway. As executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP) since 2007, he has organized several advisory boards of top Republican, and Democrat thought leaders to develop recommendations on national energy and climate policies. PCAP is not associated with the White House.