POLITICAL SCENE: REPUBLICANS VS. CLIMATE CHANGE

POLITICAL SCENE: REPUBLICANS VS. CLIMATE CHANGE

by Samantha Henig, The New Yorker, November 11, 2010

The Republican Party’s shifting position on climate change is “one of the mysteries of the organism,” says Elizabeth Kolbert on this week’s Political Scene podcast. Twenty years ago, George H. W. Bush introduced a cap-and-trade agreement “with a lot of fanfare and a lot of pride,” and, as recently as 2008, seven Republicans voted in favor of cap and trade. But now, Kolbert says, members of the party are “challenging the science behind that original commitment, which is absolutely unassailable at this point” and “telling you this science can’t be true”—a position that she says “has nothing to do with facts.”

Until the past few years, climate change was not so politically polarizing. Ryan Lizza, who wrote last month about this year’s failed climate-change legislation, explains on the podcast that it used to be mostly a regional debate: politicians from states that depended on coal or oil favored the status quo, while those from coastal regions were more eager to explore alternative energy. “But once President Obama made it a plank of his agenda,” Lizza says, “it became not just a regional issue but an extremely partisan issue, and Republicans abandoned it, and the base and the Tea Party turned it into a rallying cry.”

Kolbert, who wrote in April about declining support for climate-change legislation, says Obama could have put forward a compelling, bipartisan narrative: that China is developing new sources of carbon-free energy, and Americans can “either drag your heels and let the Chinese do it or you can be on the vanguard.” But he failed to make that argument, and, given the way the conversation has turned since he took office, Kolbert says,

It’s going to take a very, very long time just to get the conversation back where it was two years ago so that you could maybe potentially move forward, and that is just time that unfortunately the planet does not have, because every year that goes by and we build more infrastructure that’s very carbon-intensive, it makes it that much more difficult to solve the problem.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/11/political-scene-republicans-vs-climate-change.html#ixzz15SN32oUf