Like 54 percent of conservative Republican voters, I believe that climate change is real and that human activity is driving it.
Fifty-four percent. It is not a statistic we encounter every day. Far more often, it's news that Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), brought a snowball to the Senate floor, or that Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump tweeted: "the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."
Yes, Republican voters have a better grasp on climate change than Republican politicians. These voters recognize that the scientific consensus on climate change is compelling. The 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report says it best: "it is extremely likely [95 percent confidence] more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together." In other words, even taking into consideration aerosol pollution’s cooling effects, human greenhouse gas emissions are behind the majority of the warming over the past 60 years.
But instead of engaging in the climate change policy debate, Republicans have withdrawn from it. Hiding under the banner of denialism, skepticism, head-in-the-sand-ism—however you would characterize it—Republicans have ceded the issue to Democrats.
In this vacuum, liberals are promoting government-centric solutions. For example, last August progressives cheered President Obama's announcement of the "Clean Power Plan," which empowers the Environmental Protection Agency to issue sweeping new regulations on carbon dioxide emissions from now through 2030.
Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor who once taught Obama, explained in recent Congressional testimony that the EPA's latest ukase usurps lawmaking authority from the legislative branch. "Much is up for grabs in this complex area," Tribe said, "but burning the Constitution of the United States, about which I care deeply, cannot be part of our national energy policy."
The EPA's plan is simply bad policy. It will raise electricity prices. It imagines new meanings of definitions in settled law. It issues arbitrary clean-energy quotas in lieu of harnessing market forces. It is difficult to imagine an energy policy conservatives would like less. But harmful policies like Obama's 15-year-plan are the price conservatives pay for withdrawing from constructive debate.
There must be a better way. A constructive conservative energy policy would frame the debate differently. Instead of questioning the science of climate change, instead of placing economic well being and environmental stewardship at odds, conservatives should ask: "how can government and markets work together? What energy policy is in the long-term interest of the United States? And what is the best way to achieve it?"
Questions like these will drive conservatives, centrists and liberals to find common ground. Most will agree that hydrocarbon fuels have significant climatic, geostrategic and health-related disadvantages and that we should seek out alternatives. This debate wouldn't be about attributing blame or shaming opponents—it would be about how to accelerate the next energy revolution.
Whale oil kept the lights shining for one generation. Kerosene fueled the next. Coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear energy power our present age. Emerging sources of electricity generation—wind, solar, tidal, nuclear and geothermal—all contend to be the "energy source of the future." Both subsidy regimes and regulatory approaches strive to cultivate these new forms of energy. But both strategies are hopelessly inefficient and should be discarded in favor of a market-based approach, such as a carbon tax.
The disadvantages of the regulatory approach have already been discussed, but why abandon subsidies? Green-energy advocates might point to Germany, China or even the United States as subsidy success stories. But in all these cases, subsidies have provided disappointing results. Renewable energy generates 27 percent of electricity in Germany but German electricity prices stand among the highest in Europe. Chinese investment in renewables—a ploy to reduce unpopular air pollution, not a commitment to environmental justice—has outstripped the electrical grid's capacity, resulting in squandered power. In the U.S., the ethanol subsidy is an unmitigated disaster (and the driver of quadrennial pandering before the Iowa caucuses), while failures like the Solyndra bankruptcy mar government efforts to promote renewables.
Rather than continuing to pick winners and losers, we should raise the price of carbon and let the market decide what will replace fossil fuels. Instead of distorting the market with subsidies, a carbon tax would correct the price of carbon to account for its true costs to the environment, public health and national security. Dismantling the subsidy regime in favor of a carbon tax would advance energy innovation, as scrappy energy start-ups too risky or too boring to secure a government subsidy would look even more attractive to investors seeking to diversify their portfolios.
A carbon tax draws objections from conservatives and liberals alike. Conservatives are wary of instituting an entirely new tax. Liberals fret that carbon taxes, like sales taxes, are regressive, meaning that they take proportionally more from lower-income people. But the right policy could allay both concerns at once: pair any carbon tax increase with an income tax cut (or tax credits to the low-income consumers most affected by higher gasoline and electricity prices) to make the carbon tax revenue neutral. With a carbon tax, consumers would prioritize energy efficiency, power companies would seek out lower-priced alternatives and start-ups would compete to invent the most appealing alternatives to existing energy sources.
Advances in oil and natural gas production have made the United States an energy superpower, but a carbon tax would make America the world leader in the design, manufacture and installation of renewable energy production for the foreseeable future. Conservatives must rethink energy policy or else be consigned to the (coal) ash heap of history.
Matthew King is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs on alternate Mondays.
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