Hey, look, a Republican who cares about climate change!

[Willinois]

This Grist interview has been getting re-posted by my tree-hugging facebook friends. The former Republican Congressman was defeated by a tea party primary challenger, and now he's starting the "Energy & Enterprise Initiative."

I was expecting the usual half measures full of corporate giveaways that we usually get from Republicans who claim to care about climate change. But, his ideas sound better than I expected. He makes insightful comments about the tea party too, but I'll just quote his energy idea.

Quote:It’s called the Energy & Enterprise Initiative. It’s an effort to advocate for the elimination of all subsidies for all fuels and the attachment of all costs to all fuels. That’s the free-enterprise fix to energy and climate. If you correct the market distortions and make all fuels accountable for all of their costs, that will drive innovation and as a result reduce CO2 emissions.

The freebies for coal and petroleum are substantial even if you leave out the climate change impacts — just consider the health impacts, or attach to petroleum some of the defense costs in the Persian Gulf. We want the accountability that is a key value of social-issue conservatives, who believe, as I do, that human beings are responsible actors. The argument to social-issue conservatives will be, if you’re coal, you gotta be accountable! If you’re causing 23,600 premature deaths in the U.S. annually, over 3 million lost work days annually, pay up!

And to the economic-issue conservatives, the argument is, don’t you see the market distortion? If those costs aren’t attached to coal, how will you ever build a nuclear power plant? It used to be convenient for us as conservatives to blame enviros for why we’re not building nuclear power plants, but if we update our rhetoric to the actual facts, what we find is it’s more a question of economics. It just doesn’t make sense to build a nuclear power plant if you can build a coal-fired plant that can belch and burn for free.

For the libertarian conservative, our case will be that we shouldn’t socialize costs and privatize profits. And for the national-security conservative, the case is, why haven’t we broken this addiction to oil? Why has every president since Richard Nixon made the same speech that Barack Obama made last spring? Because we haven’t said we’re ready to fight this thing; we’re gonna make the economics right. We fund both sides of the war on terror. We fund them with our gas pump purchases and then we fund the bombs to blow them up.

It's similar to Robert Kennedy Jr.'s argument that clean energy would win right now in a true free market where fossil fuels are forced to pay their true costs instead of being heavily subsidized. It might even be better than a cap-and-trade bill that would have been loaded up with special favors for coal and oil.

Obama is already taking things in this direction. New EPA regulation will force the coal industry to spend more money on environmental controls instead of passing those costs onto the public in the form of pollution. He's also trying to remove oil industry subsidies, not that cynics on the left have noticed. They're too busy telling everyone that Obama is as bad as Bush.

[jaxx]

Interesting article. I hope he's wrong about the tea party surging for this election....they scare me with their damn guns and hate.