Washington Post affirms a proposed “Reagan way” on climate
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8106
In a 25 February Washington Post blog piece , Post editorial writer Stephen Stromberg lamented that explanations about scientists’ climate consensus not only don’t change scoffers’ minds, they actually seem to solidify scoffers’ views. Focusing on the partisan divide in the political climate wars, Stromberg considered an alternative approach along the lines of his posting’s headline, “Can only Republicans help Republicans on climate change?”
He wrote:
There are plenty of national Republican leaders who appreciate the risks of unabated greenhouse emissions—but not enough for them to make climate policy a public priority, especially lately. They are the ones best positioned to create space on the GOP side for dealing with greenhouse emissions, perhaps by focusing less on whether to do something and more on what to do—less on the interminable rhetorical wars and more on offering workmanlike policy that responds to climate risks.
One such Republican leader is George P. Shultz, who co-wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed two years ago advocating a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Before serving in the 1980s as President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state for more than six years, he served in President Richard Nixon’s administration as labor secretary, Office of Management and Budget director, and treasury secretary. That WSJ op-ed called for boosts in federal energy R&D and for elimination of energy subsidies and government involvement in commercializing energy technology. It said energy producers should be held accountable for pollution costs.
A carbon tax, it said, “would encourage producers and consumers to shift toward energy sources that emit less carbon—such as toward gas-fired power plants and away from coal-fired plants—and generate greater demand for electric and flex-fuel cars and lesser demand for conventional gasoline-powered cars.” Revenue neutrality would mean refunds to the public, not growth in government spending.
Shultz is listed prominently as a backer of the report Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States , which former Republican treasury secretary Henry Paulson announced in “The coming climate crash,” a high-profile New York Times piece last June. The New Republic explained that Risky Business aims at Wall Street, attempting “to put a dollar value on the risk climate change represents.”
On Sunday, 15 March, less than three weeks after Stromberg mused about Republican leaders “focusing less on whether to do something and more on what to do,” Shultz’s op-ed “A Reagan approach to climate change” appeared in the Sunday Post. Shultz began by adducing data from what he called “simple and clear observations” that led him to “conclude that the globe is warming and that carbon dioxide has something to do with that fact.” He cautioned, “Those who say otherwise will wind up being mugged by reality.” He invoked the memory of President Reagan’s role in protecting the ozone layer in the 1980s, and asked, “Why don’t we follow Reagan’s example and take out an insurance policy?” Shultz called again for energy R&D and a revenue-neutral carbon tax. His ending line reemphasized the claimed precedent: “It’s the Reagan way.”
On that same Sunday, Stromberg and his opinion-page colleagues also published the editorial “What would Reagan do? An approach to climate change that conservatives would do well to embrace.” The headline online similarly emphasized the claimed precedent: “Addressing climate change—the Reagan way.”
The editors wove Reagan’s name throughout the short piece. “Pretty much every Republican politician insists that the country should return to ‘the Reagan way,’” it began. “Few have first-hand knowledge. An exception is George P. Shultz, President Ronald Reagan’s longtime secretary of state and one of the Republican Party’s most distinguished senior members.” The editors cited and praised Shultz’s op-ed and asserted that “Reagan would have acted on the best conservative principles: prudence, practicality and a reverence for free enterprise.” They emphasized that Shultz saw first-hand what Reagan “did when confronted with warnings about a thinning ozone layer: He acted, buying the nation an insurance policy it turned out to need, and he marshalled private businesses to help.”
At the end, the editors added their own plugs for what Stromberg had called “focusing less on whether to do something and more on what to do":
What Mr. Shultz doesn’t say, but is nevertheless true, is that if Republicans pressed Democrats to accept a carbon plan that refrains from picking winners and losers, a plan that eschews the ugly spectacle of politicians using environmental policy to pay off interest groups, they would likely win big. If the GOP got behind a simple, market-based carbon strategy, it could demand an end to irrational energy subsidies and Environmental Protection Agency carbon mandates. Republicans would have serious policy leverage—if only they were willing to follow the Reagan way.
Immediately on 15 March, the conservative site Breitbart.com posted an attack piece under the headline “Selling global warming mythology and carbon taxes as ‘The Reagan Way.’” The opening gives a clear sense of it:
In February, the nascent Jeb Bush presidential campaign announced a team of 21 veteran foreign policy advisers, including former Secretary of State George P. Shultz. Let’s hope Bush isn’t looking to Shultz for economic or science policy advice. But unless he says otherwise, there’s no reason to believe Bush isn’t on board with Shutltz’s [sic] call for jacked-up carbon taxes in the name name of Ronald Reagan, issued at the Washington Post this weekend.
Most of Schultz’s [sic] article is a canned recitation of fashionable “climate change” mythology surrounding the enormous problem of polar ice refusing to do what the cult predicted it would. To get around this, the cult created some new arbitrary divisions between types of polar ice, so it could pretend that while the total ice coverage is increasing—the opposite of what all their models predicted—the “good” ice is actually melting, so we’re still doomed.
---
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.