The Republican Climate Change Plan Sucks in an Encouraging Way

This crap is progress!

I’ve often wished that America had a normal conservative party. I look at the Tories in the UK — who summoned modest support to legalize gay marriage — or the Christian Democrats in Germany — which has a notable pro-refugee contingent — and get envious. There’s supposed to be a right-wing party that spends less money than I would like and restricts immigration more than I would like, but that forms part of the consensus on big issues. Instead, America has a party that sows vaccine skepticism, thinks you shouldn’t have to fill out a form to buy a military-grade weapon, and is currently debating whether the winner of an election should win the election. Maybe my perception is skewed by proximity; maybe this is like thinking that everyone’s parents are cooler than yours. But it does feel like most countries have a party led by stodgy old bastards who are nonetheless sane, while our right-wing party is basically a pirate ship full of feral children smoking angel dust.

The GOP’s shortcomings might be most noticeable on climate change. Their response to the biggest challenge of our time has been to fuss and resist like a toddler who won’t put on his jammies. When Jim Inhofe — the fucking chair of the Senate Environment Committee — tossed a snowball on the Senate floor, it marked total victory for the Up With Stupidity movement. In the past several decades, Republicans have contributed about as much to the solution to climate change as they have to the development of modern hip hop.

Which is why I was encouraged when the GOP announced a climate change plan last week. Was this…something? Was this a sign that Republicans might be ending their decades of climate denialism and wading into the policy debate? I was intrigued, so I read the plan.

It is not a long plan. I did not have to lock myself in my office with a pot of coffee and a highlighter; I read it while waiting for a train. Actually, I read it twice while waiting for a train, which says something about the state of GOP policymaking and also about the state of the Washington, DC Metro (in summary: Both have seen better days). My takeaway is that Republicans are taking what Democrats do badly and doing it somewhat worse. And yet: This is still progress.

Let me explain.

I feel very strongly that the best way to solve climate change is to attach a price to carbon. I have written more columns about a carbon tax than Gene Simmons has written songs about his dick. The main thing I like about a carbon tax is its versatility: Right now, we don’t know which technologies will pan out. A carbon tax lets the market sort that out, and could also spur behavioral changes that reduce our energy needs. Basically, it gives us the flexibility to tailor our plan as we go instead of forcing us to place big bets on a few technologies today, which — as backers of Betmax and the Microsoft Zune can tell you — is a dodgy proposition.

But a carbon tax won’t happen in this country any time soon. So, we go to Plan B: subsidies. Subsidies for clean energy and other green stuff are politically possible; crucially, they appear to have the thumbs-up from Grand Emperor Manchin, Exalted Be His Name. Subsidies can have an impact; there’s evidence that the green energy subsidies in the 2009 stimulus bill gave green technology (especially solar) a sizable boost. This is not my favorite way to do things — I think a carbon tax would give us much more bang for our buck — but this is a classic “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” situation. I support literally any real solution available; if we could solve climate change by shoveling puppies into a blast furnace, I would support that, because at this point we really just have to go with whatever works.

Democrats like subsidizing things like solar power, wind power, and electric cars. A big part of the Republican plan is to shift that support to nuclear power, natural gas, and fossil fuel energy with carbon capture. Republicans do this by calling for subsidies and looser regulations. That’s why Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) called the plan “a big oil wish list,” and it basically is that. Of course, you could also call the subsidies Democrats want a “big renewables wish list”. After all: Who do Democrats think builds industrial-scale wind farms? The Girl Scouts? Amnesty International? A Christian youth group with matching t-shirts and boatloads of positive mental attitude? Power companies build wind farms; when you commit yourself to the "subsidize new technology” strategy, you’re committing yourself to writing huge checks to huge companies, end of story.

The question becomes which technologies you choose to subsidize. The most contentious technology in the Republican plan is fossil fuel energy with carbon capture. This is where energy is produced using carbon-intense methods — usually coal — and then the carbon is captured and stored underground. Carbon capture plants currently exist the same way that Marty McFly’s auto-lace-up Nikes from Back to the Future II exist: They have been built and are a physical object on Earth, but they are not practical or remotely cost-effective. They are a curio that allows us to say “Look at what we built!”, even though we have to immediately follow that with: “Though we have no plans to ever build it again.”

If carbon capture works, it could be the low-carbon energy source we’re looking for. And if it doesn’t, we could have diverted money away from renewables and be stuck with dirty energy for far too long. It’s a high-risk proposition. I don’t know enough about the technology to meaningfully assess its viability, though it might be true that no-one knows enough about the technology to meaningfully assess its viability. Which is another down-side of having the government place 12-figure bets on far-off technologies: Not many lawmakers will be willing or able to assess the prospects of complex technologies, so they’ll just vote for stuff in their district so that they can brag about “creating jobs”.

The Republican plan also calls for “low impact” projects to be fast-tracked under the National Environmental Policy Act. This caused Melanie Ann Stansbury (D-NM) to call the plan “an end-run around environmental protections that have been in place for decades.” I understand the concern; one person’s “red tape” is another person’s sensible regulation. But I think Democrats should avoid reacting to proposed changes to NEPA as if Republican are planning to mix strychnine into baby formula. Environmental regulations are often used to block green energy projects. If Democrats treat every word of NEPA as if it was handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai, we’re going to end up making green energy projects significantly more difficult.

Some parts of the Republican plan are “yeah, sure” items. There are forestry management provisions that I think make sense. There’s a call to update flood maps, sure to be the hot-button issue of 2022. The plan wants the US to step up production of minerals used in green technology, and on one hand, that’s good; China tries to dominate minerals markets. On the other hand, mineral production is not quite the same as mineral independence. That same mission creep makes me less bullish about the call to make industry less carbon intensive, which is framed as “level(ing) the playing field for American manufacturers.” We need to keep our eye on the ball; we need green technology, no matter where it comes from. If it comes from the US, then great. If it’s Chinese, then okay. Equatorial Guinea — a real sleeper, but fine. The goal is to develop technology, not to add a new trade war to the old trade war that we started on accident and then forgot about.

The Republican plan is definitely not a solution to climate change. In my opinion, its focus is misplaced. There are a million things that it could do but doesn’t. It’s vague. It’s small. And it contains no numbers — it’s hard to know what something like “invest in America’s nuclear plants” really means without a dollar figure attached. Republicans remain allergic to taxes; they funded the infrastructure bill by rummaging through old coats in the hall closet until they found 1.2 trillion dollars. If the “investment” in nuclear ends up being a water jug full of pennies and a $20 voucher to Supercuts, then Republicans haven’t actually done a damn thing.

But I think that sneering at the plan is the wrong reaction. If nothing else, the plan does one big thing: It acknowledges that climate change is real and caused by humans. That’s huge. I know I’m grading on the silliest of curves here; I feel a bit like I’m handing a trophy to a 40 year-old who crossed the street without shitting his pants. But Republicans were very recently led by a guy who called climate change a “con” and a “hoax”, so reading a GOP plan that acknowledges basic reality feels like a “man walks upright for the first time”-level moment.

The plan is not a Midnight Sky-level pile of shit. It contains salvageable stuff. In a sane world, this plan might be the start of a discussion, perhaps one that jolts Democrats out of our stupid ambivalence on nuclear power. The parts of the plan on which I’m not totally sold — like the support for energy with carbon capture and the NEPA workaround — are things that I might be willing to agree to in exchange for other stuff. And that fact that the plan is pathetically small could be solved by making it part of a bigger deal.

But the plan will absolutely not spark a debate that will lead to a grand bargain on climate change. As I write this, the plan has already basically become irrelevant. Democrats scoffed at it, and there’s no indication that Republicans will ever put any meat on the extremely sparse skeleton they’ve created. In a sane world, we might have a discussion, but in this world, we definitely will not.

Still, I enjoyed imagining that I was reading a sincere plan by a sane party in a country with a functional government. At times, it almost felt — dare I say it — normal. I’m supposed to read a plan from the other side of the aisle and think “bad idea…misfire…half-measure…red herring.” And I absolutely did think that. But once I’m done whinging about the parts I hate, I’m supposed to take the parts I like and go from there. The GOP continues to be a party without a workable climate change plan, but they are now a party with an extremely shitty climate change plan. Which, if I’m being honest, I actually find pretty encouraging.