Despite a long string of years in which Republican leaders and candidates bashed global warming science, the platform adopted on July 18 has no section characterizing — one way or the other — the party’s view of risks from an unabated buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I’ll take that sidestep as a promising sign that some high-level Republicans recognize there is no credible way to dispute the basics of the science pointing to a human-heated planet.
The platform does bash the solutions pursued by President Obama, the Environmental Protection Agency and the new international climate agreement produced in Paris in December. And it expresses flat opposition to “any carbon tax.”
But then there’s a weirdly jarring line that seems to clash utterly with any view that warming and the CO2 buildup aren’t worth addressing:
We urge the private sector to focus its resources on the development of carbon capture and sequestration technology still in its early stages here and overseas.
How can a party platform omit any characterization of global warming and CO2 as a problem while urging businesses to develop a technology with no purpose other than sopping up the main greenhouse gas emission raising the planetary thermostat?
In a free market, wouldn’t that happen on its own accord? What’s the need for urging?
Actually, the only tool that’s seen as making carbon capture economically viable (setting aside huge technical issues) is a rising price on carbon. But the Republicans reject that outright.
Maybe there was confusion because the few elected Republicans who seem to understand global warming skipped Cleveland (as Ben Adler noted on the 18th).
When I posted a note on Twitter about this language, Costa Samaras, a climate-policy analyst at Carnegie Mellon University, agreed: “Firms invest in R. & D. to capture market share of discounted future revenues. No expectation of a greenhouse gas price? No R. & D.”
With this in mind, the only explanation for a line like this is that it was written by some coal or utility or oil executive for whom carbon capture is the only way to stay in business in a world with tightening greenhouse-gas standards. We might have to narrow that down to coal (or a Koch), given that even Exxon Mobil and other oil companies have supported a carbon tax.
How did this section of the platform survive vetting? I’m happy to hear your theories.
In some ways, its prescriptive quality resonates with policies of the new Five Star Movement mayor of Turin, Italy, Chiara Appendino, a vegetarian who just laid out an agenda aimed at sharply cutting consumption of meat and other animal products in that city. Here’s one line from the political game plan, as reported by the Italian website The Local: “The promotion of vegan and vegetarian diets is a fundamental act in safeguarding our environment, the health of our citizens and the welfare of our animals.”
Pledge allegiance and march, left or right….
* Addendum | Here’s a brief addendum on the coffee grounds I mentioned above. The surge of convention attendees in and out of Cleveland’s international airport didn’t do much for the environment, in a sense nicely reflecting the heart of the Republican platform’s section on environmental policy.
But the travel blitz did create a bumper supply of coffee grounds at Starbucks and other food vendors. On Thursday, Gregory Jackson, who founded Groundz, a composting program linked to Rising Harvest Farms, picked up 38 five-gallon buckets of coffee grounds from the airport’s management company.
Win one for the soil.