This just in:
Former South Carolina GOP Rep. Bob Inglis, is urging conservatives to stop denying that humans are contributing to global warming.
Inglis … will lead a new initiative at George Mason University to promote “conservative solutions to America’s energy and climate challenges” …
Inglis lost his 2010 primary to Trey Gowdy, who went on to win the general election to represent South Carolina’s 4th district, which is in the northern part of the state.
Details here at The Hill
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I really doubt the Republicans can do that now, or for quite some time. They’ve happily spent several decades digging themselves into a hole they share with science deniers of various stripes, and they’re beholden to them to an extent that precludes them from breaking away. They’d have to abandon their base, the 20-30 percent or so of the population that is really so crazy as to truly believe all the anti-science nonsense. This base is not shared with the Democratic Party, and is at present — as seen in polls — an overwhelming portion of GOP voters.
They need to break away from them eventually, but doing so strips away maybe half their votes or more. What would they be left with? the dumber end of the rich set, and any science-accepting racists there may be. Not exactly election-winning numbers, that.
I wish him luck but let’s look at the track record. Cap and trade was a Republican idea and when the Democrats accepted it the GOP turned against it. They can’t even pass their own ideas.
They can’t even pass their own ideas.
Rather like how they rant against the ACA, despite it being the ’90’s era Republican health care plan repackaged.
I also seriously doubt the GOP is going to correct itself on the climate. What seems to be happening instead is that Big Oil is beginning to grudgingly accept in public that AGW is real, though they continue to minimize its effects and assure us that it’s just another “engineering problem.”
As the industry slowly abandons the denial stance as a failure, less money will go to GOP politicians. Those politicians are more likely to simply say less and less on the issue, and hope the public has a short memory. Unfortunately for them, their wingnut supporters will keep bringing up the issue, and the public will be reminded of what whores their GOP representatives have been.
The GOP won’t and really can’t.
The problem is that once you accept that AGW is real then you also have to accept that the vast deposits of fossil fuels contain more carbon than can be burned and released into the atmosphere.
Once you do that, then you can’t attach a value to those deposits still in the ground that assumes that they can all be extracted and burned with no cost for CO2 mitigation.
Once you do that, you can’t lend money using fossil fuel deposits as collateral at book value when you know the actual value is much less and it may cost more to extract and utilize the fossil fuels than they are worth.
This is the problem. The book value of companies is based upon the book value of the fossil fuel deposits they control. If/when the value of those deposits goes to zero (because no more CO2 can be emitted without mitigation), the book value of everything that depends on the book value of those fossil fuel deposits changes accordingly.
Once the financial world starts to appreciate that the asset base of fossil fuel companies is a bubble, then the fiduciary responsibility will compel (honest) financial advisers to take that into account.
Once there are sophisticated models for estimating the value of fossil fuel reserves under reasonable CO2 regulations, the reasonable financial planner would have to take them into account or face liability for breaching his/her fiduciary obligation.
If someone doesn’t do that, they are not “investing”, they are speculating that they will know about regulations soon enough to respond before anyone else does.