Open thread for night owls: Non-denying Republican says don't scare people about global warming

Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina, a right-winger who lost his 2010 primary in a landslide to an ultra-right tea party candidate, has become executive director of the Energy and Enterprise Institute. The new think-tank will focus on a "free-enterprise" approach to dealing with global warming.

You read that right. Inglis is one of those increasingly rare Republicans who believes that global warming isn't a liberal lie. More than half the incoming Republicans to the House of Representatives in 2010 either deny the actuality of global warming altogether or say nothing should be done about it. Inglis vigorously disagrees with them. But he says environmental advocates and politicians who try to capitalize on the wildfires and heatwaves and droughts now under way in the United States as a means to persuade Americans that global warming is happening will likely have the opposite effect.

"The thing that would not be helpful is for anybody associated with climate change action to be wagging their finger in Colorado and Texas or wherever it's hot saying, 'See I told you so,'" Inglis said in a telephone interview.

"That is the worst possible thing for anybody wanting climate action to do because then you engender the predictable response of, 'I will show you. I will not budge an inch.'" [...]

"Those who do speak, speak in apocalyptic visions and that drives us further into denial as a suitable coping mechanism," Inglis said. "If you tell me we are all toast and it's just terrible, that doom is imminent, if you tell me that then eat, drink and be merry. If I am toast, I may as well just ignore it," he said.

In fact, deniers are already following the eat-drink-and-be-merry approach when it comes to global warming. Not because they think nothing can be done but because they don't think anything should be. Given politicians' resistance to the facts'out of ignorance or malignance or the flow of campaign cash'persuading them to take action is a no-win proposition. The energy oligarchs, too, are for the most part unconvinceable. The solution in both cases: Topple them.

The energy institute's solution is altogether different: Get rid of all energy subsidies and let the "magic" of the marketplace do its work with the true costs of energy charged to every source. While the idea of requiring health and environmental costs to be attached to all sources of energy makes very good sense'something that activists have been saying since the 1970s'there's a problem with the institute's stance on subsidies. The so-called leveling of the playing field only sounds fair.

It ignores the residual impact of a more than 100 years worth of subsidies to fossil fuels, 75 years to hydropower and 60 years to nukes. But for a brief period during and after Jimmy Carter's term in the presidency, renewable energy sources have received subsidies for only 20 years. Those sources are only just now reaching a take-off point.

To be sure, a century is far too long for an energy source to be subsidized, especially a subsidy whose ultimate impact is killing people with pollution. But Inglis's proposal would demand that wind, solar, geothermal sink or swim on their own just at a time when subsidies are on the verge of doing for these renewable sources what fossil-fuel subsidies did for those sources over many decades. The full outcome of the institute's approach is uncertain, but it certainly would slow down a commitment to renewables just when we should be in acceleration mode.

High Impact Posts. Top Comments.