Climate Could Be an Electoral Time Bomb, Republican Strategists Fear

By Lisa Friedman, The New York Times, Aug. 2, 2019

WASHINGTON — When election time comes next year, Will Galloway, a student and Republican youth leader at Clemson University, will look for candidates who are strong on the mainstream conservative causes he cares about most, including gun rights and opposing abortion.

But there is another issue high on his list of urgent concerns that is not on his party’s agenda: climate change.

“Climate change isn’t going to discriminate between red states and blue states, so red-state actors have to start engaging on these issues,” said Mr. Galloway, 19, who is heading into his sophomore year and is chairman of the South Carolina Federation of College Republicans. “But we haven’t been. We’ve completely ceded them to the left.”

While Donald Trump has led the Republican Party far down the road of denying the scientific consensus of human-caused climate change, Mr. Galloway represents a concern among younger Republicans that has caught the attention of Republican strategists.

In conversations with 10 G.O.P. analysts, consultants and activists, all said they were acutely aware of the rising influence of young voters like Mr. Galloway, who in their lifetimes haven’t seen a single month of colder-than-average temperatures globally, and who call climate change a top priority. Those strategists said lawmakers were aware, too, but few were taking action.

“We’re definitely sending a message to younger voters that we don’t care about things that are very important to them,” said Douglas Heye, a former communications director at the Republican National Committee. “This spells certain doom in the long term if there isn’t a plan to admit reality and have legislative prescriptions for it.”

President Trump has set the tone for Republicans by deriding climate change, using White House resources to undermine science and avoiding even uttering the phrase. Outside of a handful of states such as Florida, where addressing climate change has become more bipartisan, analysts said Republican politicians were unlikely to buck Mr. Trump or even to talk about climate change on the campaign trail at all, except perhaps to criticize Democrats for supporting the Green New Deal.

That, several strategists warned, means the party stands to lose voters to Democrats in 2020 and beyond — a prospect they said was particularly worrisome in swing districts that Republicans must win to recapture a majority in the House of Representatives.

The polling bears out Mr. Heye’s prediction of a backlash. Nearly 60 percent of Republicans between the ages of 23 and 38 say that climate change is having an effect on the United States, and 36 percent believe humans are the cause. That’s about double the numbers of Republicans over age 52.

But younger generations are also now outvoting their elders. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, voters under the age of 53 cast 62.5 million votes in the 2018 midterm elections. Those 53 and older, by contrast, were responsible for 60.1 million votes.

“Americans believe climate change is real, and that number goes up every single month,” Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican strategist, told a Congressional panel recently. He also circulated a memo to congressional Republicans in June warning that climate change was “a G.O.P. vulnerability and a G.O.P. opportunity.”

A new Harvard University survey of voters under the age of 30 found that 73 percent of respondents disapproved of Mr. Trump’s approach to climate change (about the same proportion as those who object to his handling of race relations). Half the respondents identified as Republican or independent.

“Here’s another gap between our party and younger voters,” said a recent report by a Republican polling firm, Public Opinion Strategies. Speaking of younger Republicans, the firm concluded that “climate change is their most important issue” and called the numbers “concerning” for the party’s future.

The full effect quite likely will not be felt until after the 2020 election cycle. President Trump’s campaign appears to have identified a strategy for winning re-election that relies on polarizing the electorate on issues like race, immigration and, it seems, climate change. But conservatives said the long term implications of that gambit were worrisome for the future of the party and the planet.

“He gets to set the national platform,” Joseph Majkut, director of climate policy at the Niskanen Center, a center-right research organization, said of Mr. Trump. But, he noted, “Every year that goes by, where people are going about their lives as if greenhouse gas emissions are a matter of very small concern, we make the problem worse for ourselves.”

Mr. Galloway and 45 other young Republicans with the American Conservation Coalition, a group that advocates for conservative environmental policies, brought that message to Washington last month when they lobbied Congress to address greenhouse gas emissions with free-market solutions.

“You can be skeptical of climate change all you want, but young people aren’t, and there’s no way conservatives are going to win elections if we don’t deal with climate change,” said Benjamin Backer, 21, the coalition’s founder and president.

Mr. Backer said he was encouraged by Mr. Trump’s environmental speech on July 8 as well as recent moves among some Republicans in Congress to advance climate policies. But he also said changes were not occurring fast enough to lure his generation of environmentally conscious conservatives.

“There’s a lot of people out there who would probably vote Republican if they knew there was a conservative agenda on climate change,” Mr. Backer said. Instead, he said, “They’re going to go to the Democratic Party, because that’s the only party that’s talking about the environment.”

Mr. Trump’s core supporters say they’re not worried. Standing in the sweltering heat outside East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., last month as he waited for entry into a rally led by the president, Trey Bagley, 25, readily acknowledged climate science. But Mr. Bagley, a sergeant in the Marine Corps Reserves wearing a “Trump 2020, Make Liberals Cry Again” shirt said that did not make him a Democrat.

“I completely agree that we’re offending the climate,” Mr. Bagley said. “But the solutions that are being introduced to fix it are going to drive us back into the Dark Ages.”

He’s not alone in that belief. To illustrate that, Alex Flint, executive director of the Alliance for Market Solutions, a conservative nonprofit group that advocates for a carbon tax, hit play on a video of 11 Trump voters around a hotel conference table in Florida discussing climate change. Government can’t be trusted to solve climate change, the focus group agreed. But like Mr. Bagley, they also all agreed that climate change is real.

“Republican orthodoxy is changing,” Mr. Flint said. “You’re safe saying you acknowledge climate change.”

He said climate change is hardly a top-tier topic among even moderate Republicans. But he noted it is a key differential issue in swing districts that can either help a candidate win young, college educated and female voters, or lose them.

“It’s a matter of honesty,” he said. “Voters believe it is happening, at the very least, they want their politicians to acknowledge reality.”

Scott Jennings, a Republican consultant and a former campaign adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said 2020 candidates in different states would take various approaches to climate change, but he predicted that most would focus on simply attacking Democrats and the Green New Deal.

Still, he said, “Someday Republicans are going to have to come up with some proposals that are responsive to these issues and, frankly, be more reasonable and more thoughtful.”

Moody’s Analytics says climate change could cost $69 trillion by 2100

By Steven Mufson, Washington Post, July 3, 2019

The consulting firm Moody’s Analytics says climate change could inflict $69 trillion in damage on the global economy by the year 2100, assuming that warming hits the two-degree Celsius threshold widely seen as the limit to stem its most dire effects.

Moody’s says in a new climate change report that warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, increasingly seen by scientists as a climate-stabilizing limit, would still cause $54 trillion in damages by the end of the century.

The firm warns that passing the two-degree threshold “could hit tipping points for even larger and irreversible warming feedback loops such as permanent summer ice melt in the Arctic Ocean.”

The new report predicts that rising temperatures will “universally hurt worker health and productivity” and that more frequent extreme weather events “will increasingly disrupt and damage critical infrastructure and property.”

Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi said that the report was “the first stab at trying to quantify what the macroeconomic consequences might be” of climate change, written in response to European commercial banks and central banks.

Climate change, Zandi said, is “not a cliff event. It’s not a shock to the economy. It’s more like a corrosive.” But, he added, it’s one that is “getting weightier with each passing year.”

Moody’s Investors Service, a major credit ratings agency, has already said that it wants to take climate into account when weighing the financial health of companies and municipalities.

[More U.S. businesses making changes in response to climate concerns]

The new report highlights the harm done to human health, labor productivity, crop yields and tourism.

It says that “water- and vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will likely be the largest direct effect of changes in human health and the associated productivity loss.”

The report also says that rising temperatures will allow mosquitoes, ticks and fleas to move to new areas, resulting in more sick days. It would also raise public and private spending on health care.

Labor productivity will take a hit, especially among outdoor workers, including those working in agriculture.

The hardest-hit economies will be some of the fastest-growing ones — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the report says.

The Moody’s Analytics report also forecasts lower oil and natural gas demand, dealing a blow to oil-exporting countries, especially in the Middle East. It forecasts that Saudi GDP will drop more than 10 percent by 2048; the kingdom would be the country harmed the most by climate change, hurting government revenue, Moody’s says.

Although Saudi Arabia has suffered drops in GDP when highly cyclical oil prices sink, Moody’s says that the kingdom would suffer more lasting harm as a result of climate change.

Of the 12 largest economies, India will be the worst hit, the report says, with GDP growing 2.5 percentage points more slowly than it would without the effects of climate change. The country’s service industry will be hit by heat stress, agricultural productivity will fall, and health-care costs will climb.

The firm carried out different scenarios using an international study by the World Bank, taking different locations into account and weighing different economic sectors. It said that rising sea levels would damage coastal real estate, wiping out rental incomes in some areas and thus cutting consumer spending.

But the scenarios only go through 2048. The Moody’s report says “the distress compounds over time and is far more severe in the second half of the century.”

“That’s why it is so hard to get people focused on this issue and get a comprehensive policy response,” Zandi said. “Business is focused on the next year, or five years out.”

He added: “Most of the models go out 30 years, but, really, the damage to the economy is in the next half-century, and we haven’t developed the tools to look out that far.”

Other businesses are peering ahead on climate change, too.

Chubb, one of the biggest insurance firms in the United States, on Monday said it would no longer sell insurance to new coal-fired power plants or sell new policies to companies that derive more than 30 percent of their revenue from the mining of coal used in power plants.

Although more than a dozen leading insurance companies in Europe have already cut off insurance for coal companies, U.S. firms have resisting pressure to take climate change into account.

Chubb’s step was just an initial one. “A major U.S. insurer like Chubb restricting insurance for coal projects and companies is a game-changer,” said Ross Hammond, a senior strategist for the Insure Our Future campaign, which has tried to pressure insurance companies to pull out of the coal market. But Hammond said that the company still needs to stop insuring new coal mines and the oil sands, or tar sands, in northern Alberta.

Lindsey Allen, executive director of Rainforest Action Network, said that “new coal projects cannot be built without insurance, and Chubb just dealt a blow to the dozens of companies that are still betting on the expansion of coal globally.”

Separately, the chief economist of Equinor, the Norwegian oil company previously known as Statoil, has written a report that looks at three scenarios for climate change and its impact on global economies, especially on energy.

Only one of those, the report said, would lead to a sustainable path, but that path comes with enormous challenges. To reach that set of targets by 2050, “almost all use of coal must be eradicated,” oil demand would need to be halved, and natural gas demand trimmed by more than 10 percent. Renewables as well as carbon capture and storage or utilization would have to increase sharply, helped by continuing advances in technology.

“In order to hit 1.5 degrees Celsius, the model to get there is enormously challenging,” said Eirik Waerness, senior vice president and chief economist of Equinor. He said more than half of new cars would have to be electric vehicles by 2030. Electricity demand will double, yet wind and solar would equal the entire current electricity output, a leap from current levels.

The threshold of 1.5 degree Celsius is the target set by most climate scientists for avoiding dire climate change.

Waerness also said that the company currently assumes a carbon price of $55 a ton when considering whether to finance new energy projects. As a result, Equinor has been investing more in projects such as offshore wind, where it can also tap into its experience with offshore platforms and technology.

Joe Biden and other 2020 Democrats give climate change the attention it deserves

USA Today editorial, June 11, 2019

Global warming is now a hot topic for voters, and candidates are taking note

In 2016, the two presidential candidates spent all of five minutes and 27 seconds on climate change during three televised debates. 

Now Democrats seeking the White House in the 2020 election are all but falling over each other with sweeping proposals for recasting the economy by promoting renewable energy, with a goal of reaching net zero carbon emissions nationally by midcentury.

The presidential hopefuls are taking cues from the Green New Deal resolution,  introduced in February by Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, which set a high bar for action and urgency.

To be sure, their proposal to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 is an overreach that is further burdened with costly social engineering goals involving guaranteed jobs and health care. But at least they helped elevate climate change to a national debate as people were hurting from record California wildfires, widespread flooding hit the Midwest and the scientific evidence grew increasingly indisputable.

The DNC said no to a climate debate. Some of its members are still trying to make it happen.

Democratic voters are telling pollsters that climate change is one of their top concerns, and nearly half of young adults surveyed call it a "crisis." Candidates are taking note. Detailed action plans sprouted from Washington Gov. Jay Inslee — running as a climate candidate — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, former Rep. Beto O'Rourke and, last week, former Vice President Joe Biden. 

The plans contain some important ideas. These including sticking with the Paris Agreement (President Donald Trump would pull Washington out, leaving the United States as an international pariah), pushing ahead with Obama-era fuel economy standards, embracing nuclear power as part of a clean-energy solution, and imposing some kind of price on carbon.

We continue to believe that the best approach would be a refundable national carbon tax that would make renewables and carbon-capture schemes more competitive — and prevent emitters from using the atmosphere as a free waste dump. Ideally, such a tax would be imposed in concert with similar actions by the world's other leading carbon emitters, so no nation would bear a disproportionate burden.

With the United States responsible for 15% of the global carbon pollution, Biden's plan would use U.S. economic pressure to prompt China and other major polluters to rein in their greenhouse gas emissions.

Disappointingly, the Democratic National Committee has scheduled up to 12 debates and refuses to devote even one solely to climate change. Given the importance of the issue, this is a mistake. 

Nonetheless, the contrast between Democratic proposals to address climate change and cricket-chirping silence from the Republican Party is breathtaking. Trump remains willfully, and at times incoherently, ignorant about the threat.

"I believe that there’s a change in weather, and I think it changes both ways," Trump told interviewer Piers Morgan last week, allowing that he was "moved" by the passion Prince Charles displayed for protecting future generations from the impact of a warming planet.

Indeed, members of a new generation will go to the polls in 2020. Right now, only one political party is seriously addressing the threat posed by climate change, and it isn't Trump or the GOP.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/06/10/joe-biden-democrats-give-climate-change-crucial-attention-editorials-debates/1406822001/

75 Executives Lobbied Congress for a National Carbon Price. We Listened

FORTUNE magazine

By CHRIS COONS and FRANCIS ROONEY June 1, 2019

Right before Memorial Day, over 75 businesses came to Capitol Hill to demand that their lawmakers establish a national carbon price. The participating business leaders collectively employ over 1 million U.S. workers and represent a combined market value of around $2.5 trillion—the largest group of businesses assembled on the Hill to advocate for climate legislation in a decade.

In over 80 meetings with members and staff from both the House and Senate, these business leaders spoke forcefully on the risk climate change poses to their operations, their employees, and their customers. They challenged Congress to heed their warning, accept the severity of the crisis, and take action to address the threat of a rapidly warming world. And they made clear: There is support in the business community for setting a national carbon price as a central component of any legislative strategy to address climate change.

Now, it is our responsibility, as members of Congress, regardless of our party affiliation, to respond to the businesses who drive our economy.

We represent different parts of the country and stand on opposite sides of the aisle in Washington, but we agree that there is perhaps no issue as urgent for our nation—and our economy—as tackling climate change.

Fortunately, solutions are not as elusive as politics would suggest. Seven in 10 Americans are concerned about climate change—more than ever before. Climate impacts are being felt by Americans all across the country and our constituents are calling for solutions. And an increasing number of both Democrats and Republicans agree on a key policy to address climate change: putting a price on carbon pollution.

Businesses know all about the risks of climate change. Companies are increasingly experiencing disruptions to their supply chains and damages to their assets from floods, droughts, wildfires, storms, and other climate-driven extreme weather, and investors see it reflected in their portfolios. Businesses’ bottom lines show that climate change isn’t a far-off risk, it’s a cost that’s already racking up damages to our economy to the tune of more than $300 billion a year, an amount which is only expected to grow.

That’s why we have both introduced legislation proposing a price on carbon. A price on carbon will level the economic playing field in the energy sector, unlock market-driven innovation, and lead to the deployment of low, zero, and negative carbon technologies. It will help create millions of new jobs and slash U.S. carbon emissions dramatically, making it a powerful tool for curbing climate pollution. Our bills are not the only ones—there are several proposals to price carbon that have been introduced in Congress.

The transition to a cleaner economy should not be achieved at the expense of those who will be hardest hit: That’s why we propose using the proceeds from the carbon fee to help ease the transition to a clean energy economy, by returning money to the taxpayers as a dividend each month, investing in research and development, and rebuilding our infrastructure.

Our approach also aims to efficiently reduce emissions and spur innovation and investment in new technologies. Placing a price on carbon emissions allows for individuals and companies to make more informed decisions by factoring in the cost of greenhouse gas pollution to society, allowing the market to appropriately respond by reallocating resources to lower-emissions products and behaviors. A transition to clean energy is a job creator: In 2018, the renewable energy and energy efficiency sectors alone employed nearly 3.3 million Americans. And this proposal would create and support more jobs across a wide range of sectors, including in the building trades, manufacturing, science, and engineering.

Our own states are already unlocking the growth potential of clean energy and working to minimize the future costs of rising seas. In Delaware, we are transitioning our electricity sector to 25% renewable generation by 2025. And in Florida, cities are already spending over $4 billion to harden infrastructure, improve drainage, and renourish beaches to combat tidal flooding.

The public is often presented with a false choice between growing the economy and combating climate change but we are heartened to see businesses recognize that this trade off is a myth. America must not lose out on the good paying jobs and new technologies that will come with the transition to clean energy. A strong, stable, national carbon price will help combat climate change, speed the uptake of renewable energy in the U.S., unlock innovation in our economy, and boost our competitiveness overseas.

It’s time for Congress to take bold action to address climate change and create jobs. Putting a price on carbon will help us reach both of these goals.

Chris Coons is a Democratic senator from Delaware. Francis Rooney is a Republican representative from Florida.

Global CO2 nears troubling benchmark

By Scott Waldman, E&E News, May 7, 2019

Researchers at the Mauna Loa Observatory recently observed record-high levels of atmospheric CO2.

The world has surpassed a level of carbon dioxide not seen in about 3 million years, and levels are accelerating an unprecedented pace.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide almost topped 415 parts per million on May 1 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, according to the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. On that day, the observatory measured a CO2 level of 414.94 ppm. Levels could go even higher and surpass the 415 ppm mark before the end of spring.

Every year, carbon dioxide tends to spike in the spring before plant life reemerges in a large part of the world to begin the uptake of the greenhouse gas.

But the rate of carbon emissions has accelerated in recent years, said Gernot Wagner, author of "Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet" and a researcher at Harvard University's Center for the Environment. The jump from 410 ppm to 415 ppm happened more quickly than the jump from 400 ppm to 405 ppm, which happened faster than the previous 5-ppm jump, and so on, he said.

That accelerating rate of increase is one of the more alarming, and less covered, aspects of the rising CO2 levels, he said.

"It's what matters most for all these climate damages; it's the increase in those concentrations that is still increasing at an increasing rate," he said. "We are going in the wrong direction at an increasing speed."

The newest benchmark brings current CO2 levels in line with the Pliocene Epoch, which occurred between 2.58 million and 5.33 million years ago. At that time, global average temperatures were 5.4 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than today and 18 degrees warmer at the poles, according to Scripps. Sea levels were 16 to 131 feet higher than today, Scripps has found.

During ancient climate change events, an increase of 10 ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide might have taken 1,000 years. It has taken just six years to go from 400 ppm to 415 ppm. When the late Charles David Keeling started measuring carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa in 1958, levels stood at 316 ppm, a slight increase from the 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution.

At the current rate, CO2 levels will top 1,000 ppm in about a century. That level will profoundly alter life on the planet and render wide swaths of Earth uninhabitable, scientists have found.

Keeling's data set — it's now maintained by his son Ralph — is regarded as one of the key measurements that demonstrate how human-caused climate change is affecting the planet. The elder Keeling developed the Keeling curve, which shows annual fluctuations in CO2 levels and links them to fossil fuel consumption.

As carbon dioxide levels rise, so, too, do global temperatures. The last five years have been the hottest on record. And while nothing happens as the 415 ppm benchmark is surpassed, it's another significant step into a warmer world, Wagner said.

"We've never had this global experiment. It's an amazingly fast increase," he said. "Three million years ago, when we did have CO2 levels as high as they are today, those changes happened very, very slowly, and the world was a very different place. We had crocodiles in the Arctic Circle; we had sea levels 30 to 90 feet higher than today."

Climate change: Is an economic overhaul needed?

April 20, 2019

Al Jazeera

The planet is facing a crisis. Temperatures continue to rise, bringing extreme weather, exacerbating food shortages, and leading to the extinction of some species. Scientists have repeatedly warned that the effects of climate change are becoming irreversible.

What will it take for politicians and the public to tackle climate change and implement policies that bring actual solutions? And what role does the world economic structure play in perpetuating the crisis?

In this week's Arena, we debate these issues with renowned climate scientist James Hansen, climate activist and cofounder of the Sunrise movement, Varshini Prakash and Amanda Mukwashi, CEO of the global NGO Christian Aid.

To see the 12-minute show: https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/upfront/2019/04/climate-change-economic-overhaul-needed-190419180710245.html