February 8, 2017: THIS changes everything!

I wrote about this a few of days ago, the morning I was stunned to see two major newspapers (NYT and WSJ) publish similar op-eds and articles on the carbon fee and dividend proposal of prominent Republicans George Schultz and James Baker III. The WSJ titled their piece "A Conservative Answer to Climate Change." Just seeing the works "conservative" and "climate change" together made me smile!

I think that history will show that this day marked a turning point in the previously liberal movement (in this country, at least) to act on climate change. That this group of respected, stalwart Republicans got together as the Climate Leadership Council and proposed a market-based plan to deal with runaway carbon emissions, publicly admitting that climate change is real, that humans are causing the problem with greenhouse gas emissions, and that something needs to be done--Wow!

Here is the opening paragraph from that report: "Mounting evidence of climate change is growing too strong to ignore. While the extent to which climate change is due to man-made causes can be questioned, the risks associated with future warming are too big and should be hedged. At least we need an insurance policy. For too long, many Republicans have looked the other way, forfeiting the policy initiative to those who favor growth-inhibiting command-and-control regulations, and fostering a needless climate divide between the GOP and the scientific, business, military, religious, civic and international mainstream."

What a gift to the cause taken up for years by the Citizens' Climate Lobby, which has acted in a bi-partisan manner in an effort to pass carbon fee and dividend legislation for almost a decade. The proposals of the CLC and CCL (confusing, huh?) have some differences, but they both place a fee on the carbon extracted at the source, and then return (the "dividends") the money collected to American households. This action will change consumer habits and investor priorities, moving the pendulum towards renewable energy sources in a steady, reliable manner. A CCL-sponsored report predicts that this will cause a carbon reduction of 50% of 1990 levels while adding 2.8 million jobs to the American economy.

ACTION: Call your Members of Congress (three of them--two Senators and one Representative) and ask them to consider this proposal.

MORE INFORMATION:

CITIZENS' CLIMATE LOBBY PROPOSAL

CLIMATE LEADERSHIP COUNCIL PROPOSAL