Weeks before Barack Obama launched his administration’s most ambitious plan to cut carbon emissions, four Republicans competing to be the party’s Senate candidate in North Carolina were asked if climate change was real.
One by one in a televised debate, they gave the same, firm, single-word answer: "No.”
After a period decades ago when Republicans led the debate on climate change and more recently competed with Democrats on policies to combat it, the party and its leaders now barely touch the issue, so toxic has it become among conservative activists.
"Conservatives break out in hives once you mention carbon and have an anaphylactic reaction once you mention tax,” said Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman forced out of Congress largely because of his support for action on climate change.
Republicans are furious at Mr Obama’s announcement on Monday, using new Environmental Protection Agency rules to cut emissions from power stations by 30 per cent by 2030 from 2005 levels, a move with the potential to reshape the US electricity sector.
But Mr Obama had no choice if he wanted to move on climate change, because the Republicans’ hostility to mitigating carbon emissions has ensured that Congress will be paralysed over the issue for the foreseeable future.
Although views among Republicans range from outright denial to scepticism, the reasons the politics over climate change have shifted so radically goes well beyond the debate over science.
In the short term, in the race for control of the Senate in the congressional midterm elections in November, the future of the coal industry could be pivotal in mining states such as Kentucky, now held by Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader.
"In the Senate, Kentucky is Ground Zero,” said Jennifer Duffy, of the Cook Political Report in Washington. "It’s not just about the health of the [coal] industry; for the workers, it’s about whether their jobs, their families and their communities survive.”
Mr McConnell’s Democratic opponent in Kentucky, Alison Lundergan Grimes, herself immediately attacked Mr Obama’s announcement, with an advertisement featuring a miner proudly holding a lump of coal.
Mr Obama successfully beat off a well-funded campaign against him by the coal industry in Ohio and Virginia in the 2012 presidential election but Mr McConnell may have more success this year in using the issue to hold his seat.
"There are hardly any Republican lawmakers in states that aren’t energy production states, so there’s little downside risk for them to be so pro-energy,” said Brandon Barford, partner at Beacon Policy Advisors, a research group.
"Even the Republicans left in swing states are from rural parts that benefit from the energy boom,” he added, giving as examples the coal-producing regions of West Virginia and Kentucky.
Cheap and newly abundant gas has been undermining the use of coal in the US as much if not more than tighter environmental regulations, but that is a message that is harder to sell, and no more palatable for the industry.
The gas boom has also triggered by itself a dramatic fall in carbon emissions, with energy-related emissions of greenhouse gases dropping 12 per cent between 2005 and 2012, to their lowest level since 1994.
It was as though I had defected from my own tribe to the tribe of Al Gore
- Bob Inglis, former Republican congressman
In the longer term, however, climate change has become what Mr Inglis calls a "flashpoint in the culture wars”, and indelibly linked in Republican minds with bigger government and more regulation.
There have been similar backlashes in other democracies. In the UK, David Cameron’s Conservative party once ran on a slogan of ‘Vote Blue, Go Green’, but that has been cast aside, and in Australia, the rightwing Liberal Party swept to power partly by attacking their opponent’s carbon tax.
Mr Inglis himself lost the Republican primary for his district in South Carolina in 2010 in the wake of his activism in Congress on climate change, and other issues.
"It was my most enduring heresy,” he said. "It was as though I had defected from my own tribe to the tribe of Al Gore.”
Mr Inglis, no fan of Mr Obama’s EPA rules, now runs the Energy and Enterprise Initiative which promotes market-based solutions to climate change and is pushing a plan for a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
(by Financial Times, June 3, 2014)
