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Republicans Warm to Climate Change

Posted on: Thursday, 18 October 2007, 09:00 CDT

By Marc Santora

Michael Luo and Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

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While many conservative commentators and editorialists in the United States have mocked concerns about climate change, among Republican presidential contenders a different reality is emerging: a near-unanimous recognition among the party's leading candidates of the threat posed by global warming.

Within that camp, however, sharp divisions are developing. Senator John McCain of Arizona is calling for capping gas emissions linked to warming and higher fuel economy standards. Others, including Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York, and Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, are refraining from advocating such limits and are instead emphasizing a push toward clean coal and other alternative energy sources.

All agree that nuclear power should be greatly expanded.

The debate has taken an intriguing twist. Two candidates appealing to religious conservatives, former Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, call for strong actions to ease the effects of people on the climate, at times casting the effort in spiritual terms even as some evangelical groups have taken up the cause.

The emergence of climate change as an issue dividing Republicans shows just how far the discussion has shifted since 1997, when the Senate voted, 95-0, to oppose any international climate treaty that could hurt the U.S. economy or that excused China from responsibilities. The current debate among Republicans is largely not about whether people are warming the planet, but about how to deal with it.

The issue inserted itself into the presidential campaign Friday with the announcement that Al Gore had won the Nobel Peace Prize for work highlighting the threat posed by climate change. The leading Democratic candidates rushed to praise Gore, and their party has sought to seize the issue with proposals like higher standards for fuel mileage and taxing emissions of carbon dioxide.

McCain, who acknowledges that he knew little about the climate problem when he sought his party's presidential nomination eight years ago, held a Senate hearing on climate change in 2001 and quickly became a convert to the notion that carbon emissions were warming the planet.

In recent years, he has fought to introduce measures for caps on dangerous emissions. Last week, McCain promised to demand much higher fuel standards from the automobile industry. He also promised to have the United States join the international climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, although only on the condition that India and China join, too. Many experts say that condition is unlikely to be met at the moment.

"I don't know what it is going to be like the rest of my life on this planet," McCain told the Global Warming and Energy Solutions Conference on Saturday. "But I can tell you this. I have had enough experience and enough knowledge to believe that unless we reverse what is happening on this planet, my dear friends, we are going to hand our children a planet that is badly damaged."

Romney and Giuliani say little about the potential dangers of climate change and almost nothing about curbing emissions of heat- trapping gases like carbon dioxide. They talk almost exclusively about the need for independence from foreign oil as a necessity for national security.

In the tangled Republican race, Giuliani and Romney have been much more hesitant to criticize policies of President George W. Bush, who in his two presidential campaigns said that more study of climate change was needed before considering restrictions on heat- trapping gases.

On the campaign trail, Giuliani has said, "I do believe there's global warming," but in a speech on energy in the summer in Waterloo, Iowa, he had hardly a word about the environment. Instead, he focused on tapping domestic sources of energy, including coal, which is considered a major contributor to global warming.

"Ethanol, biodiesel, clean coal, nuclear power, more refineries, conservation," Giuliani said. "There's no one single solution. But each one of these has to be expanded 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent."

"America has more coal reserves than Saudi Arabia has oil reserves," he said. "Aren't we safer and better off relying on our own coal reserves than on a part of the world that is a threat to us?"

Romney has voiced an almost identical theme, with the two candidates saying they will lead an effort that will be on the scale of putting a man on the moon or the race to build an atomic bomb in order to make the United States energy-independent.

To illustrate the commitment to new fuel sources, a clip of Romney's forum in April in Derry, New Hampshire, has been posted on his campaign's Web site.

"I believe we have to be developing more energy sources ourselves, which would include offshore drilling and drilling in ANWR, nuclear power, biodiesel, biofuel, ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, probably liquefied coal," Romney said. "We have enormous supplies of coal."

McCain said Saturday that he wanted to push for alternative fuels, but he implied that more needed to be done to protect the environment.

One of his priorities, he said, would be to establish "cap and trade," a system in which corporations are rewarded for deep cuts in harmful emissions. McCain has written a bill on that and forced two votes, losing both.

In addition to calling for improved fuel efficiency, McCain said he wanted to see the government finance the research and development of an automobile battery that can travel 200 miles, or 300 kilometers, between charges.

The senator opposes a measure that many environmentalists desire, a carbon tax, which would most likely be another gasoline tax. He told the warming and energy conference that he generally opposed new taxes, and that he also believed that poor workers who tend to commute to work longer distances would be disproportionately affected.

McCain said it took a few months of hearings as a member of the Senate Commerce Committee after the 2000 election for him to realize the threat from climate change. Asked about Giuliani and Romney's commitment to energy independence, he said voters should look at their records.

"What were they doing in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006?" McCain asked.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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