Become a Partisan Issue?
Twenty years ago, Senator John McCain tried to spearhead an effort. What has happened to Republicans since then?
By Elizabeth Kolbert
In January, 2000, during the run-up to the New Hampshire primaries, Presidential candidates in the Granite State were confronted by a young man—a recent Dartmouth graduate—wearing a red cape, orange long johns, and yellow-painted galoshes. He called himself Captain Climate, and asked any candidate within shouting distance, “What’s your plan?” All the candidates ignored him, except one.
That candidate was John McCain, then the senior United States senator from Arizona. McCain went on to win New Hampshire’s Republican primary and then to lose the nomination to George W. Bush. He had been troubled enough by the shouted question that he returned to Washington that spring and held a series of hearings on climate change. At the first hearing, he apologized for not having a plan to deal with the problem, but said that everyone—especially policymakers—should be “concerned about mounting evidence.” “I had a genuine sense that he wanted to know the best information,” Kevin Trenberth, a scientist from the National Center for Atmospheric Research who testified at one of the hearings, later recalled.
McCain then did come up with a plan. With Senator Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, he introduced a bill to impose an economy-wide limit on carbon-dioxide emissions. The Climate Stewardship Act, as it became known, was modelled on legislation that had been approved a decade earlier, under President George H. W. Bush, which had used a so-called cap-and-trade program to curb the emissions that cause acid rain. In 2003, McCain managed to force a floor vote on the bill, over the objections of Senate leaders. It failed, even though McCain and five other Republicans voted for it. Ten Democrats voted against it. (Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware, was a “yea.”) McCain said, “We’ve lost a big battle today, but we’ll win over time, because climate change is real.”
Last week, the Senate finally approved a bill that aims to limit carbon emissions—the Inflation Reduction Act. It has been called “the most important climate action in U.S. history,” which is certainly true; the act provides more than three hundred and fifty billion dollars—mostly in the form of tax credits—to promote clean energy.
As a problem, climate change is as bipartisan as it gets: it will have equally devastating effects in red states as in blue. Last week, even as Kentucky’s two Republican senators—Rand Paul and the Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell—were voting against the I.R.A., rescuers in their state were searching for the victims of catastrophic floods caused by climate-change-supercharged rain. Meanwhile, most of Texas, whose two G.O.P. senators—Ted Cruz and John Cornyn—also voted against the bill, was suffering under “extreme” or “exceptional” drought.