Thanks aaron. That makes sense.
Climate change deniers are killing us with their greed.
Climate politics are changing. A recent Monkey Cage article described is as shift from "distributional" to "existential," meaning a shift from who gets what, to who lives and who dies.
So, for example, Exxon just pledged $1,000,000 over two years to campaign for a carbon tax. Other fossil fuel companies are still campaigning to prevent one. I think what's driving it is some oil companies think they are well-placed to be leaders in Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS). Basically, many oil companies are already pumpng C02 into the ground to get at the last drops of oil in some wells.
They are realizing that they could use the same system to pump high concentrations of C02 down there and leave it there, resulting in negative emissions. The tech for massive sequestration is still not there yet, but I can only read the Exxon move in one of two, non-exclusive ways:
- greenwashing: having seen what happened to big tobacco, and Exxon being known to have been guilty of hiding internal research in the 1970s detailing the threats of climate change, they are worried about eventually being forced to make reparations, so they might as well get going on it and try to head off the worst of the blowback.
- the belief that they are ahead on CCS tech and stand to be a winner and that they will be one of the "carbon" companies still standing when it's all over.
But in either case, those are both "existential" politics, rather than just "distributional" reasons
We see the deadlock breaking in the Republican party too, with politicians like Carlos Curbello from Florida recognizing that this is an existential issue for Florida and for his career, which drove him to break ranks with his party.
My congressman is a hard-core climate denier and he looks likely to sail to victory in November. Increasingly, though, he's an outlier among Republicans. Lining up against him are not just Curbello and Exxon, but almost 50 sitting Republican representatives on the Climate Solutions Caucus (remember that in early 2016, that number was zero). Republican elder statesmen like James Baker, George Schulz and even Trent Lott (who once got a zero rating from the League of Conservation Voters) have created PACs to campaign for a carbon tax.
I am not expecting the sea change to come in November, but if I look at how much climate politics have changed since 2016, I think it will be a big issue by 2020.
That said, this would have been an easy battle if we had gotten serious in 2000. Now it's going to be close to impossible and requires massive carbon sequestration technology to come online fairly soon.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/10/08/the-climate-is-changing-heres-how-politics-will-also-change/https://www.wsj.com/articles/exxon-puts-up-1-million-to-campaign-for-a-carbon-tax-1539079200