The Green Blob must be hating this. It’s the worst kind of momentum shift…
In 2008 the main US Presidential contenders were all supporters or “the free market solution” for carbon (called cap n’ trade in the US). But in 2015 the political landscape cracked, and now they’re going out of their way to reverse that. It’s now seen as a bad thing to look like a gullible patsy for Big Green.
How times have changed.
U.S. Republicans Increasingly Sceptical Of Climate Alarm
Amy Harder and Beth Reinhard, The Wall Street Journal
GOP presidential candidates who had generally accepted the scientific consensus on climate change have said recently that it is unclear how much, if at all, humans are contributing to warmer temperatures.
Shortly after a conservative website on Wednesday posted 2008 footage of Sen. Marco Rubio backing a cap-and-trade program to combat climate change, his campaign roared back with a counterattack that included an entire web page aimed at debunking the video.
In media-speak, this is not so much about Republicans waking up to something, it’s Obama’s fault:
Mr. Rubio’s muscular response revealed how toxic the issue of climate change has become in the Republican Party under President Barack Obama, who has sought to make reducing carbon emissions to alleviate global warming one of his signature accomplishments.
Until 2008, many Republicans, including then-presidential nominee John McCain, supported cap-and-trade to address climate change. Once Mr. Obama won the White House, Republicans swiftly unified against nearly all of his initiatives, including a cap-and-trade bill that would have set limits on carbon emissions and allowed companies to trade pollution credits to comply.
As I’ve said before, having GOP candidates compete on this changes everything. The shift that occurred in the US in 2015 was big. There is an opportunity for sensible people all over the world to pick up this momentum and run with it.