Friday, April 11, 2008
Editorial: Changing the GOP on climate change
The Republican Party, as the party of national defense, has good reason to come around.
From the RoundTable blog
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Virginia Sen. John Warner understands that mitigating climate change is essential to national security. But he's having to work hard to convince fellow Republicans to support his bill to limit the greenhouse gases the U.S. spews into the atmosphere.
The GOP worries about the impact on the economy -- in particular, how a cap on carbon emissions would affect costs for industries that rely overwhelmingly on carbon-based fuels.
Republicans maintain, though, that theirs is not only the party of business but the party of national defense. The security implications of climate change are reason enough for Virginia's senior senator to put his prestige behind the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. The GOP should hear his plea to anticipate -- and in anticipating, work to prevent -- a disastrous competition for resources that would lead to future wars.
That argument should be easier to hear now, when even the Bush administration acknowledges Lieberman-Warner's cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions would have minimal impact on U.S. economic growth.
Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported on an Environmental Protection Agency analysis of the bill's impact on the nation's gross domestic product over two decades. The EPA's conclusion: GNP would grow 80 percent from 2010 to 2030, 1 percentage point less than projected otherwise.
Weigh that against the report last year of a Military Advisory Board made up of 11 retired top military officers, who warned: "Climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world."
"We'll see water wars. We'll see drought wars," Warner said at a Capitol Hill news conference this week with representatives of local governments that support the climate change bill.
In the absence of federal action, states and even localities are trying to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, and hope to reap some revenue from Warner's bill that they could invest in energy conservation projects.
That'd be well and good. But America needs to fight climate change on a coherent, national scale. A June 2 Senate vote is expected on Warner's bill. It deserves strong bipartisan support.
