A Louisiana Republican Reckons with Climate Change

Garret Graves wants to help the
Gulf Coast adapt to sea-level rise,
 but Democrats are skeptical about
how far he will go.

Garret Graves is a forty-seven-year-old Republican congressman from Louisiana who, earlier this year, bet his considerable political future on the proposition that the age of conservative climate denial is over. Graves had come to the point of view, he told me recently, “that those who were denying were taking an unsustainable position. That the science was going to further and further sink the island that they were standing on, and that eventually they would be inundated.” When the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, announced a new Select Committee on the Climate Crisis this winter, after teen-aged activists staged a sit-in at her office, Graves visited the Republican leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, to argue that the new committee gave Republicans a chance to take a less obstinate position on climate change, if they were nimble enough to see it.

Graves, who is medium height and athletic, with a strong chin and a loud voice, came with a PowerPoint presentation, laying out for McCarthy “everything from the disasters to our progress on emissions, without blowing up the economy, to the strategic resources of the United States and those of other countries.” There was, he argued to McCarthy, “a better way to apply Republican principles to this issue of climate change”—an insistence that the challenge of climate change can be met by scientific innovation, by the application of our remarkable instruments and brains. In February, McCarthy named Graves to serve as the ranking member on the committee. And, just like that, the Republicans chose as their spokesman on climate change a gregarious, outdoorsy young man who liked to say that not only was sea-level rise real but that he had measured it with his own yardstick.

Read the story from The New Yorker by Benjamin Wallace-Wells - “A Louisiana Republican Reckons with Climate Change."