The Republican Climate Closet

For a political party stocked with people who deny the seriousness of the climate crisis, the Republican Party does some curious things.

A group of teenage protesters, demanding action
on climate change, gathered in front of the White House in May.

Did you know, for instance, that a Republican Congress put an explicit price on emissions of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide? That was in early 2018. Companies can now get a tax credit from the United States government as high as $50 a ton for pumping carbon dioxide into the ground, instead of emitting it into the air.

For years, Congress has also subsidized the installation of low-emission sources of electricity like solar panels and wind turbines, a policy that has helped scale the market and drive their cost down drastically. More recently, it has offered tax incentives for the purchase of electric cars, and their costs are falling, too. Some of these policies were originally adopted when Congress was controlled by the Democrats, but the Republicans declined to kill them in the years when they held both houses.

Read the story from The New York Times by Justin Gillis - “The Republican Climate Closet.”