Climate activists have spent the past 20 years debating the merits of bipartisanship versus a unite-the-left approach to global warming.
The latter approach isn’t working.
Passed without any Republican votes, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, actually a major climate bill despite the misleading name, is now, three years later, in partisan-driven shambles.
For the sake of durability, it’s time to take another look at the case for pursuing bipartisan action.
First things first: Yes, there are Republicans who care about climate change. Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins take climate change seriously, as does Utah’s newest senator, John Curtis. (While serving in the House, Curtis founded the Conservative Climate Caucus; it currently has 66 Republican members.)
Pursuing bipartisan climate action has two main advantages. One is that it decreases the risk of backsliding. Climate change is a long-term problem that requires long-term solutions, not IRA-style whiplash. A policy that only one party can support is likely to provide a sugar rush rather than the strong bones and muscles needed for longevity.
The second advantage of a bipartisan push is that it would have to take seriously the concerns and preferences of members of both parties, concerns and preferences shared by many Americans.
As a prime example, consider the idea that climate action needs to be pocketbook-friendly. This seems obvious, but it’s an area where the unite-the-left approach has gone off the rails, with self-discipline succumbing to the fantasy that we can build the clean energy economy and get big oil companies to pay for it. Any economist can tell you this is wrong, and so can drivers in Washington State, which in 2023 implemented a “cap-and-invest” policy which ended up raising gas prices by about 30 cents a gallon. It’s a political dead end, one that not even other left-leaning states like New York are keen to emulate.
Two related conservative concerns are that climate action should be small-government and economically efficient, pursuing the biggest bang for the buck and allowing American businesses to compete internationally on a level playing field. It might seem impossible to find a policy that can do all this — plus keep Democrats in the fold — but there is one: a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
A carbon tax is the most direct way to reduce carbon emissions, which is the single most important step we can take to tackle climate change. Carbon pricing harnesses market forces to reduce emissions and to find the least-cost methods of doing so. The “revenue-neutral” idea is that we should balance the carbon tax with reductions in existing taxes; fossil fuels will cost a little more, but the offsetting tax cuts will allow us to more easily afford other things.
We are not naïve to the challenges facing revenue-neutral carbon taxes. One of us is a former 6-term Republican Congressman from South Carolina who lost a primary challenge after acknowledging the risks of climate change. One of us founded a pioneering carbon tax ballot measure campaign in Washington State that was defeated in 2016. We joke that carbon taxes face opposition from folks on the right who are afraid that it’s socialism and from folks on the left who are mad that it isn’t. We remind ourselves that there is no magic policy out there; as Sherlock Holmes famously put it, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth.
Certainly it will take time to build support for a revenue-neutral carbon tax. But that time would allow us to build a climate movement that includes all of America. That movement can build from the state level up: every state levies taxes that people hate, giving every state potential fodder for a carbon tax swap. In Utah, for example, a carbon tax could replace the state sales tax on grocery store food. (It would also improve the state’s air quality.) You might not even need to use the words “carbon tax”: roughly half of U.S. states impose state sales tax on electricity and could therefore consider a “climate action tax cut” that would eliminate this regressive tax for utilities that reduce emissions.
These types of policies can earn bipartisan support, just as they did in previous decades. Market-based instruments were at the heart of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments signed by President George H.W. Bush. At the time, environmental economists wrote papers with titles like “How the patient followed the doctor’s orders.” Bipartisan climate action could finally make that vision a reality. So buckle up: it’s going to be a bumpy ride, but it’s time to go back to the future.