Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A group of College Conservatives have sided with the Democrats and demanded climate action – though liberal media outlets are still sneering at them for being Conservative.
Young Republicans Want to Fight Climate Change 30 Years Too Late
College conservatives support a carbon dividend, but what they really need is a time machine.
By Harry Cheadle Dec 13 2019, 5:57am
There’s a climate “debate” in American politics today the same way there’s a debate between a car and the wall it’s driving toward. On one hand you have heated arguments among Democrats about whether radical, capitalism-destroying action is necessary to save the planet. On the other hand Republicans are rigidly opposed to even relatively moderate, market-based attempts to cut emissions—when one such measure was being considered by the Democratic-controlled Oregon state legislature this summer, GOP lawmakers literally fled the state to deny the Democrats a quorum and block the bill.
In that context, any sign of a hint that Republicans might be willing to even consider a compromise that leads to the federal government taking action on climate can be seen as a step in the right direction. So the formation of a group called Young Conservatives for Carbon Dividends, a coalition of right-leaning college students, could be justifiably celebrated. The group, Reuters reports, launched this week and “backs a market-based solution, calling for an initial $40-a-ton tax on carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, at mines, wells or ports where it is produced.” This money would be paid out directly to Americans at the same time that what YCCD calls “burdensome regulations” would be slashed.
…
Read more: https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/k7eep3/young-republicans-want-to-fight-climate-change-30-years-too-late
The original Reuters report includes a quote from one of their leaders;
Young U.S. Republicans defy party to fight climate change
…
Drawn from Republican groups on more than two dozen university campuses, the Young Conservatives for Carbon Dividends called for laws to tax oil, natural gas and coal producers of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
The taxation plan would make fossil fuels more costly while the resulting revenues would go to taxpayers.
“We claim to be the party that cares about the future that our children will inherit, and we need climate policy that reflects that,” said Kiera O’Brien, 21, a senior at Harvard University who co-founded the group.
“We are offering up what we see as the common sense solution and the way forward for the party,” O’Brien told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
…
Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climate-politics-trfn/young-us-republicans-defy-party-to-fight-climate-change-idUSKBN1YG00J
The co-founder of Students for Carbon Dividends quoted in the Reuters article is Kiera O’Brien, a student at Harvard and former president of the Harvard Republican Club.
I’m disappointed. Not because Kiera O’Brien is worried about climate change, but because she and her group are not acting like conservatives; she wants to introduce a new tax.
Pretty much everywhere which attempts to introduce a carbon tax eventually abandons it, because carbon taxes don’t work. Energy intensive manufacturing and industry flee the cost of the new tax, manufacturing jobs crash and politicians abandon the tax once voters figure out the cause of their misery.
Kiera, why would any business person in their right mind hang around and pay your carbon tax, when they can cut costs and relocate to a “developing country” beyond the reach of your artificially inflated energy prices?
One of the main reasons so many jobs are returning to the USA right now is President Trump ditched the Paris Agreement. By renouncing the Paris Agreement, President Trump provided a credible assurance to investors that he and the Republican Party intend to stand up to the green bullies, and keep US energy prices affordable and globally competitive.
Your proposed “border carbon adjustments” would not help US exporters. It would still make sense for manufacturers to relocate, pay the border adjustment tax for exports to the USA, but remain globally competitive in other markets. And there would be enormous perverse incentives to misapply the border tax. As P.J. O’Rourke once said, “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”
If Kiera wants to campaign for a climate policy, it’s a free country. But Kiera, please put a little thought into it; at least advance a policy idea which makes sense.
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After our daughter of fifteen years of age was moved to tears by the speech of Greta Thunberg at the UN the other day, she became angry with our generation “who had been doing nothing for thirty years”.
So, we decided to help her prevent what the girl on TV announced of “massive eradication and the disappearance of entire ecosystems”.
We are now committed to give our daughter a future again, by doing our part to help cool the planet four degrees.
From now on she will go to school on a bicycle, because driving her by car costs fuel, and fuel puts emissions into the atmosphere. Of course it will be winter soon and then she will want to go by bus, but only as long as it is a diesel bus. Somehow, that does not seem to be conducive to ‘helping the Climate’.
Of course, she is now asking for an electric bicycle, but we have shown her the devastation caused to the areas of the planet as a result of mining for the extraction of Lithium and other minerals used to make batteries for electric bicycles, so she will be pedaling, or walking. Which will not harm her, or the planet. We used to cycle and walk to school too.
Since the girl on TV demanded “we need to get rid of our dependency on fossil fuels” and our daughter agreed with her, we have disconnected the heat vent in her room. The temperature is now dropping to twelve degrees in the evening, and will drop below freezing in the winter, we have promised to buy her an extra sweater, hat, tights, gloves and a blanket.
For the same reason we have decided that from now on she only takes a cold shower. She will wash her clothes by hand, with a wooden washboard, because the washing machine is simply a power consumer and since the dryer uses natural gas, she will hang her clothes on the clothes line to dry.
Speaking of clothes, the ones that she currently has are all synthetic, so made from petroleum. Therefore on Monday, we will bring all her designer clothing to the secondhand shop.
We have found an eco store where the only clothing they sell is made from undyed and unbleached linen, wool and jute.
It shouldn’t matter that it looks good on her, or that she is going to be laughed at, dressing in colorless, bland clothes and without a wireless bra, but that is the price she has to pay for the benefit of The Climate.
Cotton is out of the question, as it comes from distant lands and pesticides are used for it. Very bad for the environment.
We just saw on her Instagram that she’s pretty angry with us. This was not our intention.
From now on, at 7 p.m. we will turn off the WiFi and we will only switch it on again the next day after dinner for two hours. In this way we will save on electricity, so she is not bothered by electro-stress and will be totally isolated from the outside world. This way, she can concentrate solely on her homework. At eleven o’clock in the evening we will pull the breaker to shut the power off to her room, so she knows that dark is really dark. That will save a lot of CO2.
She will no longer be participating in winter sports to ski lodges and resorts, nor will she be going on anymore vacations with us, because our vacation destinations are practically inaccessible by bicycle.
Since our daughter fully agrees with the girl on TV that the CO2 emissions and footprints of her great-grandparents are to blame for ‘killing our planet’, what all this simply means, is that she also has to live like her great-grandparents and they never had a holiday, a car or even a bicycle.
We haven’t talked about the carbon footprint of food yet.
Zero CO2 footprint means no meat, no fish and no poultry, but also no meat substitutes that are based on soy (after all, that grows in farmer’s fields, that use machinery to harvest the beans, trucks to transport to the processing plants, where more energy is used, then trucked to the packaging/canning plants, and trucked once again to the stores) and also no imported food, because that has a negative ecological effect. And absolutely no chocolate from Africa, no coffee from South America and no tea from Asia.
Only homegrown potatoes, vegetables and fruit that have been grown in local cold soil, because greenhouses run on boilers, piped in CO2 and artificial light. Apparently, these things are also bad for The Climate. We will teach her how to grow her own food.
Bread is still possible, but butter, milk, cheese and yogurt, cottage cheese and cream come from cows and they emit CO2. No more margarine and no oils will be used for the frying pan, because that fat is palm oil from plantations in Borneo where rain forests first grew.
No ice cream in the summer. No soft drinks and no energy drinks, as the bubbles are CO2. She wanted to lose some pounds, well, this will help her achieve that goal too.
We will also ban all plastic, because it comes from petrochemical factories. Everything made of steel and aluminum must also be removed. Have you ever seen the amount of energy a blast furnace consumes or an aluminum smelter? Super bad for the climate!
We will replace her 9600 coil, memory foam pillow top mattress, with a jute bag filled with straw, with a horse hair pillow.
And finally, she will no longer be using makeup, soap, shampoo, cream, lotion, conditioner, toothpaste and medication. Her sanitary napkins will be replaced with pads made of linen, that she can wash by hand, with her wooden washboard, just like her female ancestors did before climate change made her angry at us for destroying her future.
In this way we will help her to do her part to prevent mass extinction, water levels rising and the disappearance of entire ecosystems.
If she truly believes she wants to walk the talk of the girl on TV, she will gladly accept and happily embrace her new way of life.
This is great, Michael, I will share it with everyone I know!
Don’t forget to commend her for those pioneering sacrifices she’s making consistent with her rejection of odious oil!
Michael,
You remarked, “Bread is still possible, …” Not so! Leavened bread produces CO2 from the work of yeast. Bread tends to get overlooked in the list of anthropogenic contributions to the Carbon Cycle. There is a small proportion of humans that don’t eat leavened bread and pastries daily.
Is a Harvard Republican anything like Mitt Romney? Yes. Well, then ….
This is no more a movement of Young Republicans than John Kasich is of old Republicans.
Young …………………. and DUMB …………………… Republicans
Here’s a radical idea — do some actual research and a little study of data and scientific principles that underlie your beliefs about how modern society should be structured, as in get some real education, show some real intelligence, speak from a real rational perspective for the good of all. What a concept!
The left embraced environmentalism as a way to reach conservative leaning voters. In every other left wing policy area the left favors the short term over the long term. It is curious then that only when it comes to the environment that they worry about 50 and 100 years from now (climate change) and a million years from now (how long fission by products will remain radioactive). The purpose is to appeal to conservative leaning people. It’s why they are immune to accusations of hypocrisy. They don’t really care about what happens 50 years from now. The way to tell the difference between an environmentalist who really cares about the environment and one who is using it as a policy lever to achieve other ends (the demise of western civilization perhaps?) is their attitude towards nuclear power.
To a conservative,a nuclear power plant has an environmental footprint the size of a swimming pool: no sun blotting or lung clogging particles go into the air, no chemicals combine with water to make acid rain, no valleys are flooded and no birds or bats are killed. The only by-product is a lump of radioactive isotopes that may be useful when the technology becomes available. Already the technology exists to use yesterday’s waste in newer reactors. It will probably not be long before someone will find a way to economically separate out the medically valuable isotopes and so on.
Someone needs to start a movement called Environmentalists For Nuclear.
Needless to say nuclear fusion doesn’t even have the footprint of fission so we need to get on with that.
“Needless to say nuclear fusion doesn’t even have the footprint of fission so we need to get on with that.”
Doesn’t seem to have a footprint, or viable working version, at all.
Speaking of carbon taxes, the European Union is considering a carbon border tax to protect its domestic industries (like steel) from cheaper imports from countries where there are more lax climate policies:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/explainer-eu-carbon-border-tax-115443173.html.
I believe Trump already warned them against doing such a thing as it will trigger an Atlantic trade war. Diseases get worse before they get better.
From the article: “Drawn from Republican groups on more than two dozen university campuses, the Young Conservatives for Carbon Dividends called for laws to tax oil, natural gas and coal producers of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
The taxation plan would make fossil fuels more costly while the resulting revenues would go to taxpayers.”
Well, if you make fossil fuels more expensive then you make everything else in the economy more expensive, and even if you reimburse taxpayers for the carbon dioxide tax they paid, you won’t reimburse them for all the other extra expenses they will incur as a result of making fossil fuels more expensive.
This carbon dioxide tax is not a taxpayer “hold harmless” tax as its proponents claim. This kind of tax will raise costs on everyone from one end of the income scale to the other because it raises prices on everything we buy, not just fossil fuels.
CO2 propaganda has caused these young Republicans to give up their conservatism. They have allowed a false human-caused climate change crisis to overwhelm their conservative ideals.
The Earth is not in an emergency situation because of CO2, young people. Wake up and smell the coffee. You have been fooled into believing something that hasn’t been shown to be true.
So they want to play dress-ups too do they?
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/a-fright-at-the-opera-house-tourists-are-left-baffled-after-extinction-rebellion-protesters-clad-in-red-with-white-painted-faces-break-out-in-song-on-the-steps-of-sydneys-famous-landmark/ar-AAK8yXE
They’ll get their carbon dividend allowances just as soon as I get my cheque from Big Oil.
and “useful idiots”.
What this means is that there is no such thing as young Republicans anymore.
It’s what you get when you allow one ideological side to control education, through illegal discrimination no less. Unless that changes, don’t bother celebrating any victories because they are all temporary.
From post:
Kiera O’Brien, Harvard Politics Student, Republican
Really? Hard to believe there are any true Republicans in Communist-Haaaaavard (they’d be assaulted). Maybe a RHINO (like a Mitt Romney)…..
rich kids with trust funds, puke.
YOU WANT TO PAY CLIMATE TAX THEN DO SO, DON’T FOIST THIS BS ON THE REST OF US NORMAL PEOPLE WITHOUT TRUST FUNDS
Just because they say they are “conservative” or “republican” doesn’t mean they are…….
Problem – too much CO2 in the atmosphere.
Solution – take money from people and give to corrupt politicians.
My engineering/chemistry training never taught me that approach!
This is really sad because it is founded on a few fallacies, in my opinion. The first fallacy is that the reason climate has warmed since the end of the LIA is because of human activity. The second is that temperatures of the “pre-industrial” age were normal and today’s temperatures are somehow abnormal. The third is that there is anything the US can do, even if we took our human CO2 emissions to zero, that would have any significant impact on global CO2 concentrations. Finally, there is the notion that most or maybe even all of current climate warming is due to CO2. I don’t believe we have enough evidence for any of those notions to risk spending trillions of dollars (which always lands in *someone’s* pocket) and turning over extraordinary power to them to micromanage industry and energy.
It is also my opinion that this entire thing is based on creating an “existential crisis” so that people of a certain political ideology can justify obtaining greater control over the economy in general.
The “pre-industrial age” was probably the coldest period in the past 8200 years or so. It is a very convenient reference point to use for this. I believe what we have witnessed over the past 150 years or so is a natural recovery from an abnormally cold period. Temperatures rose just as quickly over the same period of time from 1910 to 1940 as they did from 1975 to 2005 before we were emitting enough CO2 globally to have much of an impact. In 1910 the US was still using horses in a good number of cases and most of the rest of the world would be for several decades. The mule was still an important military vehicle and sailing ships were still common. We also have a problem of people tinkering with the data so that it becomes increasingly difficult to tell what actual climate was in the past because the past records keep getting modified to in order to justify “the narrative”.
Since 2004 the rest of the world has added more emissions globally than the US produces. China now emits more than twice what the US emits and that is going to increase as their per-capita emissions continue to grow. In the meantime, the rate of global atmospheric CO2 increase is unchanged. So if an amount equal to the entire output of the US has been added and the rate of atmospheric CO2 increase did not rise, I have little faith in the notion that if the US emissions were to go to zero that the rise would reduce. What it WOULD do, however, is hamstring the US economy, much to the delight of global competitors.
Then there is the matter of exactly how much warming is due to CO2. We have a problem in how we arrive at the surface temperature. We take a bunch of temperature observations and roll them into a global average and say the entire planet is warming. In many cases this warming is very localized to specific regions and is not global at all. The USCRN, for example, still shows no warming trend at all in the continental US since 1995. Imagine if I had 100 people in a room and I measured them but one of them was a 4th grader. Now I come back and measure all the same people again 10 years later. The fourth grader has doubled in height. I now produce an average and claim that ALL people are growing taller because the average height of the people increased. That’s horse malarkey. We have a LOT of reasons for localized climate change. First there is urbanization, then there is land use change. Irrigation, building dams and creating large reservoirs even abandoning cultivation can have local impacts on measured temperatures that get blended into the “global average” as do things brought on by long term atmospheric changes on decadal or multi-decadal scales.
This is probably one of the largest thefts of resources from the people in global history. The entire “climate change” effort is meant to fleece people of their cash and their liberty.
Crosspatch
I have previously suggested that instead of focusing on a ‘one size fits all’ global average, what should be presented are the changes for all the Koppen Climate Zones. It is common knowledge that the Arctic is warming two or three times faster than the global average. However, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover the some climate zones are cooling, or showing no change. Trying to stampede the lemmings with a single number is not the way that good science is done.
The Arctic is probably much more dynamic in change than other regions. It probably both warms and cools faster than other areas. There is ample evidence that some areas of the Arctic were up to 6 degrees warmer during this interglacial than they are today. It is likely that it was as warm or warmer in the late 1920’s and 1930’s as it is today. All it takes is a change in persistent atmospheric pressure patterns to change prevailing wind directions for a decade or three. In addition, the projections used for these maps makes a relatively small area at high latitude spread out in a huge area of the map giving the impression that this extraordinary warming is taking place over a greater portion of the surface than it really is.
crosspatch
I suspect that the tropics are the least dynamic with clouds providing natural ‘air conditioning,’ and that the mid-latitudes will be somewhere in between. However, it would be instructive to see if there are differences in the Koppen Climate Zones because it might shed light on whether CO2 or WV is more important in regulating temperature, or that something dismissed out of hand is actually the driver, such as cloudiness.
How about we try to understand natural variation before we buy the golden air conditioner that runs on pixie dust
Meanwhile democrat congressman Jeff Van Drew crosses over to join the Republicans.
Separately this weekend, the Washington Post reported that Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, an anti-impeachment Democrat, will soon join the Republican Party.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-impeachment-democrats/top-democrats-make-case-for-republicans-to-endorse-trump-impeachment-idUSKBN1YJ0FN
(Very end of article.)
A solution might be to gather a collection of these climate changelings, and ask them how they would stop it and PROVE it. Could be a lot of silence!
The proposal is typical of progressive thinking. Tax everyone and everything. Hire an army of government workers and then distribute any remaining cash to people who support your policies. LOL Their ideas are antiquated with a supposedly new reason and goal.
“Their ideas are antiquated with a supposedly new reason and goal.”
‘Progressivism’ is the new Conservatism. It’s trying to conserve the tired, failed old ‘progressive’ garbage they forced on the West decades ago.
The real radicals these days are trying to throw out a century or more of Progressivism.
‘Conservatives’ couldn’t conserve reliable power or little girls’ bathrooms, and are very close to not even conserving indoor plumbing.
Everyone now knows they’re just the left’s best friend and have been for decades.
You can tell climate change is commie, because simply put, the climate changers are more than willing to kill as many animals, birds and as much of the earths vegetation and fish as it takes to save the earth. Their logic always involves killing those that they claim to be saving.
The problem is all the AGW propaganda the students over the years are forced to memorize and regurgitate in order to pass tests. The reality is that, based on the paleoclimate record and the work done with models, the climate change that we have been experiencing is very small and is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. Despite the hype, there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and there is plenty of scientific rationale that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is zero. There are many good reasons to be conserving on the use of fossil fuels but climate change is not one of them.
Is there a point where the comparative fitness for intellectual jobs of someone with no school education beside the basics, and one with a higher education is inverted?
That is, when the amount of not only factually incorrect but just ridiculous, illogical, incoherent, garbage ideas taught in higher education dominates the correctly structured stuff that was taught, but also makes the “highly educated” people not just unable to think clearly, but also unable to learn to think clearly because they have been confused and corrupted mentally.
Dear Santa;
I’d like to confirm that coal delivery…
The democrat “on deck” want to spend 70 Trillion dollars of your money to fight climate change.
As a Republican I want to see President Trump put Billions into the American Economy to reduce CO2 emissions.
The world is up in arms because President Trump is in the process of pulling America out of the Paris Climate Accord.
America has 600 years of good quality coal available and we believe this coal needs to be used to produce America’s electricity.
America’s natural gas needs to be used for building space heating and by industry to produce all those other products we use daily.
America’s oil needs to be used for transportation and by those industries that produce products requiring oil.
Doing the above will keep America into energy for over the next 100 years
America’s renewables (wind & solar) need to be connected to it’s own grid , supplying electricity to America’s growing EV market. Then when the sun goes down and the wind doesn’t blow and the batteries go dead, it’s time to call it a day. No harm done.
Our Sidel companies have since 1978 been focused toward Energy Efficiency at natural gas and LPG fuel consuming facilities and reducing coal emissions at coal fired power plants. With a Sidel Carbon Capture Utilization System a coal fired power plant can operate at a 100% firing rate and put into the atmosphere less CO2 than a new designed natural gas fired power plant. We turn the Captured CO2 into good paying full time jobs and money. This is why we have to utilize America’s coal supply. No pipelines required.
America’s natural gas can be consumed to near 100% efficiency. That is already roven in the residential market. Natural gas was combusted for a purpose. Finish fulfilling that purpose. The problem is in our standard combustion equipment. It’s not efficient. So we add a Sidel Condensing Flue Gas Heat Recovery Unit to recover the heat energy out of the combusted exhaust, and the recovered heat energy is utilized within the building or facility where it was combusted. Being vented is COOL exhaust, some day’s even cooler than the outside air temperature.
For every 1 million Btu’s of heat energy recovered and utilized, 117 lbs of CO2 will not be put into the atmosphere. That adds up to be tons in a hurry.
Are we concerned about water? In every 1 million Btu’s of combusted natural gas are 5 gallons of recoverable distilled water. To get at this water, take the heat out of the exhaust. The cooler the temperature of the exhaust, the greater the flow of produced water.
Please visit our websites: http://www.SidelSystems.com http://www.SidelGlobal.com
Then let’s have President Trump sell these technologies to all those other countries associated with the Paris Climate Accord who do not yet know how they are going to reduce their countries CO2 emissions.
It will be Great for America’s GDP.
I just read this on EESI’s website:
“The results of the climate negotiations in Madrid were disappointing. But what was even more disappointing is the lack of leadership from the United States,” said EESI Executive Director Daniel Bresette. “The Administration has relinquished its duty to lead the way on climate action. It is failing to tackle climate change with the urgency it demands. Fortunately, other Americans are taking action. In particular, I would like to thank the Congressional delegation, led by Speaker Pelosi, who conveyed a message that reflects what 75 percent of Americans know: humans are causing climate change, and we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.”
Work with me and President Trump will have so many coal fired power plants operating and emitting near zero CO2 emissions. We want to recover the waste heat energy out of the combusted power plants coal and natural gas exhaust and utilize that heat energy to heat and or cool large ranges of commercial greenhouses, in which food crops can be grown, employing more people.
Industry and large commercial buildings vent a tremendous amount of combusted natural gas exhaust. Recover the waste heat energy and vent cool exhaust instead. This is great in the battle against Global Warming!
Reducing the worlds CO2 Emissions can be The USA Republican thing. Let’s show them how it’s done!!