Climate Change Hoax? Republicans Urge GOP To Push Climate Change Policy To Replace Obama’s Environmental Regulation

A group within the Republican party has released a plan to replace former president Barack Obama’s environmental plans and are now pushing the party, which has shown skepticism over the issue in the past, to take action on the issue of climate change.

“The simplistic view is that Democrats want to solve climate change and Republicans don’t,” Ted Halstead, CEO of the group called Climate Leadership Council, reportedly said as he announced the plan. “As our statement proves, that is not true... it is not enough to repeal the current programs. You also must replace those current programs with something better.”

The report has been titled “The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends,” and advocates putting in place a carbon tax. Under the proposal, the tax will be increased over time, coming back to the public in form of a dividend.

The group of senior Republicans includes former Secretary of State James Baker, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and former Secretary of State George Shultz and has the backing of economists like Martin Feldstein and N. Gregory Mankiw, who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, endorsing the plan.

“Crazy as it may sound, this is the perfect time to enact a sensible policy to address the dangerous threat of climate change,” Feldstein, Mankiw and Halstead wrote in the op-ed. “This would be pro-growth, pro-competitiveness and pro-working class.”

President Donald Trump has shown considerable skepticism over the science of global warming and called climate change a hoax on multiple occasions in the past. However, the Republicans hope to use his deregulation to put in place a new set of environmental rules to address climate change.

The proposed carbon tax would begin at $40 per ton and increase with time. The report says that this is also expected to make the U.S. meet its emissions reduction commitment to the Paris Agreement — a deal which Trump initially said he would back out of. The president now, however, has taken a more moderate outlook towards the climate change agreement.

“This will become the inevitable climate solution,” said Halstead, as the group emphasized that skeptics would also have to deal with the reality of climate change. “We cannot tell you when, but we can tell you that eventually, this country has to deal with this issue, and we think that our solution will be front and center.”