This guest post was written by Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina who is executive director of the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, an educational campaign devoted to free enterprise energy and climate solutions.
(Photo credit: jczart)
By Bob Inglis
Let’s face it: Politics and business are worlds apart. But not unlike business, politics is about solving problems. See the problem, pinpoint the cause, craft the solution and then persuade the customer – the voter – that your answer will work.
Failed politics is a failure of vision or analysis, solution or persuasion. When it comes to climate and energy, both parties are profoundly failing the people of our country. Posterity will suffer for it.
Experience is telling Americans that they have a problem with a changing climate. They’ve seen record-breaking weather disasters, persistent drought, “Summer in March,” an excruciating wildfire season and now the tragedy of Hurricane Sandy. These have torn lives apart in small towns and big cities.
Insurance giant Munich Re recently reported that weather-related loss has quintupled in the United States in recent years. Last year, we broke the record for most billion-dollar disasters, 14 that totaled $47 billion. Sandy is estimated to cost New York and New Jersey upwards of $70 billion. These are bigger human tragedies than they are financial tragedies.
We’d better not try to tell voters in those places that they don’t have a problem. They have a problem, all right, but we have an opportunity – an opportunity to serve.
The larger tragedy is our nation’s failed policy on energy and climate, as the evidence of climate change grows and the only steps we take rely on big government and small vision. Republicans can seize the moment with a smart, small-government solution with the big-vision transformative power of the marketplace.
Republicans correctly rejected a big-government solution called cap-and-trade. Loaded down with too many give-aways to special interests on the left and the right, it deserved the cap-and-tax label the GOP slapped on it. But we must not stop there. No entrepreneur ever succeeded simply by trashing the competition. You’ve got to come through and meet the real needs of your customer.
And our customer needs a solution that works.
In business or politics, you’ve got to believe in your product. For conservatives, the product is muscular free enterprise. We believe in transparent and accountable markets that deliver innovation and drive down prices. We believe in the liberty of enlightened self-interest where individuals, not governments, pick winners and losers. And we believe that these freedom principles build stronger communities where people enjoy the dignity of providing for their own families and the joy of willingly meeting the needs of others.
It’s no great leap to apply these freedom principles to the energy and climate challenge – unless you just doubt your product.
Conservatives have the answer to energy and climate and it doesn’t grow government. We need to leave behind the science denial of the past few years and the knee-jerk embrace of fossil fuels. We need to rally around a superior solution.
That solution would look at the real costs and the real benefits. As part of tax reform in this year’s fiscal fix or next year’s bigger fiscal fix, let’s empower our energy economy with free enterprise:
- Do a revenue-neutral tax swap that reduces taxes on income and shifts the tax onto carbon dioxide, thereby attaching to fossil fuels an approximation of the cost of their negative externalities. [Note: Make sure to keep this revenue-neutral. You may have to add revenue elsewhere in a grand bargain, but the goal of this tax swap is the correction of a market distortion, not the raising of revenue.]
- Eliminate all subsidies for all fuels, thereby correcting yet another market distortion called government failure.
- Re-examine and streamline EPA regulations as we tax energy pollution, crafting a more logical approach to a cleaner environment that combines measurable outcomes with the transparent and accountable price signal from a carbon tax.
More and more Americans now recognize that climate change is endangering their lives, property and communities, and that it’s only going to get worse unless we act. Recent national surveys show Americans’ belief in the reality of global warming has increased by 13 percentage points over the past two and a half years. At the same time, the number of Americans who say global warming is not happening has declined nearly by half, to a mere 12 percent.
That means that there are millions of potential customers out there looking for a real solution on energy and climate, and our small-government approach will work. Conservatives: your public, your country, awaits.
