The fact and fiction of the GOP's climate denial

Mark your calenders: The GOP is fighting meaningful carbon-cuts policy now (think Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell crying that Kentucky coal jobs are more important than the full earth's population and Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe invoking God, not carbon, for what he has called the climate change "hoax"), but the demographics of the Republican Party should bring change in the coming decade. That's because there is a global warming generation gap in the GOP.

Thanks to that gap, primarily an age gap, building a policy now intended to gut the Environmental Protection Agency's climate regulations and President Obama's greenhouse gas reduction plan could leave Republican leaders looking badly out of step with their constituency, according to Washington Post writers who analyzed the data from a series of global warming questions in a Post-ABC News poll in June.

The poll asked a nationally representative sample of respondents whether they believe the federal government "should or should not limit the release of greenhouse gases from existing power plants in an effort to reduce global warming?"

People overwhelmingly supported the idea, with 70 percent in favor.

A followup question asked them to put their money where their mouths are: "What if that significantly lowered greenhouse gases but raised your monthly energy expenses by $20 a month - in that case do you think the government should or should not limit the release of greenhouse gases?"

Once again, a majority (63 percent) said they were willing to spend $20 a month to limit greenhouse gas emissions. That included a 51 percent majority of Republicans. But breaking that 51 percent majority down by age was the big reveal:

GOP'rs over 65 would spend $20 more only by a ratio of 42 to 45, but those between 50 and 64 supported spending to limit greenhouse gases by 46 to 44 percent, and those between ages 18 and 49 supported such a move by 61 to 38 percent.

The question is: Can rational policy wait out the GOP climate change deniers? (Note that the media - notably National Public Radio - now is correctly calling the likes of Inhofe climate change "deniers" not "skeptics." Skeptics, it seems, actually devote themselves to intellectual and scholarly pursuit in search of logic and evidence rather than clinging to absurd conspiracy theories.

But logic doesn't fit with the GOP's climate fact and fiction. Remember Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's reaction to the U.S./China climate deal and his re-election chant? The war on coal (his synonym for constructive energy policy) will only cost jobs (especially in Kentucky) and hurt Americans.

Let's examine that.

Fact: The Congressional Research Service has acknowledged that many Obama-era pollution rules (often dubbed the war on coal) proposed to enforce the Clean Air Act "began development under the Bush Administration." Bush's former EPA Administrator William Reilly actually said some of them were "like little hand grenades that have been rolled out there by previous administrators, and now they're ticking ..." Meanwhile, the electric utilities - the biggest users of coal - knew the rules were eventually coming and some began planning alternatives. Ultimately, according to the CRS, coal plants have been retired because of lower power prices, depressed demand and cheaper and abundant natural gas "almost regardless of EPA rules."

What about jobs?

In 2012 - Obama's second election year - Fox news, the Weekly Standard and Forbes all had stories during June and September claiming that EPA regulations were causing large job losses - "casualties for the embattled coal industry."

Fact: The West Virginia Center On Budget And Policy analyzed data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and found: "U.S. coal mining employment is much higher today (2012) than it was over the last decade." The analysis stated the industry employed 85,600 compared to 77,200 in December of 2007. "In fact, coal mining employment today is higher than at any time between 1999 and 2008."

But aren't we told all the time - even by the Tennessee Valley Authority (which just gave its 11,500 employees an average $11,400 end of year bonus) - that coal is our most affordable energy source despite its carbon sin?

Fact: It really isn't very affordable at all. The costs of coal use outweigh its benefits, according to several reports. One of these reports made five years ago in 2009 by the National Academy of Sciences even excluded costs that might be incurred by climate change. Instead, the Academy examined other external effects associated with coal emissions from 406 U.S. coal-fired plants and found tens of billions of dollars in damages "aside from climate change effects" were about $62 billion, or "$156 million on average per plant."

Finally, won't the greenhouse gas rules drive up the cost of electricity?

Fact: Not according to Brookings Institute, the Bipartisan Policy Center and the director of Harvard's Environmental Economics Program. Brookings Senior Fellow Peter Wilcoxen in 2012 explained that because the greenhouse gas rule applies only to new coal plants, which are already facing competition from natural gas, "[t]he idea that the new regulations will shut down the coal industry is nonsense. ... Because it only rules out an expensive option that wouldn't have been used anyway, the EPA rule will have no significant effect on electricity prices."

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