5.1: Climate Change
Confront climate change. Other Information:
The issue of climate disruption is far more complex, but can play a similar, discrediting role. There is a difference between
a healthy skepticism toward fashionable liberal shibboleths and dogmatic resistance to accumulated evidence. Gregg Easterbrook,
an environmental commentator who has a long record of opposing alarmism, put it this way: "All of the world's major science
academies have said they are convinced climate change is happening and that human action plays a role." To acknowledge climate
disruption need hardly lead one to embrace Al Gore's policy agenda. It is perfectly reasonable to doubt the merits of pushing
for a global deal to cut carbon emissions—a deal that is almost surely beyond reach—and to argue instead for a focus on adaptation
and investments in new and emerging technologies. Republicans could back an entrepreneurial approach to technical and scientific
investment as opposed to the top-down approach of unwieldy government bureaucracies offering huge subsidies to favored companies
such as Solyndra. (See above, under "corporate welfare.") Confronting climate change is important in and of itself. It is
also important as a matter of epistemology, to show that Republicans are not, in fact, at war with the scientific method.
Only then will Republicans have adequate standing to criticize junk science when it's used as a tort weapon or as an obstacle
to new energy technologies.
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