Bridging the Partisan Climate Divide

Andy Stone: Welcome to the Energy Policy Now podcast from the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. I’m Andy Stone. Can conservative political values align with a strong commitment to addressing climate change? Many believe they can. In this special episode of Energy Policy Now, Penn climatologist Michael Mann speaks with former Republican congressman and climate activist Bob Inglis about efforts to bridge the partisan divide on climate policy. The conversation, which was recorded live in February during Energy Week at the University of Pennsylvania, explores a conservative perspective on climate change and policy. Mann and Inglis discuss how conservative messaging on climate issues has evolved over time, and examine areas of common ground in addressing climate challenges.

Inglis, who is now the Executive Director of RepublicEn.org a group that advocates for conservative climate leadership, also shares his perspective on carbon pricing and strategies for reducing us carbon emissions. The conversation is moderated by Sanya Carley, Faculty Director of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. Our recording includes Q and A with the audience following Mann and Inglis’ comments.

And one note before we begin the conversation. Due to a technical challenge, the first two minutes of Bob Inglis’ dialog are difficult to hear. We’ve transcribed those two minutes in the show notes to make it easier to follow along. And a full transcript of this and all Energy Policy Now podcasts are available on the Kleinman Center website. Now on to the conversation.

Sanya Carley: Good afternoon, everyone. It’s great to see you all here. Welcome to the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, and welcome to another Energy Week event. Thank you all for coming out to so many of our events this week, and this is a particularly special one. I’m Sanya Carley. I am the Mark Alan Hughes Faculty Director of the Kleinman Center, and I’m a Distinguished Presidential Professor here at University of Pennsylvania in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

We’re so happy that you came out today for this very important conversation, and a conversation that is incredibly timely as we witness a whiplash of federal energy policy changes. What if you’re conservative and you support climate action? Do you have a spot at the table? How do you find your voice? What if you’re not conservative, but you’re working towards bipartisan cooperation? What are your opportunities for consensus? With so much polarization in the United States surrounding clean energy and climate change, right now seems like to the appropriate time to have these conversations.

And I can truly think of no better individuals to speak with us about it than Bob Inglis and Michael Mann. So allow me the opportunity to introduce both of them in turn, starting with our very own Michael Mann. Michael is the first Vice Provost for Climate Science Policy in Action here at University of Pennsylvania. He is a Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, with a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School of Communication. Michael’s research focuses on climate science and climate change. In 2022, Scientific American named him one of 50 leading visionaries in science and technology. He has received many awards, including the Hans Oeschger Medal of European Geophysical Union and the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and is a fellow of several prominent organizations, including the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is co-founder of realclimate.org, an author of more than 200 peer-reviewed publications and edited volumes, op eds, commentaries, as well as six books, including his most recent, which I know many of you have read, Our Fragile Moment.

Bob Inglis, who’s here to my direct right, is the Executive Director of RepublicEn. So RepublicEn, you might not be able to see, of course, the spelling, but there is an En, and I will explain what that means. But first, a little bit of history. Bob was elected to the US Congress in 1992 having never run for office before. He represented Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina from 1993 to 1998, unsuccessfully challenged us Senator Fritz Hollings in 1998, and then returned to the practice of commercial real estate law in South Carolina. And then in 2004 he was re elected to Congress and served until 2010.

After that, Bob shifted into promoting free enterprise action on climate change, and launched the Energy and Enterprise Initiative at George Mason University. And later, he rebranded the initiative to RepublicEn.org. For his work on climate change. Bob earned the 2015 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. He appears in the film Merchants of Doubt and in the Showtime series Years of Living Dangerously, episodes three and four, which you all will watch tonight. And he’s spoken at TEDx Beacon Street and TEDx Jacksonville. He has been a resident fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, a visiting energy fellow at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, and a resident fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics.

So I’m going to begin then, if that’s all right. And Bob, I’m going to start with you. I just gave a brief history of some of your credentials, but I’d love it if you could help us fill in the blanks of specifically your career as it relates to climate.

Bob Inglis: Yeah. So for my first six years in Congress, I said that climate change was nonsense. All I knew was that Al Gore was for it. And in as much as I represented Greenville- Spartanburg, South Carolina, that was the end of the inquiry. Okay, pretty ignorant. But that’s the way it was my first six years.

Out of Congress six years, as you just heard, doing commercial real estate law again. And then had the opportunity to run for the same seat again in ’04. Our son had just turned 18, so he was voting for the first time. And he came to him and he said, “Dad, I’ll vote for you, but you’re going to clean up your act on the environment.” His four sisters agreed. His mother agreed. New constituency, you know. So you’ve got to respond to those people, because they can change the locks on the doors to your house, you know. So, very important, responding to those people.

And so that was step one of a three-step metamorphosis. Step two is going to Antarctica Science Committee and seeing the evidence and the iceberg drillings. Step three was another science committee trip, and really a spiritual awakening, which seems improbable, right, on a godless Science Committee trip. Because we all know that all scientists are godless, right?

Well, apparently not. Because this Aussie climate scientist who was showing me the glories of the Great Barrier Reef, I could see he was worshiping God in what he was showing me. You know, Saint Francis of Assisi supposedly said, “Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.” So Scott Heron, this Aussie climate scientist who’s now become a very dear friend, was doing that. I could see it in his eyes. He’s written all of his face. It was in his excitement about what he’s showing me, he was clearly worshiping God.

So I knew we shared a world view before any words were spoken. So after we got the snorkels out of our mouths, we were able to talk. And he told me about conservation changes he was making in his life, to love God and love people. He rides his bike to work, does without air conditioning as much as possible in Townsville, Australia, a pretty hot place. Hangs the family’s clothes out on the line. All to consciously love people coming after us. So I got right inspired. I want to be like Scott, loving God and loving people.

So I came home and introduced the Raise Wages, Cut Carbon Act of 2009. Note to self. Do not introduce carbon tax in midst of Great Recession, when you represent perhaps the reddest district of the reddest state of the nation. It will not go well. It did not go well at all. After 12 years in Congress, I got 29% of the vote in a Republican runoff. The other guy got the other 71% of the vote. I had a spectacular face plant. I just think in politics, you don’t lose that badly unless you’ve been indicted or something. Actually, that used to be the case. Now, maybe you get indicted, you do better, I don’t know. But back then, you know, if you get indicted, you’re pretty much toast.

I had been indicted. I was just on the wrong side of some Tea Party orthodoxy. Wasn’t just climate change, by the way. I’d voted to rescue the banks, the $800 billion plan that George W. Bush cooked up. By the way, all of it was paid back. Not— just saying, okay. It’s all paid back with interest. I’m over it, though you understand. But, voted against the troop surge in Iraq. I had conservative concerns that my friend, George W. Bush, was doing nation building in Iraq.

There’s actually something encouraging about that. Political orthodoxies appear fixed, but they’re actually pretty fluid. Imagine that. People told me in 2010, “How dare you vote against our president, George W. Bush?” The same people cheer as Donald Trump trashes the whole effort in Iraq about once a month. So political orthodoxies aren’t quite fixed. They move around. TikTok, maybe, is a better example currently, right? Boom. It goes this way or that way. So. But my main heresy was just saying climate change is real. And so that’s what got me to tossed out of Congress. And then I set about this, to convince conservatives that it’s really quite conservative to care about climate change.

Carley: Wonderful. Thank you. Do you think you could also fill in a few details for us about RepublicEn, and just tell the audience about what it is?

Inglis: Yeah, so RepublicEn. E-N is for energy, entrepreneurship, the environment. We sort of write it as though it’s an element on the periodic chart, you know. The idea is, if you go to our website, you’ll see that we’re conservatives who care about climate change. It’s about 10,000 people. We need a couple of zeros on the end of that. Probably necessitates a couple of zeros on the end of our budget. But— so we’re out to convince conservatives to get in the conversation. And it is a different conversation right of center that it is left of center, because left of center we generally encounter communitarian egalitarians, according to my friend Dan Kahan at Yale. He says communitarian egalitarians. Those are left of center people. Believe in community, focus on fairness. Communitarian egalitarians.

Right of center people, Dan says, are hierarchical individualists. They believe in working through a hierarchy, chain of command. And they’re for individual reward and individual effort. And so it’s a very different conversation right of center than it is left of center. But most of the climate conversation has been conducted in the language of the left. So it’s no wonder really that the right feels left out and somewhat estranged from the conversation. So you’ll hear me talk a lot about Milton Friedman. And of course, if you’re a conservative, you know to sort of bow at the mention of his name. If you’re a populist nationalist, I don’t know whether they know or care who Dr Friedman was, right? So that’s a little bit of a challenge right now in my party. But that’s our story, is reaching to the right of center.

Carley: Thank you. So I think we all need a little bit of hope right now. So I want to ask a question about hope. What is your hope for the future at a time in which climate activism is no longer a challenge, or climate action is no longer a partisan issue? Maybe Mike, we can start with you?

Michael Mann: Sure, yeah. I see there are a couple students of mine in the audience. And they are—that’s where I derive hope. From Gen Z, from young folks. Seeing their passion, their— just the level of engagement that they have in addressing the defining challenges of our time. It is a challenging time, of course, if you care about climate. The environment, sustainability. You know, the levers of government are not in our favor right now, at least at the national level. There is an opportunity for meaningful progress at the local level, the municipal level, at the state level, and states working together. And there’s, of course, opportunities for progress internationally.

And here at Penn, with this new hat that I’m wearing as the Vice Provost for Climate Science Policy in Action, we’re sort of thinking about, how can we lean into this moment? What can we do at Penn that draws upon our unique talents, our unique resources, and areas of expertise, that can help advance the cause of climate and sustainability? And one of the focal points of that effort is, in fact, bridging the partisan divide. We’re not going to bring every Trump supporter on board with an agenda to address the climate crisis. But I think that there are actually a lot of quiet conservatives who think a lot like Bob does, who have conservative politics, but are conservative in the true sense of the word, right? In the sense that Abraham Lincoln was a conservative. That want to conserve the planet, right? What more important way can we be conservative than in conserving this planetary home?

Just a brief aside. I also want to mention that in my own history, I’ve had some interesting experiences with Republican politicians. And some of them have been interesting in a not so good way, but some of them have been extremely gratifying. When we published “the hockey stick curve,” my co-authors and I, more than 25 years ago or so, and it became this sort of icon in the climate change debate, I found myself under attack, primarily by conservatives. By Republicans who are opposed to regulation, who are opposed to climate action. And found myself in the hot seat with a Republican congressman, Joe Barton of Texas, and later on, Ken Cuccinelli of Virginia. Politicians who wanted to discredit this work, wanted to discredit me personally, to sort of send a message to climate scientists that, “We’re going to come after you if you speak out.” And Bob knows what that’s like, in his own way.

But two of the biggest heroes to emerge when that happened weren’t actually Democratic politicians. They were Republicans. John McCain, who stood up to some of his fellow Republicans and called out Joe Barton, a Congressman, Republican Congressman Joe Barton, in some of the harshest terms. Violating that principle of Ronald Reagan, “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican.” John McCain called out Joe Barton for engaging in modern-day McCarthyism in his attacks on me and my co-authors.

And Sherwood Boehlert, who became a good friend of mine, a Republican congressman from upstate New York— who again, was conservative in the true sense of the word. Again, coming from a district that’s home to the Adirondacks. He cared about the environment, he cared about clean water, clean air, and fought for those things while being true to a conservative ideology. And that’s what we need more. So why am I hopeful? Let me come back to that. I’m hopeful in large part because of the young folks who are involved here. Some of my students here I see in the audience. And the fact that we’re having these sorts of conversations, right here at Penn.

Inglis: Interesting. Yeah, Joe Barton. I got some polling data—it’s interesting. When we were both in Congress, I went to Joe with some Christian Coalition, interestingly enough, polling data showing that people cared about climate change. Particularly young people. Mark you, this is the Christian Coalition polling data. And so we went and talked to Joe about it. Joe, who is possessed of a fair degree of certainty, said he didn’t care about the polling data. That he knew, as a civil engineer, that it wasn’t true. And this is a guy who hadn’t practiced civil engineering in quite a while. I was really sort of impressed by the sense of security he had. You know, in himself, that he could declare these things. Interesting. But it was my hope that we can correct ourselves. And that’s the beauty of a free society, is self correction.

Carley: So I think you both have been around long enough— and that is in no way a commentary on age— but to see the Republican Party change its messaging when it comes to climate, from skepticism to cautious acceptance, to most recently, adamant denial. So, a two-part question here along this trajectory and thinking about the history. What do you see as the kind of primary drivers of this evolving narrative? And have I appropriately captured this history, or are we someplace else right now, in this trajectory, or this history?

Inglis: I think we’re better than we were when I was getting tossed out in 2010. In 2010, there was aggressive disbelief about climate change. It’s basically, “I don’t believe in climate change, and you shouldn’t either.” Very aggressive disbelief. Now, it’s not that way anymore. I mean, it’s— yeah, you still find in some pockets. But you know, experience is an effective, but often very harsh teacher. And we are being taught harshly about climate change.

I mean, for example, Fort Pulaski, Georgia, has seven inches of sea level rise since 2010. We’re talking, Fort Pulaski is— water’s coming up. People— as my friend Katherine Hayhoe likes to say, people have stopped arguing with thermometers. I mean, it’s just— it’s an argument you can’t win. And so now the mental block is more this— how we get the world in on this thing. That’s the current block, right of center. Is, if you could show me a practical way to get the world in on this, and that we can create wealth and jobs and prosperity by doing it, I could be on board. We think we can do that. All those things, all those things can be done.

And so I’m actually a lot more optimistic than— those were the dark days of the Great Recession is 2010, when I was getting tossed out. It’s a lot better now. But still, we’ve got a long way to go. We do have a challenge in the White House not being so much with this right now. But I was just yesterday in Washington with the Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who chairs the Conservative Climate Caucus. It’s one of the largest caucuses in the US House. She’s a member of Congress from Iowa. It was started by John Curtis, who was a House member, and now he’s a US senator. Took Mitt Romney’s place in the Senate. And so good things are happening in some quarters right of center, the White House notwithstanding.

Mann: Yeah, I concur entirely. A few years ago, I wrote a book, The New Climate War, which was sort of about the evolving nature of the assault on climate action. And the thesis of the book— and I think it’s proven true— is that we’ve seen sort of an ebbing of climate denialism, for precisely the reason that Bob just said. You can’t argue against things that people see with their own two eyes. You know? I mean, increasingly— you can in the world of deep fakes and AI. But still largely true. You can’t argue with something that people can see with their own two eyes. That they’re feeling. That they know people, that they have neighbors, they have friends, they have relatives who have lost homes and wildfires or floods.

And so there has been this move away from this one word, D-word, denial, to a whole bunch of other D-words— deflection, division, doomism, delay. And that’s really where the battle is now, not so much over the basic scientific evidence, the reality of climate change. Although we have seen bad actors weaponize climate misinformation and disinformation on social media. So if you you know, if you’re immersed in the world of Twitter, you would believe that there is a groundswell of disbelief in the basic science of climate change. When the polling by our colleagues, Ed Maibach and Tony Leiserowitz, the Yale-George Mason polling on climate, shows that dismissives— those who really do outright reject the science of climate change— are only in the single digits. Nine, maybe 10% of the public. It feels like it’s more than that, because, again, the way that social media and even our mainstream media has been weaponized to make it seem like there’s a debate over the basic science.

But that’s not where the battle is right now. The battle is in actually doing something about it, and the real obstacles are delay and deflection and division. And I’ve talked a lot about doomism. There are bad actors who want us to believe it’s too late to do anything about climate change, because if you think it’s too late, then why bother? And so we have to be aware of that sort of pivot away from denial to all of these other tactics that are very much still an obstacle to the action that we need to see.

Carley: Despite some of these stats and trends that we observe, it’s still the case that voters don’t rank climate as the top of their priorities. Especially exit polling, for example. So what will it take to convince voters that the climate is very intimately and intricately connected to other issues, such as the economy and geopolitics and other issues?

Mann: As long as we treat climate as a niche issue, like it’s some other category of concern, it’s always going to rank down in any list that compares it to sort of bread and butter issues that people are dealing with. You know, paying for their bills. Inflation. So what we have to do— and there’s been an effort to do that. In fact, I think there is very much a movement towards making sure that people understand that they do connect the dots, and understand that part of why we have inflation is because of the interruption of supply chains by extreme weather events. The military, the security challenges that we face today, many of them are fundamentally about a battle for diminishing resources at a time when there’s there’s less available drinking water and food and space.

And so to the extent that we can connect climate to all of these other issues that are on the front burner, that is, in my view, the best way to sort of elevate concern over climate, and support for meaningful climate action. We need to connect the dots and make sure that people understand that those catastrophic wildfires, those devastating floods back east with the hurricane season we had— that is climate change. Those disasters have been amplified by climate change.

And look no further than the fierce effort that there is by the other side, by polluters and those who advocate for them, to interrupt those teaching moments. And we saw that with the California wildfires, the massive misinformation. Throwing as much mud on the wall as they can, so that there isn’t an opportunity to have that basic conversation about, yes, you know, there are various factors that come into play. But the science is very clear. Climate change has led to a near tripling in the extent of wildfires in the western US over the past several decades. Clear increase in intensity in damage and loss of life. People need to understand that.

Inglis: Yeah. And you know, what I would add to that is, is we need to understand that as long as we can keep it out of the realm of death and taxes. Because this doomism really is a problem. And it’s part of the reason that it’s so culturally marked with left of center language. You think about it. If it’s all left of center language, it really does sound to right of center folks like we’re all going to die next Tuesday. Well, if we’re all going to die—

Mann: We’ll get Wednesday, at least.

Inglis: Okay, Wednesday. If we get we got just until next Wednesday, we’ll eat, drink and be merry, right? I mean— because there’s nothing we can do about it. So here’s what I would just implore you, if you’re left of center, please don’t see climate change as too good of a crisis to waste. See too many people on the left, I think, have decided, “Hey, let’s just put some more things on the wagon. We got this climate change wagon. Let’s just put a whole bunch of other stuff on it.”

Well, what I would just beg you to see, is the wagon is sinking in the mud. You can’t pull that wagon across the finish line with all of your fondest progressive dreams. You really can’t. We’ve got to take all that stuff off the wagon. If you’re really concerned about climate, let’s get this done, get it across the finish line. And the way to get it across the finish line is to talk about opportunities in fixing it. You know, it’s really important to message, I think, without all those progressive things that put it in cultural marking. Take those things off the wagon and say, “All we’re trying to do is get solution on climate.”

And I should have mentioned, I got to take this opportunity to put in a plug for what we think is a solution. You know, there’s three ways to fix climate change. One, you can regulate emissions. Can’t regulate Chinese emissions. So therefore, if you regulate here, and they don’t regulate there, and manufacturers pick up and move from here to there, you just went downhill on solving climate change. You have cleaned up local air. That’s good. But you have just gone downhill on solving climate change.

Second way, clean energy incentives. If I were still in Congress, I’d be voting for some of those things. Why not? Problem? Those are mostly tax incentives. Only apply to American tax paying entities. You haven’t affected the economics of any foreign firm. Chinese, Cambodian, Vietnamese, their economics aren’t affected. So you end up possibly in the same spot as number one.

The answer, we believe, that is a rock solid conservative, is tax it. Tax emissions. And the proof of that is on our website. Milton Friedman, on The Phil Donahue Show. Let me explain who Phil Donahue was. People are too young to remember. He was basically a white guy doing an Oprah Winfrey Show. And so he used to have Dr Friedman on, and they’d debate. “What you do about pollution, then, Dr Friedman, if you don’t want to regulate it?” Friedman says, “You tax it. You tax pollution.” And then he goes on to explain, you can’t let two people affect a third person. The government has to step in and stop those two people from dumping on a third person. This a moral case for that, but he was making the economic case that that’s a distortion in the free enterprise system. You’ve got to fix that distortion by internalizing the negative externalities.

Now, I say that because I’m in a room full of probably people who’ve had Econ 101. Everywhere else, I say—because my ad guy laughs when I say that. He says, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” to try to tell me, “Bob, don’t say that.”

Mann: We just talked about that in class today.

Inglis: Really? There you go.

Mann: The tragedy of the commons.

Inglis: There you go. So that’s all we talk about at RepublicEn.org. And we think that it can be done through a carbon tax that’s paired with a reduction in payroll taxes, to address the regressivity problem. And then, that’s combined with a carbon border adjustment mechanism. And that’s the key. Because then you use the allure of access to the American market to make it in our trading partners’ interest to tax it themselves. And then you get the whole world seeing the true cost of burning of fossil fuels, because it’s built into the price of everything.

Now, if you’re a progressive, and what I just described sounds— “He just described it as rock solid conservatism, but it sounds familiar to me,” if you’re a progressive. Well, might be, it’s because Al Gore has been for that for about 30 years. I asked him several years ago, “Is it all right if I—”  He said, “Hold up, Bob, because you’re talking a low,” I said, “No, sir, I’m talking a substantial carbon tax. It’s steadily rising. Paired with a reduction in payroll taxes, so there’s no growth of government. And then applied at the borders in a carbon border justice mechanism.” He said, “Yeah, fine, then. You can tell people what you’re for, RepublicEn.org, is the same thing I’ve been for for about 30 years.”

So we have this hope that we could actually bring the country together and lead the world to solutions. But here is a challenge. Al Gore is probably now milquetoast to some on the left. He’s way centrist. So all those people that are loading that wagon up, they think Al’s like, oh so very 2000 or something. And that’s the real challenge right now in American politics. We got people that have energy and enthusiasm way left, and energy and enthusiasm way right. Those are the people who show up to primaries and choose candidates. That’s our challenge. And so somehow we’ve got to reassert a reasonable sort of range where we say to the way lefties and the way righties, “Listen. Love your passion. We’re not doing all you’re talking about.” And so I hope that, you know, somebody like Al Gore is representative what can happen going forward.

Mann: Yeah, a couple of follow ups. I agree with everything that Bob just said. A number of years ago. Malcolm Turnbull, who’s a good friend of mine. I met him when I was on sabbatical in Australia a number of years ago. He actually— the first event that our center here at Penn held was a conversation with the former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of the Liberal Party. But as you know, in the Southern Hemisphere, everything’s opposite, right? So the Liberal Party is actually the center right party in Australia. So he is a conservative who actually, you know, fought for meaningful climate action. And like Bob, actually found himself opposed by people within his own party for doing that.

One of the things that I’ve said in the past is—and some of you will get the film reference. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was getting progressives to oppose a carbon tax. And I think there actually has been quite a bit of effort by polluters and bad actors to actually turn progressives against some of these basic instruments. And that’s the great irony. And you’re— you know, as you say, to the point where it’s now anathema to many environmental conservatives to talk about carbon pricing, to talk about carbon tax or other carbon pricing mechanisms.

And that’s really unfortunate, because, in my view, you have to work within the system that exists today to solve a problem that has such a sort of a short fuse, right? We’ve got to reduce carbon emissions dramatically within the next decade. We’re not going to change the entire world socioeconomics and politics in 10 years. We’ve got to work within the system that exists, and we have to figure out what sort of market incentives can be used to solve this problem, as Bob is saying.

Carley: I really appreciated those responses. And maybe if I could pull the thread a little bit more, I’m curious on your thoughts of, over the past 20-plus years, whether those that have been advocates for climate action have had any particularly strong missteps. And how it connects to the last question is— for those of you in the audience that are my students, last semester, we we read an op-ed piece about economists and the missteps that economists have had when it comes to climate. And their vehemence, their fighting for a carbon tax, might have been part of a misstep. And I’m just curious as to whether you see that as a misstep, and whether there are others that have transpired?

Inglis: Well, I think one thing that I wish might have happened differently is if Al Gore could have chosen a Republican to be his alter ego, that might have helped us. I don’t know who it might have been.

Carley: You. If he approached you.

Inglis: No, I wasn’t on board yet. So it could have been me. But maybe John McCain or somebody. If he’d chosen John McCain.

Mann: John McCain. Or Lindsey Graham, even, back then, maybe.

Inglis: Yeah. So if he had had somebody that was— the Noah’s Ark rule, you know, that a lot of people use in Congress now. Really pretty effective. That in order to join the caucus, you got to bring— if you’re a Republican, you got to bring a Democrat with you. That’s really— I think that leads to good government. And so that would have been a helpful thing.

As to whether the— I think we’ve got to explain a carbon tax. It’s really hard to explain, because, you know, particularly—if we go around talking about a carbon tax, “Oh, wait a minute. You’re talking— you’re a conservative. You’re talking a new tax.” Yeah. But it’s paired with a reduction in other taxes. Because you see, a carbon tax by itself is regressive. It hurts poor people. Put on a $30-per-ton price on carbon dioxide at the pipeline, at the mine, upstream application, right? And administrative efficiency in that. You get a 30-cent increase in price of gasoline here in Philadelphia or in Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina. You get an $11 increase in the average family’s electricity bill.

Okay, that’s a problem for poor people. But if you pair it with a reduction in the payroll tax, the Congressional Budget Office says the bottom 70% of Americans do better because you’re giving them a full paycheck. A fuller paycheck. And they can do things to avoid the carbon tax. They can turn down the thermostat, put plastic on the windows in the winter, drive less. They can do some things to avoid the carbon tax.

And so it’s really— you know. And there’s got to be some way to illustrate this very clearly. And what we find is, if you give me 10 minutes, I can usually do it on talk radio or with a conservative group and get head nods. “Oh, yeah, that makes sense. That’s practical. It fits with a profit motive. It fits with hierarchical, individualistic thinking.”

And so the example I always like to give is, there’s somebody working at McDonald’s near here right now. It’s her second or third job. She is paying 12.4% payroll taxes at that job right now, 6.2 that she sees on her paycheck in the FICA box, 6.2 that McDonald’s is paying. Twelve-point-four is what she’s being taxed. Reduce that tax, put on the carbon tax. Now she’s going tonight to Walmart because she’s got a bridal shower she’s going to tomorrow. She’s supposed to bring the plates. So she goes to Walmart tonight, and she’s choosing between the paper and the plastic plates. Well, the paper is a little bit cheaper. But go back after the carbon tax. Paper plates going up in price a little bit, because, you know, chainsaw gas and natural gas at the paper mill. But the plastic, wow, is it going up. I mean, it’s all petroleum, all natural gas, all the time. And so she’s got the bigger paycheck in her pocketbook, and she’s choosing between the paper and the plastic. Well, at RepublicEn.org, we’re for freedom. If she just loves plastic— you know, the feature that when you tip a plastic plate, the food goes splat on the floor? You know, she just likes that. Go ahead and buy plastic. But if she’s cheap like me, she’s probably going to choose the paper. And that point, every shelf in Walmart has the same thing going on. The greener, cleaner, now appears cheaper relative to the dirty made accountable. All we’ve done is adding a tipping fee to dumping into the trash dump of the sky. We’ve fixed the economics.

And that should be the strong suit for right of center people, to be able to make that case. Because they should be the people understand the economics of that. And by the way, Al Gore understands it too, because the guy is making jack at Apple, you know? I mean, he’s doing quite well. He seems to understand the free enterprise system. And so— a lot better than me, I would say. But, so we think it’s a saleable proposition, if you have credible messengers who go to them and sit with them and help them to understand that, “Hey, this is us. This is our strong suit. Come on.”

Mann: Yeah, it’s really interesting. Because there are these challenges in communicating or getting people on board with carbon pricing, you know, folks who have a conservative, anti-tax sort of ideology. And so there’s that challenge. But there’s also a challenge on the other side of the political spectrum, which I was alluding to. That’s the great irony that “climate inactivists”, as I call them, polluters, those who oppose climate action, were able to convince progressives that that a carbon tax would be a bad thing for them. And the way they did that was by trying to convince, especially, low-income people, people in frontline communities, that this would hurt them. That it would lead to refineries being built in the places that they live. And that it was regressive tax, and so they would pay more.

When, in fact, that’s not the case. It’s not the case with the emissions trading scheme that was implemented in Australia, that was a revenue-neutral carbon pricing system that actually preferentially returned the revenue raised by the tax to frontline communities, to low-income households. So it was actually progressive in nature. That was what was being argued for here in the United States. Fee and dividend, or some sort of revenue neutral carbon tax that had a progressive sort of system of returning revenue to lower income folks. And that case was just not made convincingly enough, effectively enough.

Now it’s easy to say that. In the presence of a massive disinformation machine funded by dark money and billions of dollars, sometimes it’s difficult to get your message out. And that is fundamentally one of the challenges we continue to have. In a neutral environment, we could, I think, pretty effectively articulate the case for these sorts of mechanisms. But in this very adverse environment political economy that we find ourselves in today, it’s really hard to do that. That’s where effective communication becomes so important, and the sort of work that we’re doing here at Penn, when it comes to climate communication. To me, that’s where the battle really is now. It’s not over the science, it’s not over the economics or anything else. It’s over, you know, our communication space and our ability to get information, neutral information out to people.

Carley: Thank you. We’ll go ahead and open the floor to audience questions.

Willis Abram: Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for coming. I’m Willis Abram, from Greenville, actually. So thank you for representing us. So you know, I like to thank everybody in this room is a smart person. I go to Wharton. I understand discount rates. I understand the economic benefits a hundred years from now for all these actions we can take now. But as you talk about communication and the challenge there, you know, the average age of the MSNBC viewer is 75. The top podcast has 15x viewership of Anderson Cooper. The media landscape is changing. So what can we do? What can firms like RepublicEn do, to reach people like me, who don’t listen the radio, maybe look at TikTok too much. Yeah. How do we increase the education rate of those people to kind of change those political wins you’re talking about?

Inglis: Well, I hope you can help us. Because we do all those social media things, except Tiktok. We haven’t done Tiktok. But it is a huge challenge. And you know when Joe Rogan has more—  that’s one of the guys you’re talking about, right? He has way more, like the numbers you just had. So how do you reach him? Anybody know him, or got his email address? Because I want to be on with him. I want to talk on his show.

Justin Mason: Thank you. My name is Justin Mason. I’m down from Erie County. I’m with Conservative Energy Network Pennsylvania. I would like to say thank you for coming today and being here, Congressman Inglis, and thank you for addressing the importance of energy efficiency. Few people ever really touch on how important energy efficiency is. But my question is, what opportunities exist for bipartisan action over climate change? What issues can really bring the right and the left together, and even the layperson like all of us?

Inglis: Right now, I think the thing that might have some purchase is Senator Cassidy of Louisiana’s Foreign Pollution Fee Act. It’s basically a carbon border adjustment mechanism without a domestic price. Probably has a World Trade Organization issue there, but it gets the conversation going. And it seems to fit the moment, because President Trump seems to be talking a lot about tariffs, and so why not put a tariff on high-emitting products? And, you know, level the playing field a little bit.

That’s what you do, actually, in a carbon border adjustment mechanism. You know, you’d make it so that you would have people internalizing the negative externality in their own country, so that they wouldn’t have to pay the tariff on entry to the United States or it’d be actually rebated to them and applied here. But one way or another, the economics work out for them, right? Rather than getting away with it.

Because what we’re doing is, we are, as consuming Americans, we are outsourcing our emissions to other places. And so the idea is to get all of that reflected in the price of products. And so I think that that’s the thing that could actually move in this pretty polarized, difficult situation, would be Senator Cassidy’s Foreign Pollution Fee Act, I think.

Mann: Yeah. I mean, I agree completely. One other thing that you might think about adding to the mix is sort of just framing this in terms of international competitiveness, right? I mean, the idea that China now is going to dominate the solar energy economy globally, because we are sort of unilaterally pulling out of that industry. At least if we adhere to the policies that are coming down the pike in the new administration. And so framing that in terms of international competitiveness, I think, appeals across the political spectrum.

Carley: Great. Thank you so much to our speakers, Michael, and Bob, for joining us today.