***… What was known on Capitol Hill? … What do you think is really behind [the rejection] of the science?
… So when you’re dealing with an existential threat like death or like climate change, if you see it as we are all toast anyway, then denial is a pretty good way of coping. So a convenient way to dismiss the anxiety [that] comes from the awareness of climate changes, you say: “Must not be a real. Scientists must be off.”
“When you’re dealing with an existential threat like death or like climate change, if you see it as we are all toast anyway, then denial is a pretty good way of coping.”
Another part of that is that if I accept the science, then perhaps it means I need to change my behavior. Perhaps we really do need to figure out how to innovate on the energy front. And if I don’t want to innovate or feel it would be too expensive, I don’t want to admit that I’m selfish, so the better way to dispose of it is to say, “Well, science must not be right.” Dismissing the science becomes a way of getting around changing my life. …
Another one is there’s an assumption of technological progress, that somebody is going to fix it, whoever that somebody is. I remember speaking with a grandpa who I knew very well, and I know him to be a very caring fellow. … He was upset with me about voting [against] cap and trade. He agreed with that, that I should have voted against cap and trade, but he very much disagreed with any focus on energy and climate.
So I was talking to him about, “What about your grandkids?” And he said, “I think they can get [by on] their own.” … I don’t think that that caring fellow really meant it quite that bluntly. I think what he meant was, somebody will figure something out.
And of course my response to him is, well, technological innovation will sure work better if we set the economics right, because what we believe as conservatives, and people who believe in free enterprise, is if you set the economics right, somebody chasing the dollar will deliver to me a better product. They will make money, and they will serve my needs. That’s what makes our system go around.
But he can’t get to that next step of getting the price on carbon, because if you attach that price, that external hidden cost to the product, it changes economics and all kinds of exciting things happening for the enterprise system.
But he wants to stick at the point of saying it’s not a cost. The CO2 is not a cost; it’s not a negative. If it’s a negative externality, it’s of zero value. If you attach a zero to it, there’s no change in the pricing structure. So for him, it’s very important to continue to deny the science because he wants to assign a zero to the cost of carbon.
Like [the ad about] carbon: “Some people call it pollution. We call it life.”
Right. They’re breathing it, so therefore how could it possibly be bad? And of course I tried to explain that. I’m not a scientist. I was on [the Committee on Science and Technology]. I just played one when the lights came on.
… I used to pooh-pooh climate change. In my first term in the Congress, six years, I said: “A bunch of nonsense. Al Gore’s imagination.” We had a very successful press conference where we absolutely panned Vice President Gore’s proposals on a Btu [British thermal unit] tax. So that was Inglis 1.0. …
My kids had an impact on me. I got in trouble for saying this, but my oldest was voting for the first time when I ran again in ’04, and he said, “Dad, I will vote for you, but you are going to clean up your act on the environment.” And so I had this new constituency: my son, my four daughters, my wife, all feeling the same way.
But then the other thing that really happened was as I get to Congress [for the] second time, I was on the science committee and got to see the evidence. And the main evidence really was in Antarctica, is the ice core drillings that show that in a mile of ice on top of the South Pole, … we’ve got what the scientists believe is 800,000 years or so of records of the earth’s atmosphere, because the South Pole is a desert. It only gets a quarter of an inch of precipitation a year. So in those ice core drillings, you can find a record of the amount of CO2 over time in the atmosphere. …
And so for me it became pretty clear in that evidence that, gee, that makes sense; that we just started burning all this fossil fuel, we affected the chemistry of the air. Physics are physics, and light comes in, heat doesn’t go out, you are warming.
[Journalist] David Frum once said something very interesting to me. He said, “We learn what we need to learn in order to protect ourselves.” And I think that’s a lot of what’s going on in the rejection of climate sciences, is I want to protect who I am; I want to protect my lifestyle; I want to protect what I built.
And the way to do that is to not receive information about how this fossil fuel thing really is creating a problem, because my life is sort of built on those fossil fuels. If I’m challenged to change that, and I want to protect what I’ve got, I reject that information. And so we learn what we need to learn in order to protect ourselves. …
You are talking about you only know what you want to know. Who were some of the people? …
It’s really, really disappointing that there are people out there that are selling themselves as experts who aren’t. … Lord [Christopher] Monckton, who is actually a journalist who holds forth on climate science, … people sadly on my side of the aisle have listened to him and presented him as an expert. …
Why do you think that is?
Because I think he’s saying something that people want to hear. …
The thing so unusual about that, though, is that we conservatives are usually the people who use the example of the buggy whip manufacturers. In our passionate advocacy of free trade, we say you can’t hold back the market.
If the market is saying we don’t need buggy whips anymore because we are going to ride in Henry Ford’s automobiles, then we conservatives, people who believe in free enterprise and believe in free markets, have typically been the ones who have argued against, for example, labor unions, who invariably are the ones trying to hold onto the buggy whips and protect their jobs.
We invariably are the ones saying you’ve got to roll with this thing. You’ve got to innovate; you’ve got to go forward; you can’t stand still. And we are right in saying that. We are surely right.
But oddly, on fossil fuels, we are now in the position of saying no, we cannot go forward. We can’t see any future besides fossil fuels, and we insist on “Drill, baby, drill” as the answer.