Today marks the tenth anniversary of Christine Todd Whitman’s last day as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. The anniversary is especially poignant coming just two days after President Obama announced aggressive executive branch action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. After all, President Obama is fulfilling a campaign pledge – a campaign pledge that George W. Bush made when was running for president in 2000 and that Whitman signaled she would be carrying out, before she was ousted.
Yes, it’s true: in 2000, then-presidential candidate George W. Bush pledged to reduce carbon dioxide emission from power plants – the very policy that has John Boehner howling today. Republicans have not always denied the reality of climate change or the need to do something about it. As Jake Tapper recounted on Salon.com (reporting on Whitman’s departure in 2003), Whitman had told Senators in 2001 that, “there’s no question but that global warming is a real phenomenon, that it is occurring” and that the “science is strong” that flooding and droughts “will occur” because of it.
After his election, Bush reversed course, apparently influenced by Vice President Dick Cheney. And with the rise of the Tea Party, Republicans generally fell silent on climate change or, worse, started claiming that the science is not yet proven. But this week is an especially good time to remember that Republicans can change their position on climate change policy.
President Obama’s newly announced Climate Action Plan is a step in the right direction given the circumstances – those circumstances being that Republicans in Congress refuse to put an overarching solution to climate change in place. As such, President Obama was left to choose between doing nothing or taking a regulation-heavy approach. Obama made the right choice given his limited options but a better policy would be an overarching Pure Cap-and-Dividend program. Pure Cap-and-Dividend embraces both conservative and liberal principles.
Obama has made it clear that he would prefer a market-driven, bipartisan solution to climate change. Today is a good day for Republicans to do some soul searching and consider whether they wouldn’t prefer the same.