Republicans Are Just Misunderstood On Climate, Republican Says

People have the impression that Republicans oppose climate action because they use different language to discuss it and because they ask questions, the chairman of the Conservative Climate Caucus said today.

“Sometimes I think Republicans speak a different language—I think that’s fair to say—when it comes to climate, and we communicate in a different way,” said U.S. Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah) in an appearance at the Columbia University Global Energy Summit. “And so sometimes when you feel a pushback on that from Republicans it doesn’t mean we don’t want to do that.”

There are 81 members of the Conservative Climate Caucus, just over a third of the U.S. House’s 222 Republican members.

“Imagine anybody who doesn’t think less emissions are better than more emissions,” Curtis said. “I don’t know anybody who doesn’t think it would be great to have zero emissions. But sometimes the way we talk about it is important. And I also think Republicans are quicker to see obstacles and impediments along the way that we want to talk about.”

Curtis then demonstrated one of the ways Republicans talk differently about climate—by defending the fossil-fuel industry and defending legislation that would ease permitting for oil and gas.

“We’ve reduced more greenhouse-gas emissions in this country during the last decade and a half than anyone would have ever guessed possible. We’ve far exceeded other countries. How have we done that? We’ve done that with the fossil-fuel natural gas.

“Our natural gas is about 40 percent cleaner than Russia’s. Why aren’t we replacing Russian natural gas with U.S. natural gas? Why are we demonizing the fossil-fuel industry, who is talking about carbon sequestration, direct-air capture. They may beat everybody else to net zero, so I think it’s really important we have to make a decision: do we hate fossil fuels or do we hate emissions, and I think we hate emissions, and fossil fuels can actually play a role. They can be part of the solution, and not the problem.”

Laurence Tubiana, the CEO of the European Climate Foundation, acknowledged that emissions have indeed fallen because of fuel switching from coal to natural gas. And Europe has replaced some Russian gas with U.S. gas, she said. However, she characterized fuel-switching as a temporary first step in a transition that requires reduction in fossil fuels.

The oil and gas companies would need enormous volumes of carbon capture, she said, at enormous cost to continue the pace of fossil-fuel use.

“For the moment, the number doesn’t fit,” Tubiana said. “There is an economic model which is not there, where with clean electricity, for example, the economic model is there already.”

Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund challenged Curtis’s claim that U.S. natural gas is cleaner. Most of the major oil companies have agreed to allow empirical measurements of methane leaks with third-party verification, Krupp said, but some American companies have not.

“For reasons that I don’t understand, Exxon and Chevron, two American companies, are not yet willing to sign up and give the world the data that virtually all the other majors have agreed to. So I don’t think we can yet assert how clean American gas is.”

Like Tubiana, Krupp said fossil-fuel use must decline:

“The International Energy Agency in Paris, which is the definitive source, says there’s no way to get to net zero without a dramatic decline in the use of fossil fuels.”

Krupp noted that the Inflation Reduction Act includes a little-known carbon tax, specifically on methane waste. Exxon has been calling for a carbon tax for years, Krupp said, but now, “the American Petroleum Institute, an arm of the big oil companies, is fighting to get Congressman Curtis and his colleagues in Congress—there’s a bill pending now—to repeal this methane tax.

“The duplicity is astounding,” Krupp said. “We have a price now on a greenhouse gas, and yet there’s an effort to repeal it. So the oil and gas companies have said we want good policy, and yet at least some of them working through their trade organization are now working to claw it back.”

Curtis interjected that he had not been lobbied on that issue.

“Nobody has asked me to repeal that,” he said. “I was regretting that you may walk away with the impression that there’s so much we disagree on, and … there’s really far more that we agree on than we disagree. I do want the audience to know that there are many good Republicans and Democrats who are thoughtful about this issue who are working together and trying to find solutions together.”