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hatrack

(59,442 posts)
Wed Dec 11, 2019, 09:54 AM Dec 2019

And Here's Why The GOP "Oooh! Look! Innovation" Approach Won't Have Any Appreciable Impact

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The efforts on the right side of the committee dais mark the most coherent Republican climate platform to date, but they also show the limitations of the party's move away from climate science denial. All 12 bills on the list would essentially chip at the edges of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and yesterday's showcase focused entirely on emerging technology, most notably carbon capture and small-scale nuclear.

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By most academic accounts, however, innovation and consumer demand alone simply won't be enough to curb emissions and halt potentially dangerous climate change, said Noah Kaufman, a research scholar at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy who studies carbon pricing and the economics of climate policy. In testimony before the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change last week, Kaufman said that even if every Department of Energy clean energy research program reached its highest end goals, the resulting emissions reductions would not be enough.

"Even in that scenario, which no risk manager would recommend counting on, U.S. emissions are projected to fall by less than one-third over the next few decades," he said in his written testimony. That's why there needs to be a market signal — whether via direct carbon price or regulatory framework — to drive deployment on a scale that matches the science, Kaufman said in a follow-up interview. "Innovation can make decarbonization cheaper, and it can make it occur faster," Kaufman said. "But it's not going to do the job itself."

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Still, despite successes getting a handful of GOP moderates to support carbon pricing, Kaufman said he "did not sense any signs" Energy and Commerce Republicans were interested in what he had to say last week about market signals. And the intense focus on innovation by the GOP and conservative organizations has some advocates wary. Alex Flint, executive director of the Alliance for Market Solutions, which supports carbon taxes, said, "Advisers to Republicans are better to face the reality and the scale of climate change head-on. "It is quite possible that these groups are creating a movement toward an entirely inadequate response to climate change, and, when that becomes clear, Republicans that embrace it will have to shift again," Flint said.

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https://www.eenews.net/stories/1061770221

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