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The Degeneration of the GOP’s Climate Policy

Jonathan Chait comments on the suit filed by 12 states to block the administration’s Clean Power Plan and Rep. Mike Kelly’s (R-PA) op-ed in the Wall Street Journal endorsing the lawsuit.  

“Kelly’s op-ed neither denies nor accepts the validity of climate science. Rather, it offers up a pastiche of political and economic reasons to oppose regulatory action, or any action at all, to mitigate climate change. As such, it represents something close to the cutting edge of Republican Party thinking on the issue.”  

Chait concludes: “One searches in vain for any minimal attempt to grapple with the costs of allowing the unlimited free dumping of carbon into the atmosphere. The degeneration of the GOP’s climate policy is almost total. A party that six years ago was converging on mainstream climate economics can now muster nothing more than feeble gestures that bear only the vaguest resemblance to actual thought.”

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