Bob Inglis is a former Republican congressman representing South Carolina and the current Executive Director of republicEN, an EcoRight organization that supports a free market approach to climate change. Today, Bob joins Ross and Christophe to share the three-step metamorphosis that inspired his belief in climate change. He defines conservatism, discussing the link between Christianity and climate action and explaining why current conservative politics don’t reflect Christian values.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jospe. We’re doing a remote episode today and one that we are excited to bring to you. Christophe, why don’t you tell our audience who this might be?
Christophe Jospe: This is former Congressman from South Carolina, Bob Inglis, and current Executive Director of RepublicEN.org. And I’m actually really excited. I saw a play this weekend called The Metamorphosis, and I think we’ll get excited.
Bob Inglis: Great to be with you. Thanks for the opportunity.
Christophe Jospe: So, Bob, we like to really begin this with people’s story, their Genesis story, but also like how they got to where they are today, which is sitting in your library on a Zoom call with Nori on the Reversing Climate Change podcast.
Ross Kenyon: How were you deceived into doing this, Bob?
Bob Inglis: How did I end up doing this? Well... You know, I was in Congress for six years saying that climate change is nonsense. I didn’t know anything about it except that Al Gore was for it. And in as much as I represented probably one of the most conservative districts in one of the most conservative states in the country, the fourth district of South Carolina, that was the end of the inquiry. I admit that’s fairly ignorant now, but that’s the way it was for six years. And then I was out of Congress six years.
Doing commercial real estate law again in Greenville, South Carolina. Had the opportunity to run for Congress again in 04. And my son came to me. He’s the eldest of our five children. He’d just turned 18, so he’s voting for the first time that year. And he said to me, Dad, I’ll vote for you, but you’re going to clean up your act on the environment. He was the first of a three-step metamorphosis for me. He wasn’t making a classic interest group threat. He’s going to vote for me no matter what. I mean, if we’d lost by one vote, it would have been really bad for him.
What he was really saying was, Dad, I love you, and you can be better than you were before. So how about make this Inglis 2. 0, the new and improved version. And so his mother agreed, his four sisters agreed. A new constituency is born. They could change the locks on the doors. That’s an important constituency to respond to, I suppose.
Ross Kenyon: Well, absolutely. It sounds like your incentives were aligned there for a metamorphosis. Yeah. Yeah. Bob, it sounds like you are a flip-flopper, though. How is that acceptable to change your mind in politics? Doesn’t that make you unreliable?
Bob Inglis: Yeah, that’s a great question. And then it’s like, that’s the curse of our time sort of is we don’t give people the opportunity to grow. In fact, when you say that word grow, some people groan because they say, oh, don’t tell us about growing. We want you to stay the same way you were. Well, I think that if you try to stay the same way you were and not accept new information, Then really you become susceptible to being overcome by the facts. And when you’re overcome or overtaken by the facts, it’s better to be overtaken than to try to be the rock there that’s going to be pushed over.
Better to learn and grow with the information you get. So for me, that first step was just the love of my son and his four sisters, my wife. That’s where it started. The second step for me was going to Antarctica with the science committee and seeing the evidence in the ice core drillings. Really being impacted, too, by interactions there with scientists. You know, the science committee used to go visit in Antarctica every other year to visit with the money, basically. Back then, we were spending $340 million a year on the polar programs.
And so the idea was to go see if the scientists were actually doing work or whether they were just playing around down there, you know? One of those scientists was an impressive guy named Donald Manahan from the University of Southern California. And oddly enough, the fact that he needed to go call his mother meant something to me. He had an aging and ailing mother at the time. I had an aging and ailing mother at the time. And the fact that he needed to go call her enabled me to hear his science better.
That’s a strange thing, but it’s just a reality of who we are as humans that we’re not computers. We really do receive information based on whether we like the people that are talking to us and whether they like us or not. So that was the second step for me was being able to hear that science in Antarctica, become acquainted with computers. The reality is that there’s a uptick in CO2 levels trapped within the ice cores that are drawn out of the mile of ice that’s in Antarctica and flown off to Ohio State and put in the freezer at the Byrd Polar Research Center.
And there what we see is this uptick that coincides with the Industrial Revolution. And that’s pretty persuasive. Correlation doesn’t indicate causation, but it does just make sense that if you’re burning trees long gone and other vegetation long gone, turned into fossil fuels over time and temperature and pressure, you bring it to the surface, you burn it, you’re changing the chemistry of the air. And the physics of light that have been known since the 1800s are that light enters the All the heat generated from that light striking Earth surfaces doesn’t go back into space because of the presence of greenhouse gases and you get warming.
And those physics and that chemistry is pretty straightforward, really. The modeling, of course, is rather complex. But that’s what I heard in this in Antarctica. What I saw there, there was a second step in my metamorphosis is getting the science education. Third step for me was another science committee trip. And something of a spiritual awakening which seems impossible on a godless science committee trip because I think a lot of us assume that all scientists are godless. Apparently they’re not because this wonderful Australian climate scientist named Scott Heron was showing me the glories of the Great Barrier Reef and talking to us about coral bleaching.
And I could see that he and I shared a worldview before any words were spoken, because I could see and hear Scott worshiping God and what he was showing me. He’d come back to the surface after going down with me, snorkeling, and he’d come back up and he’d be all excited about what we’d just seen. And he’d be telling me about it. And I could just see and hear him preaching the gospel. You know, St. Francis of Assisi said, And so Scott was preaching the gospel, just not with those words.
Later we had a chance to talk and he told me about conservation changes that he was making in his life in order to love God and love people. He does some things that maybe some of my conservative friends would find silly. He rides his bike to work. Tries to do without air conditioning in Townsville, Australia, as long as his wife and three daughters will let him get away with it. Tries to hang the clothes out on the line rather than use the electric dryer, all to consciously love people coming after us.
So I got right inspired. I wanted to be like Scott, loving God and loving people. So that’s when I came home and introduced the Raise Wages, Cut Carbon Act of 2009. Note to self, do not introduce carbon tax in midst of great recession. In reddest district of reddest state of nation, it will not go well for you. And it did not go well for me at all. In fact, after 12 years in Congress, there’s a Republican runoff and I got 29% of the vote and the other guy got 71% of the vote.
So a rather spectacular face plant after 12 years in Congress.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a great story. Sounds like you’ve learned a lot. And we really respect when people can change their mind about things and are able to be convinced. And we don’t like it when people are a little too doctrinaire about things. I think you could talk either of us out of basically anything that we believe.
Christophe Jospe: And oh, man, politicians with conviction. What a refreshing thing to have in this day and age. Yeah.
Bob Inglis: And, you know, some people would find a contradiction there. They would think that, no, if you have conviction, you would stay with what you came with, you know, dance with those who brung you. And there’s some truth to that. But on the other hand, if you can’t receive new information and say, you know, really, I’m sorry, I was just wrong before. If that’s not possible, then it’s not possible for America, the young people, To grow and to adapt, it becomes America the old that is set and concrete and can’t move.
You know, if you think about it, cultures that allow that sort of flexibility are the ones that succeed. The ones that insist on whatever, growing crops the way we always grew them, or doing it the same way that we’ve always done it. Those are... Those are societies that fail. It’s like the famous last words of a dying church, you know, or we’ve always done it this way. And so that’s the way it is with a society that expects conviction to be To be evidenced by complete inability to receive new information, there needs to be some exception.
Conviction means having enough courage to say, listen, I was wrong before, and now I understand this better, and let me see if you can agree with me on this, and try to explain it rather than go along, particularly even the worst thing I can imagine is continuing to spout something that you know is just patently wrong. That’s got to be, that’s not just a lack of courage, that’s into a moral fault of being a demagogue, I suppose.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed. And you set us up very nicely for one of the questions I wanted to ask as a nice background setting for our audience, which we did this a little bit with Benji Backer from the American Conservation Coalition and asked, what is conservatism and what does What does that mean to you? Because I think a lot of people associate it with that. We’ve always done it this way. And I think they associate it with just being a reactionary and saying no and holding prejudices that may have been acceptable some decades ago to say.
Yeah.
Bob Inglis: This is great. You know, my son used to tell me, he said, Dad, you’re not a conservative. When I was in Congress, he said, you’re not a conservative. I said, what, Robert, I’m a conservative. He said, no, no, you want to change so many things. And I said, well, conservatives can be about changing things. They don’t have to be people who say, no, we got to keep things the way they are. But there are some people who identify that as conservatism, you know, that resistance to change. But I guess I make myself sort of a...
What Jack Kemp used to call a bleeding heart conservative, which is somebody that really does want to change things and make them better. You know, I mean, why can’t we have government at the speed of an app? Well, the answer is we can if we are willing to change a lot of things. And, you know, and I think it’s something that really does fit with Especially young people today is they would say, yeah, why can’t I do with government what I do on my phone with Amazon or with Visa or MasterCard or PayPal?
So we really can reinvent government, to borrow the phrase that Al Gore used as many years ago. And conservatives should be people that are about that. Conservatives should be, I think for me, it’s The reason that I consider myself a conservative is the place I look to answers for ordering a society or the means by which we can order society. And for me, that would be a family rooted in its faith and strong beliefs and then also exercising its rights in free enterprise where people are rewarded for effort. And not a series of guarantees where supposedly the government is big enough to be the blesser of every soul, which seems to me a misplaced faith in government.
If government’s big enough to give you everything you want, it’s big enough to take everything you’ve got. And so that makes me a conservative as a person who’s looking for free enterprise solutions that are based on family and faith and also, though, affected by a need for fairness and looking for a way to balance that individual effort with also caring for the least of these and Somehow making sure that the system is fair and not rigged against some people because of whatever their out status is, whether they are somehow made the outlier or the other.
That’s where I think faith steps in and says, wait a minute, we can’t treat people that way. And so even if a laissez-faire free enterprise system That’s where the free enterprise system has to be constrained by a moral system. And that moral system should protect that other, protect the minority, and make sure that the majority doesn’t become a mob that runs over them. And that’s really why Now you can hear the sort of patriotic music playing is in my head as I’m thinking about the beauties of the Constitution, because I think that’s what the amazing thing of our Constitution is, is that somehow a freedom for the people to do what they wish, but not the freedom to oppress people that disagree with them.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. I think that’s a pretty decent baseline for people to work with. I wanted clarification on one small point. I remember reading Edmund Burke and him having a line about there being little platoons, and these are small groups, either like These groups are the ones that should be experimenting with change. And oftentimes the conflict between conservatives and progressives happen because progressives want this change to be taking place at a very large scale by conservatives. Or by executive fiat or something like that. But conservatives tend to want change to bubble up from the bottom up.
And if there are experiments that smaller groups work with, and this could be federalism at the state level, or it could be even smaller than that. Just culturally, without it being dictated from above, I think there’s sort of a ... This doesn’t always play out in politics. If you write me and say, Republicans don’t really do this, it’s possible that we just see less of it these days. But this is part of the conservative intellectual tradition that there is a sort of less managerial, more bottom-up way of seeing how change can be experimented with before it’s just imposed generally across society.
Do you think that’s a fair way of understanding this, Bob?
Bob Inglis: Yeah, I think that’s true, that as a conservative, I generally distrust engineered solutions that come from a Soviet five year plan, let’s say, because we saw what clunky came out of those five year plans in the Soviet Union. And I’m dating myself now, aren’t I, if I’m speaking to the Soviet Union.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, talk about ISIS or something. Talk about the Islamic State and keep up with the new foreign policy crisis for us.
Bob Inglis: But when you attempt to centrally plan something and don’t use the innovative capacity of free people engaged in free enterprise, then you end up with some clunky stuff. So there are examples of that all over in the tech revolution, for example. And it’s pretty exciting to see the power of free enterprise and the innovation that comes there. Now, I think that where it pertains to climate change, though, it may sound like an inconsistency here because I’m looking for a worldwide price on carbon dioxide. That’s even bigger than this country. That’s a real big centrally planned solution maybe, but not really.
It’s just asking for, really insisting on accountability for all of us as to what emissions you’re creating. And it’s said like this, in the salad bar of life, take what you want, but pay for what you take. And so, yeah, choose what you want from the salad bar. But you got to pay by weight at the end of this thing. So if you fill up that plate with the sliced turkey and the ham or whatever and the cheese, well, the salad bar owner has to charge you for that at the end of the salad bar or else they can’t remain in business.
You can’t have free riders. You got to have people paying their way. And so that’s a rather conservative notion and one that leaves people in liberty, but it causes them to be responsible. And so you got to balance those two things. And liberty does not mean being a libertine. You know, you’ve got to be responsible and accountable for your actions.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, definitely. And I mean, it seems pretty straightforward when we’re, you know, whether you’re looking at ice cores that can show that the CO2 levels have been going up since the Industrial Revolution, and we’re adding around between two and three parts per million of CO2 each year. It stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. And the science is there that we know more CO2 in the atmosphere warms the planet. So it’s pretty straightforward to say if we’re adding this because of our human activities, let’s price in the cost of what it means to dump it.
So it requires some kind of price to say, if you’re going to do this I wanted to go back to something you said early on, which I think is really interesting and really important in thinking about how to do that. I would not make this an issue of one political party or another, but reaching people where they are. And, you know, it’s just cool to think, okay, you listen to people because they were able to meet you where you’re at. They weren’t explaining something. They weren’t patronizing. They weren’t saying you’re wrong.
You’re a climate denier. But it’s kind of there’s that connection. There’s something that resonates with people. So I’m wondering, what is it today that you think the climate movement has got wrong in how it’s communicating this message? Because at the end of the day, would you agree that climate change is totally solvable? It’s just a PR problem?
Bob Inglis: Yeah, it’s completely solvable. And that’s what’s so exciting about it. It’s also, you know, it’s so different than, say, healthcare. Healthcare cannot be solved. It is 100% death rate. And there’s a lot of suffering between here and there. And literally, there’s no... There’s no healthcare system that works anywhere near perfectly anywhere in the world. But climate change is not that. It can be solved. It’s like, here’s the problem. We’re dumping greenhouse gases at a rapid rate into the atmosphere. And we’re messing up the balance that... The Creator intended. And so let’s clean up our act.
And if we can figure out a way to power our lives differently, then things will be different. So, yeah, it’s inherently solvable. I think to the question you’re asking, it’s like this. We learn from people who are like us and who like us. And we don’t learn much or anything, really, from people who declare that they don’t like us. So in answer to your question, the problem with the climate change communication that’s going on is there’s been an awful lot of communication of dislike, especially to my tribe, conservatives, is... People basically saying to them, you’re really dum-dums.
The last kid in the class to get it. Why are you so stupid? You know, I mean, that’s not a very compelling message. I mean, in other words, if you tell me that I’m stupid or that you don’t like me or that you’re better than me, I don’t want to hear anything else you’ve got to say. But if you come to me and say, you know, hey, Bob, I like you. You’re a fine guy. And all the better if you can also say, and hey, I’m like you. I believe as you do.
I have similar beliefs and a similar language to yours. Then I can really hear what you got to say. But even if you lack that second part, just approaching with respect and saying, gee, I like you fine. You’re an okay guy. Then I can hear you. But if you tell me you don’t like me and that you’re better than me and that I’m stupid, well, See you later. I don’t want to hear any more from you. And it’s like one time at a conference, this guy asked me, he said, did you buy carbon offsets for your travel here today?
And I said, no, that’s a scam, isn’t it? Because I just read something in the Wall Street Journal about how the accounting is funny. He turned to the guy next to him and says, that’s what they all say when they don’t want to be responsible for You know, if that guy told me that this is whatever day of the week, I’d check the calendar because I don’t want to hear any more the guy’s got to say, right? He just told me in that interaction with the guy sitting next to him and overheard by me is that he’s better than me, that he’s righteous, that I’m some kind of a sinner.
He’s holy. I’m unholy. He’s smart. I’m stupid. I don’t want to hear any more from him. And I wouldn’t trust anything he said to me. No new information could come from that fellow to me. But contrast that with my friend Scott Heron, the Aussie climate scientist whose faith I saw in his eyes and on his face and heard in his voice as we were snorkeling him showing us Great Barrier Reef. If Scott told me, listen, let’s swim across the Potomac. We can do it. The weather’s nice outside. Let’s go. I’d be inclined to do it because I know that Scott cares for me and he wouldn’t put me at risk.
And if he says it’s okay, well... I think I’d want my shots, but he’s a scientist. If he told me we don’t need shots, really, the water’s fine. Maybe I’d do it with him, you know, or I probably would do it with him because I know he cares for me. But that guy at that conference asked me about the carbon offsets. I’m not going to hear any more from him. So the challenge is getting to people with credible messengers and a message of affirmation and hope rather than this message of I’m better than you are and you’re stupid and have you finally come around?
And that’s way off in the presentation from climate activists to people who aren’t yet convinced.
Ross Kenyon: Absolutely. We think that’s very much true. And one of the questions we wanted to ask you about, in fact, maybe I’ll phrase this in the way of testing a theory with you, Bob, because we tend to think that A lot of conservative reaction against taking action on climate change is due to solution aversion, which we’ve spoken about on the show quite a lot, which for any listener who may not be aware, if you don’t like the solutions that are being proposed for a problem, you may go all the way back to the beginning and Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But if there are messengers who are credible and the message that they have are friendly to their interests, something like, hey, actually technology and free enterprise can do a lot of the heavy lifting for climate change. It isn’t just taxes and regulations. Maybe there would be less conflict over this issue. Do you think that’s true? That’s the theory I’ve been using so far.
Bob Inglis: Absolutely. I think that solution aversion goes a long way to explaining The rejection of the climate science that we’ve seen. And the way I explain it is because some people might find that irrational. What do you mean? You don’t like the solution. Therefore, you doubt the existence of a problem. I mean, that seems backwards to a lot of people. But here’s the way I’d put it to those that aren’t yet convinced that solution aversion is real is here’s a plan of surgery for that back problem you’re having. First, we’re going to remove your head.
After we’ve got your head off, we’ll work on your spine. Then we’re going to put your head back on. Thanks, Doc. I’m feeling a lot better. I don’t have a back problem because the solution is nuts. You’re not going to take my head off. And so what conservatives heard about climate change is they want to regulate our very breath. That’s nuts. We must not have a problem because the solution is just plain nuts. And so we do it all the time. All of us operate on solution version. Of course we do.
It’s rational. It’s not irrational. It’s totally rational. If there’s a solution that’s unattainable or unavailable or just downright wacky, then let’s just assume there’s not a problem because... That’s what you got to do in order to live in a world with all kinds of options coming at you.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. I always like being told I am right. So thank you, Bob.
Bob Inglis: Yes, me too. I like that.
Ross Kenyon: What do you think is the link between climate action and Christianity? We spoke about this with Joel Salatin He’s quite devout. We talked about the doctrine of dominion and Genesis. Why hasn’t this been a popular application of this doctrine in churches? I’m sure the Unitarians got this under control, but for the rest of the churches in America, it doesn’t seem like stewardship has been perhaps a dominant theme.
Christophe Jospe: You got the Pope.
Ross Kenyon: He’s making some So Catholics are making some moves. I don’t know what you’re seeing with either Catholics in your district or the country at large, but mainly Protestants. Is there any change happening in that direction towards the Dominion Doctrine and becoming a better steward of the planet?
Bob Inglis: Yes, particularly among young believers. And on this one, there really is an age divide. If you’re talking about a young person, They want to see action on climate change. They embrace this stewardship message. If you’re talking about older believers, They are very much affected by a period of time where the resistance was to people that were doing earth worship and people that are telling us that we were equivalent to a bug, that there’s no difference between us and say a chicken or a fish or whatever. And so having Grown up in that period, older believers are quite adept at seeing and smelling and spotting that kind of confusion that some have taught, particularly maybe through the 50s and 60s, of an equivalency between human beings and lesser parts of the creation.
Whereas young believers would see now that, no, we are the highest part of the creation, according to the Genesis account. And that’s where God says that he was very pleased. Every other one, it was good, but he says it was very good when he created humankind. And gave them dominion, as you just referenced, over all those other things. And then you have the vestiges of something that goes on there. Some people that are using that word dominion to say something that’s just really sort of strange if you think it through.
Is it, okay, the word dominion is used, and let’s assume then that, yes, human beings do have dominion over the creation. If so, what does dominion look like as modeled... And the answer is, it’s a servant’s dominion. It’s not an authoritarian, burn it up, use it up, dictatorial, look at me, pay attention to me, I’m number one. You know, that’s not at all the nature of Jesus as revealed in Scripture. What’s revealed there is a servant. That being the case, we are granted dominion, but the dominion is a dominion of service.
It’s a little bit like what you find out in Congress, by the way. This seems incongruous, maybe, because most of the time we think of members of Congress as, you know, sort of pompous and sort of full of themselves. But I saw this over and over. Somebody becomes the chairman of a committee, and what happens is they get to speak less than everybody else. The reason is their role is to call on other people and to run the meeting and to let other people be heard. And so it sort of becomes a picture of what happens if it’s working right, where dominion is, yeah, you’re the leader, but it means you’re empowering other people.
And if you have dominion over the creation, Then you’re the steward who’s caring for that creation. You’re not the one that’s using it up, burning it up, raping and pillaging it, stinking it up, destroying it. That’s just very foreign to the person and work of Jesus and the teachings of Jesus. Not just in the New Testament, but the essence of God that’s revealed in the Old Testament. Same thing. It’s not a dominion.
Ross Kenyon: That was a fascinating answer, and we should do more episodes that have theological components in them. I don’t think we’ve done that nearly enough.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I think we probably should bring on someone who’s...
Ross Kenyon: We’re coming for you, Pope Francis.
Christophe Jospe: We got your number, Pope. It also brings to mind, I was reading an article the other day about some farmers who, I mean, they’re farming in the Jewish faith, but they basically, from the Old Testament, Are inspired to let their land rest every seven years. And it’s just, when you go through the Bible and look at all of these different examples of places where God and nature come together and the sort of respect that we have for the land, not to call people out, but would argue that there are a lot of people who would consider themselves Christians who aren’t acting necessarily in a Christian way if they really read the book and took it a little bit more literally.
But that might not be fair, Bob.
Bob Inglis: Absolutely. It’s just so clear that a lot of people haven’t read the book and aren’t acting on it. And we do need to call fellow believers to account for that because how else are we going to know if we don’t help each other see that truth? And so, for example, in the Old Testament, the concept of not muzzling the ox while it’s treading out the grain is It has an awful lot to do with another verse. It says the wages of the laborers cry out to me. So if you’re in the capitalistic system and you’re not paying your workers and you’re not, you’re, you’re, you’re muzzling the ox and the wages of the laborers cry out to God.
And so treat them fairly is what that means. And so That’s what I’m talking about earlier about how, yeah, I believe in free enterprise and a capitalistic system, but it has to be constrained by a moral system. If it’s constrained by a moral system, it works pretty well. If that moral system fails to have an impact on the capitalistic system, it turns into sheer greed, and it’s really a pretty gross system. People of the book need to read the book and realize that the character of God that’s revealed there. And, you know, that’s what in Romans, Paul says that the nature of God is revealed in the things that he’s made so that people are without excuse.
We know how God has made things and we can see it in the creation itself. And so it’s, you know, I had a, once had a, I guess I’ll go ahead and finger the university because it is, I had a Harvard professor say to me one time, he said, shame the Bible doesn’t say anything about environmental protection. Of course, my jaw dropped and I’m thinking, fella, have you ever read it? I mean, are you kidding me? It’s replete throughout scripture. And like I say, a lot of young believers see this and definitely celebrate or moving on it.
And people like Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, that’s an exciting group that really is acting on their faith. They’ve read the book recently and they are inclined to act on it, which is really exciting.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t want to be necessarily too hard on Christians always. Christ set a very high standard. It’s not the easiest personage to emulate and try to walk in his shoes. I think everyone probably has a fair amount of hypocrisy or a failure to live up to that standard if they’re truly trying to. But yeah, I think we can all think of examples where we wish maybe the trying was a little more clear.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. Well, I’m interested. So, you know, obviously, within the conservative movement, there’s a lot of influence from Christianity. But what to get into some of the policies, and I like that we were saying these are bottom up ideas, but also they’re top down ideas. But what is a conservative friendly climate policy? What do those look like? What might one look like?
Bob Inglis: Yeah, let me disagree with something you said, though. In the conservative movement, I’m not sure in the current moment that Christianity is reflected in that movement as we see it today. In fact, I don’t think it is. People really need to read the book again and be reminded of the teachings of Jesus. So, for example, to have Franklin Graham a while back saying that the Bible says nothing about the immigrant, It’s about the most preposterous thing I’ve heard in quite a while. There are verses throughout scripture about caring for the alien among you.
And that’s, I don’t know where in the world Franklin got off saying that, but it sure was strange to the ears of a believer. If you’re reading the book, now if you’re acting in some new book where it’s not And so you sort of pushed a button there. Sorry, there’s a fair amount of intensity there. But how do Christians, how do you get Christians involved on climate? It’s basically helping them to see this glorious creation that we’ve been given and our role as stewards of that creation. And it’s pretty exciting.
It’s also true what you just said, though, that we’ll never exercise that duty perfectly. And therefore, we’ll always need grace. And we’ve got to extend that grace to one another. And I’m sort of emblematic of that. People who understood in my first six years of Congress that climate change was real. Well, I need a lot of grace from those people. Because I wasted those six years. Sane is nonsense. Because Al was for it, Al Gore was for it, therefore I’m against it. That was my first six years in Congress. So I need a lot of grace from people who knew that it was real back then.
And likewise, the people that are coming around now need grace from people who’ve long been in this effort. So we need to extend that grace freely because otherwise we’re not going to solve the problem.
Ross Kenyon: Seems like a good way to treat people. We’ve spoken about this a little bit too, but even if you wanted to change minds just for purely Machiavellian reasons, that’s actually a way to be persuasive, but also from a more humanistic lens. Yeah. Offering that type of forgiveness and humility, I think is probably a better way to live one’s life than seems like the constant combat we’re in right now where the stakes are so high that it seems impossible for people to have a productive conversation. I like this conversation because we’re actually able to explore these ideas in a non-threatening capacity.
Listeners, I hope that’s why you like the show. That’s what we try to do because it doesn’t seem like it exists in as many places as we would like it to. Bob, we want to run through some of these policies or projects for climate change that see maybe how you feel about them, what you think might be the best way to go. Offsets, you mentioned, so keeping with the biblical theme, you can throw the offset provider. Well, what we make can easily be confused for offsets because we help people make carbon removal certificates, but they represent real activity of having taken carbon out of the atmosphere and traceability to see that actually happened.
Some are better than others, but your mileage may vary on any of the specifics of the offsets. What do you think about offsets, Bob? It’s voluntary. Conservatives can choose or not choose to participate. Do you think that’s something that they should do?
Bob Inglis: Yeah, I think that’s a step toward the internalization of the negative externalities associated with the burning of fossil fuels. I sound like an economist. I’m not an economist, but it’s a simple concept that all costs should be included in And exposed in the marketplace so that consumers can choose based on the true cost of what it is they’re buying. If you let me at Inglis Coal Fired Electricity, let’s say, get away with socializing my soot from the burning of coal to make electricity, then my customers aren’t seeing the true cost of my product.
And there’s a market distortion. And so you want to fix that market distortion by making me even biblically accountable. Hold your ash on your property, Inglis. Don’t do on your property something that harms someone else’s person or property. And hold your carbon on your property too, Inglis. And then I’m heard to complain, no, no, that’d cost me a lot of money to sequester that stuff. Yeah. And my rates would go up. Well, precisely. They’d go up not to an artificial number. They’d go up to a truly accountable number. And then all those competing technologies, other ways to make electricity, wouldn’t need the subsidies that they currently need.
We prop them up with somewhat clumsy subsidies. That actually end up costing a great deal of money if you look at it in terms of carbon reduction. But if you just make all the players accountable and then eliminate all the subsidies, then in the liberty of enlightened self-interest, consumers would pursue their self-interest and good things would happen. You know, as a conservative, we generally believe that... Blessings flow from accountability. Havoc results from the lack of accountability. Climate change is the havoc of the lack of responsibility. And so just make people accountable.
Make us all accountable. Let us see the true cost of all the fuels and then watch innovation happen faster than government regulations or mandates or fickle tax incentives could ever imagine. And so a step toward that, yes, some sort of a voluntary method of offsetting through actual capture. That’s pretty exciting. Particularly if it leads to the beginning of, by the way, there’s steps toward early adoption. If it leads toward technologies that are proven to work, then you have one of those platoons you were talking about earlier where something is shown to work.
And hopefully it can reach to scale. I think, though, that probably in order to reach scale, you have to have a policy by which the government steps in and says, okay, listen, no more free polluting, okay? No more dumping into the trash dump at the sky without paying a tipping fee for the space you’re taking up in that trash dump. You got to pay for the space you’re taking. And so there’s a role for the government in stepping in and being that honest cop that says, no more free dumping, no more free polluting.
Ross Kenyon: I love the subsidy discussion too, because that always struck me as the ultimate conservative pro-gamer move. If you just removed all the subsidies for fossil fuels, I think we would see a lot of action. Though every time it’s come up on the podcast or even personally when we’re not doing the show, it’s always easier to add new subsidies than to take away old ones. And it seems like getting rid of those are maybe just politically impossible. But I think removing that policy would do a lot more than a bunch of the new policies that would be added.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like that’s in the cards at all. Do you agree with that, Bob?
Bob Inglis: Yeah, it is hard to take away existing subsidies, but the thing is when, and this is where the early adoption that you’re talking about with some voluntary efforts help pave the way, once better technology becomes available, then... The subsidies, whether they’re explicit or implicit, sort of start falling away because people move quickly to that new technology. So if you think about the way that essentially horses were the means of transportation and they were in various ways had systems of support. Among others, maybe the most graphic one would be the city of New York sweeping up the poop from the south end of a northbound horse.
And when they did that, they were basically subsidizing horse travel on Manhattan. Now, I’m pretty sure that Manhattan does what we do in Charleston, South Carolina, and that is you’ve got to have a diaper on that horse. The south end of that northbound horse. And you got to change the diaper on the horse and deal with your own poop because the city of Charleston ain’t going to pick up your poop for you. And that’s, you know, so, so, I mean, that’s a rather graphic example of how there’s a implicit subsidy or in that case, it really was rather a Patent subsidy was the lack of accountability for what happens at the south end of a northbound horse.
And so you make people accountable. Well, Henry Ford’s cars would have been more attractive more quickly. You tell me it’s 90 degrees and I got to carry this stuff off this island of Manhattan? That’s not very attractive. I think I’ll get one of those 10 Lizzie’s. So it’s those kind of things that speed up the pace of innovation is when we just bring accountability.
Christophe Jospe: Definitely. And I love the metaphor that you gave around this thinking of carbon as waste, because it really comes down to dealing with climate change a waste management problem. I mean, we’re not able to turn off fossil fuels today, and no one’s saying that we want to live in a garbage-less society. We just want to treat this as something that we need to put away so we ultimately can balance the books. And the solutions you were talking about, some level of Putting a price on carbon, which takes some form of a carbon tax or some role of a policy to do that.
And I agree with that. We also, on this list of policy options, had cap and trade up there. And I know previously you’ve said some things that aren’t always putting that in the most favorable light. And I think we can sort of put this in context in today’s day and age because actually Oregon just shot down a cap and trade bill. And I thought that was the right thing to do personally. This isn’t a Nori opinion, but I thought it was the right thing to do because that was an ineffective policy.
But then you see a big uproar from people who are pro that idea blindly in the name of, well, anything, any movement on climate is good movement. I’m sort of priming you a little bit in your response, but I’ll let you answer from your own opinion. How do you see cap and trade being effective or ineffective as a climate policy? Yeah.
Bob Inglis: When I was in Congress, I voted against cap and trade, the Waxman-Markey bill, because I thought it was hopelessly complicated, embarrassing in the free allocations to the well-connected, would have decimated American manufacturing, and it was a massive tax increase. So for all those reasons, I voted against cap and trade. But I would say this, that most economists would say, I think, that They’re in a dime’s worth of difference between a well-designed carbon tax and a well-designed cap and trade system. Both essentially accomplish the same thing. It’s just that for all those reasons I just stated, I didn’t think Waxman Markey hit that mark.
But the thing that I think is particularly attractive about a carbon tax as compared to the cap and trade system is that carbon tax is simpler. And it’s just a simple application of a tipping fee for the trash that you’re putting in the sky. Just like the tipping fee you got to pay when your trash hauler takes the trash to the city dump. And you might not realize you’re paying that tipping fee, but you are because the city you live in charges that trash hauler for the space that they’re taking up.
And so that... That’s back down to your bill. If you’ve got a private trash picker-upper. And that’s the way it should be. As a conservative, isn’t that what we believe? Back to the salad bar of life and pay for what you take, but pay, you know, take what you want, but pay for what you take. So, yeah, I think that a carbon tax is simpler, but most economists would say it’s the same thing as a cap and trade system if they’re well-designed. And straightforward. And just one thing I’d add about the state initiatives is, you know, there are a number of things that states are attempting.
And at RepublicEAN.org, we say, bless them all, because anybody that wants to try to get the conversation going is very helpful. There is, however, an Achilles heel for all of those state efforts, and that is their inability to stop leakage across their state borders. And what that means is that people will pick up and move Let’s say from Illinois to Indiana, if Illinois puts on a carbon tax, because then the billboards go up, Illinois yet moved to Indiana. And so people decide that they are Illinois because they don’t want to pay the carbon tax in Illinois, so they move their operations to Indiana, don’t pay its carbon tax.
Well, that’s obviously a problem for any state that goes first. So Contrary to what we were saying earlier about little platoons, this takes the whole nation moving in order to accomplish this. Because if you can truly price carbon dioxide, it’s got to be done in such a way that it’s applied on imports and consistent across the United States. First, consistent across the United States, but then also applied to imports. And that only the federal government can do under our constitution. So that’s the Achilles heel of these state initiatives.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there’s a lot there to make sure it gets right. And the stakes are high once it’s at that level. It seems like things have a tendency to stay there longer than they maybe should. There’s plenty of policies that need updating that. It’s just hard to change. Those fights are public and large scale. So that is an Achilles heel and we’ll agree with you there. We’ve had lots of discussions and internally at NORI, various people like the carbon tax, others prefer the Alden Donnelly, who’s our director of carbon economics, likes the performance standards approach, which she believes also leverages the market incentives in the correct kind of way by I won’t belabor it for listening.
We’ll let you off the hook there, though, Bob, so we don’t get super nerdy and wonky on this episode. Where do you think it’s possible for conservatives and progressives to collaborate on climate change? It seems like the, I can never tell if it’s just what I see on the news and social media, people being angry and it doesn’t seem like bipartisanship or transpartisanship or working together is very popular these days. It seems like people are more siloed than ever. Do you think it’s possible that we’ll end up working together more on this?
And if so, how might we do this?
Bob Inglis: Yes, I do think it’s possible. And I think that we’re in a moment that is almost sure to pass. You know, I’ve seen it in my measuring life in politics. There’s devotion to, let’s say, the interventionism of George W. Bush in my party, which I had the temerity maybe to challenge when I said I’m not voting for the troop surge because I knew we could do it. But I wanted the Iraqis to secure their future, not American blood and treasure to do that. Well, that got me in a lot of trouble.
How dare you vote against our president? Now we’ve got a Republican president who trashes the whole effort in Iraq about once a month. And so orthodoxies appear fixed, but they’re actually quite fluid. And so this moment will pass where we’re in this hyper... Partisanship, I believe it’ll pass. And I think that actually climate action is the place where we may model the way out of this morass that we’ve gotten ourselves in. And so part of that may well be that if Donald Trump continues as the Disputer-in-Chief of Climate Action. He may take that with him whenever it is that he leaves the stage because quite often presidents when they leave the stage they do take something with them.
It sort of becomes passe. So the interventionism of George W. Bush sort of left with him. I think it’s quite possible that unless Donald Trump turns around, that the climate disputation that he’s so become attached to or identified with will leave with him. He’ll take it with him when he leaves the stage. And the next president will be somebody who says, now listen, we still have it in us to lead the world to solutions. And we have it in us to unite America And come together and solve this thing, and to show the world, the world that’s waiting on the indispensable nation, which is America, to lead, that we can show that leadership.
And I happen to think that’s well stated from a conservative perspective, that doesn’t have to be a progressive voice saying that, it can be in concert with progressivism, It’s a rock solid conservative voice. It says, heck no, we’re not tired of leading. We plan on leading the world another century or two or three. And America is capable of that. And no, we aren’t tired. Some people may be tired, but the rest of us aren’t. And we’re ready to lead, lead the world to solutions on climate change. So there’s a great opportunity to model this thing of coming together to solve problems.
And I nominate climate changes as the way to show that, to model that behavior.
Ross Kenyon: I very much hope you are correct. I find the current way of existing just exhausting and unproductive. I think the quality of the conversations are not so good. People are angry. Much of the anger is justified. I just don’t always know the productive way to engage with it. I do hope climate change is a time where we can come together and recognize this as a big crisis and that We’re all in the same boat here. It’s not like you can do it alone or you can avoid the changes that are coming.
So I really hope we’re able to do that and I hope that is a correct prediction. So let’s hope that’s the future course. Bob, if someone identifies as a conservative or right of center or however they like to frame it, they wanted to learn more and they wanted to find good trustworthy resources that can appeal to their values and also talk about climate in a productive way, what would you recommend to them?
Bob Inglis: Come stand with us. Join us. We need you at RepublicEN.org. In fact, if you want to get straight to the page, it’s RepublicEN.org slash join and we’ll help amplify your voice. We believe that what this takes is conservatives becoming visible. And once they become visible, elected officials will respond to that constituency. The reason that Conservatives is currently serving in Congress. Many of them are somewhat afraid to engage on climate or have been in the past. This is changing right as we speak, which is very exciting. But in the past, they’ve been afraid to engage.
It wasn’t an evident constituency for action, but we and others on the eco-right, as we call it, eco-right, a balance to the environmental left, are helping conservatives to find their voices and to amplify their voices. And the result is that conservative elected officials are saying, gee, there is a constituency for action on climate. And so they feel supported and they... They enter the competition of ideas. So that’s what we’re after. So it’s self-serving for me to say, come join us at republicen.org. But honestly, I think it’s about the best thing you can do if you’re conservative and concerned about climate change.
And then get information from all of our compatriots on the eco-right. There are a lot of them out there, you know, in the Scanning Center, the R Street Institute, Clear Path Foundation, Alliance of Market Solutions, I could go on. There are a whole bunch of us and we can From our website, link people to all kinds of neat resources.
Ross Kenyon: I’m not sure if you attribute this to the Green New Deal entering the zeitgeist in such a prominent way, but I at least see the conservatives and libertarians or people who like markets generally talking about climate change more these days in a serious capacity is because they are a bit afraid of what might happen if the Green New Deal passes and it’s only progressive. So conservatives realize now it is the time to act. Do you think that’s what is happening right now?
Bob Inglis: Yeah, I think there’s something like, you know, what we all experienced maybe in middle school, which was the spirit week cheer. We get spirit. Yes, we do. We get spirit. How about you? And then the other side of the gymnasium responded with, you know, the same same chorus back. So I think what’s happening here is the Green New Deal came out and it’s like we get a solution. Yes, we do. We get a solution. How about you? And thankfully, there are some conservatives that are calling back to that chant. Yes, we do have a solution.
And, you know, I happen to think that it’s a better solution. It’s a simple accountability in a very small government footprint and left leaving people in freedom, accountable freedom. So I’m excited about conservatives entering the competition of ideas because the bedrock concept of internalizing negative externalities can win the day here and prove to be the best policy. And the good news is it’s not just conservatives who believe that, it’s a lot of progressives. Because if what I’m describing here sounds familiar to a progressive who may be listening It may be because it’s the same thing that Al Gore has advocated for about 30 years now.
And so the reality is we can bring America together and lead the world to a solution if we decide to drop the political wedges and realize that we’re literally in this together and that the world is waiting for the most important country in the world to rise to the occasion. It’s very similar to, you know, us delaying our entry into World War when it’s just unspeakable atrocities were going on and the risk of totalitarianism was spreading across the world and we were giving some ships maybe to Sir Winston Churchill, Lend Lee’s program, but we weren’t in it until we were attacked.
And then we got in it And as Churchill said, it’s over now. America is going to win this thing. And so that’s the same place we are on climate, is once America decides to enter this thing, and that’s what the world’s waiting for, we can solve it. And back to where we started, this is very much solvable. It’s unlike things like health care that are imponderable and really difficult to solve. You just try to reduce suffering. But in the case of climate change, it’s inherently solvable.
Ross Kenyon: Well, Bob, there’s a lot of inspirational stuff in there for our audience to chew on. Thanks so much for being here with us. We are very grateful that we had a chance to have this conversation. We like having people of your persuasion on the podcast because I don’t think people get to hear this as much as they need to, that there’s opportunities to work together, that conservatives can care about this. I don’t know. I like doing shows like this. Thanks for having fun with us. I had fun with you, Bob.
Bob Inglis: Well, it’s been great to be with you, both of you, Christophe and Ross. It’s great questions and a great show. So look forward to America actually leading and showing the way out of this thing.
Christophe Jospe: Looking forward to it. Yeah, we’re on the same team.
Ross Kenyon: Let’s make it happen. Yeah, thank you. That is former Congressman Bob Inglis, a Republican of South Carolina. If you like the show, please rate it in iTunes or Apple Podcasts, write a review, tell your friends. Please help us get this conversation out there to more people. It’s very important. I’m sure you care about it if you’re already listening. And thanks so much for joining us.
