Lindsey Graham: "We Owe It To The Country To Have An Alternative To The Green New Deal"

Yeah, Lindsay, I'm sure the brightest minds in the GOP will get right on that.

A recent surge in activism, spurred in part by the popular Green New Deal, has made climate change a top issue for 2020 Democratic candidates and forced Republicans to reconsider their longstanding opposition to climate action. Speaking at a Texas banquet Thursday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told reporters that congressional Republicans hope to develop their own climate bill, which will likely focus on energy efficiency, natural gas, and technology to clean up coal power plants. “Let’s just cross the Rubicon,” Graham said. “Let’s, as a party, say the Green New Deal sucks but climate change is real.”

“We owe it to the country to have an alternative to the Green New Deal,” said Graham, as E&E News reported, noting the senator expressed frustration with those in his party who oppose climate action. “We’re going to sit down with the president and see if we can unveil a bill for 2020 that would be good for the environment and good for business.”

Ed. -emphasis added.

EDIT

During a policy forum in February, prominent climate science deniers admitted that the real risk of the Green New Deal would be Republican policymakers suddenly feeling compelled to introduce a so-called “Green New Deal-lite.” One of the “dangers” of the Green New Deal, said Myron Ebell, director of global warming and international environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is that “by expanding the political spectrum of what’s in the debate, it’s moving the debate left and it’s creating a very large space for a certain class of people, many of them in the Republican Party, to start talking about how we need to have moderate solutions, or reasonable solutions.”

And just this week, the Heartland Institute, a think tank that has long promoted climate science denial, criticized those Republicans seeking to devise their own climate plan. “This cadre of Republicans is attempting to sell out President Donald Trump and his conservative voting base on the signature political issue of the day,” James Taylor, a senior fellow for environment and energy policy at Heartland, wrote in a blog post. All of this comes as a new report examines the likelihood of conservative climate action succeeding. The report, released by the New Models of Policy Change program at the think tank New America, details how many of the organizations currently pushing for climate action on the right are small, politically weak, and have little funding.

EDIT

https://thinkprogress.org/republicans-green-new-deal-climate-lindsey-graham-27033d71d2f4/