Great Op-Ed: “The winning conservative climate solution”

“A well-designed carbon fee checks every box of conservative policy orthodoxy.”

The legendary George P. Shultz, who served as Secretary of State to President Ronald Reagan and was a chief architect of the end of the Cold War, co-authored an excellent op-ed in today’s Washington Post.

In it, Shultz and his co-author Ted Halstead make a persuasive case for why carbon pricing is the winning conservative climate solution:

There are essentially three ways to reduce emissions — regulations, subsidies and pricing. The first is the worst of all options for a party committed to free markets and limited government. Many Republican legislators are, therefore, gravitating toward the second option: tax credits and research-and-development spending to promote innovation. Those now introducing legislation along these lines deserve praise.

Republicans are correct to focus on clean-energy innovation as a crucial driver of climate progress. But while subsidies are an important steppingstone in fostering nascent technologies, they are hardly the best way to stimulate innovation across the whole economy. As numerous studies show, subsidies are a costly means to drive clean tech deployment at scale, requiring ever-higher taxes and deficits to get the job done.

The winning Republican climate answer is the third option: carbon pricing. Just as a market-based solution is the Republican policy of choice on most issues, so should it be on climate change. A well-designed carbon fee checks every box of conservative policy orthodoxy. Not surprisingly, this is the favored option of corporate America and economists — including all former Republican chairs of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Read the full op-ed (highly recommended!) here.