Don’t miss David Roberts’s interview with former Rep. Bob Inglis. He was a South Carolina Republican who voted for TARP, had kind words for climate change science, and criticized Glenn Beck. He was, unsurprisingly, crushed in a 70-30 landslide in his party’s 2010 primary. Being out of Congress is less fun than being in it, but Inglis’s consolation prize has been a steady flow of op-ed slots and interviews where he’s been able to argue about how dopey and emotional his party has gotten.
[T]he most enduring heresy I committed was saying that climate change was real and let’s do something about it, even though I voted against cap-and-trade. I don’t like that solution; I think it’s too complicated, it decimates American manufacturing, there’s just real problems with it. So I had the foolish political instinct to propose an alternative, a bill we introduced that got precisely two cosponsors — two very brave people, Jeff Flake [R-Ariz.] and Dan Lipinski [D-Ill.]. It’s called the Raise Wages, Cut Carbon bill. It is a tax shift, off of payroll, on to carbon dioxide — a 15-page alternative to the 1,200-page cap-and-trade bill. It was a border-adjustable tax, removed on export, imposed on import.
All I’d add here is the name of the school where Inglis has set up his Energy & Enterprise Initiative. It’s George Mason University, which has received, over the years, around $30 million from Koch associations. The money mostly goes to the Mercatus Center (“markets,” in Latin), yes, but here’s another example of what your money ends up supporting if you spread it far enough around.
