Jonathan Chait has a short piece at TNR on the conservative strategy for dealing with climate change:
If you want to know how little sacrifice most Republicans are willing to endure to make a dent in global warming, here is your answer. They're not even willing to take back a special interest subsidy--worth $1.3 billion per year, roughly 1 percent of the industry's annual profit--that nobody was willing to defend when it was enacted.
That's about right. There is a shift taking place within the conservative movement on this issue, but Chait largely misses the point because he can't resist harping on some boring and silly subsidy that no one on the right would care to defend or repeal. But then Chait makes a good living writing on topics that bore me to tears. The larger issue, though, is interesting. So I'll lay it out for Chait. Conservatives have been forced to concede defeat in the debate over climate change. Americans believe in it, they believe they're responsible for it, and they want their politicians to do something about it. Which isn't to say that conservatives actually believe in global warming, just that they tend to be slightly more pragmatic than their liberal counterparts on such issues. So we're working on a new strategy, and as Chait found out, it can be boiled down to two simple words: do nothing. If the American people want something done about climate change, they don't necessarily want to pay for it. Take for example cap and trade. It's a marvelous system for obscuring the true costs of regulation, but it clearly isn't the most effective way to reduce carbon emissions. So what happens? You get conservative economists like Steven F. Hayward and Kevin A. Hassett joining forces with far left environmentalists in agitating for a direct carbon tax. I won't assume that Hayward and Hasset have anything but pure intentions, but their position gets a lot of support from conservatives who've never advocated for a tax on anything. Cynic that I am, I think I know what's going on here. Chait writes of Republicans, "If you're not willing to inflict a one-cent hike at the pump, you're not willing to endure any sacrifice whatsoever to reduce global warming." True, but nearly half of all Americans are not willing to endure a one-cent hike at the pump:
Forty-eight percent of Americans are unwilling to spend even a penny more in gasoline taxes to help reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new nationwide survey released today by the National Center for Public Policy Research.
So there's the strategy--and skeptics have good reason to think it'll be successful.