After running a fever for a while and noticing abnormal aches and pains, you see a specialist. The doctor examines you, runs tests, and says you have a serious disease. Without immediate treatment, it will worsen over time and be harder, if not impossible, to cure.

Since the treatment is unpleasant and will cost money that you would rather spend on other things, you decide to get a second opinion. Same warning, same prescription.

You ask for a third, fourth, and fifth opinion. Same answer.

After visiting nine specialists, you visit a 10th doctor who tells you what you want to hear—that all of the other specialists are wrong, your health is fine, and you can forget the whole thing.

Now you can get on with your life. You saved a lot of money. You and your family have nothing to worry about.

Or do you?

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We have all been exposed to “cap and tax” rhetoric from the talk-radio crowd, Fox News, and Republican leaders in Congress demonizing the climate bill that passed the House of Representatives in June and is now being considered in the Senate. You have probably heard claims that the bill would greatly increase energy costs, enrich Wall Street at our expense, and wreck the economy.

For the most part, these attacks are coming from people who do not believe that carbon dioxide emissions generated by burning fossil fuels are causing climate change. They choose to ignore the nine doctors and listen only to the tenth doctor, because that is the diagnosis they want to hear.

The inflated cost numbers that they attach to the climate bill are ginned up by groups like the Heritage Foundation, which share their skepticism about climate change. These “estimates” are the result of cherry-picked data and contrived assumptions that shape the numbers to fit with the skeptics’ political agenda. They differ greatly from estimates provided by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

REP SUPPORT FOR ACES

The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) is not the climate bill that Republicans for Environmental Protection would have written. It is overly complex and overly prescriptive. It symbolizes the old joke that equates drafting legislation with sausage making. It is not easy to watch.

At the end of the day, however, REP praised the eight House Republicans who voted in favor of ACES. Their support was crucial to passing the bill and sending it on to the Senate, which has an opportunity to improve the bill if senators on both sides of the aisle act responsibly.

We concluded that, despite the bill’s flaws, passing ACES was the right thing for the House to do. Further delays in limiting greenhouse gas emissions are not acceptable. Nor can America wait any longer to begin reducing our country’s dangerous dependence on oil.

Had Republican leaders rallied behind a GOP alternative that would actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such as a revenue-neutral carbon tax, a cap and dividend proposal, or Senator John McCain’s cap and trade plan, REP would be pushing it enthusiastically. They didn’t. Instead they dusted off a bunch of old energy production proposals, such as drilling in the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, slapped them together as an alternative, and ignored climate entirely.

THE COST OF INACTION

Ignoring climate change is not an option. The weight of evidence indicates that the impacts of climate change are hitting earlier and harder than scientists had projected only two years ago. As serious as the 2007 projections were, they understated the threat.

In a joint statement released in June, the national science academies of the United States and 12 other large nations reported:

“Climate change is happening even faster than previously estimated; global (carbon dioxide) emissions since 2000 have been higher than even the highest predictions, Arctic sea ice has been melting at rates much faster than predicted, and the rise in the sea level has become more rapid. Feedbacks in the climate system might lead to much more rapid climate changes. The need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable.”

In another statement, the science academies of the U.S. and more than five dozen other countries, large and small, indicated that carbon dioxide emissions are causing the world’s oceans to become more acidic, which could lead to irreversible damage to fisheries that supply protein-rich food to millions of people.

You can download and read the statements for yourself.

Doing nothing about greenhouse gas emissions would result in greater risk of extreme weather, damage to natural resources, and threats to public health. A study released earlier this year by a group of climatologists concluded that the trigger point for risks, including the risk of pushing the climate system past dangerous tipping points, is at lower emissions levels than scientists had estimated as recently as 2001. In other words, we have less of a margin for error. Delaying action could result in higher costs and more damaging consequences sooner than we had earlier believed.

Reducing emissions will not be a free lunch, as some Democrats and environmental organizations imply. However, analyses by CBO and EPA show that the costs would be manageable, shaving the gross domestic product by less than 1 percent.

Importantly, those analyses are conservative to a fault. They compare the costs of implementing climate legislation to a business-as-usual scenario that assumes no costs of inaction.

In the real world, however, there would be significant costs of doing nothing, as the best available climate science has concluded.

Doug Holtz-Eakin, domestic policy adviser to the McCain campaign last year, wrote on NewMajority.com:

“The balance of risks says to do something. In the end, it comes down to paying a price to raise the odds of a better future for our children, nation, and globe. Aren’t conservatives the breed most dedicated to fighting the costly fights and taking the difficult stands to achieve this goal?”

Holtz-Eakin reminded his fellow Republicans that “conservatives favor preserving freedom of opportunity for the generations to follow.” It would not be conservative to play fast and loose with our environmental inheritance today and leave it for future generations to pick up the pieces.

ENERGY SECURITY

Climate change and national security are closely related. A report published in May by a panel of retired U.S. generals and admirals warned that climate change would be a “threat multiplier” and urged the federal government to push the development of low-carbon technologies.

Admiral Joseph Lopez, U.S. Navy (Ret.), former commander-in-chief of U.S. naval forces in Europe, pointed out that climate change increases the odds of destabilizing events, such as droughts and violent weather, in “regions of the world that are already fertile ground for extremism.”

Waiting for perfect information about climate change before acting would be a prescription for disaster, said another one of the panelists, General Gordon Sullivan, U.S. Army (Ret.), former Army chief of staff. As General Sullivan put it:

“If you wait until you have 100 percent certainty, something bad is going to happen on the battlefield... You have to act with incomplete information. You have to act based on the trend line.”

Oil usage accounts for about 36 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Oil dependence is a threat to national security, because our demand for petroleum supports hostile regimes and exposes our economy to unpredictable price spikes. That dependence will worsen in the absence of action, especially once the economy begins to recover and energy demand resumes rising.

Even with its economy in a weakened state, the U.S. accounts for more than 22 percent of global oil consumption. Our share of global oil production, however, is less than 8 percent and our share of proven global reserves is less than 3 percent, according to the latest edition of BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy.

Consequently, there is no realistic prospect that “drill, baby, drill” could unshackle the U.S. from the global oil market, its price volatility, and the baleful influence of unfriendly petroleum-exporting regimes. As Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, U.S. Navy (Ret.) testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on July 21:

“We simply do not have enough resources in this country to free us from the stranglehold of those who do. We find ourselves entangled with unfriendly rulers and undemocratic nations simply because we need their oil.”

Only a concerted effort to commercialize new fuels and drive technologies could free our transportation systems from their near total dependence on petroleum.

Doing nothing about oil dependence raises the odds that Americans will be hit with damaging price spikes like 2008’s, when petroleum surged to $140 per barrel. Doing nothing about oil dependence perpetuates U.S. vulnerability to hostile regimes.

CAP AND INNOVATION

How would ACES address the related problems of greenhouse gas emissions and oil dependence?

By instituting an emissions cap, the bill would send a price signal to energy markets that releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere imposes costs on human society and the environment. A carbon cap is not a “tax,” as demagogic rhetoric from congressional Republican leaders would have voters believe. Instead, a cap amounts to paying for CO2’s costs. “You’re being charged a fee for the damage you’re doing to the environment,” J. Wayne Leonard, CEO of Entergy, which owns electric utilities in the South, said in a recent media interview.

A number of large utilities, including some that depend on carbon-rich coal for a significant portion of their resource portfolios, support a legislated cap on carbon emissions. Their executives have pointed out repeatedly that setting out clear rules would enable their companies to plan investments in energy infrastructure that both reduces emission and stimulates the growth of new industries in low-carbon energy technologies.

Duke Energy is the third largest consumer of coal in the United States. Duke’s CEO, Jim Rogers, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a May 19 hearing that certainty creates opportunity:

“The right comprehensive energy and carbon legislation can provide not only the certainty and rules of the road by which we can plan, build and compete, it will also protect consumers, help us advance efficiency and alternative technology efforts, and all while cleaning up the environment.”

At the committee hearing, Rogers made it clear that other countries are not sitting around waiting for the U.S. to make up its mind about developing low-carbon technologies. He quoted an estimate from the research firm New Energy Finance that the global market for low-carbon technologies could reach $600 billion by 2020. “Without a U.S. carbon program, we will not be participating in this lucrative market,” Rogers told the committee.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Further delay would put climate legislation into the spin cycle of the 2010 and 2012 campaigns. Posturing for 2010 already has begun. Once the campaign gets going in earnest, Congress will be consumed with electoral politics for the better part of the next three years.

In sum, the costs of doing nothing about climate change are high. Climate change is real and the impacts are hitting home faster than we anticipated. It is linked to our heavy dependence on oil and other fossil fuels that create a subset of economic and national security risks that urgently command our attention.

Doing nothing about climate change would be a disservice to our country, its citizens, and our unborn descendants. As conservatives, we believe that we owe them the duty of being good stewards of our natural endowment, including a stable atmosphere. A great, enterprising country that built the transcontinental railroad, dug the Panama Canal, won two world wars, and put men on the moon can deal with climate change more effectively than any other country in the world. All that’s needed is the will to act.

We applaud the House Republicans who put country ahead of partisan political agendas and voted to pass ACES and send it to the Senate. (See Proud to Praise 'Em!)

We urge the Senate’s Democratic leaders to work in good faith with Republican senators who take climate change seriously and have thought through balanced ideas for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Working together, they can improve ACES and give America a climate bill to be proud of.