GOP leaders came up with a great solution for climate change

“Before Facebook, I thought everyone believed in science.”

I saw this as a meme on the internet, and it hit home with me.

Over the past 20 years, we’ve seen this transition play out in the conservative narrative on global warming.

Since the 1990s, when global warming was first recognized as a threat, my right-wing friends have used these arguments — in sequential order:

Global warming isn’t real; it’s a conspiracy by scientists.

The hidden agenda of these scientists was apparently to ruin the American economy.

Right-wingers never could explain why these scientists wanted to ruin our nation and who was funding them, but they never backed off the claim that scientists were not being honest with their data.

Global warming isn’t real; scientists are wrong.

Their basis was something even I remember: Back in the 1970s, there was vocal minority of scientists who believed in a greenhouse cooling effect.

It actually was easier to explain: Pollution was creating particulates in the atmosphere that would block the sunlight, thus reducing the sun’s heat.

It culminated in a 1974 Time magazine cover asking when the new Ice Age would occur.

Even then, the majority of scientists believed in a warming trend, but their data weren’t as exciting. The warming trend eventually was proved in the 1980s.

Global warming is real, but it’s not man-made.

My conservative friends send me charts showing how Earth has cooled and heated over the eons.

Although climate scientists concede that Earth’s temperature has changed over time, the current acceleration in warming is easily traced to human activity since the Industrial Revolution.

Global warming is real, humans are part of the problem, but there’s nothing that can be done about it.

Al Gore can save his breath. They agree with him that global warming is real, but the fix is too economically devastating.

Here’s the real frustration: There is a fix to global warming, and Republicans are the ones who came up with it.

It is a fix that has been proven to work, a fix that includes the free market with gentle economic incentives. It’s called “cap and trade.”

We know it works because Republicans used it to fix a similar problem that is no longer in the headlines.

Remember “acid rain”? It was noticed back in the 1800s that marble statues and steel structures were deteriorating rapidly due to rain that was more acidic than normal.

The first federal action to investigate this issue was in 1980 by Ronald Reagan. The final solution was signed by George H.W. Bush in 1989 with a series of amendments to the Clean Air Act.

Title IV established the cap and trade system designed to control emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides.

In fewer than eight years, the total SO2 emissions reached the goal ahead of the 2010 targets.

Industry was able to do it economically, on their own terms without draconian federal regulations.

The way it worked was that those companies that invested in pollution-reduction equipment sold their excess pollution credits to those companies that would rather pay to maintain their current emissions.

Over time, the cap was reduced until the overall pollution reductions were met. The private sector was allowed to get there in their own way.

Cap and trade provides the private sector with the flexibility to reduce emissions while stimulating technological innovation and economic growth.

Unfortunately, conservatives have demonized cap and trade (they like to denigrate it by calling it “cap and tax”).

But cap and trade is a solution, and Republicans ought to embrace it because it is their idea.

The alternative is to wait for global warming to reach a crisis level, requiring a more expensive fix that can’t be implemented without government intervention.

Let’s save our planet now, using our innovative private sector, before we lose the opportunity.

This story was originally published May 6, 2016 at 5:55 PM with the headline "GOP leaders came up with a great solution for climate change."