George Shultz Urges Republicans to Take Action on Climate Change
Bloomberg : Former secretary of state George Shultz has a new cause and it is “one few fellow Republicans support: fighting climate change. ”
“Shultz, now a distinguished fellow at Stanford University, said the reality was driven home for him during a visit to the California campus by Gary Roughead, the U.S. Navy’s retired chief of naval operations. Roughead shared a time-lapse video of the Arctic ice cap shrinking over the last quarter-century.”
“Opinion surveys show most Republicans disagree with taking steps to control climate change. Only 37 percent of party members say they believe there’s solid evidence the earth is warming and just 25 percent view it as a major threat to the U.S., the Pew Research Center said in a September report . That compares to 61 percent of all Americans in the same poll who said the globe is warming and 48 percent who see it as a threat.”
“In June, he joined Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, a Republican, in signing onto a bipartisan report that said a warmer climate could cause hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses. Hank Paulson, George W. Bush’s former treasury secretary, was another signatory.”
Shultz “supports a system to reduce emissions through a revenue neutral tax on fossil fuels that would recycle the money collected back to citizens in the form of a carbon dividend check.”