Carbon tax earns audience support at conservative forum
Helping Inglis win over the crowd was Andrew Moylan, outreach director and senior fellow at R Street, a free-market think tank that co-sponsored the event. Moylan and Inglis made the case that a price on carbon was inevitable so it would be better for conservatives to use the revenue from a carbon tax to bring down the rates on personal income and corporations.
The other sponsor of the event was the Heartland Institute, a conservative group that R Street split from in May 2012 over disagreements about Heartland’s staunch denial of climate change. Heartland sent James Taylor, a senior fellow and managing editor of Environment and Climate News, a climate-skeptic publication. He and David Kreutzer, an energy economics and climate change research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, countered that a carbon tax would be disastrous for the economy and would inevitably lead to a larger federal government.
…That should not be the case, according to Inglis. The Energy and Enterprise Initiative and R Street are conservative voices that are “trying to change the conversation,” he said. “We’re not talking apocalyptic visions. We’re talking reasonable risk avoidance. There’s risk — the science indicates risk. Our friends in the casualty insurance industry know it and are pricing that risk. So let’s follow their lead.”
