PD Editorial: Some needed candor on climate change

Say this for Gov. Jerry Brown, he doesn’t mince words.

Whether he’s questioning the commitment to build affordable housing here in left-leaning Sonoma County or the denial of climate science by A-list figures on the political right, Brown tends to say just what’s on his mind.

In an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the Democratic chief executive upbraided Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a coal-country Republican who has been urging states to repudiate federal clean air regulations. He had even stronger things to say about GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the first official entrant in the 2016 presidential election.

“That man betokens such a level of ignorance and a direct falsification of existing scientific data, it’s shocking,” Brown said. “And I think that man has rendered himself absolutely unfit to be running for office.”

A final verdict will be rendered in Republican primaries or, perhaps, the general election. Yet as the campaign unfolds, voters would be wise to demand candor from Cruz and other candidates, in both parties, and not just on climate science.

But climate policy must be at or near the top of the agenda.

There may be room to debate how much human activities are driving rising temperatures, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, unusual weather patterns and other signs of climate change. But too many policymakers, most though not all of them Republicans, deny clear evidence of climate change, by whatever cause, or dodge the issue altogether by saying they aren’t scientists.

Most of these elected officials aren’t accountants, physicians or generals either, yet they manage to form strong views on taxes, health care and national defense.

Cruz and other climate skeptics, especially those who aspire to the presidency, ought to consider the words of George P. Shultz, a cabinet secretary in the Nixon and Reagan administrations.

Writing in the Washington Post last week, Schultz recalled President Ronald Reagan’s response to reports of an ozone-hole in the Earth’s atmosphere. Rather than getting caught up in the controversy over the science or the validity of various worst-case scenarios, Reagan enlisted private enterprise and its “entrepreneurial juices” to develop a solution, which became part of the 1987 Montreal Protocol.

“We all know there are those who have doubts about the problems presented by climate change,” Schultz wrote. “But if these doubters are wrong, the evidence is clear that the consequences, while varied, will be mostly bad, some catastrophic. So why don’t we follow Reagan’s example and take out an insurance policy?”

California has taken some steps in that direction, including its cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases, restrictions on auto emissions and a goal of generating 33 percent of the state’s electricity from renewable sources by 2020. (Brown has proposed increasing the renewable goal to 50 percent by 2030.)

In Washington, meanwhile, the new GOP majority on Capitol Hill has vowed to fight Obama administration efforts to reduce carbon emissions under an agreement that calls on China, for the first time, to do the same. Will Republican presidential candidates take the same stance?

Public opinion polls show that large majorities of Americans believe that the federal government should limit emissions of greenhouse gases and that voters, especially women, minorities and young people, support candidates who promise to address climate change.

If Cruz’s views prevail, and GOP candidates keep debating whether climate change is caused by human activity, rather than how to address it, they risk, as Schultz’s wrote, getting “mugged by reality.”