NORTHAMPTON – A nonpartisan climate advocacy group with a revenue-neutral plan to cut emissions will hold its annual regional conference in Amherst next week.
The Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which advocates for a free market-based solution to climate change, will meet at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Campus Center on March 18 and 19.
The group’s central goal is the implementation of a “carbon fee and dividend” program that would place increasing levies on fossil fuels and other greenhouse gases, and would then return that money to households in the form of a monthly energy dividend.
The proposal would be revenue-neutral, according to the organization’s website, since none of the fees would go into government coffers. The center-right British Columbia Liberal Party in British Columbia, Canada, introduced and passed a similar measure back in 2008 with mixed results.
The idea has won the nonpartisan Citizens’ Climate Lobby some prominent conservative backers, including Ronald Reagan’s former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is on the group’s advisory board.
Some environmentalists may chafe at Shultz’s other proposals, including his suggestion in a 2015 Washington Post op-ed to eliminate “burdensome existing laws and regulations and using the marketplace rather than edicts by the government to do this or not do that.”
But the fee-and-dividend scheme is catching on among conservatives. Other former Republican officials like President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker III, have recently been championing the idea in the halls of Washington, according to The New York Times.
Other right-wing politicians apparently in support of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby include U.S. Congressman Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., whose legislative aide will be presenting lobbying tips at next weekend’s conference.
“Our whole thing is to make this bipartisan connection,” said Caroline Mack, a 70-year-old member of the Ashfield, Massachusetts, chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby. “Unless Republicans are on board, nothing is going to pass through the Congress.”
Mack, who considers herself a Democrat, said her chapter doesn’t get bogged down in politics. Instead, she said the organization focuses all of its energy on pushing their agenda on both sides of the aisle.
“It’s not the usual way of doing politics,” she said.
The conference will also include a keynote address from Republican former U.S. Rep. Claudine Schneider, the first woman ever elected to Congress from Rhode Island.
The event will begin March 18 at 8 a.m. and run through the evening. On March 19, activities will resume from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.