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WASHINGTON — After a decade of debate over the existence of climate change, many prominent Republicans are changing their stance over the medium term. deadly heat wavesdevastating drought and wild Forest fires beating their territories and returning their voters home.

Members of Congress, who have long insisted that the climate changes due to natural cycles, have significantly rectified this view, and many now accept this solid science: emissions Burning oil, gas and coal raised the Earth’s temperature.

But their growing recognition of the reality of climate change has not translated into supporting this one strategy. scientists said A major United Nations report this week is imperative to prevent an even sadder future: stop burning fossil fuels.

Instead, Republicans want to spend billions to prepare communities to deal with extreme weather conditions, but are trying to thwart Democrats’ efforts to cut emissions that fueled the disaster in the first place.

Dozens of Republicans in the House and Senate have said in recent interviews that the rapid switch to wind, solar and other clean energy will harm an economy that has been fueled by fossil fuels for more than a century.

“I’m not doing anything to increase the cost of living for American families,” said Florida Senator Rick Scott, whose climate-related disasters have cost the state more than $100 billion over the past decade. federal government.

Mr Scott said he wanted to address climate change but “you can’t do that where you’re killing things”.

It’s a message supported by polls showing that Republican voters are more concerned with business than the environment. A Pew Research Center survey In May, it found that only 10 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning independents were deeply interested in addressing climate change, while the majority thought President Biden’s ambitious plans to curb climate change would hurt the economy.

with the exception of provoking young Republicans To get their parties to take climate change more seriously, conservative voters as a whole haven’t changed much in the last 10 years. This skepticism may have culminated in President Donald J. Trump, who famously mocked climate science. Relaxed emissions rules and expanded oil and gas drilling on public lands.

With the effects of global warming becoming more pronounced, every weather forecastNow, Republicans and their allies advocate investing in research and development or technological solutions that are years away from viability, such as cleaning the air after oil, gas and coal are burned. Many also favor the expansion of nuclear power, which does not generate greenhouse gases but poses other challenges, including the long time it takes to build new plants and concerns about the disposal of spent fuel and the risk of radioactive leaks.

A few Republicans, such as Utah Senator Mitt Romney and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have said they support companies for the carbon dioxide they produce, a strategy that economists say will create a strong incentive to reduce emissions. But no man urgently advocates such a measure.

The majority of Republican lawmakers support less aggressive responses popular with their constituents, such as planting trees to absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or offering tax credits to businesses that capture carbon dioxide after it’s released into the air by power plants or industrial sites. .

“What they oppose is any program that will significantly reduce emissions,” said David G. Victor, co-director of the Deep Decarbonization Initiative at the University of California, San Diego.

Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana helped create the $1 trillion infrastructure package the Senate passed this week, making sure it includes billions of dollars to protect coastal states from sea level rise caused by climate change. But Mr Cassidy said he would not vote on any policy to reduce the amount of oil drilled off the coast of Louisiana.

“We can’t live without fossil fuels or chemicals, point is the end of the story,” said Mr Cassidy, who wanted to expand exports of liquefied natural gas produced in Louisiana, which emits half the carbon dioxide of coal but is a source of methane. , an even stronger greenhouse gas in the short term.

And while North Dakota Republican Senator Kevin Cramer allows it climate change triggers extreme drought He said the gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels, not the fuels themselves, should be the target, which has destroyed crops and destroyed much of cattle in his state this summer.

“We need to be on an anti-carbon mission, not an anti-fuel mission,” said Mr Cramer, whose state is also a top oil and gas producer.

Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio said there is no point in the US reducing its emissions while other countries like China continue to pollute the environment. But it also rejected trade policies that would put pressure on China and others to reduce their emissions.

Utah State Citizens’ Climate Lobby coordinator Tom Moyer, who is trying to build bipartisan support for a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, said that Republicans’ recognition of emissions as a problem points to progress, but it’s incremental. “Small bites in a solution, but much more than we could have gotten a few years ago,” he said. “And I hope the trend continues.”

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell he talked about climate change last September, “I agree that this is happening and that this is a problem. The argument is about how best to address that.”

“I have no doubt that the climate is changing and people are contributing to it,” Senator John Cornyn of oil and gas-rich Texas said in an interview in July. Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama said he thought air disasters simply happened, but “I’m sure, with all the stuff we put in the air, a lot of it is self-made.”

Even Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe, who once famously threw a snowball onto the Senate floor to claim that the planet was not warming up, insisted last month that he never called climate change a “hoax”, only that the dire consequences were exaggerated. (Mr. Inhofe is the author of a book titled “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.”)

“They don’t want to look like they’re denying the science, but they don’t want to appear like they’re anti-free market and support regulation,” said Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international relations at Princeton University. . “But the truth is there is no way to solve this without regulating and mandating cutting emissions. There is no magic, easy ‘innovation only’ way out of this.”

Democrats say the tools are available to fend off a hotter planet: rapidly expanding wind and solar power, boosting energy storage and the power grid, electrifying transportation and making buildings energy efficient.

Many of these elements are tucked into A $3.5 trillion budget package that Democrats hope to pass in autumn. The budget bill includes a tool called a clean electricity payment scheme, designed to direct utilities to generate increasing amounts of electricity from low and zero-carbon sources such as wind, solar and nuclear power.

If approved, the measure would be the most significant climate bill in United States history, putting the country on track to meet President Biden’s goal of roughly halving local greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. But to get it through an evenly divided Congress, every Democrat, at least two of them, Senator Joe Manchin from coal-rich West Virginia and Kyrsten Cinema from Arizona have indicated they can oppose it.

Meanwhile, Republican leaders have made it clear that they will vote against the budget bill, arguing that it is too expensive and that mandates like a clean electricity standard and government-funded electric vehicle expansion would hurt taxpayers and consumers.

Their messages closely mirror the position of major oil and gas companies running ad campaigns touting “technology innovation” in response to global warming.

“They acknowledge their role in climate change, but they want the public to believe they’re above it,” said Edward Maibach, director of the George Mason University Climate Change Communication Center. “They say they are innovating, they are improving, they have it. They don’t need politics – and Republicans are following that lead.”

Behind the scenes in Washington, oil and gas interests continue to lobby firmly against policies to reduce emissions, particularly stricter vehicle mileage rules that would prevent the burning of hundreds of billions of gallons of gasoline.

These companies overwhelmingly donate to Republicans. In the 2020 election period alone, oil, gas, coal mining and other energy companies gave $46 million to the Republican Party. That’s more than industries donated to Democrats in the past decade. Responsive Policy Centeris a nonprofit group that tracks money in politics.

In many ways, the $1 trillion infrastructure package, Senate approved by 69-30 votes Tuesday shows the limits of Republican action on climate change.

The package, which still needs parliamentary approval, includes nearly $80 billion in programs to upgrade the country’s electricity grid, create charging stations for electric vehicles and research new clean energy technologies. It provides more than $12 billion for the technology to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions, which, when commercialized at scale, could extend the life of fossil fuel power plants; and $2.5 billion for the development of next-generation nuclear reactors.

Any provision that would require the reduction of fossil fuels or the emissions they produce was excluded. Nineteen Republicans, including the minority leader, voted for the law.