At roughly the same time one Republican said he was thinking about co-sponsoring a carbon tax bill, another was tacitly telling Prince Charles to buzz off with his crackpot global warming theories.

Thankfully, the latter is president and can veto lousy legislation as well as withdraw from counterproductive international climate pacts.

Some Republicans in Congress, prominent among them Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, are warming (yes, warming) to the idea of enacting a carbon tax to do Al Gore’s work, which is “fighting” a windmill called “climate change.”

E&E news reports Romney is “considering co-sponsoring a carbon tax bill amid shifting attitudes in the GOP and increasingly strong advocacy for carbon pricing programs in corporate America.” The Wall Street Journal says “some Republican lawmakers” are breaking with their “party on climate change.” These congressmen “favor market-based solutions over government regulations.”

“Solutions” implies that there’s a problem. Can these GOP lawmakers clearly identify the problem? Where’s the evidence that human-produced carbon dioxide emissions are warming Earth? With what degree of certainty can any politician, scientist, or activist say that man is causing the climate to change in ways that threaten him? 100%? No one can say this. 75%? No serious person would make such a claim. 50%? A 50-50 chance simply isn’t worth the known costs of carbon taxes and other mitigation proposals (Green New Deal, for instance). 25%? No serious person should consider such low odds to be grounds for making significant policy changes — the unknown is too great.

Despite the 1994 revolution, the Tea Party protests, and the 2010 midterm turnaround, it seems little has changed in the GOP. It’s easily bullied by a hostile, agenda-driven media, and would rather incrementally surrender to Democrats’ big-government urges than put up a fight on principle.

But one Republican who has been a registered Democrat, and has even said “in many cases, I probably identify more as Democrat,” is refusing to give in to the demands that we have to let governments take over the global economy to neutralize a mirage. While on his recent visit to the United Kingdom, President Trump met with Prince Charles, who a decade ago said the we had “less than 100 months to act” to save the planet from irreversible climate change. Their scheduled 15-minute meeting went 90 minutes, during which, Trump said, the prince “did most of the talking.” Trump listened politely, but implicitly told the prince he wasn’t interested in joining him to bay at the moon.

Trump has said the global warming scare is a “Chinese hoax.” We don’t believe it’s a hoax, Chinese or otherwise. Or even a conspiracy.

It is, however, hysteria gone wild. Activists, politicians, and journalists want global warming. They have to have it. They can’t live without it. Nothing ever persuades them they might be wrong, not the deeply flawed warming models, not the unreliable and doctored temperature record, not the fact that multiple factors, not just CO2, affect the climate. Religious fervor overwhelms their rational thinking. They want to shame, shut up, and shun those who don’t share their mania.

This is the fanaticism that some Republicans have decided to give in to. We understand keeping an open mind, and we’re willing to change ours if the facts prove our skepticism wrong. But surrender is not a sound policy agenda. The GOP leadership needs to reel in its wayward lawmakers.

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