When the Green New Deal started to gain steam with voters across the political spectrum last year, the Republicans faced a choice. They could counter Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s plan with one of their own, a free-market solution to the planet’s existential crisis. Or they could respond in the same way they’ve responded to every climate plan: by doubting the seriousness of global warming, or even denying its reality.

Some have suggested that the GOP is on the path to righteousness. The New York Times reported last month that Republican leaders who were once loud-mouthed science deniers are “now openly discussing climate change and proposing what they call conservative solutions.” Senate Environment Committee Chairman John Barrasso, in what the Times called “an important shift among Republicans in Congress,” said that “If we are serious about climate change, we must be serious about expanding our use of nuclear energy.” And Senator John Cornyn of Texas reportedly “is helping write legislation to reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions through ‘energy innovation.’”

Politico, too, has reported that Republicans are undergoing a “shift in perspective” when it comes to climate change. That shift was evidenced in part by Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, who proposed a 10-point plan to fight claim change, which he called a “new Manhattan Project for Clean Energy.”



I believe #climatechange is real. I believe that human emissions of greenhouse gases are a major cause of climate change. And, I’m proposing this response to climate change. pic.twitter.com/RzsQHhJfUn — Sen. Lamar Alexander (@SenAlexander) March 25, 2019

Alexander, though, has always been an outlier in his party on this issue. In 2015, he was one of only two GOP senators to vote in favor of a non-binding resolution stating a simple fact: that climate change is real and caused by humans.

If that resolution were introduced again today, it would garner roughly the same level of support among Alexander’s peers. As even the Times acknowledged in its article last month, Republicans in Congress remain unwilling to speak honestly about the existential threat global warming poses to humanity and the natural world. “In almost all of the cases in which conservative politicians are cautiously staking out territory on climate change,” the report says, “they still do not acknowledge the extent of man’s responsibility for causing it.”