Former U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) discussed climate change and conservatism at an event Monday afternoon in the Special Collections Library. The speech he gave, titled “Climate Action and Conservatives,” was part of the Miller Center’s Great Issues programming.
Associate Public Policy Prof. Guian McKee introduced Inglis and discussed Inglis’s work with climate change during his time as a U.S. congressman.
“Our speaker today has been on the front lines,” McKee said.
Inglis served as a representative of the fourth congressional district of South Carolina from 1993-1998 and again from 2005-2011. He was unseated during the Republican primary election runoff in 2010, which many attribute to his recognition of climate change.
“It would appear that it’s not possible to bring America together,” Inglis said at the beginning of his speech. “Is it possible for the current generation of our species to care about the future generation of our species?”
The future of Earth is a rather glum topic, Inglis said, but is one worth talking about.
“My party … hasn’t answered climate change,” Inglis said in an interview with The Cavalier Daily. “Climate is one of the [issues] we’ve got to address or else we’re going to be stuck on [a] dead-end demographic street.”
Inglis said he walked in the opposite direction from many of his constituents when the issue of climate change came up.
“My primary opponent called me ‘the Al Gore of the Republicans,’” Inglis noted. “There’s a lot of progressives that agree [with me].”
In 2012, two years after losing to Trey Gowdy in the primary election runoff, Inglis founded the Energy and Enterprise Initiative — known as RepublicEN — at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. The program, which Inglis directs, focuses on promoting free-market strategies to solve climate change.
“We’ve had an awful lot of positive media about the efforts and we’ve engaged with thousands of people,” Inglis said. “We’re beginning to see results.”
Still, Inglis said, there is more work to do, and it is not always easy.
“People who self-select to come to presentations are quite often not conservative,” Inglis said. “Our biggest challenge is figuring out how can we actually reach conservatives.”
With less than one month before the election, Inglis said he is glad the issue of climate change is a factor in determining who will be the next president.
“The thought that climate change is a Chinese hoax and conspiracy is something that I hope gets painted all over Donald Trump’s plane,” Inglis said. “Because when that plane gets down, I hope he takes with him the idea that it was a Chinese hoax and conspiracy. His loss is going to be explained at least in part by some pretty crazy assertions about climate change.”
Lena Lewis, a Batten graduate student who attended the speech, said she is glad to see some common ground between liberals and conservatives.
“I thought it was very inspiring,” Lewis said. “It’s great to know that we can each approach climate change from our own starting place and maybe find some solutions together.”
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