George Shultz, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State from 1982 to 1989, is not only willing to buck the Republican Party’s orthodoxy on global warming by acknowledging climate science, he’s outright calling for action. And he’s even willing to walk the talk.
Shultz, a former University of Chicago economics professor and president of Bechtel, has installed solar panels on his house and drives an electric car around the Stanford University campus, where he’s a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace.
According to Bloomberg, Shultz’s climate awakening came when a retired Navy admiral showed him time-lapse footage of disappearing Arctic sea ice and “explained the implications for global stability.”
“The potential results are catastrophic,” Shultz says to his fellow Republicans. “So let’s take out an insurance policy.”
Shultz, who supports a tax on fossil fuels that would be used to pay “carbon dividend checks” to US citizens, was part of a bipartisan group that produced a report earlier this year on the economic risks of global warming called “Risky Business.” In commenting on the report, he spelled out what he means by calling for a climate change “insurance policy” a little more clearly:
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