Bob Inglis was a reliably conservative Republican with a solidly conservative voting record from one of the most conservative congressional districts in the most conservative state in the country. It went without saying that he didn’t think global warming was real.
“For six years, I said climate change was nonsense. I didn’t know anything about it but that Al Gore was for it,” Inglis recalled. “That was the end of the inquiry for me. Al Gore’s for it. I’m against it. Next.”
Inglis might have remained rooted in this belief if he hadn’t been elected to Congress and then become a senior member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. During his tenure on the committee, Inglis traveled to Antarctica and toured a laboratory that tested ancient air bubbles trapped in ice cores from deep inside ancient glaciers. The evidence from these tests astounded Inglis and seemed simply inarguable. The evidence showed that atmosphere carbon concentrations were increasing dramatically. Al Gore wasn’t anywhere nearby to interject his opinion.
The facts just stood alone.
A slow change unfolded in Inglis’s thinking. The change was fed by other trips he took as a member of the Science Committee. He visited coral reefs that were dying because of the increased carbon levels in the water, which made oceans more acidic. He studied the heat-trapping effects of carbon and the enormous levels of carbon emissions from industrial activity. He came to believe that carbon emissions were a slow-moving, man-made disaster that might eventually endanger life on Earth.
When he ran for Congress in 2008, Inglis ran on a platform that supported the renewable-energy industry. He saw it as a way to win jobs for his home district. Inglis didn’t see any political danger in this position—he had a keen feel for his voters in the Fourth District of South Carolina, a largely rural area that included the small cities of Greenville and Spartanburg. He thought that betting on conservation and renewable energy was betting on the home team. General Electric manufactured wind turbines in his district, and a Michelin factory there manufactured tires designed to increase gas mileage in cars. When he ran for office, one of his slogans was “The road to energy independence starts in South Carolina.”
When Inglis talked about controlling carbon emissions, he talked about it using the vocabulary of markets, and capitalism, and innovation. Pollution became a problem if the pollution didn’t carry a price, he believed. This was the classic market problem of “externalities,” when companies externalized the cost of their production, like pollution. Carbon emissions were arguably the largest externality in the history of humankind. The cost of the emissions would be born heavily for future generations, and companies burning carbon today didn’t have to pay a dime for it.
“Coal-fired technology gets away with belching and burning into the trash dump of the sky without paying any tipping feeIII for the damage that it’s causing there,” Inglis said
In spite of this conviction, Inglis couldn’t get behind the Waxman-Markey bill. He felt like it was too complex and too sprawling to actually work. But Inglis couldn’t let himself simply vote “no” on Waxman-Markey. “I had this rather Boy Scout notion that if you’re going to oppose, you better propose,” he said.
In late May, Inglis proposed a law called the Raise Wages, Cut Carbon Act of 2009. The bill was similar to many New Deal laws in that it was severe, far reaching, and elegant in its simplicity. It proposed putting a tax on carbon but matching it with a cut to payroll taxes. This meant that any tax increase on consumers could be offset by a tax cut on their earnings. And if people wanted to avoid the tax on carbon, they had the freedom to shift away from carbon-intensive fuels. The tax would feature a “border adjustment,” meaning that it would be levied on imported products from China and other countries, ensuring that the cost of carbon wouldn’t be unfairly heaped on US manufacturers.
In spite of this, Inglis was closely aligned with Koch Industries for most of his political career. After he was elected in 2004, Koch invited Inglis to tour the company’s Invista factory in his district, which provided about a thousand jobs. Inglis remembered Koch’s lobbyists flying in from DC to accompany him on the tour. He shook the hands of employees, learned about Invista’s product line, and had a delightful time. The affection seemed mutual. Between 2005 and 2006, Koch’s PAC donated $7,000 to Inglis’s campaign, becoming his fourth-largest contributor. For the 2008 campaign, Koch’s PAC donated $10,000 to his campaign, becoming his second-largest contributor.
In 2009, the impending vote on the Waxman-Markey bill put Inglis in a bind. He had long claimed global warming was a danger, but now his convictions would be put to the test.
The pressure intensified in late May, when the Waxman-Markey bill was passed by the Energy and Commerce Committee, which had stifled the effort for so many years under John Dingell. Henry Waxman, the new chairman, pushed the bill through committee so quickly that it even surprised the staffers working on it. Phillips had believed that passing the bill through the committee would be harder than passing it through the entire House, because the committee was heavily staffed by conservative Democrats with deep ties to the energy industry.
“I got emotional [during the vote]. I remember looking around on the dais, and my eyes were welling up,” Phillips recalled. “That really was the day where it was like, ‘Oh, holy shit. This might happen. This is probably going to happen.’ ”
It looked like the bill would be voted on by the entire House in June. This was breathtaking speed in the world of legislation. Within a month of the bill passing committee, every member of the House would have to figure out where they stood on the cap-and-trade bill. Bob Inglis was no exception. As he tried to figure out if he would vote for Waxman-Markey, Inglis kept in close contact with his campaign donors. Like most congressmen, Inglis spent hours, every week, raising cash. He never had the luxury of focusing entirely on the job of policy making; the midterm election of 2010 was just over a year away, and Inglis needed to have plenty of money on hand.
Inglis raised cash in a small office building just a short walk from his office on Capitol Hill. The office was in a nondescript townhouse that was home to the National Republican Congressional Committee, the fund-raising arm of House Republicans. It was illegal for members like Inglis to use their own offices to raise money, so the NRCC provided them with a small call center for the task. Inglis and a staffer showed up at the NRCC and walked down the hall to a small, private office, which Inglis called a “cubby,” that had two chairs and two phones. Inglis’s staffer worked the phone until she had someone on the line, handed the phone to him so he could ask for money, and start dialing for the next donor.
Koch Industries was a reliable donor, so Inglis made sure to call them early.
Inglis called Koch’s lobbying office to see if he could count on the company’s support again. Calls like the one to Koch were the easier calls—he was maintaining a relationship rather than trying to build a new one.
The call went poorly from the beginning. The lobbyist whom Inglis usually spoke with wasn’t there. He asked if a Koch lobbyist might be able to attend a fund-raising breakfast. He was told that that would not be possible. The call ended quickly.
“I just remember it being a little bit chilly,” he recalled. He hung up and thought to himself, They’re not giving me any money this cycle.