Can the GOP go green?

Congressional Republicans are looking to revitalize their flagging brand by embracing environmentalism. At least, that's the theory - I've written a piece for Political Climate explaining why the GOP may find it tough to go green:

Unfortunately, it’s far from clear that the Republican rank and file will be willing to join in the greening of their party. GOP lawmakers held a closed-door meeting this week in a bid to reach agreement about the way forward - but utterly failed to reach anything like a consensus. Instead, the meeting underscored the rift between the party’s McCain-Warner wing, which takes climate change reasonably seriously, and the Bush-Inhofe flank, which tends toward apathy and outright climate-change denial.

Even if the GOP does manage to find a single voice it won’t make much difference. Republicans can’t out-green the Democrats without scaring off their own conservative base - so their rebranding is aimed not at saving the planet but at becoming just green enough to blunt the Democrats’ environmental advantage with independent voters. That means we can expect to see the GOP paying more lip-service to environmental issues - but stopping well short of supporting the kind of substantive changes we so badly need.

Read more here.