Former Congressman Bob Inglis Keeps Fighting for Climate-Change Solutions

Not all heroes wear capes.

Sometimes they are regular people.

Sometimes, they were once an elected official. An elected official who dared to evolve his thinking away from the talking points he’d been expected to parrot and toward what he saw with his own eyes, heard from the mouths of scientists with his own ears.

One of my heroes is former South Carolina Congressman Bob Inglis.

Congressman Inglis did not always think climate change was real, something he pokes fun at himself for, but with regret and maybe a little embarrassment tinging his words. “That’s just who I was then,” he says of this before time.

In the 2009–2010 Congressional session, he changed his thinking about climate change and wrote a bill, the Raise Wages, Cut Carbon Act, which would levy a revenue-neutral, border-adjustable carbon tax on emissions. The voters of his district thanked him by voting for his opponent in the 2010 primary.

Weaker people would have conformed, would have returned to the dusty talking points and towed the line. But shaking off the dust of his loss, Bob went on to found the Energy and Enterprise Institute and the organization called RepublicEn.org, where he provides a safe space for the EcoRight to…