Back in 1973, Richard Nixon’s fateful Oval Office taping system caught the president and his top advisers debating a plan to write a misleading report about the White House’s role in the Watergate break-in.

“You think we want to, want to go this route now?” asked Nixon. “And the—let it hang out, so to speak?” (Remember, this is 1973.) Presidential counsel John Ehrlichman wasn’t ready for too much disclosure. “It's a modified limited hangout,” he corrected. 

Today's GOP finds itself in a similar position, but regarding climate change. Despite the best efforts of President Donald Trump and his administration to disappear information about our increasingly dire situation, straightforward climate denialism is becoming increasingly untenable as a talking point. Not only are respected scientific bodies continuing to issue highly credible, hair-on-fire reports about our careening path toward the worst-case scenario, but also extreme weather events and calamitous wildfires are bearing out those reports all over the nation's front pages. Polls show that the majority of Republican voters make the connection. In the face of such overwhelming evidence, outright denial is looking sillier than ever. 

Hence the new GOP "pivot" on climate change. Some Republican politicians are now admitting that climate change is real and that something needs to be done about it. What is that "something"? The answer, for many is "innovate." Here is Wyoming senator John Barrasso, for example, in The New York Times, arguing that we need to "Cut Carbon Through Innovation, Not Regulation." (As an example, Barrasso cites a speculative carbon-sequestration process called enhanced oil recovery: "By injecting carbon dioxide into an otherwise unproductive well, oil can be economically extracted. This is good for the environment and the economy—producing more American energy and sequestering carbon dioxide underground.")

Then there's Thom Tillis, senator from North Carolina, who called for "an innovative, market-driven strategy to combat the impacts of climate change." Marco Rubio of Florida said, "To the extent that we want to truly limit carbon emissions, technology can get us there." And on Fox News, Ben Sasse of Nebraska said, "You can't legislate or regulate your way into the [pre-warming] past. We have to innovate our way into the future." 

This innovative messaging shift recalls an earlier pivot 16 years ago, when Republican messaging guru Frank Luntz told the party in a confidential memo that they had "lost the environmental communications battle," particularly on the subject of global warming. Luntz advised GOP officeholders to play up the notion of scientific uncertainty, to say "climate change" instead of the scarier "global warming," and to play up the "unfairness" of the United States being asked to do more than China or India. There's also this: 

Global warming alarmists use American superiority in technology and innovation quite effectively in responding to accusations that international agreements such as the Kyoto accord [the predecessor to the Paris climate accord] could cost the United States billions. . . . This should be our argument. We need to emphasize how voluntary innovation and experimentation are preferable to bureaucratic or international intervention and regulation.

So—pretty much the same playbook as today.

Very few Republican leaders have dared to go beyond these lip service appeals to support the kinds of governmental policies that might actually lead to serious innovation. After the release of the National Climate Assessment, Republican senator Susan Collins of Maine ventured the heretical opinion that "we should reconsider some regulatory steps that the president has been eager to overturn." Last year, Carlos Curbelo, a GOP representative from Florida, went so far as to introduce legislation to institute a carbon tax of $24 per ton. But the bill never came up for a vote and died with the last Congress. Curbelo says that he hopes it will be reintroduced this year—but unfortunately he isn't in a position to do so himself, having lost in November to Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell.