George Shultz Presses Congress to Act on Climate Change

George P. Shultz, a former Republican cabinet secretary, seems an unlikely figure to fight for climate change, which is largely the political turf of Democrats.

But climate change was exactly why Mr. Shultz, who is best remembered as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, came to Washington on Friday, breaking a 20-year absence from Capitol Hill to push lawmakers to support the development of hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, and alternative energy.

“If we can capitalize on these opportunities, we’ll have a much better energy future from the standpoint of our national defense, from the standpoint of our economy and from the standpoint of our environment, including climate change,” he said at a conference.

For the past few years, Mr. Shultz, an economist, has been studying energy policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He recently traded his hybrid car for an all-electric one, and he advocates a carbon tax to pay for the research and development of alternatie energy sources.

At the conference, he said that a regulatory framework for the safe development of fracking might be best left to the states. But he said that Congress should pass a fee-and-dividend carbon tax that would remit revenues to consumers. The tax would be revenue-neutral, covering the cost of research and development for alternative energy sources without generating extra income for the government.

But in Washington, where Republicans and Democrats are deeply divided over the size and scope of government, talk of new taxes and regulations is toxic. A carbon tax like the one Mr. Shultz supports has been proposed by Senators Barbara Boxer of California and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, although Mr. Shultz did not endorse their measure.

Mr. Shultz, 82, spoke at an event sponsored by the Partnership for a Secure America, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington that wrote a letter warning Congress of the “staggering” cost of inaction! . The letter included 38 signatures from a broad spectrum of former lawmakers, Cabinet secretaries, military and intelligence officials, and national security experts, including Mr. Shultz; Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state; and Richard G. Lugar, the former Republican senator for Indiana. Mr. Shultz was also a labor secretary, a budget director, a Treasury secretary and an adviser to President George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign.

He is one of a trickle of Republicans who are challenging the party’s stance on climate change. He said that Republican presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to George Bush signed off on major environmental policies, like the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act.

“Good work on conservation and the environment is in the Republican gene,” Mr. Shultz said. “We’ve been the guys who did it. So we’ve just got to get back to that.”