Bob Inglis, U.S. Representative from South Carolina
Bob Inglis represented the 4th Congressional District of South Carolina from 1993-1998 and again from 2005-2010. A member of the House Science Committee who served as Ranking Member of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee, Inglis initially opposed efforts to address climate change. But interactions with scientists in Antarctica, Australia and elsewhere, along with encouragement from his five children, changed his views on climate change, and he began advocating for a carbon tax to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. In Washington and South Carolina, Inglis’s acknowledgment of the scientific reality of climate change drew intense criticism from within the Republican Party, and in June 2010, he was defeated for re-election in the Republican primary. He went on to found and currently directs the Energy & Enterprise Initiative to encourage conservatives to accept the reality of climate change and to promote market-based innovations to address the challenges it poses.
BOSTON, MA – The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation today announced that former U.S. Congressman Bob Inglis (R-SC) was named the 2015 recipient of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award™ for political courage. Inglis is being awarded this honor for the courage he demonstrated when reversing his position on climate change after extensive briefings with scientists, and discussions with his children, about the impact of atmospheric warming on our future. Knowing the potential consequences to his political career, Inglis nevertheless called on the United States to meaningfully address the issue. In June, 2010, Inglis lost his re-election to the U.S. Congress. The prestigious award for political courage will be presented by Jack Schlossberg, President Kennedy’s grandson, at a ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston on May 3, 2015.
"Bob Inglis is a visionary and courageous leader who believes, as President Kennedy once said, that 'no problem of human destiny is beyond human beings,’” said Schlossberg. “In reversing his own position and breaking with his party to acknowledge the realities of a changing climate and its threat to human progress, he displayed the courage to keep an open mind and uphold his responsibilities as a leader and citizen at the expense of his own political career. His evolution in thought, brave stand and continued dedication to tackling the single biggest environmental and humanitarian crisis of our time inspires us all."
Bob Inglis represented the 4th Congressional District of South Carolina from 1993-1998 and again from 2005-2010. A member of the House Science Committee who served as Ranking Member of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee, Inglis initially opposed efforts to address climate change. But interactions with scientists in Antarctica, Australia and elsewhere, along with encouragement from his five children, changed his views on climate change, and he began advocating for a carbon tax to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. In Washington and South Carolina, Inglis’s acknowledgment of the scientific reality of climate change drew intense criticism from within the Republican Party, and in June 2010, he was defeated for re-election in the Republican primary. He went on to found and currently directs the Energy & Enterprise Initiative to encourage conservatives to accept the reality of climate change and to promote market-based innovations to address the challenges it poses.
The John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award is presented annually to public servants who have made courageous decisions of conscience without regard for the personal or professional consequences. The award is named for President Kennedy’s 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage, which recounts the stories of eight U.S. senators who risked their careers, incurring the wrath of constituents or powerful interest groups, by taking principled stands for unpopular positions. The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation created the Profile in Courage Award™ in 1989 to honor President Kennedy’s commitment and contribution to public service. It is presented in May in celebration of President Kennedy’s May 29th birthday. The Profile in Courage Award is represented by a sterling-silver lantern symbolizing a beacon of hope. The lantern was designed by Edwin Schlossberg and crafted by Tiffany & Co. Previous recipients include former U.S. President George H. W. Bush; Gabrielle Giffords, former U.S. Representative; Liberian peace activist and Nobel laureate Leymah Gbowee; Hilda Solis, former California state senator and U.S. Secretary of Labor; U.S. Representative John Lewis; and Brooksley Born, former chair, Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The recipients of this prestigious award for political courage are selected by a distinguished bipartisan committee of national, political, and community leaders: Albert R. Hunt, columnist for Bloomberg View, chairs the 14-member Profile in Courage Award Committee. Committee members are Christopher Dodd, former U.S. Senator (D-Connecticut) and CEO, Motion Picture Association of America; U.S. Congresswoman Donna F. Edwards (D-Maryland); Kenneth R. Feinberg, Chairman of the board of directors of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation; Adam Frankel, former speechwriter to President Barack Obama, now Vice-President of External Affairs at Andela; U.S. Senator Lindsey O. Graham (R-South Carolina); Antonia Hernandez, president and chief executive officer of the California Community Foundation; Elaine Jones, director-counsel emeritus of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund; Paul G. Kirk Jr., former U.S. Senator (D-Massachusetts) and Chairman Emeritus of the board of directors of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation; Martha Minow, Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School; Shari Redstone, Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of Viacom Inc. and Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of CBS Corporation; Jack Schlossberg, grandson of John F. Kennedy and student, Yale University; David M. Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; and former U.S. Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). Heather P. Campion, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, is an ex officio member of the Committee.
The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation is a 501(c)(3), non-profit organization founded in 1984 with the purpose of carrying President Kennedy’s legacy forward. The Foundation aims to inspire and engage both Americans and people throughout the world with his timeless vision of public service, civic responsibility, civil rights, scientific discovery and creative cultural pursuits and ideals of peace, optimism and service, so they may learn how to translate them into action. As a major part of this mission, the Foundation supports the work of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, whose core function is to collect, preserve, and make available for research, the documents, audiovisual material and memorabilia of President Kennedy, his family, and his contemporaries. Today, the Kennedy Library in Boston is one of the most visited of the 13 presidential libraries in America. Over 200,000 people from around the globe visit the museum each year, and the Foundation serves 25,000 students annually through a host of free educational programs.
Thank you for saying all of those nice things, Jack. I can’t imagine a more meaningful affirmation than a Profile in Courage. You know from the writing we’ve done together that I grew up dreaming of a part in Camelot, so it is an amazing thing to be here with you, with your family and with the memories of a young American president on whom this country pinned so many hopes.
It’s those hopes—of that young America with the future before it-- that I wish to describe here today as a potential, bright shining moment for climate change.
On September 12, 1962, President Kennedy spoke at Rice University. Congress had approved his moon shot, and he was in Houston to inspect the progress at Apollo mission control. Sweltering in the September sun, he started: “We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a State noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three, for we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.”
OK, so it doesn’t sound the same in Southern!
Applying those words to climate change, our knowledge has increased, our ignorance has unfolded, and we’re beginning to see the damage that we’re doing to the remnant of Eden in which we live. We wish to act, but our fears tempt us to deny what we see. We want it to be that we’re not responsible, because responsibility brings guilt, and guilt without redemption brings paralysis.
But what if there is redemption? What if solutions are available to us?
Having read Profiles in Courage early in college, I knew I wanted to be one of those. I knew then and I know even better now that the future has a few leaders and a lot of followers, that when leaders are optimistic they’re saying they believe in the people they represent. President Kennedy believed in us at Rice. He said that some of the materials that would be need for space flight hadn’t even been invented yet, admitting that some of what he was saying was “faith and vision.” But he said, “the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first.”
I had hoped to be as inspiring on climate change in perhaps the reddest district in the reddest state in the nation. Apparently I didn’t do it quite as well as President Kennedy!
In Landrum, South Carolina, in the darkest days of the Great Recession, there was a debate under a big tent. The tent wasn’t quite big enough for action on climate change. The moderator, a local Christian talk radio host, asked me and my four Republican primary challengers if climate change was man-made and whether we would support a bill in Congress that would tax carbon emissions. The crowd laughed. Audibly.
It was well known that I had committed the heresy of believing climate science. My 2008 primary opponent had nicknamed me the “Al Gore of the Republican Party.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment. This was now the 2010 cycle, and we had descended into the depths of the Great Recession. People were upset. They would happily receive the news that climate change was one thing we just didn’t need to worry about.
My affirmative answers—that climate change is real and human-caused and that free enterprise can solve the problem if we tax emissions with equal and offsetting cuts to payroll taxes—were not well received. All of my opponents answered the moderator’s questions in the negative, advancing the populist rejectionism of the Great Recession—rejection of the science, rejection of all things Obama, of course, and rejection, more fundamentally, of the notion that we can come together to accomplish really great things.
I wasn’t always so courageous on climate. In my first six years in Congress from 1993-1999, I had said that climate change was hooey. I hadn’t looked into the science. All I knew was that Al Gore was for it, and therefore I was against it. After a six year hiatus doing commercial real estate law, I was re-elected to Congress in 2004. Our son, the eldest of our five children, was voting for the first time that year. He came to me and said, “Dad, I’ll vote for you, but you’re going to clean up your act on the environment.” That was Step 1 of a 3 step metamorphosis for me. Step 2: I got on the House Science Committee and saw the wonders and the warnings of science in places like Antarctica. Step 3: I heard the call to love God and love people—people we will never know because they will come after us—through Scott Heron, an Aussie climate scientist at the Great Barrier Reef. I came home and introduced an alternative to cap-and-trade—an emissions tax with equal and offsetting cuts in payroll taxes together with a border adjustment that would impose the tax on imports.
My political timing wasn’t great, but I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s been a circuitous path and one that I would not have chosen, but it’s been a good path. Given a choice between the law of love and the laws of politics, I know I chose the better.
Those of us who are given this Award for only sweat and tears are awed by those who have also bled. We can’t match them. People like Congressman John Lewis of Georgia, a personal hero of mine even though our voting records don’t match up.
And then there are other awards for those who have also died—service men and women who gave the last full measure of devotion and public servants whose departures were not of their own making. Their impact was not only for their own times.
One of them said,
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country. . . .
That was Sen. Bobby Kennedy in 1968 announcing the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
If we succeed on climate change, if we apply love, and wisdom and compassion, our impact, like his, will be not only for our own times.
For what we do now, will determine the future. I realize that some of my friends say, no, you’re arrogating to humankind control over God’s creation. But isn’t ours the same God who has said to us,
I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live, 20 loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice, and cleaving to him; for that means life to you and length of days.
“I set before you blessings and curses.”
The blessing of loving and providing for those who will come after us.
The curse of not caring.
The blessing of winning the future.
The curse of missing the opportunity to lead.
The blessing of risking a seat in Congress to explain what will become obvious while it’s still appearing as novel and courageous.
The curse of eking out re-election and losing the ability to face your children and your children’s children.
Their love, their affirmation is worth more than a voting card in Congress. And since they have the greater claim on the future, they challenge us don’t they?
They ask, when are we going to do it?
When is America going to rise to the challenge on climate?
Well, I think it’s soon. I think it’s before the decade is out. I think we’re going to come together and get this done because I believe that a pricing of carbon dioxide will be like someone said of the financial crisis, “It’s amazing how the impossible went to the inevitable without ever passing through the probable.”
The solution will come when we overcome the tribalism that’s developed on climate change.
When tribes are under pressure—as we were in the Great Recession—adherence to tribal orthodox gets to toxic levels. In such times, it’s dangerous but good to take the advice of a Palestinian businessman I met in Gaza who told me one time, “God gave us two eyes,” he said, “One to see from the perspective of another.”
When a member of Congress gets elected by his tribe and goes to Washington, he gets used to hearing the arguments of the other tribes. His blood pressure no longer rises when he hears their point of view, and he runs the risk of being detected and ruled soft by the keepers of his tribe’s orthodoxy. He has a choice to make: he can slam himself up on the right hand wall (or, if he’s a liberal, on the left hand wall) or extend a hand from that wall to try to reach the other side.
If tribalism has this weakness, it must also have some strengths. Tribes give us an identity. They help us interpret the world. They help us to process information and to make decisions and judgments on the basis of shared values.
So let’s use that strength.
Dare we stipulate that each of the tribes has some strengths to offer?
Dare we go beyond the zero sum game of grudging compromise and rise to creative collaboration?
Dare conservatives ask, “Can free enterprise solve climate change?”
Dare progressives imagine something more efficient than a regulatory solution?
Dare Republican presidential candidates break out of the disbelief of the Great Recession, the agnosticism of “I’m not a scientist” and the defeatism of “We can’t do it; we’re not China; it will hurt our economy”? Dare they answer the question with, “Yes, of course, free enterprise can solve climate change!”?
Dare the environmental left leave aside the naming and shaming for a cycle and let conservatives come back to themselves as people who accept science?
Dare conservatives of faith, like me, celebrate the science? Dare we believe that our faith is affirmed by science, not challenged by it?
To quote a very underquoted line from President Kennedy’s speech at Rice, “I think we’re going to do it.”
The impossible will become the inevitable without ever passing through the probable.
All we’ve got to do is...
Dare to ask
Dare to answer
Dare to lead
Dare to love
I know it’s within reach. Just like the moon.
Thank you all for being here today.
I want to thank my fellow members of the Profiles in Courage Selection Committee, and all the people who work here at the library that make this day possible.
Today is a great moment for the library and for my grandfather’s legacy, but it is only one day of a long year. The men and women who work at the library and all those who generously give to this institution ensure that President Kennedy’s legacy remains alive and vibrant here every other day of the year, when there are no cameras here to watch them, but when thousands of people from across the country and around the world come here to learn, reflect, and find inspiration.
Since taking over my mother’s old job of ambassador to Columbia Point, this award has become quite meaningful to me.
Coming to this library, walking through the doors and past pictures of my grandfather, smiling and sailing through the sixties, to sift through a slate of candidates, each of whom made tremendous sacrifices for our country, to select the winner of this award reminds me that courage is not as rare as we may think, and that we ought to remind ourselves of the unsung profiles in courage that we encounter in our own lives.
Every year for 25 years, the Kennedy Library has given this award in recognition of political courage. Each recipient has symbolized the ideals and principals of service and sacrifice that my grandfather embodied as a man and as a president.
For me, this year is particularly special. I come to the library in a curious moment in my own life. If I pass my last exam on Tuesday morning, which is far from a safe bet, I will have completed my studies and will graduate later this month.
I will leave Yale and step out into a world that faces a challenge greater than any other before it– climate change. My generation has grown up with this disaster looming ahead. From the sidelines, we’ve felt helplessly frustrated as our leaders have failed to address this great problem that we know exactly how to solve.
Recently, as I thought about leaving Yale and entering the world as it is today, I revisited the commencement address my grandfather delivered at Yale in 1962.
It wasn’t his best speech – it’s very long and a bit boring, but for a Harvard graduate I suppose that is to be expected.
But two passages buried within caught my eye, and President Kennedy’s words help explain the special significance of this year’s award and the profound importance of the courageous stand taken by the man sitting behind me.
Speaking to the Yale crowd, President Kennedy said, “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”
This holds true with respect to climate change. Most Americans don’t believe the lie—a great majority believes that climate change is real.
Yet inaction is justified by the myth that climate change is too large and daunting a problem to solve, that individual nations are powerless because every nation is culpable, and that no one person can make a difference. We challenge that view today by celebrating one man’s tremendous political courage.
A Republican Congressman from South Carolina, Bob Inglis had once rejected the idea that human behavior was altering the earth’s climate. That changed when he traveled to Antarctica, where a group of scientists presented him with the evidence for man-made climate change.
One defining quality of leadership and courage is the capacity to listen and change. Bob deferred to these experts, and the undeniable evidence he saw for himself. He had courage to admit that he had been wrong.
Back at Yale in 1962, President Kennedy ended his speech with a call to action. He said, “There is a show in England called "Stop the World, I Want to Get Off." You have not chosen to exercise that option. You are part of the world and you must participate in these days of our years in the solution of the problems that pour upon us.”
Bob Inglis didn’t want the world to stop or to get off it. Bob Inglis did not neglect his responsibility. He chose to participate fully in these days of our years and to work for a solution. He recognized that climate change is only frightening if we choose to sit and wait and do nothing about it. He saw it as an opportunity for all of us to add a chapter to the story of American triumph and human progress.
He went back Washington, and broke with his party when he publically stated that climate change is real, and that America needs to do something about it. He proposed aggressive reforms even though he knew they would enrage his colleagues, his base and special interests, but he summoned the courage to push forward.
For Bob, the truth certainly was inconvenient. In response for his stance on climate change, his party recruited a Tea Party candidate to challenge him in 2010 and drove him out of office.
But this defeat did not discourage him. He continued the fight for sweeping federal action on climate change, devoting himself to the Energy and Enterprise Initiative and working tirelessly to advocate responsible reforms.
Bob Inglis defines President Kennedy’s vision for a profile in courage. My grandfather’s legacy is kept alive by Bob’s courageous decision to sacrifice his political career to demand action on the issue that will shape life on earth for generations to come. It is my honor to welcome to the stage a man with vision, courage and resolve: the winner of the 2015 Profiles in Courage Award, Bob Inglis.