MARCH 19, 2010 -- State Rep. Dwight Loftis has had such a busy, “green” legislative session so far this year that his efforts may place him in the middle of the global warming debate. Key word: “middle.” 
Loftis, a Greenville Republican, has been the primary sponsor of a bushel of bills that would do everything from kick-starting the production of switchgrass, a potential fuel source, to revamping wastewater treatment in his corner of the state to creating a state Department of Energy.
“The one thing really missing in South Carolina is a unified strategic energy plan,” said Loftis this week in the relative calm of the waiting room of the House, while his colleagues slugged it out on the floor over a loan to keep a Hilton Head golf tournament afloat.
Global warming still an issue
But for all of his tom-thumbery, Loftis, a 15-year vet of the House who now serves on the Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee, was not ready to throw his lot in with pointy-headed intellectuals busy with worshiping dirt and hugging trees.
“I don’t know about all this global warming,” said Loftis, who has seen research that showed other planets in our solar system are warming up, too. “I think it may be related to the sun.”
He’s not alone. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-Clinton), chair of the House Ag Committee, has openly derided global warming as bunk. Nationally, stories abound about the “cooling” of global warming debate, as politicians and leaders seek a middle ground.
For Loftis, taking care of the environment is more about stewardship of the planet, keeping the air clean and creating jobs while at the same time avoiding the trap he sees where unscrupulous greenies are looking to make a quick buck off a government grant program. It’s also about energy independence and national security, he said.
Nestled in the inside pocket of his blazer, Loftis carries a small rectangle of what appears to be duct tape. In fact, it’s a swatch of a Chinese product that, when in wider and longer form, can be rolled out on flat-top buildings and used as solar power collection device.
Loftis said he was old enough to have lived through two rounds of heightened environmental rhetoric and that has fueled his skepticism. “When I was in college,” said the 67-year-old, “we were being told that we were entering a second ‘ice age.’”
Planting some seeds
Loftis said the state needed to get behind switchgrass, high in energy-rich cellulose and harvestable twice a year, before efforts in surrounding states get an even bigger head start satisfying growing demand in Europe.
Still, Loftis has planted seeds in an ever-greening legislature, which seems to have moved in a more earth-first direction since Gov. Mark Sanford took office. Sanford fought for tax credit packages for rural landowners who agreed not to turn their tracts into tract homes.
The legislature has taken the bait, and over the last few years has put forward its own efforts, like requiring more aggressive energy conservation goals for new state buildings over 10,000 square feet. Or a bill that would create a pool to assist low-income homeowners buy Energy Star appliances in hopes of keeping down power demands, as well as the demand for new, expensive power-generating plants.
A recently proposed bill coming out of the Senate would create a loan program to allow homeowners to borrow money through programs run by utilities to upgrade their windows and insulation. The state has passed, some say finally, a bill that allows for homes and businesses with solar collectors to send extra energy it generates back into the grid for credit.
For some in the state’s environmental and conservation communities, turning the legislature’s gaze toward efficiency has been a glacial process.
Ann Timberlake, executive director of the environmental watchdog group Conservation Voters of South Carolina, calls these efforts, as well as Loftis’s, “important steps, baby steps, but in the right direction of a clean energy economy.”
GINOS? (Green In Name Only)
Like Loftis, Timberlake worried that some of the bills snaking their way through the legislative process weren’t what they seemed. But where Loftis saw attempts by greenies to make money off a subsidized green economy, Timberlake is wary of industry attempts to take advantage of legislation.
Timberlake said she was on the look-out for bills that looked green on the outside, but their guts were attempts to clear the way for unwise energy policy. Some of the bills, she said, would make it easier for the construction of a proposed facility in the Chester area that, while it would create some electricity as a byproduct, was actually an incinerator in disguise.
But Loftis and some of his fellow Republicans have not been alone in the drift into the middle of the environmental debate. Many in the state’s green community have come in from the left and begun to take positions that favor a nuclear power future for the state.
Nuclear power, while not exactly a cause célèbre for the left, has in recent years been seen from a different perspective that, while potentially odious, it is was a far cry better than the environmental ravages of coal.
“Nuclear power was never off the table,” said Timberlake, who quickly points out that her clan is backing energy conservation as the key to the state’s energy future.
Crystal ball: Clean-air Republicans in the legislature may be gaining in numbers, but other “numbers” may mean more delay. Creating new programs for more responsible energy technology and industry takes money and money will be in short supply in the Statehouse for the next few years. Regardless, as the state moves forward, look for more bills attempting to protect this state of majesty, this other Eden, demi-paradise, this precious stone set against a silver sea. (With apologies to Bill Shakespeare.)