Congressional Republicans have partly unveiled their plan to save the planet. Beginning with roughly 190,000 square miles of it.

That’s the total area of the 31 most vulnerable Democratic districts heading into November’s midterms, as judged by the Cook Political Report. They skew, like most blue districts, toward cities and suburbs, with 21 rated "rural-suburban” or higher in the Bloomberg CityLabs Congressional Density Index. Only two are designated as "pure rural.” This, in turn, correlates with popular support for climate policy in most of these districts. On average, 61.2% of Americans living in them think Congress should do more to address climate change, according to polling by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. That’s a hair higher than the national average, which also shows a clear majority in favor.

This math suggests it’s a no-brainer for Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to add a tint of green to his platform. Except, of course, the Republican base tends to skew more rural and, especially, skeptical about climate change. That’s in part because former President Donald Trump called it a Chinese hoax, and few things matter more to today’s Republican Party — very much including McCarthy — than being seen to agree vociferously with Trump. It’s a quandary all right.

Still, even if he haunts the midterms, Trump isn’t on the ballot and you don’t get to be speaker of the House by winning districts you already hold. So it makes sense to offer a greenish olive branch to persuadable types in those shaky blue suburbs.

You may forgive my cynicism when I tell you that the opening installment of the Republicans’ Energy, Climate, and Conservation Task Force’s proposal kicks off with a call to "Restore Energy Dominance.” Not only does that not address climate change, it presupposes that "energy dominance” is a thing that existed in the first place. The former president who coined the phrase ended up donning more of a supplicant’s mantle at times, cajoling foreign autocrats into variously supporting or suppressing oil prices.

Today, the U.S. is already a net exporter of oil and petroleum products, and yet here we are, paying the high pump prices that feature prominently in the task force’s opening salvo, in part because one of those autocrats launched a war 5,000 miles away. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden looks to have all but scheduled his flight for the traditional pilgrimage to Riyadh.

In any case, this throwback to a mythical age of dominance in the title doesn’t bode well for the body of the text. We are told high up that emissions jumped 6% in Biden’s first year. Like the oft-tweeted bad faith comparisons between today’s gasoline prices and those in 2020 — when the pandemic emptied the roads — that 6% figure ignores the fact that emissions collapsed by 11% in Trump’s last year in office due to the ravages of the disease he repeatedly claimed would just disappear.

A slightly more involved sleight of hand is needed to claim that imports of Russian oil soared by 160% in 2021. For this one, we also have to deal with the talking point referencing only crude oil, rather than the semirefined oil that makes up the bulk of U.S. "oil” imports from Russia. Factor that in and the picture is far less dramatic. (Plus, imports plunged in the first quarter of this year.)

Click through to the task force’s talking points on how to "unlock American resources,” and you might be forgiven for thinking you had unearthed a manifesto from the 1970s. The dominant themes are high energy prices and dependence on foreign adversaries. The word "climate” doesn’t appear at all. This part bemoans U.S. reliance on imports of critical minerals for batteries and such, but the only nod to rethinking our energy system involves a call for updating the nation’s dams to produce more hydropower. Dams! While one admires the moxie of appropriating the FDR playbook — a green old new deal, as it were — dams really aren’t going to cut it.

This isn’t a climate plan. It’s energy independence/dominance repackaged with some greenish tints and aimed mostly at making Biden look like Carter 2.0. There’s the usual trope about how the U.S. did very well on cutting emissions since 2005. It did this mainly through gas displacing coal-fired power generation on the back of a shale boom built on unsustainable economics. The realization of this now constrains fracking, suggesting the past 15 years’ experience offers no template for the next 15. The message is that Democrats make your energy expensive and insecure and drill, baby, drill is the only solution (apart from the dams, of course).

The thing is, though, it’s a powerful message. While energy costs as a share of income are nowhere near the levels of prior crises such as in 2008 or the late 1970s, the rebound since the pandemic has been swift. Amid broader inflation, paying $60 to fill the tank of even a modest sedan is the sort of thing that sticks in the American voter’s mind — more than the gathering impacts (and costs) of rising average temperatures anyway.

The current context of high prices and confrontation with Russia lends weight to Republican attacks on Biden’s ambivalence toward U.S. oil and gas production. Discouraging supply before you’ve reconfigured demand is a recipe for being voted out of office rather than saving the planet. While the GOP, along with many in the oil industry, vastly overstates Biden’s role in the sudden drilling discipline of U.S. oil producers, the administration could offer some inducements to encourage extra domestic molecules to offset the impact of sanctioning Russian ones. In return, the industry could offer greater commitment to decarbonization rather than resisting it, as I argued here.

Encouraging American oil and gas production now but discouraging it longer term — drill, baby, don’t drill — is necessarily a complex undertaking. Yet there can be no serious climate policy without addressing how to do that. If Biden’s failure involves too little attention to the first half of that equation, the Republicans’ failure involves, as ever, barely acknowledging the second. Their immediate electoral prospects will hardly convince them of the need to appreciably shift tack — as this climate-free climate plan confirms.

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities.