SALT LAKE CITY — As a child, John Curtis’ mother would ask him the same question every time he came home from skiing: “Did you fall?”
The Republican congressman told a room full of University of Utah students on Thursday that’s because “if you don’t fall, you don’t learn.” While those falls helped him become a better skier, Curtis, who has represented Utah’s 3rd Congressional District since 2017 and is now seeking to become the state’s next U.S. senator, said he believes the same potential for failure doesn’t exist in politics, which leads to poor governance.
Curtis spoke Thursday at the Sutherland Institute’s annual debate with Utah’s federal delegation, in which he chose the title “Reinventing the Wheel — But This Time, Try a Square Wheel” for his debate with Jason Perry, director of the university’s Hinckley Institute of Politics.
“How many of you think government isn’t working?” Curtis asked the audience in response to a question about why he chose the title. Several hands went up. “So often we try to solve things thinking the wheel is round, and we never try the square wheel, because we all know that square wheels are bad, right? And yet we keep coming up with the same solutions, and they don’t work.”
Curtis believes the reluctance to seek unconventional solutions comes from a political culture that tolerates no mistakes and rewards those who stay in their comfort zone.
“One of my regrets about politics is not giving people the opportunity to make mistakes,” he said. “In politics, if I make one small mistake, it’s all over social media, right? … And politicians are so loud and raucous, they don’t want to make mistakes. But if you’re not willing to make mistakes, how are you going to find a different way to do things?”
Curtis’s Middle East Travels
The forum’s discussions came after an eight-day visit to the Middle East in which the lawmaker met with leaders of Israel, Jordan, Qatar and Egypt amid ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Curtis described the experience as “powerful” and said he met with the families of Americans held hostage in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, including the mother of Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg Pollin, whose death was confirmed last week. Curtis said he sat next to Rachel Goldberg during a meeting before her son’s death and witnessed “how desperate she was to bring him back to life.”
While Israel’s ongoing bombing of the Gaza Strip has killed tens of thousands of people and sparked strong reactions from many around the world, Curtis said no one during his visit expressed “a feeling that Israel is overreacting” to the atrocities committed by Hamas fighters on October 7.
“Every time, what emerged was the absolute necessity to find a path to a ceasefire,” he said, “and that’s what all the leaders are focusing on.”
On US policy towards Israel, Curtis said he firmly supported the country, but added that the key issue was “how do we preserve Israel’s right to defend itself and put an end to this?”
Are climate activists too ‘critical’?
Curtis is perhaps best known for founding the Conservative Climate Caucus, through which he offers conservative solutions to human-caused climate change and seeks to align Republicans on the issue. He said he felt “nervous” about being the first Republican to utter the word “climate,” but he doesn’t think environmental concerns are anathema to most conservatives.
He likened the partisan divide over climate change policy to the “timeshare trap” where a salesman pressures customers into buying shares in a resort.
“Even though in their hearts they know they shouldn’t do it, a lot of people do it and walk away,” he said. “That’s exactly how Republicans feel when asked about climate. Most of them have never really thought about the science, they’ve never debated the science, but they’re scared that if they say the climate has changed, they’ll be pressured to do things that they don’t think are good.”
He said it’s natural for people to automatically assume that any support for climate policy would lead to the most radical change, and that people concerned about the effects of climate change should try more to find common ground with climate skeptics.
“The automatic reaction was, ‘Oh, that’s a hoax, because … your proposed solutions are unacceptable,'” he said. “And I think what we’ve been able to do is say, ‘Can we put all that aside and agree that we want to leave the Earth in a better state than we found it?’ No one has ever said no.”
Curtis believes the climate change movement as a whole is “too critical and too quick to condemn”.
“We’re putting people on their feet and the more comfortable people are talking about this, the less fearful they’ll be and the more willing they’ll be to engage in proposing solutions,” he said.
The congressman announced Thursday that he will host the third annual Conservative Climate Summit on Oct. 4 at Utah Valley University.
