Conservative environmentalists? Yes, they exist
There are several conservative groups that believe facing climate change is compatible with economic prosperity.
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Republican environmentalists? There are some — and they’re worth listening to
October 15, 2015
(Photo illustration: Yahoo News, photos: AP)
A
recent study found that even among conservative parties in other
developed countries, the Republican Party stands alone in doubting the
threat, or even the existence, of human-driven climate change.
Sondre
Båtstrand, a political scientist at the University of Bergen in Norway,
examined the manifestos of conservative parties from nine countries —
the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Canada,
New Zealand, Australia and Germany — and found that the other parties or
platforms supported climate measures.
“Even
though other conservative parties might share skepticism towards
concrete political measures, the Republican Party is the only [one] to
openly question climate science and to criticize political opponents for
taking climate change seriously,” Båtstrand, whose findings were first published in the Politics and Policy journal on Aug. 12, said in an email to Yahoo News.
Most conservative Republicans
doubt or deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change, but there
is a movement within the party arguing that conservative values and the
power of the free market can ultimately solve the crisis.
“Conservatives
are the ones who will deliver the answer to climate change in the
dynamism of the free enterprise system,” former Rep. Bob Inglis, R-S.C.,
said to Yahoo News. “It’s doubly surprising that the free-enterprise
party in America isn’t the first one to raise its hand and say, ‘Yes we
believe in conservation, and, yes, we believe in the power of free
enterprise to solve the problem.’”
At least 97 percent of active climate scientists say that climate-warming trends are the result of human activity.
Gavin
Schmidt, a climatologist and the director of the NASA Goddard Institute
for Space Studies in New York, explained that scientists know with
great confidence that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has
increased by about 40 percent over the past 150 years.
“It
continues to rise at around two [parts per million] a year, and that’s
undoubtedly due to the burning of fossil fuels, particularly coal, oil,
natural gas, with a contribution from deforestation,” he said in an
interview with Yahoo News.
(Photo: Yahoo News/AP)
But nowadays, in the United States, one’s political affiliation is often a better predictor of his or her opinion on this issue than his or her knowledge of science or level of education.
This raises the question: Why is the GOP an anomaly in denying the scientific consensus concerning anthropogenic climate change?
Schmidt was quick to point out that not all Republicans doubt the scientific evidence. Arizona Sen. John McCain comes to mind.
“It’s
not that there is something fundamentally anti-science about the
Republican Party,” he said. “But there are elements within the party
that make people afraid of taking a stand on this issue.”
The
anti-science rhetoric of some Republicans, Schmidt suggested, is an
example of shooting the messenger when they hear that natural resource
exploitation might need to be regulated or curtailed — seemingly at odds
with their small-government principles.
“Of course that doesn’t sit well with the huge multibillion-dollar companies that do most of that extraction,” he continued.
Schmidt
said that oil and natural gas companies, the Koch brothers and various
think tanks successfully planted the seed of an anti-science meme within
certain segments of the Republican Party that were already skeptical of
information coming from academia or “the coasts.”
Katharine
Hayhoe, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas Tech University,
experienced this suspicion firsthand when a student in an undergraduate
geology course accused her of being a Democrat after she explained the
basics of the climate system.
She wrote in the Great Plains journal Prairie Fire
that those sorts of incidents compelled her to restructure her class
presentations: Now she starts with ice cores, carefully connects the
dots between water and carbon and discusses politically neutral
solutions.
(Photo: Yahoo News/AP)
Distrust of taxes and the government runs deep in our national consciousness, dating back to the American Revolution.
“So
is it any surprise that there is such a rancorous, ideological reaction
to climate-change solutions that, by definition, require collective
action?” Hayhoe asked. “Particularly when that action requires the
government to levy a price — or, let’s be blunt, a tax — on carbon, a
substance previously perceived to be cost-free for all Americans to
produce as they desired?”
At
its heart, she said, our inability to recognize and respond to the
threat of climate change is a “tragedy of the commons,” in which
individuals lack the incentive to limit their own actions for the common
good.
Scott
Denning, a climate scientist and professor of atmospheric science at
Colorado State University, has given climate change presentations to
many conservative audiences, including the Heartland Institute, a
libertarian think tank that supports climate change denial.
“Frankly,
we’ve done a poor job of framing this for those audiences,” he said to
Yahoo News. “The three-part message goes as follows: Climate change is
happening, it’s human-caused and there’s this huge consensus of
scientists.”
According
to Denning, this strategy makes some people defensive and all but
invites them to disagree with the premise that humans are responsible.
Instead, he keeps the focus on the fact that carbon dioxide absorbs
heat. As with a pot of water on the stove, “heat in plus heat out equals
a change in heat.” Adding heat from the burner with a lid on will
result in a change in heat in the water much faster.
“That
resonates with people because there’s an obvious cause and effect that
they can relate to in their own lives. They respond better to that
instead of a kind of a guilt message,” he said.
As
it stands, in this country, most of the political solutions offered to
combat climate change come from the left. But it does not need to be
this way.
There
is no reason that the Republican Party cannot acknowledge the science
while crafting solutions that align with conservative principles — even
leading the charge. It is the party of Theodore Roosevelt, after all.
A belief in sound fiscal policy and small government in no way requires doubting the work of scientists.
(Photo: Yahoo News/Getty)
“The
solutions being tossed around are all from the left,” Denning said.
“When I talked to Heartland, I said, ‘You guys are AWOL. Don’t you think
that some of the solutions to this problem ought to come from the
political right?’”
Conserving
the environment is by definition conservative. Incentivizing American
entrepreneurship, innovation and free market forces to invigorate the
national economy and address the climate crisis is conservative. Putting
a price on carbon so that polluters rather than taxpayers take
responsibility for their own actions by footing the bill is
conservative.
Jerry
Taylor, president of the Niskanen Center and former fellow at the Cato
Institute, both libertarian think tanks, argues that supporting a carbon
tax is a conservative position because the government’s role is to
protect the rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of
happiness.
“If
party A is harming the person or property of party B, it is the
government’s job to enjoin those rights violations or to somehow make
the harmed party whole,” he said to the Nature Conservancy Talk blog.
“There is no asterisk in conservative or libertarian ideological
doctrines that says ‘unless energy companies are the parties
responsible.’ Or, at least, there shouldn’t be.”
There are several conservative groups that believe a healthy environment is compatible with economic prosperity.
In
2012, Inglis founded the Energy and Enterprise Initiative (E&EI) at
George Mason University to research and promote conservative solutions
to energy and climate challenges. Two years later, E&EI launched RepublicEn, a community of conservatives who describe themselves as “energy optimists and climate realists.”
“They’re
energy optimists, confident that market-driven innovation can
accelerate an energy revolution,” the group’s website reads. “They’re
climate realists, compelled by the evidence that climate risk requires
risk management; and they are pumped to learn that they’re not alone.”
E&EI’s
preferred policy solution is a revenue-neutral, border-adjustable
carbon tax: Revenue-neutral means we need to cut taxes elsewhere;
border-adjustable means it will be imposed on imports for countries
without a similar tax.
“That’s
a way of internalizing the negative externalities,” Inglis said. “If
you do that, the free enterprise system can sort this out faster than
government regulations or mandates could ever imagine.”
(Photo: Yahoo News/AP)
The
conservative position, he said, should include eliminating all the
subsidies for oil and gas, no credits for electric cars, no production
tax credit for wind, no under-market leases on public land for the
extraction of those fossil fuels and no allowing industries to treat the
sky as a trash dump without accountability.
Inglis
said that people need to stop asking Republicans if they believe in
climate change, which could alienate them from their audience, and start
asking them if free enterprise can solve climate change.
“That
is a question that conservatives can answer in the affirmative in front
of the reddest-meat crowd,” he said. “Conservatives, we believe that
free enterprise can solve problems you don’t even have.”
Similarly, ConservAmerica,
which was founded in 1995 under the name Republicans for Environmental
Protection, argues that it is a “persistent myth” that environmental
protection is a liberal cause. The group thinks establishment
Republicans have lost sight that it is a core conservative value. There
are even, counter-intuitively, green members of the tea party, such as
Debbie Dooley, president of the Green Tea Coalition and founder of
Conservatives for Energy Freedom.
Liberal
and conservative politicians can reasonably debate the proper response
to climate change while sharing basic scientific principles.
As
the climate crisis deepens, the voices of conservatives concerned with
the environment should only grow louder. But they are not lighting out
for uncharted territory.
The onetime senator and Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, “Mr. Conservative,” once wrote,
“While I am a great believer in the free enterprise system and all that
it entails, I am an even stronger believer in the right of our people
to live in a clean and pollution-free environment.”
None
other than former President Ronald Reagan, the steward of the 1980s’
free-market revolution and a hero to the Republican Party, said that
protecting the environment should not be a partisan issue.
“If
we’ve learned any lessons during the past few decades, perhaps the most
important is that preservation of our environment is not a partisan
challenge; it’s common sense,” the Great Communicator said while signing the annual report
of Council on Environmental Quality in July 1984. “Our physical health,
our social happiness and our economic well-being will be sustained only
by all of us working in partnership as thoughtful, effective stewards
of our natural resources.”
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