John Kerry was tapped last week by President-elect Joe Biden for the post of “climate czar,” which amounts to an opening move for the incoming administration’s implementation of what could be a radically aggressive environmentalist agenda. It will continue with America’s resubmission to the Paris climate change agreement, rebooting of the ambitious regulatory regime fostered under President Barack Obama, and probably whatever snippets of the “Green New Deal” the administration can impose without the help of the Senate. All of this will cause compounding economic harm in exchange for little, if any, environmental benefit.
What it also does, however, is offer an opportunity for Republicans, if they care to take advantage of it, to present a reasoned, workable alternative approach to environmental stewardship, and reclaim a mantle they lamentably ceded almost entirely to the Left decades ago.
The Left did a masterful job of appropriating the cloak of environmental conservatorship and polarizing the issue virtually beyond recovery. Conservatives, for their part, mostly played contentedly into their hands, forging the dichotomy that doggedly persists to this day. As former Sen. James Buckley wrote a decade ago, this polarization is “attributable in substantial part both to the excesses of ‘greens’ who have converted environmentalism into a secular religion and to the continued blindness of too many conservatives to legitimate environmental concerns.”
It’s a false dichotomy that conservatives, and Republicans as their political standard-bearer, ought to refute — and with good reason. The politics of preservation fall neatly within the orbit of conservative thought, even, one might convincingly argue, define it. Consider the root of the word “conservative.” It is not unthinkable that a political philosophy dedicated to preserving the culture and institutions of our Western patrimony ought to be any less dedicated to preserving the natural heritage that has been vouchsafed us.
The Right is well-positioned, then, to point out the fallacies of the planted axioms that dominate the conventional left-leaning approaches to environmental concerns — mainly that their designs are not only costly but counterproductive. Progressives, for instance, have tendentiously pointed the finger at free markets as the predominant cause of ecological damage and accordingly have devised much of their program around dismantling, or at least suborning, the free market system. But the alternative, the absorption of industry by the state, leaves those same enterprises in hands unaccountable to any limiting power, explaining the ecological devastation witnessed in the command economies of the former Soviet Union and China.
Less extreme iterations of the ideology rely on deference to international organizations and heavy regulation of those industries deemed the greatest sources of environmental offense — which, in the ultimate analysis, includes virtually everything humans do in the course of feeding ourselves, making things, keeping warm, and getting from point A to point B.
Here again, the top-down approach ends up being a rather less-than-efficient mechanism and an expensive one at that. As an example, market-manipulative vehicle regulations (mandating electric vehicle sales or emissions standards, for instance) have the paradoxical effect of making new vehicles so cost-prohibitive that people stay in their older, high-emitting automobiles for years longer than they would otherwise, exacerbating the problem that the mandates were meant to solve.
The tenets that guide conservatism (resistance to fanaticism, national attachment, and the desire to preserve) mitigate toward the adoption of more rational and workable policies. On the issue of clean energy, for instance, these traits can serve as a counterweight to the Left’s long-standing resistance to nuclear power and the superstitious belief that the atom is somehow forbidden fruit.
And as preternatural as it may seem, conservatives ought to resist the temptation to reject any governmental role whatsoever, even while pushing back against the notion that all solutions to environmental considerations gravitate toward the public sector. It will be imperative, in the face of expected imperious use of executive authority by the Biden-Harris administration, for Congress to reclaim its legislative authority preemptively. The passage of the Great Outdoors Act, quarterbacked by Republican Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, is a great example of what can be prudently accomplished. Republicans should also consider support, for instance, for Sen. Ron Wyden’s Malhuer County Empowerment for the Owyhee Act, which looks to be a workable compromise between local ranchers and the more-reasonable conservation groups.
The late British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton outlined much of this in his book Green Philosophy, which delineated a conservative approach to environmental issues. One of his most important contributions to the environmental discussion as it relates to conservative philosophy is his term oikophilia — love of home; the distinctly conservative affection for local custom, tradition, orders, and nation; that Burkean concept of familial continuity between the dead, the living, and the yet to be.
Once the pandemic is behind us, the usual arguments will resume en force, and conservatives would be wise to position themselves to counter what is sure to be a fanatical approach with measured, principled conservative alternatives that are far better suited to addressing the common problem. That begins with the clarity of recognizing that there is, in fact, a common problem to be addressed.
Kelly Sloan (@KVSloan25) is a Denver-based public affairs consultant and columnist.
