I have a confession to make: For years I have been ambivalent about the way environmentalists are treated by conservative commentators. I begin to squirm when people such as Rush Limbaugh deride environmental activists as nuts and kooks and breezily dismiss concerns about endangered species and the effects of global warming.
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I find it puerile to blithely assume that the earth has the capacity to absorb whatever gasses and pollutants we dump upon it, the height of presumption to take it for granted that scientists will come up with a substitute for fossil fuels as soon as we need it. The math is obvious: Someday the masses of Asia and Africa will want to own cars and air-condition their homes. It is not far-fetched to imagine a day in the not too distant future when competition for control of the world’s oil reserves will lead to war between nuclear powers. Not if you ask me.
So, if I feel this way, why am I ambivalent about environmentalists? Because I accept Limbaugh’s basic point: There is a hidden agenda in much of the environmental activism of our time, an anti-capitalist bias that seeks to blame corporate greed and the profit motive for the despoiling of the planet. I submit that Ralph Nader’s Green Party would be as committed to expanding the government’s regulatory power over the economy even if the air and water in North America were as clear as the day Henry Hudson sailed up the river named after him. Cleaning up the environment is another way for them to press their case against the free-market system. I don’t want to join in that crusade.
I would go so far as to say that most “movement” environmentalists imply — and not so subtly — that we would not have a problem with pollution if our economy were socialist; that a government-controlled economy, dedicated to the public good instead of profit, would never pour toxins into our air or water. Which is absurd. Only someone blinded by ideological enthusiasm could see things that way. Some of the most polluted industrial areas of the world were in the old Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries. There was the famous case of a river that burned for weeks in the old Soviet Union because of the industrial chemicals dumped into it by the Communist Party hacks in charge of the factories in the area.
What I have been looking for is some sign of a less ideologically driven environmental movement. If we are committed to “remaking all things in Christ” we must play our part in keeping the planet as God intended it, and that can’t be a polluted and ravaged mess. Well, I am happy to say that such a movement may be taking shape. Conservative columnist Charley Reese has broken the ice. Granted, Reese is more on the populist than the libertarian side of modern conservatism, but no one would call him a man of the left. Nonetheless, he is asking conservatives to take a common sense stand on the environment; to not assume that every call for pollution control is motivated by a desire to get us all to live like one of Mao’s Red Guards or the residents of a 1960s’ hippie commune. He writes, “If we have learned anything in the past century it is that laissez faire won’t cut it. Only the power of government can match the power of big business, and only then if an alert, intelligent and ethical people put in public office men and women who won’t be bought. Concern for the environment should cut across all ideological, political, sectional, national, racial and ethnic lines.”
Reese will not permit the extremism of environmental extremists to cloud the big picture: “Many ideological conservatives are scornful of environmental issues, assuming they are the province of leftists or liberals.” He asks us to rise above partisan politics: “Rather than take a gloom-and-doom approach, we should see it as the great and exciting challenge of our times. Every generation has had to face problems and meet challenges. Ours is to preserve those conditions that sustain life on Earth.”
But doesn’t Reese’s position imply that we must employ government regulation to downgrade our standard of living, just as the “back to nature” crowd argues? Not necessarily. In a recent Wall Street Journal column, Pete Dupont reported on the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford University. The GCEP’s goal is not to condemn technology as the source of our pollution problems, but to employ it to provide the solution. The group’s leaders understand the problem: “Within 20 years, 7.5 billion people will occupy this planet, about 25 percent more than do so now. They will want to heat and light their homes, power electrical devices, move from place to place, grow food and drink clean water. Supplying the energy required to do all this is, by itself, a significant challenge.” They know that we cannot count on fossil fuels being readily available to us by the end of this century.
But their solution is not to have us all going to work on bicycles and living without the amenities of modern living. Instead, they have committed $225 million to “identify clean, efficient energy technologies, see what the barriers are to their use, conduct research to learn how to overcome those barriers, and then make those successful technologies available to the world.”
Could we call this “right-wing environmentalism”? I think that might be the right term. Rather than sink into socialist yearnings for an imagined simpler pre-industrial past, the project is exploring ways to harness the power of the sun through “a geostationary solar power satellite array — with a surface area the size of Manhattan — in orbit some 22,000 miles above the equator, which would beam power to 8-by-6-mile surface antennae.” They are also looking to collaborate with “Japan’s Institute of Space and Aeronautical Science to beam energy from a satellite in low orbit to less developed nations near the equator.”
I don’t know about you, but hearing such things brings me a sigh of relief. It makes clear that it is possible to be responsible and concerned about the environment without becoming an “environmentalist.” In Dupont’s words: “The energy technologies the Stanford study develops should refute the Malthusian conclusion that a growing global population’s increasing energy demands will trigger either massive reductions in living standards or the collapse of the biosphere. That’s a refreshing attitude, and better energy technology is an essential global goal.”
Will efforts such as this prove fruitful? Who knows? But it seems clear to me that only those individuals shaped by an anti-capitalist bias would not want to try to use technology to solve our energy needs before committing us to the austere lifestyle favored by the environmental activists.
