It's been a few weeks since the latest U.N. Intergovernmental Climate Change report (.pdf) was made public and I'm noticing a slow shift away from outright denialism from the Right to a seemingly more pragmatic line of public commentary. Conservatives appear to be moving from Sen. James Inhofe-style anti-science hysteria to milder, more neoliberal0 form of acceptance.
Conservatives have rightly opposed many of the climate change proposals offered by the Left. But standing against bad policy does not require hiding from good science. We can't govern responsibly by belittling America's National Academy of Sciences (and all the other science academies on the planet). We can only govern responsibly by confronting the reality that we will be forced to spend big money dealing with the effects of climate change — money that won't be invested in our communities, our schools, or our private enterprises.
The two people who wrote that bit above aren't RINO heretics, but winners of a writing contest sponsored by the conservative
Energy and Enterprise Initiative. E&EI is headed by former GOP representative Bob Inglis,
who has himself had a change of opinion on this issue1:
Inglis says his views evolved from not believing in global warming to advocating our “moral obligation to restore Eden wherever possible.” But this doesn’t mean we should give up on energy production or consumption. “[W]e have a moral obligation to extend power to the developing world,” he says, “to make sure they have the freedom of mobility to light their homes at night and participate in this grand world.”
I mean, all GOPers aren't
completely there yet,
but acceptance of the idea of climate change on the Right is growing. This could be because traditionally Republican constituencies are increasingly on board with the idea; for example,
military communities take threats like massive global destabilization very seriously:
In a similar vein, last month retired Navy Rear Adm. David Titley co-wrote an op-ed for Fox News: “The parallels between the political decisions regarding climate change we have made and the decisions that led Europe to World War One are striking – and sobering. The decisions made in 1914 reflected political policies pursued for short-term gains and benefits, coupled with institutional hubris, and a failure to imagine and understand the risks or to learn from recent history.”
In short, climate change could be the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the 21st century.
Big Business is
warming up as well. They have to; massive environmental disruptions aren't just problems for rare animal species and farmers. You're talking food supply disruptions,
billions in property losses, economic disruptions on a Great Recession- or Depression-level scale, populations migrating, violent clashes over natural resources, and
too many other things to list here...and I don't need to. We Lefties understand all that; it's why we've been so persistently arguing the facts about climate change. The good news is that a number of conservative-type people
are starting to come around.
The bad news is, well...
(please continue below the fold)
The bad news is that conservatives are coming around on climate change.
I mean, it's good that they are starting to accept the reality of the issue, but the solutions they will propose will unfortunately be ones consistent with their values...all of which boil down to, "how do I make money from this?" Author Naomi Klein calls this Disaster Capitalism; I called it crisis profiteering. It's the unwelcome practice of taking some calamity - natural or man-made - and using it to push for policies of dubious value that end up adding more digits to a wealthy people's bank statements. It's nothing new; in the aftermath of the Chicago Fire of 1871:
Relief agencies, mainly privately run, were charged with aiding only the 'worthy,' and they were 'deserving' of help only after close inspection of their work habits, family arrangements, home economics, drinking customs, and so on. Civil War General Phillip Sheridan established martial law and was quick to fire on suspected looters, while enforcing a curfew to keep the 'twilight population' in check.
At the same time, Chicago's business elite, its civic leaders, and a remarkable roster of first-rate architects went about reshaping downtown Chicago into a modern hub of commerce and culture that they hoped would rival New York. Real-estate speculators made a fortune, although none were known to have been shot for looting. For some, in other words, the fire functioned as a fortuitous slum clearance/urban renewal program on speed.
Sounds like what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, doesn't it? Now consider weather events that affect the entire
planet; it will be prime times to advance an agenda and/or get rich off of the pain and suffering of your fellow man.
Apologies; that last line comes off as cynical. It should read, "Conservatives will see this as an opportunity to embrace the environmentalism of Nixon and Reagan by offering business-friendly, tax-effective policies that will mitigate the worst effects of global climate change." Tom Friedman sure spins it that way:
Well, the first thing we would do is actually slash income taxes and corporate taxes and replace them with a carbon tax so we actually encourage people to stop doing what we don't want, which is emitting carbon, and start doing what we do want, which is hiring more workers and getting corporations to invest more in America...
...we would actually borrow money, the federal government would borrow money at almost 0 percent and invest it in infrastructure to make our cities not only more resilient, but more efficient.
The third thing we would do is make permanent the wind and solar and other renewable energy tax incentives so we would actually stimulate more innovation and ensure that our companies are going to lead the next great global industry which is surely going to be clean water, clean power, etc
Aside from the bit about taxes, those suggestions sound like reasonable ideas that the Left has been proposing for at least a decade...and it's no surprise that conservatives are adopting the liberal framing of this issue, as their earlier position of skepticism and denialism is being countered by reality. It's another way of defining public discourse on an issue in terms favorable to conservatives; doing something about climate change will require cuts to income and corporate taxes just like they were needed to get out of a recession and after 9/11. For whatever ails you, conservatives have a tax cut solution.
2
You'll see an emphasis on other market- and business-friendly solutions such as carbon and emissions trading rather than enactment of a carbon tax or 'big government' solutions such as stricter standards and the means to enforce regulatory violations. It won't matter if the solutions they offer will be of benefit to the masses or even work; cap-and-trade has issues with both how the exchanges are managed and what value they actually have...especially in regards to the human cost of various solutions:
We can’t be talking about really drastically cutting our emissions here and now. So we have to play shell games, right? We have to have carbon offsets there. We have to — we can keep polluting, but we’ll plant — you know, we’ll protect a forest in the Congo, or we will have huge agrifuel crops in Africa. And so, all of these solutions are actually deepening the climate crisis in Africa, because people are being displaced from their land, not just because of climate, but because of the solutions to climate change, because they’re losing access to forests, which are used for subsistence agriculture, they’re losing access to land that had been farmed for food and is now being farmed for fuel.
The environmental policies that will be proposed by conservatives will have characteristics
such as3:
1) commodifying and trading new forms of ‘natural capital’; 2) replacing state control of resources with capitalist markets; 3) intensifying exploitation of a given natural resource to yield increased short-term profits; and 4) transferring resource governance responsibility (and thus revenues) from states to non-state actors.
All these favor profit-seeking capitalist outcomes. Other workable solutions will largely be defined by the right as anti-business or detrimental to our economy...
which isn't really true:
...an investment to stop climate change will only knock 0.06 percentage points off the world’s annualized economic growth rate from now till the end of the century. Assuming annualized growth of about 3 percent, full-scale motivation on climate change would reduce that to about 2.94 percent. Not bad. Side effects that weren’t factored in to that calculation may include: more efficient and productive food systems, human health improvements, biodiversity protection, poverty reduction—in general, making things better.
Or we can continue on the business-as usual-path and see how that goes.
For the time being, the Right (and Center)
is still on that business-as-usual-path:
...climate change is a bigger concern for Democrats than Republicans. Thirty-six percent of Democrats worry about climate change a great deal, while just 10 percent of Republicans do the same.
So there's some question of what will it take and/or when the idea of man-made global climate change will become accepted by the establishments of the Right. Given the effects we are seeing now, I think it's a matter of when.
And at that point, we will be arguing over solutions that don't really change our behaviors or fix the our pollution problems because of the sacrifice involved for us. I'm worried that, even if the Left has been the ones who have been arguing the case for global climate change, we will rapidly lose control of the discussion. The policy outcomes of such an exclusionary framing of the issue will be less than optimal, just like they were during the health care reform debate in 2009-2010.
What are your thoughts?
--------------footnotes---------------
0I always figured the difference between neoliberalism and neoconservativsm was that neoliberals used what's the conservative ideological toolbox to 'fix' traditionally liberal programs and issues...while neoconservatives used what's in the liberal toolbox to take on traditionally conservative issues.
1on second thought, it sounds less evolutionary and more like Inglis was the recipient of a
come-to-Jesus talk
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/...
3 if you're up for a good scholarly take on all this, read the article at that link