Yielding the Moral High Ground — Part II
In Part I, we saw how conservatives were turning their backs on the moral issue of our time–global warming.
Here we’ll examine the many reasons conservatives should share ownership of this issue. Global warming and its solutions involve issues that are important to conservatives, progressives, Independents and even political agnostics. For example:
National security: “Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world, and it presents significant national security challenges for the United States,” 11 retired admirals and generals concluded in a security analysis last April. “The increasing risks from climate change should be addressed now because they will almost certainly get worse if we delay.”
Jobs: The global need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is arguably the biggest entrepreneurial opportunity the United States has known. Billions of the world’s people need access to clean energy, a market of unprecedented scale. Here in the United States, according to an analysis by the Management Information Services in Washington, D.C., energy efficiency and renewable energy can create 40 million jobs by mid-century, at skill levels stretching from entry level to the highly technical.
Competitiveness: Two of the fastest-growing renewable energy technologies today — solar electric cells and wind turbines — were invented in the United States, but we gave up our lead to Japan, Germany and Denmark — and China! We need to get it back. America remains the world’s top innovator; unleashing that talent is a key to our economic security in a post-carbon world. If we want to be the global market leader in green technologies, little steps and tentative leadership won’t do the job. As Sam Walton said in building his business empire: “Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy. We don’t want continuous improvement; we want radical change.”
Conservation: A long-time theme among some progressive Republican leaders has been the need to put “conserve” back into “conservatism.” Says Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich: “The group that I believe is the future of the American conservative movement and indeed the future of American politics are those who favor a green conservatism.” As governor of California, Ronald Reagan got it, too. There is an “absolute necessity of waging all-out war against the debauching of the environment,” he said in 1970 as American celebrated the first Earth Day. Since Teddy Roosevelt, presidents of both parties have stated a commitment to the health of the environment and, more recently, the climate.
Freedom: “The real inconvenient truth about climate change,” says Republican Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, “is that some people are losing their rights and freedoms because of the actions of others — in either the quality of the air they breathe, the geography they hold dear, the insurance costs they bear or the future environment of the children they love.”
Family: As Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) put it to Couric: “Let me put it this way to you. Suppose I’m wrong, there’s no such thing as climate change, we adopt green technologies. Then we’ve just left our kids a better world. Suppose I am right and we do nothing? Then what kind of planet have we handed to our children?”
[JR Note: I actually think that is a weak argument by McCain, which I’ll blog on later. In short, this isn’t a matter of whether McCain is right or wrong, but whether the observations and research of thousands of scientists is right or wrong.]
America’s Obligation to Lead: “The nations of the world must make common cause in defense of our environment,” President George H.W. Bush said on Sept. 9, 1989. “And I promise you this: This nation, the United States of America, will take the lead internationally.”
The silence from the conservatives running for the GOP nomination (other than McCain) can’t be blamed on a paucity of ideas. Any candidates looking to build a climate platform can turn, among other places, to the Presidential Climate Action Plan — more than 300 specific proposals for the next President to implement during his or her first 100 days. TIME magazine calls it “The Global Warming Playbook.”
Many of its proposals could have come from the Republican caucus: $1 billion in incentive awards for breakthrough technologies, small business development as the engine to move technologies to market, an end to energy subsidies that amount to corporate welfare, carbon pricing to put some magic back into the marketplace, and even the elimination of the U.S. Department of Energy in favor of a smaller and more nimble agency.
Back in 2005, before they threw their hats in the ring for the presidency, McCain and Clinton made a joint visit to Alaska to witness the effects of climate change first hand, sending the signal that this is an issue that both parties should embrace.
So far, the rest of the GOP’s presidential hopefuls are avoiding the embrace. Freedom, morality, competitiveness, a healthy economy, national security — they all are traditional conservative issues. They also happen to be climate-action issues. Do conservatives really want to give them up for adoption?
– Bill B.
December 23rd, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Bill,
You’re talking out of both sides of your mouth; typical for a politician.
Government regulation/subsidy and entrepreneurial opportunity don’t go hand-in-hand. You’re no dummy, either, so I know you know this, even if perhaps you don’t have any real world experience in getting a company or product off the ground.
Joe won’t comment when I ask him specifically about this either, so I guess that’s par for this course.
You guys say on the one hand that you’re for all these technological ‘fixes’ - and I’m also as brightly optimistic about technology as you say you are - but it sounds like you aren’t really all that optimistic in the final analysis if you think it all needs to be forced and propped up by government sticks and carrots.
Ask people like Sam Walton where they’d be if government had stepped in to ‘help’.
And take another look at that moral high ground you’re talking about. It may be you’re just standing on a stump.
December 23rd, 2007 at 5:25 pm
Ron is wrong as could be. Government support and incentives can be very helpful in developing new technologies, with the space program of the sixties being an obvious example, and there have been thousands of discoveries funded in whole in part by government research grants in this country. I didn’t see anything in the post about regulation, so I don’t know which of the voices in Ron’s head he is arguing internally with about that.
December 23rd, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Ron, I confess I can’t waste time responding to every single one of your queries — especially when they are so clearly answered inprevious blog posts or my book.
One of the singular achievements of government in the past three decades is to regulate us towards much cleaner water and air while promoting the greatest economic engine of any country in the world.
BTW, Bill is not a politician. Not sure where you got that idea.
All major infrastructure advances in this country have occurred thanks to government action or regulation — the railroads, the electric grid, the highways, the internet. Same will be true for a low-carbon energy system.
December 23rd, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Government regulation/subsidy and entrepreneurial opportunity don’t go hand-in-hand.
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Somebody needs to review the history of the Internet. For the first 25 years of its existence, the Internet was a govt funded/subsidized “research sandbox”. That’s right — from the “birth” of the Internet in 1969 (when two computers were networked together) to 1994, the Internet was gov’t funded. In the early days of the internet, the private sector did not show much interest in “over the horizon” technology such as packet-switching communication schemes. Once the Internet matured technologically under government sponsorship, the private-sector picked up the ball and ran with it.
New technologies often require both public and private funding — public funding to start things up, and then later, private funding to apply the new technology.
December 24th, 2007 at 4:31 am
National Security: This is ridiculous. Even if the temp changed 2 or 3 degrees, it doesn’t change anything about national security for the US. Maybe it does for the UN, but we’re not the world’s police anymore. Conservatives don’t want that anymore (which is why Ron Paul is shooting straight up) and the world doesn’t want it anymore.
Jobs: The jobs aspect doesn’t account for how many jobs will be destroyed by mandates from the church of global warming, which will be far more than 40 million - a net loss.
Competitiveness: When you say we gave up our lead on solar cells to japan, german, denmark, and China, what you’re saying is we decided to let them bare the cost of R&D. Now what can we learn from that? We can learn that wind mills kill birds and solar will never be enough to sustain us. What’s next? Let’s start talking about the nuclear option.
Freedom: How do you impose your convoluted version of this “freedom” on the Chinese and the rest of the world? Or do you just want to bankrupt the US so China can take us out entirely?
Family: No, the down side isn’t that we’ve left our kids a better world, it’s that we’ve thrown trillions of dollars down a hole for no reason. And in thirty years when the sun calms down and the climate cools on its own naturally, you jackasses are going to claim that you were right and we’ve started to “fix” it.
Well I’m calling BS on all of it. You want to fix the environment, use your own damned money. NOT tax money.
December 24th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
Wind turbines invented in the USA? I rather think that Poul La Cour (Denmark) and Hütter (Germany) got there first. Many of the early machines installed in California were European.
December 26th, 2007 at 12:09 am
According to his Museum, Mr Poul La Cour systematically investigated wind power from 1891 until his death in 1908.
In the US, Charles Brush manufactured arc lights and other electrical items. His business was bought by Edison and became part of GE. Brush held many patents and built a power producing wind turbine in 1888 and it operated for 20 years.
http://www.telosnet.com/wind/20th.html
In the 1920s he helped his son start another firm that specialized in beryllium products, Brush-Wellman. It still exists today in Cleveland.
Interestingly, Mr. La Cour used his turbine to make hydrogen gas and then repeatedly blew the windows out of his school.