What's Up with Global Climate Change and the Right Wing?
I can understand that certain issues break down along liberal/conservative lines: abortion, health care reform, the death penalty, same-sex marriage, etc. But conservatives almost universally reject the theory of global warming, and, for reasons I’ll get to shortly, that surprises me.
I hope you’ll read the article I’ve linked here, explaining how Robert Hurt, who won Tom Perriello’s House seat in Virginia, says clean-energy legislation would fail to “do anything except harm people.” The tea party’s “Contract From America” calls proposed climate policies “costly new regulations that would increase unemployment, raise consumer prices, and weaken the nation’s global competitiveness with virtually no impact on global temperatures.”
But why are well educated people like these taking this position? Being “conservative,” shouldn’t we have expected the precise opposite? Don’t people with conservative approaches to life normally buy insurance, and take general precautions against risk? Since the idea of global warming is accepted by nearly all scientists studying the issue, wouldn’t prudence require conservatives — or anyone — to at least hedge their bets?
I’m hoping for a few comments here that will shed light on the phenomenon.
It suprises me too, the most reasonable explanation came from the late Michael Crichton in his book “State of Fear”. Short version is that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the left was left with no arguments, so they jumped into Global Warming but, since there is no hard data to prove the GW theory, they later moved along to other topics or something like that.
When I was young, the tale was about the new ice age. Doesn’t matter.
As an Engineer and a Scientist, I know that neither climate or earthquakes can be modeled or accurately predicted, that’s why I liked so much your mink example and the discussion about long term sustaintabilty. In my view, they key issue is that regardless climate change opinions, we must switch to renewable energies as soon as they become available.
The challenge with understanding “conservatives” or “proto-fascists” – or whatever label you might pick for this aggressively anti-intellectual, militantly corporate-aligned, basely fear mongering, and fiercely intolerant movement – is the necessity we feel to explain it rationally and logically. It seems to me that, at the core, there are only two rational explanations, and both are irrational states – blind greed and a rabid lust for power.
The internal contradictions (hypocrisies) of this movement are staggering:
1) A hatred and/or fear of big government – except for a bloated and parasitic military (my vast respect for the honor and service of the fine men and woman in the rank and file not withstanding), and except for our massively intrusive “national security” apparatus and our increasingly militarized municipal police forces;
2) A misdirected obsession with “freedom” – except for working people organizing themselves for collective bargaining, or citizens exercising the First, Fourth, Sixth and a few other inconvenient Amendments, as well as the most personal liberty in terms of what you do in your bedroom and with your body and who you choose to marry, and how (or whether) you choose to worship;
3) A fierce disgust for promotion of the general welfare (what they like to derisively call “entitlements” like Social Security which is paid by the recipients and by employers, and like pensions which are paid in exchange the labor of the recipients and are nothing more than delayed compensation) – except for the free and excellent health coverage and pensions that all House and Senate members receive for themselves for life, and the unfathomable sums in welfare payments to corporate interests as in the TARP bailouts over which Mr. Bush presided;
4) Fiscal responsibility and living within means – but not when their party is in power, and then debt and deficit magically cease to be such pressing concerns… unless they go toward significant investment in the general welfare of the population in the form of free, high quality education and university programs (like the GI Bill that directly contributed the widespread prosperity our nation enjoyed in the 1950’s and 1960’s), or in the form of infrastructure and endeavors for the common good of the all the nation’s people, like the national highway system and public funded medical research;
5) A free market – except for the powerful interests that pave golden paths into political office (on both sides of the aisle) and that are then allowed to exercise monopolistic market dictatorships and rampant restraint of trade while accepting enormous advantages in subsidies, tax breaks, loopholes and the like…
These are just a few examples out of the dozens that glare in the eyes of even a casual observer with a free mind. The “ownership society” rhetoric so lamely touted a few years back has taken root in reality as the owned society, where paper beasts we call corporations now claim our birthrights while they seek to deny them to us – to the very humans they were originally intended (and required by law) to faithfully serve – where every capturable aspect of modern life has a price tag that steepens terminally, and the common good is shunted into the realm of distant and fading memory.
This monetized and commodified state of affairs reminds me of a warning outside the ant’s colony in T.H. White’s The Book of Merlin. The book concerns the legend of King Arthur’s childhood when Merlin raised him, and taught him valuable lessons by turning him into various animals – including an ant. Over every entrance to the hive was the message “Everything not compulsory is prohibited!” Yet in today’s ‘modern’ human society, the strident message everywhere before us seems to read ‘everything not commercialized will be ignored’.
Indeed, all objects, venues, organizations and events, from our birth to our food to our healthcare, shelter and clothing, from our labor and our talents to our bodies and our beliefs, from organized religion (itself a contradiction in terms) to the military (which is in truth little better now than organized murder), and finally to our deaths, natural or otherwise, and our burials and cremations – all have a tidy little price tag firmly affixed to them (and most often printed with a fraudulent number).
The one insane and lethal exception…? The very natural world upon which we all depend (however removed from it we believe ourselves to be), and the all the trillions of little cuts and poisonings by which we have for so long been gradually but inarguably murdering our priceless and precious Mother Earth. These all escape the wretched ledgers by which everything else is measured, but only because those who would make themselves the authors of our fates have determined that it is not to their advantage to expose the “externalized” costs of their rampant pillage and defecation.
Every ton of toxin dumped into the ocean; every hectare of rainforest razed, every mountaintop scraped into riverbeds, every square mile of old growth arboreal forest cut down for paper, lumber and toothpicks; every billion barrels of crude ancient sunlight sucked from beneath the feet of momentarily conquered peoples; every species of fish hunted down to genetically unsound numbers; the massive die-offs of birds and frogs and bees, and every other form of splendid life that meets it’s untimely end and counts as yet another strand severed in that great and beautiful web in which we all rest – all these costs are consistently hidden and obscured in order that no precise demand may be made for their accounting and reparation.
Imagine, just as one notorious a well-known example, where oil firms would be if they were forced not only pay a fair price to the populations whose natural resource they extract, but also to fully compensate for the grievous injuries they continually inflict on all the victims – human and otherwise – of their purposeful designs and their wayward carelessness. For that matter, consider where they would be without the $550 billion a year in tax breaks and subsidies and forgiven lease payments – not to mention the uncalculated value of the lives, bodies and minds of those hundreds of thousands of men and women who on the basis of honor and the poverty draft join our military and defend these firms’ access to the resources they exploit. Certainly, were all these “externalized” costs factored honestly into their balance sheets, they would never again occupy the loftily profitable position to which they have for so long and so viciously clung.
Perhaps I rant overmuch here, but it’s a subject about which I care and think a great deal – and one over which I believe not very much should take precedence. After all, what’s more important than the rescue of Nature, our only foundation, and Liberty in its true form, not the cheap simulation now branded as “Freedom”, from the pernicious greed and trained ignorance that otherwise will soon consume and destroy all?
At bottom, I believe that Americans – that all human beings – care deeply about each other, and that our natural instinct is to cooperate and share and help each other. If that weren’t our nature, we would never have emerged from the lawlessness of the jungle to make communal villages and complex societies. We have seen and felt and lived the reality of forming a more perfect union, establishing justice and ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
Shall we now listen and adhere to the ancient demons of our primordial heritage, and return to the frailty of a beastly nature? Indeed, shall we sink further even than that, and become the mortally enslaved fodder of megalithic corporations – those very legal fictions we ourselves had once required only be created to serve We the People?
Liberty or death isn’t just a quaint phrase from our national mythology; it’s the narrowing set of options before us today. Choice is the most sacred thing we ever had. Time is short.