Where are the Conservative Solutions to Climate Change?

Where are the Conservative Solutions to Climate Change?

BY ERIK VANCE

CATEGORIES: CLEAN ENERGY, CLIMATE SECURITY, GLOBAL WARMING DENIAL, GREENHOUSE GAS, INHOFE WATCH

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 16, 2009 @ 12:40PM PT

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For my introductory post for Change.org, I would like to begin by issuing a challenge wrapped in a question. It is a challenge to all those voters out there who call themselves “conservative.” If you are reading this please help me to understand something: Why aren't conservatives more into fighting global warming?

It seems to me like a perfect conservative issue. For one thing, it's all about efficiency and true conservatives hate waste. For another, it's about not conducting dramatic experiments with earth's atmosphere - and old fashioned conservatives believe in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Lastly, all the likely solutions are going to come from innovation, something conservatives go nuts for. Yet after years of scientific consensus, I still haven't seen a conservative climate platform. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not a polemic for any political side. Truth is, I would vote for anyone who had some ideas that seemed like they would work. I’m what you might call a died-in-the-wool member of the Nerd Party (Geekacrat maybe? Nerdocan?) And as a member of that august party I am less interested in election results than I am lab results, peer pressure than I am peer review, and abstractions than I am abstracts.

So as Nerdocan, I am following the run up to Copenhagen very carefully. And as I hear all the various potential solutions, I keep wondering: Where are the conservative solutions here? Please don’t tell me that the conservative platform is that climate change isn't happening, because the conservatives I know are smarter than that. Those conservatives (usually other Nerdocrats) have advanced degrees and are generally very clever. They can look at solid scientific evidence just as easily as I can.

My only answer to this is that political storms have so clouded the atmosphere of atmospheric chemistry that no one can see beyond the vestibule of their own little political tent. Yet hidden behind the bluster of the cable news nutcases, I am willing to bet that conservative America could come up with some bang-up solutions for battling climate change.

Tell you what. I am willing to concede that it is possible that a rise of four degrees in global temperatures may not, as Paul Krugman wrote recently, give New Hampshire the climate of North Carolina. Liberals, after all, have been known to exaggerate for the sake of headlines just like anybody else. But conservative conservation has to meet me halfway. Where are the fiscally responsible climate change options? There is, after all a lot of cold hard cash to be made by saving the planet. Why is the business sector trying to pretend that coal, a technology pioneered in the Bronze Age, is the energy of the future?

Let me help you get started. Do you know the state with the largest wind energy above it? North Dakota. Runners up? Texas, Kansas, South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, Wyoming, Oklahoma (in that order.) These states couldn’t be more red if you cut them open and applied leeches. Yet these are the very states opposing climate change legislation. Senator James Inhofe (warming denier and patron saint of the scientifically clueless) is from number eight on the list.

As conservatives, I would think that conservation would be your stock and trade. After all, maintaining the status quo means maintaining the level of tree cover and atmospheric CO2, right? Since when do conservatives want to take a huge gamble with the climate of the planet? You don’t like Kyoto? Fine, neither do I – what do you suggest? You say the Environmental Protection Agency is a bunch of pinkos? Okay maybe they are – how else can we incentivize our culture to protect us from pollution? How about a right-wing version of offsets or cap and trade? This is the debate that I long to hear, not some ill-informed bickering about statistics that every decent scientist knows are true.

So there it is. The Geekocrat vote is officially up in the air. But don’t think that you can paste some business-should-police-itself nonsense to the platform and expect us to buy it. And don’t expect us to take it from science neophytes like Christopher Horner (favorite climate “expert” with no formal education in science.) Geekocrats love numbers and hard data. We like gray areas and give you credit when you fail as long as you follow a logical path to get there. Step up to the plate. Time is running out and the ice is running thin.