Saturday, September 16, 2006
Teal Conservatives
A few weeks ago, I found myself doing a strange thing: I watched Preston Manning being interviewed by David Suzuki on the CBC.
First of all, I don't like the CBC. Second of all, I really don't like David Suzuki. Finally, since I'm an old-line PC Tory, I haven't previously liked Preston Manning either, although I'm starting to warm up to the guy by small degrees.
The show was a discussion of the environmental effects of the Alberta oilsands development. Manning was preaching a new breed of politics - teal politics, he dubbed it. Blue and green, conservatives with environmental concerns.
I found the show, subtly, very funny because you can almost see Suzuki's head about to explode as he tries to compute this thoroughly unfamiliar situation. The guy is usually such an unabashed propagandist and he is used to having guests do nothing but feed his hysterical rhetoric. But here he had to deal with Manning, a conservative who was agreeing with him on environmental policy but who wasn't afraid to challenge Suzuki's political rhetoric. Suzuki clearly didn't quite know how to handle this.
Despite the noodle-twisting aspects of the show, I must admit I like this notion of teal conservatives and I think it will be a growing trend. Conservatives are, first and foremost, supposed to be about prudence and long-term thinking, but we certainly haven't acted that way with regard to the environment over the last 20 or so years.
Instead, conservatives around the world have reflexively taken the approach of hiding our heads in the sand over these issues. We are always very quick to believe the first piece of propaganda (like Michael Crichton's State of Fear) that allows us a little more time to deny reality.
I used to be in that headspace, but I write articles for an engineers' journal. Engineers are very cautious, small-c conservative types as scientists go. They are responsible for bridges staying standing and water systems staying unpolluted, so they don't jump on bandwagons or make any sort of radical change overnight.
A few years ago, I was assigned to do a story that would feature engineers on both sides of the climate change issue. Trouble was, I couldn't find engineers on either side. I found them all in the middle. Every researcher I talked to said that climate change was definitely happening, that at least part of it was due to natural causes, that human activity may or may not have contributed to it, that there was probably very little humans could do to mitigate the change and that we needed to get started right now to adapt to climate change.
Of course, then as now, both the Right and the Left were saying and doing things that were completely counterproductive. Right-wingers were burying their heads in the sand and shouting "Garbage science! Garbage science!" whenever the topic of climate change came up. The Left, on the other hand, played the heavy, pulled out every guilt tactic about humanity's polluting ways and proposed all sorts of greenhouse gas reduction strategies that were politically, economically and scientifically not feasible.
On climate change, I firmly believe, on the basis of what my engineer friends tell me, that our only realistic response is adaptation not mitigation. But that doesn't mean we should ignore greenhouse gases. They cause a range of other problems, most notably acid rain. Some may recall that Brian Mulroney went toe-to-toe with the US to get continental air quality standards to help prevent acid rain in Eastern Canada. Now the scourge has reared its head again in Western Canada, thanks to those f**king filthy, horrific, crime-against-humanity oilsands developments in Alberta.
But don't bother telling this to today's conservatives, 'cause all they will do is holler "Garbage science!" at the top of their little ostrich lungs.
In keeping with the theme of this blog, I think the main problem is propaganda. The Right is conditioned to view the environment as a soft, "pinko" topic and therefore close their minds to it. We need to change the message. Bad environmental policy is, first of all, bad long term planning. If you owned a business and decided to save money by not hiring a janitorial service, you might have higher margins for awhile, but eventually you would lose money as your customers started avoiding your filthy stinking mess. Also, it's a public health issue. If somebody pissed in the civic water supply, the proper conservative tough law-and-order response would be to throw the hoodlum in jail. Shouldn't that logic carry through on a larger scale?
OK, let the abuse begin. I bet any money both my left and right wing friends will hate this piece ;-)
posted by The Propagandist @ 8:51 AM,
3 Comments:
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At 9:42 PM,
X said...
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Well, most right wing conservatives believe "the market" will fix it all.
On the environment, pollutions actually deal with externalities - aka market failures.
Environmental regulations are needed to correct those "spill-over effects" - where conservatives believe most government regulations are bad.
......and there you have it. No "right-minded conservatives" would be proponents of environmental regulations. -
At 10:50 PM,
X said...
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Well, to prove my arguments, here is what I found just a while ago, from Mankiw's blog:
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/09/cbo-on-global-warming.html -
At 5:41 AM,
Liam O'Brien said...
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Not sure if my response will get you a collection on that bet, but I think it's a little unfair to say that right-of-centre conservatives who are critical of things like Kyoto can sum it up with "Garbage Science." There are concerns with several facets of the cultishly strong orthodoxy that has built around the idols of Al Gore, David Suzuki, Kyoto, and the rest. There is much debate about how to best explain what has happened to the planet's climate and whether any number of other phenomena are involved. There is much debate, even if we accept man-made emissions as a significant contribtuing factor, on which emissions are involved here. Finally, and so far very much overlooked, there is an emerging and very interesting debate about what's the best way to address whatever is happening here. Your point about adaptation isn't lost on the all hands in scientific community. If you haven't already, I recommend you read "The Skeptical Environmentalist" by Bjorn Lomborg and his other works. He does a half decent survey of several environemntal discussions and problems and offers a refreshing perspective on it. It's just one part of what needs ot be a much longer reading list on environmental issues, but it's an essential part. . .
