Environmental Policy

Issues that encompass the environment, biodiversity and energy reform are among the most serious challenges confronting our nation today. In our political and policy discussions on these issues Americans seem to have split into two camps that simply shout at one another.

Why? For decades now, conservatives have abandoned the issue of the environment. In the face of the Left’s big-government, bureaucratic, litigious, coercive, high-tax and burdensome regulatory schemes which erode private property rights and individual freedom, Republicans have stood on the sidelines shouting, “No!” without offering competing solutions which fit our values. We end up sending the signal that we are anti-environment, anti-biodiversity and anti-energy reform.

Yet if one takes the time to examine the polling available on these issues, one can find a third camp into which the majority of Americans fall and to which no one is talking. Consider the following:

73 percent of Americans believe we can have both a healthy economy and a healthy environment

79 percent of Americans agree that we will solve our environmental problems faster and cheaper with innovation and new technology than with more litigation and more government regulation

•72 percent of Americans agree that entrepreneurs are more likely to solve America’s energy and environmental problems than bureaucrats

•68 percent of Americans agree that we don’t need to raise taxes to clean up our environment

•79 percent of Americans support giving large financial prizes to companies and individuals who invent new ways to successfully cut pollution

Conservation and a clean environment are supported by a majority of Americans, yet they don’t trust bureaucrats to do it. If anything, the views of the American people are consistent with conservative values and we must engage in the environmental debate with superior policies or be trapped in the constraining and destructive labyrinth of regulation the Left is constructing. Don’t believe me? Think about the Superfund program, which was supposed to clean up toxic sites. It is a cumbersome, rule-bound program in which billions upon billions of dollars have been absorbed in lawsuits, litigation and red tape instead of simply encouraging engineers and companies to get the job done efficiently. Trial lawyers have been getting rich at the expense of both the environment and the American taxpayer.

In his book Earth in the Balance, former Vice President Al Gore wrote, “We have titled so far toward individual rights and so far away from any sense of obligation that it is now difficult to muster an adequate defense of any rights vested in the community at large or the nation – much less rights properly vested in all humankind or in posterity.” What? Anyone who loves freedom and individual rather than collective rights has to ask, “Where do the rights of community, humankind and posterity reside? Where are they vested? Who is the arbiter of these rights?”

The very real danger in the Left’s pursuit of these collectivist and non-democratic “rights” is that our individual liberty and private property rights will be sacrificed in favor of what some elites in Washington, DC – or foreign capitals and international institutions – think is best for us, rather than allowing a free people to make their own choices.

No, rather than abandoning the debate, conservatives must embrace and fully engage in the debate. We must develop real world solutions that are positive, market-oriented, non-bureaucratic and respect the American traditions of individual and private property rights.

Presently, Congress is considering a cap and trade bill (the Waxman, Markey bill) that will substantially raise taxes on Americans while restricting our energy sources, which, of course, will raise the price of energy even more. Studies have shown that if implemented, the cap and trade bill will add an estimated $1,500 to $3,000 per year to each family’s energy bills. A similar bill (the Boxer, Warner, Lieberman bill) was rightly rejected in the last Congress.

There is hope. A recent study conducted by researchers at Yale and George Mason Universities found that 18 percent of Americans are so alarmed by the pronouncements of the high priests of climate change (Mr. Gore, et al) they would strongly support any and all policies that would reduce carbon emissions. Any policy, that is, except cap and trade, which had support from only 11 percent of survey respondents.

People instinctively know that schemes such as cap and trade are little more than stealth tax hikes on our energy consumption, which negatively impact family budgets, drive energy-intensive business (manufacturing) overseas, and make the cost of goods we produce and grow more expensive. That suppresses demand and slows economic growth.

Conservatives’ solutions to our environmental problems must combine concern for the environment and all the wonders of our natural world with a concern for freedom and economic growth. We have a convincing case that biodiversity and the environment can be better protected by embracing a system that encourages science, technology, entrepreneurship, creativity and free-markets, rather than the Left’s system with its focus on big government, more bureaucrats, more red tape, more litigation, more coercion, more taxes which results in less freedom and a stagnant economy.