Did you know there's a blog for green conservatives, called Terra Rossa? It features a post today about Whit Ayres, whom I just missed at this weekend's REP America conference. Excerpt about Whit's conference speech:
...where he said that if his fellow Republicans want to win elections, one thing we should do is reclaim conservation as a calling card. Whit knows his stuff, having directed a lot of traffic at the intersection of good policy and Republican party-building.What Whit does not suggest is that we suddenly start sounding like Al Gore or other lefty enviros. Rather, if Republicans offer common-sense conservative solutions to energy and environmental issues America faces (i.e. solutions that stress markets and entrepreneurship, not taxes, subsidies and more red tape) we can start to pick-up support from Independent voters who in the last congressional election voted Democratic 2-1.
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Rod:
I agree strongly that conservatives need to reclaim the environmental mantle generally, and have a realistic global warming policy specifically.
I don’t think that cap-and-trade is it. Cap-and-trade is economically very close to an inefficient, backdoor tax on carbon. It is the lack of an explicit price tag visible to consumers that makes it attractive to politicians.
I wrote a long article on a technology-based approach to global warming for National Review a few months ago. This article explains why I think such an approach is superior on both the merits and the politics.
http://nrd.nationalreview.com/?q=MjAwNzA2MjU=
I have another article coming out shortly that explicitly compares the costs and benefits of a technology-based approach vs. a regulatory (whether cap-and-trade or explicit carbon tax) approach.
Best,
Jim Manzi
Most environmental problems stem from the "tragedy of the commons", where individuals have no compelling reason to limit their use of common resources and each individual use of common resources seems insignificant when viewed by itself.
I'm going into my 4th year working i water quality and I'm continually amazed at the ignorance of a great majority of people.
Joe Public "Why can't I just dump my used motor oil on the ground, it's my property?"
Me: "Because it will get into the groundwater"
J: "So?"
Me: "Groundwater flow, unfortunately, doesn't recognize your property line"
J: "Oh, I never thougt of that"
Jim,
I'm extremely interested, but I'm not a subcriber to NRO. Are you allowed to distribute copies? Or I'll just go to the library.
I'm very shocked if you have a way to accellerate technological solutions without government spending. I'd love to see $XX million rewards for achievements in environmental research & engineering. I'd want all liscences for the resulting technology being public domain. The prize money and head start should be payment enough. Then our enterprizing citizens can get to solving the problems.
K Street: O'Rourke may have been right years ago, but the number who think this way are greatly diminishing. And as a hardcore-left greenie I'm very vocal about the idiocy of such ideas whenever I (decreasingly) encounter them among my fellows. The skinny white-kid-with-dreadlocks from "Environment Oregon" at my door the other night made plain his frustration with enviros who can't make common cause with folks who make a living directly from natural resources. In fact he'd had some great conversations with former lumber workers who'd halfway slammed the door in his face as soon as he said "environment." There seems to be enormous common ground right now, and all sides need to keep it at the front of our minds and find solutions.
I think most environmental problems require significant government action, which is a major problem for the current Republican party. They've preached the evils of government and the virtues of economic self-interest so long that when a problem arises that requires government action they're left unable to advocate the full course of required fixes, which in my mind include both acceptable market-based and entrepreneurial solutions, and unacceptable (to the GOP) regulation and taxes.
Bingo. Market-based solutions might work after the market is created by the government. That means taxing cars with low gas mileage, that means impact fees for new houses based on the estimated energy use of said houses, that means a steadily tightening market of pollution credits which means the price keeps increasing, and so on.
And it means subsidies and rebates and the government covering early-adopter costs to get the ball rolling. As I've said before, right now the government should start putting solar panels up on all its buildings. Yes, it won't save any money, and it might even take more energy than it uses, but the point isn't that, the point is to drive down the manufacturing cost of solar power, to overcome the early-adopter penalty in price. So that when people are building their home, they have a cost-effective choice.
As I am, in fact, on the left side of things, you'll notice I suggested taxing businesses that don't reduce, but rewarding people when they do reduce. Obviously, this could be a point where the left and right differ, but it isn't actually that important how we do it, we just need to set up some sort of system that makes pollution no longer free, and makes non-clear energy more expensive than clean energy. While making sure we aren't crippling both people and businesses with costs too quickly. And then the market can step in and handle it.
I am pretty much Libertarian in my thinking, but I am also in favor of conserving our resources. I think that both sides of the aisle miss a lot on environmental issues by using ecology as a political pawn. It's time that those of us who still posses a modicum of sanity to come to the forefront and help create some better policies.
Thanks for the great post and the great site!
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