By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Monday, November 01, 2021
President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and
other world leaders such as Emmanuel Macron and Recep Erdogan are gating in
Scotland for a climate summit. You know, the usual thing. Once again, we are at
a “moment of truth” and taking our “last best chance” to save the blah blah
blah, you’ve heard it all before. The results are surely going to be
unenforceable, meaningless, or poorly understood goals. Maybe China will
pretend to comply with them. Maybe it won’t bother. World leaders will be
scowled at by neurodivergent children. World leaders will pretend to like and appreciate the
scowling.
All this talk of reducing energy consumption is happening
at a time when European leaders have been warning their publics that, well, you
better have blankets and some candles, because this winter might see the
arrival of green-led shutdowns sometime around Advent.
Politics is rooted in our emotions, especially when these
emotions touch on our moral intuitions. And no issue is more charged with deep
moral intuitions than environmentalism. I think the explanation for this is
that it is the one issue on which the Left can talk earnestly about leaving an
inheritance to posterity. Normally, the progressive worldview follows Jefferson
in asking “whether one generation of men has a right to bind another,” and it
answers that they definitely do not. This goes double for unborn human babies,
who have no moral claims on their parents whatsoever, unless it’s the claim
that they recycle and buy sustainable fabrics and foods.
Conservatives have tended to shy away from all talk of an
environmental emergency, because it so often presents itself as a form of
disaster communism. The proletariat, having failed to live up to its reputation
as a revolutionary subject, prefers instead to see a protected inner party take
control of all planetary economic activity — which is to say, all activity —
for our own good.
In previous decades, the moral impetus was mostly about
asceticism and the abjuration of mammon. Humans consumed too much energy. They
were selfish. The Limits to Growth and other doomsday books
basically say that self-seeking people and their supposed needs are the
problem. The punishments that nature would eventually dole out to us were like
punishments for our sins.
In more recent years, we’ve passed through a phase of
appealing to the ideas of balance and harmony, urging “sustainable”
development. And now we’re galloping toward something else. The Green New Deal
and other policy initiatives seek to flip the script entirely. Now,
environmentalism is an “abundance agenda.” Once you guarantee basic incomes and
raise standards of living via redistribution, the people will consent to even
more radical decarbonization. Clean-energy sources will provide even higher
standards of living.
The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton argued that a conservative
environmentalism would have to be rooted in oikophilia, the love of
one’s home. And it would be a bottom-up affair, arising not from distant
treaties and bureaucracies that were insulated from public opinion but from
genuinely free people who acted as stewards and who governed themselves through
their legislatures.
“The aim of a conservative policy must, therefore, be to
achieve a managed environment, in which good results arise spontaneously from
what ordinary people do,” he wrote. “This means maintaining or creating the
feedback loops that cause people to bear the cost of their own activities, and
to prevent them from passing that cost to future generations.”
An arch-traditionalist, Scruton initially approached
environmental policy in a nearly libertarian way. He suggested, for instance,
undoing the nexus of regulations that favor supermarkets and large food
producers over smaller farmers and markets. He wanted simple and legible torts
that allowed environmental costs to be transparent so individuals and
institutions could adjust on their own. He was sensitive to the way that
regulation from above tended to be captured by well-connected lobbyists, or by
moral fads that were disconnected from our own lives and concerns.
Environmental policy is leading to strange absurdities.
It is leading to hideously inefficient wind turbines destroying and unsettling
rural landscapes — quite literally a form of green littering. It has led to
patterns of absurd subsidies for luxury sports cars. And it regularly leads to
choosing newly ruinous forms of pollution to avoid unfashionable forms of
pollution. Two decades ago, a British government used subsidies and taxes to
encourage the adoption of diesel cars because they emitted less carbon dioxide,
even though those engines were much worse polluters overall and a far worse
threat to human health. Now, the government is trying to phase out diesel.
Green policy, divorced from reality, creates waste of its own.
One of the reasons why environmental policy is such a
mess is simply that conservatives aren’t in the game at all. It’s time to allow
that sense of love of home, and our concern for posterity, to drive us toward a
better policy of managing the beautiful land and resources we’ve been given.
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