The Right's Road to Nowhere on Climate
Our plans and projects are going to be disrupted more and more often by weather-related disasters. Will Republicans even attempt a response?
When we planned an ambitious family vacation out west nearly a year ago—our first since before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic—it seemed like we were being smart. The summer of 2021 in Montana was hot and filled with fires that left the air thick with smoke in many places by early July. So we would visit early, in the second half of June 2022, when the high country of Glacier National Park is often wetter than a month later. We’d deal with the cold and dampness in return for diminished risk of fire and then close out our visit with a few days at Yellowstone National Park, a first for our nearly grown kids.
Scuttled Plans and Projects
Things didn’t quite turn out as we hoped. Unlike last year, this has been an incredibly wet and cold spring in the Montana mountains. Glacier NP received three feet of snow earlier this month, slowing down the always-colossal task of clearing Going-to-the-Sun Road, which was nowhere near open for our visit this week. But at least we’ve been able to do some very chilly hiking and rafting on the park’s perimeter.
The same can’t be said for Yellowstone NP, which, as you may have heard, was slammed with torrential floods early last week that shut down the park entirely, washing away multiple roads and burying others under mudslides and downed trees in the northern half of the park, and shutting down the north entrance for what could be years. Entrances at the southern end of the park are scheduled to open Wednesday, with restrictions designed to limit traffic in the hobbled park, but they are roughly a five-hour drive away from where we are staying. So the kids won’t get to see Old Faithful, the astonishing wildlife, and the park’s other spectacular sights, at least not on this trip.
Which is disappointing but obviously not a catastrophe. In Montana there is natural beauty everywhere you look. We will have no trouble finding alternative things to do. And anyway, as my father has always said (with a touch of hard-earned cynicism), “Man plans, fate laughs.” There’s no controlling the weather. Some fire seasons are worse than others. There can be June blizzards in Glacier National Park. You never know when a stretch of heavy rain will wash out roads built through wilderness along rushing western rivers. It happens. That’s life.
Yet there’s also a way in which my family’s experience this past week has given us a personal glimpse of a reality that awaits all of us. We tried to plan an excursion in response to last summer’s miniature environmental calamity (fires) only to have our expectations scuttled by a different miniature environmental calamity (floods). That’s our future—trying to go about our lives in the world as normally as we can while our plans and projects are ever-more-frequently upended by ever-more severe thunderstorms, hurricanes, typhoons, blizzards, tornadoes, heat waves, freezes, fires, floods, droughts, and famines.
That’s a more realistic assessment of our common future than what we hear from those who fret about an apocalypse poised to render the Earth uninhabitable for human beings. We aren’t about to be wiped out. We’re about to be forced to live with greater weather-related uncertainty, unpredictability, and extremes (along with their unhappy human consequences) than any of us are accustomed to.
Are we ready for it? I’m honestly not sure. But what really inspires head-scratching is contemplating how the right will respond to it all.
A Preference for Trolling and Reaction
Parties and politicians of the center-left and left are clear and consistent: They think the government has a crucial role to play in addressing the problem. We need regulations to force cuts in emissions that are bound to make climate change worse. We need to tax fossil fuels to force a rapid transition to clean and renewable energy sources, which should be heavily subsidized by the public sector. We should build sea walls to protect coastlines and discourage development in flood-prone areas. And so forth—all to try and slow down the global temperature rise and forestall the worst consequences of warming.
What about the right? Less than two decades ago, plenty of conservative policy wonks, while often downplaying the threat of climate change, had ideas about how to address it, through carbon taxes and other efforts at nudging civil society and the market in a more environmentally friendly direction.
But that now seems like ancient history. The Trump administration’s number one environmental priority seemed to be trolling the left by reversing Obama administration regulations, breaking promises to cut emissions, and tripling down on fossil fuel extraction. What was once an in-your-face populist provocation associated with Sarah Palin—“Drill, Baby, Drill!”—has become the Republican Party’s sole contribution to thinking about the environmental future. Which means it isn’t thinking about the environmental future at all.
So, for a moment, let’s imagine the Democratic nightmare. Well, maybe not the Democratic nightmare, which involves Trump and a scenario in which democracy itself is overturned, but a bad one nonetheless: The Republican Party wins control of both houses of Congress in 2022 and then Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis takes the White House in 2024 with a 60-plus-seat majority in the Senate, giving the GOP complete control of the federal government with comfortable margins.
Unlike the Trump administration, which was led by a real-estate mogul and reality-show star who knew and cared nothing at all about most aspects of public policy, the DeSantis administration would be staffed by people from the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Claremont Institute, the Manhattan Institute, American Affairs, and even an Ivy League faculty member or two.
What would this smarter and more knowledgeable band of populist conservatives do to respond to climate change? I honestly have no idea at all—and kind of assume they’ll do nothing beyond reacting to climate-related disasters when they happen, as they are bound to, more and more frequently. Keep drilling. Keep working to make it easier and cheaper for people to buy and drive gasoline-powered cars. Allow business to do what it wants without concern for environmental consequences. And then clean up after the floods and fires and storms that wipe out communities from sea to shining sea.
In a nutshell: Do nothing to prevent the worst from happening, and then react when it does, and then react again, and again, ad infinitum.
Am I wrong about this? Is anyone on the right writing anything about climate change, its consequences, and how our country, civilization, and yes, government should prepare for and at least try to slow it down? And even if there is someone whose work does this, would a DeSantis administration dare to hire and listen to him or her?
I doubt it very much. And that means that, in addition to confronting a painful environmental future, our country is confronting a possible political future in which we’ve resigned ourselves to absorbing blow after blow from worsening natural disasters as if doing so is just the unavoidable, inevitably rising cost of living and doing business on our planet.
That’s certain one way to respond to climate change—by not responding at all. Until recently, I assumed we could do better than that. But maybe I was wrong.
DeSantis hasn't been as horrible on environmental issues as on culture war stuff. It is possible that he would push some modest progress on the environment while kicking up a cloud of culture war issues that keeps the base distracted.
What I worry about is that he'd set up programs that penalize or ignore blue state disasters--for example no Federal help for wildfires in western Blue states, but lots of help for hurricanes and floods in Texas and Florida.
I don't see a need to rush. It's probably a smarter move at this point to make some investments in certain technologies and occasional regulatory changes, but US carbon emissions are declining and have been for some time. The vast majority of the new emissions are going to come from developing countries. Any attempts to stop developing countries from, well, developing will probably benefit China's position in the world and undermine the US. They are also likely to be ineffective. Our current position seems about right, though of course it's possible that the DeSantis admin will loosen regulations to an extent that would stop this decline, though it appears that even the Trump admin saw declining levels of emissions even as the population grew (it looks like it was basically flat before COVID too).
I'm also curious what policies that the left wants to enact would actually be worth the tradeoffs. The "Green New Deal" is not promising. Carbon taxes would crush the economy and fall mostly on consumables for the poorest people. The much-promised "green jobs" seem mostly not-well-paying and were considerably overhyped in terms of their economic benefits. The reality was less "coal miner gets retrained as high-earning wind turbine technician" and more like "coal miner gets to drive a truck carrying insulation material or recycling."
Energy needs can be taken care of easily by nuclear power, but because the left has decided to reject the science on nuclear power we aren't getting those built; California, Germany, and other enclaves of Green Party energy are even shutting them down. Republicans seem very much open to more nuclear power, while Democrats are not. Solar seems like a decent idea (better than the ugly and inefficient wind turbines), but solar farms are often being held up by environmentalists.
Electric vehicle mandates and government incentives, as of now, are a massive sop to the rich who can afford to buy them. It's amusing to see the huge empty lots of "EV only" spaces filled by just a few well-off people with Teslas while the plebes park far away in the poor lots. Maybe this will change in the future--and the government should have some role in this (wasn't it John McCain who supported a prize to innovate for better batteries?), but the current system seems like it's designed by limousine liberals and those who live in the tiny handful of walkable neighborhoods (who, incidentally, seem to run the entire Democratic Party). And let's not even get started on the utter boondoggle that is high-speed rail in California.
The left's rhetoric on climate change is also completely over-the-top at this point. Ezra Klein's unintentionally hilarious column on middle-aged liberals using climate change as an excuse not to give up their Dual-Income, No Kids lifestyles was a great example of the weird ways that the left uses climate to try to justify a whole range of things. I've seen teenagers who seem legitimately traumatized after being exposed to the "world is ending" rhetoric that's being irresponsibly thrown around by doom-mongerers on the left. The world is not ending; it's changing, and humans can and will adapt.
I would like to see the US government do some things that might get me thrown out of office if I were a Republican politician. It makes sense to strongly encourage carbon-capture research, find ways to make things reasonably more energy-efficient, and encourage competition in the electric-car sector. Maybe the populist right would do some of those things, if they appointed non-cranks. And it does make sense to coordinate climate policy with other countries, though I doubt much will get done in practice and that seems to be a non-starter on the right these days. But to throw all the blame at Republicans at the moment seems to be an inaccurate diagnosis of the situation.