The more I see of Newt Gingrich's "conservative environmentalism," the less impressive it seems. The guy's offering run of the mill, crony capitalist conservatism with a shabby green paint job.
The two top-tier public policy approaches to fighting climate change are:
- supporting green industries, practices, technologies, and infrastructure via subsidies, tax breaks, or mandates, and
- restricting and reducing GHGs via regulation.
The first is the carrot and the second is the stick. Most greens want to use some combination of the two, though they might quibble about the relative priority.
Gingrich's big innovation is to insist that we should use the first but not the second -- all carrots, no sticks. He wants us to fight with one hand tied behind our backs, not because of any plausible argument that regulation wouldn't work in this particular case, but because he is ideologically opposed to regulations that restrict corporate profit-making.
You might say, "David, you're just bashing Newt because he's a conservative and you're not."
No. Not so. Not at all.
You'll note, for one thing, that neither policy approach is "conservative" insofar as conservative still means small-government/libertarian. In that sense, a conservative approach would be something like what Carl Pope (of Sierra Club) and Jerry Taylor (of Cato) wrote about here: removing all subsidies and internalizing all costs. I'm actually quite fond of that sort of solution.
But no, what Gingrich recommends is, in Sean's phrasing, pro-business, not pro-market. He wants to ladle out public money to favored corporations while shielding them from any regulations. This is, I'd add, the same approach to climate change advocated by Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson -- and to a greater extent than generally appreciated, Huckabee and McCain as well. This is what passes for conservative in today's party of economic royalists, but it is not conservative in the original sense.
It leaves Gingrich with very little to offer beyond media-friendly rhetoric. Look at the answer he offers Sierra Magazine (in a roundtable well worth reading) on what the next president and Congress should do first:
Americans are concerned about global climate change, but they want legislation that does not expand the size and severity of federal control of business enterprise. American businesses want to be part of the solution, and they have good ideas that are being implemented. Our business community is already ahead of the American government, so government must become a facilitator of innovation. The federal government could enact creative legislation that keeps businesses on task as we work to develop clean and sustainable alternatives to petroleum. Americans will elect candidates who support real changes in energy policy and market-based innovations that will lead the world to import clean American technology.
Rhetorical fluff aside, it seems that "facilitator of innovation" is the key concept here, and in Gingrich's mind, that translates to "dispensers of subsidies and tax breaks."
And just in case you missed the point, when asked about a carbon tax, Gingrich says:
Tax incentives will work better and faster than tax penalties. To dramatically change carbon emissions, the incentives need to be significant, essentially the most robust incentives we can afford. Such incentives are likely to work most effectively with advancing automotive technology.
In other words: hand-outs. Big hand-outs.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: taking a two-pronged green strategy and cutting off one of the prongs does not demonstrate some clever, innovative new way for Republicans to address climate change. It's how the Republican party operates on every single problem these days. If anything, it just demonstrates how incapable the crony capitalist party is at dealing with public policy issues of any real scope.
Ask Umbra on buying carbon offsets
If REDD can’t save this….
Climate-news poem: Tck, tck, tck edition
Comments
View as Threaded
Sean Casten Posted 2:56 am
16 Jan 2008
So Gingrich's positioning isn't so much refuting the basis of his party as much as it is an acknowledgement that the party has abandoned their libertarian supporters. What is frustrating of course is that they still cloak their positions in the language of libertarianism, and kudos to you for pointing this out wherever you can. It is certainly disingenuous.
At the same time, the Ds have not exactly rushed in to fill that void, which has made the Gingrichian position easier to sustain, since the assertion that the Ds don't support a reduction in the scope of gov't isn't false. What is false is to suggest that this implies that the Rs do.
Permalink
Jerry Taylor Posted 3:30 am
16 Jan 2008
Permalink
David Roberts Posted 3:59 am
16 Jan 2008
So what's the latest thinking among your colleagues as to which evil is less evil these days?
grist.org
Permalink
Jerry Taylor Posted 4:55 am
16 Jan 2008
There are about 100 of us working in the Cato building, and suffice it to say that I have not conducted a poll or anything. But my sense of it is that about half the building will vote for the Libertarian Party candidate out of a sense of obligation. After all, if Cato staffers aren't going to vote Libertarian, then who will?
About 60% of the remainder will vote for Mitt Romney if he gets the nomination - not because they profer him to the LP candidate, but some of us just can't resist picking lesser of evil candidates in a bid to be electorally relevent. If the GOP banner is carried by John McCain, the GOP vote total here drops to about 30-40% of the remainder (primarily due to opposition to McCain's campaign finance stuff and his plans for an eternal war-to-end-all-wars in the Middle East). If - make-believe-God-forbid - Mike Huckabee manages to get the nomination, the GOP vote total aroud here probvably drops to about 10% of the remainder.
Those who aren't voting to the LP or the GOP candidate will be split evenly between those who vote for the Democrat and those who don't vote at all.
But that's just a guess.
But we all agree that there are no right answers here. This is a pick-your-poison question. Would you rather be shot in the head, strangled, electrocuted, run over by a truck, or drowned? You decide!
Permalink
justlou Posted 9:48 pm
16 Jan 2008
I am skeptical that liberals and conservatives will find common ground on defining exactly what is mainstream. And I am skeptical that any mainstream they can agree on in Washington is where we need to be. We need to be finding all kinds of eddies, large and small, to exit the mainstream, 'cause it is going down.
small eddy ecodiversivist
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 10:45 pm
16 Jan 2008
What we can hope for, better, in the future, is a clearer distinction between anthropocentrism and animal-rightsist biocentrism. Presumably all of today's "conservatives" would go for anthropocentrism, but so would very many "liberals."
I would love to talk with Newt about the biodiversity crisis. He surely knows a fair amount about the subject; and from his interest in evolutionary biology, he presumably looks on the issue with great concern. Back in the mid-1990s, when I was volunteering in the vertebrate paleontology halls of the American Museum of Natural History, I recall the excitement on the occasion of Newt's special evening visit, with a tour conducted by the curators.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
Permalink
justlou Posted 10:53 pm
16 Jan 2008
Permalink
nunyerbus Posted 10:56 pm
16 Jan 2008
A carbon tax would likely be an effective strategy because it puts everyone in the position of paying more for fossil-fuel energy. This will stimulate demand for solutions across the population and will leave the door open for flexible, true free market solutions. (You'd think Newt would like that...)
Permalink
Sean Casten Posted 11:38 pm
16 Jan 2008
That invitation could come from Clinton/Obama just as much as it could come from McCain (but admittedly, not many others in the R field). I completely agree with Jerry that the Rs have become a "coalition of big business, neo-con international crusaders, anti-Left cultural warriors, and mystics". But it was not ever thus, and we shouldn't presume it will always be. A proper trouncing of the lunatic fringe in this electoral cycle (Huckabee, Tancredo, Romney) would force the Rs to re-evaluate who gets invited into their big tent, and is not out of the realm of plausibility - just as (Bill) Clinton moved to the center and built a coalition that excluded the lunatic fringe of his own party, and as the Ds progressed in the last electoral cycle by softening their stances on some of their traditional red meat issues (abortion, etc.).
Optimistic, perhaps, but not implausible.
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 12:09 am
17 Jan 2008
But as for the economy "suffering," that can mean all kinds of things. Forthright recommendations that we shift certain of our patterns of consumption definitely deserve to be considered, even though they may be perceived in some quarters to be "insisting that the economy suffer."
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
Permalink
trock Posted 12:51 am
17 Jan 2008
I'm with you on the Carbon Tax, but I think it's important about how we talk about it. It's not that we should have a Carbon Tax, but that of the taxes we do have, taxing Carbon is one of taxes that has benefits along with the revenue we want to pay for government services.
The reason I think it is important to discuss it that way is because lets say that states decided to eliminate the state Sales taxes which brings in about 400 billion dollars a year and replaced it with a Carbon Tax. All kinds of people will be telling us how terrible it is, we now are taxing 400 billion, it will destroy our economy, etc.. But we are already taxing Sales taxes at 400 billion. If we switch the tax from Sales to Carbon we can go along way to helping reduce greenhouse gases from our country, but still have the same tax level.
That's why it's important to not just talk about a Carbon tax, but make sure that people realize that they get other tax reductions with the Carbon tax. It's just like when people called the estate tax the death tax, more people were against it.
Permalink