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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (187330)	5/25/2006 12:34:18 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 281500

So far I have seen no real (read action oriented) indication that "conservatives" give a hoot about the environment. I would disagree with that. Conservatives have been at the forefront of wildlife preservation and conservation. Of course, it might also have to do with the fact that many of them like to hunt... ;0) One other problem I see with many liberal proposals is that they generally consist of admonishment of people's lifestyles. Face it, what most liberals are trying to do is use governmental mechanisms to tell people that they have to make fundamental, and often sacrificial, choices about their lifestyles. And most people are perfectly willing to say they are "for environmentalism" right up until the point where you tell them they have the drastically alter their current lifestyles. And the process of educating them is slow, laborious, and very costly in itself (market and education expenses). Then we have proposals like Kyoto, although great is "theory", however, it almost utterly omits developing nations and places the greatest burden upon the developed world to spend inordinate amounts of money in research and pollution mitigation technologies, which the rest of the world (which is far more populous) gets a "pass". And their proposals are often technologically "sexy", like solar and wind power, but realistically inefficient and costly. They tell you Solar and Wind are inexhaustible, but they don't tell you that the sun only shines 1/2 the day, and the wind doesn't always blow. Here's a pretty good explanation of the difference between "conservative environmentalism" and "liberal environmentalism": It would, however, be disastrous and absurd to simply adopt the environmental views of the opposition. Conservatives rightly sense that there is something deeply wrong with these views, even if they tend to draw the wrong conclusions from this intuition. Conservatives frequently seem to dismiss environmentalism as such as a mistaken ideal. But the fundamental and inescapable fact is that, in the language of economics, environmental protection is a good. This is true by nature and not, as with things like affirmative action, according to what ideology one happens to subscribe to. Nobody has a sincere preference for a worse environment; some people just prefer different tradeoffs for getting a better one. What we fundamentally need is a way to tell the public that we are environmentalists, just conservative ones. This requires a clear conception of how conservative environmentalism, while differing from the liberal variety, is still serious environmentalism. I propose the following: (10 points of conservative environmentalism follows) frontpagemag.com Now I'm personally "wishy-washy" on Carbon Credits, but I support the concept. Of course, I also believe that in the face of the Oceanic Fertilization process, such Carbon Credit markets would collapse without government intervention to force the free-market not to depend upon long-term phytoplankton enhancement in the oceans. But I think my position is the pragmatic one.. We have two problems we're facing.. GW and depleted marine life due to a "tragegy of the commons" mentality and little enforceable global regulation. Thus, the pragmatic solution is to attempt to undertake the fertilization process with a two-tiered goal.. replenishing the ocean nutrients where depletion is indicated (maybe from lack of nutrient rich upwellings caused by warming oceans) and attempting to sequestor C02 emissions. Economically speaking, the most attractive "marketing" campaign is to propose it as a counter to marine over-fishing. That will get the fishing industry on-board, and possibly even as a participant since their ships are a potential vehicle for "seeding" the ocean with nutrients (spread the fertilizer on the way to their destinations since they are "empty" and return with their catch). I think this would garner far more support, and far less controversy from the "myth minded, fear-mongering" liberal environmentalists, than some proposal to "geo-engineer" the oceans. I'm sorry that you don't agree with it. I think it's very viable proposal from which I can see very little downside, and tremendous advantage, towards mitigating the global warming problem.. Btw, some people focus on the fear that the oceanic "conveyor" will cease its circulation. But I TRULY FEAR the oceans warming up to the point where those vast deposits of methane hydrates start percolating to the surface. Frankly, that scares the hell out of me!! And it's why I'm pretty cautious about suggestions that we mine them for energy. If we do it, the technology had better be pretty damn sound and able to avoid uncontrolled releases. Hawk