Politics and the environment
Published March 25, 2014
by Doug Clark, Greensboro News-Record, March 24, 2014.
Should there be stricter laws and regulations to protect the environment?
In 1992, according to the Pew Research Center, 93 percent of Democrats and 86 percent of Republicans said yes.
Twenty years later, 93 percent of Democrats still said yes. But only 47 percent of Republicans agreed.
Bloomberg View's Christopher Flavellewonders about this shift in attitude among Republicans about environmental protection as well differences between Democrats and Republicans in their view of climate change:
"One possible interpretation is that Republicans are just plain worse than Democrats at absorbing and understanding science. That's absurd, and Democrats who reach that conclusion will only make this debate harder to resolve.
"Another possibility is that Republicans are being deceived, whether by their news outlets, their opinion leaders or their political representatives. That's a tempting conclusion, but it feels too limited. Sure, liberals and conservatives watch different television stations, but they're not living in different countries. The gaps picked up by Gallup suggest some deeper division.
"A third interpretation is that political preferences have leaked into the perception of fact. Republicans may conflate the existence of climate change with the need for more government -- more federal research, more federal programs, more intervention in the economy, and more taxes to pay for all of it. Rather than relax their objection to government, maybe it's easier to look for reasons to think that climate change isn't happening, or isn't serious."
In regard to environmental protection, many Republicans might believe that existing laws and regulations have achieved their purpose and that no further restrictions are necessary.
Or there might be a fundamental difference in the value systems of some Republicans and some Democrats. If only 16 percent of Republicans care about the quality of the environment, according to Gallup, maybe that's because having clean water, air and natural areas just isn't important to the other 84 percent, whereas Democrats tend to place higher value on nature.
Or Republicans might see a direct conflict between environmental laws and economic growth. What drives Republicans to ease such regulations, they say, is the desire to unburden businesses to let them grow and create more jobs. So, it's not necessarily that they don't care about the environment, it's just that they care more about business and industry.
Recent experience in North Carolina, unfortunately, illustrates the fallacy of that thinking. Not only does the Duke Energy coal ash spill into the Dan River show that regulations have not been strict enough, we can also see that large environmental accidents impose very high costs on communities affected, governments and the businesses at fault. There is no real economic benefit to be had as a result of environmental neglect. Just the opposite.
The climate change question is more complex because naysayers fall into different categories:
Those who deny the climate is changing.
Those who concede it is changing but say that happens naturally.
And those who say that, even if human activity contributes to climate change, there's little we can do to reverse it or at least nothing that we can reasonably afford to do.
Flavelle makes an important point in this, which is that we should not expect striking differences when it comes to understanding and interpreting science. Where such differences do exist, and attitudes seem to split down partisan lines, it's fair to suspect a strong political influence.
March 25, 2014 at 10:16 am
Norm Kelly says:
Perhaps the difference between Demoncrats & Republicans is different than proposed by this column. Let's take one statement as an example. Extracted directly from this post "Not only does the Duke Energy coal ash spill into the Dan River show that regulations have not been strict enough". This is the interpretation of the spill from a lib perspective. But what do the FACTS show? The FACTS are pesky little things sometimes. Too often these FACT things are ignored by people who want to make more regulations for the sake of making more regulations. Or at least it seems the only reason for the extra regulations are for the sole purpose of having more regulations on the books so you can tell some environmental nut that you are at least trying. As opposed to those pesky Republicans who have only 2 interests: destruction of the environment, meaning dirty air and unclean water, and expansion of business and profit.
But what the FACTS about the coal ash spill actually show is that for DECADES even environmental loving, tree hugging, more regulation supporting Demons who controlled Raleigh for a century ignored the regulations already on the books. If the regulations had been enforced for decades, would the coal ash spill have happened? Possibly. Would MORE regulation have prevented the spill? Possibly, but if those 'more regulations' were enforced as well as the existing regulations were enforced, then the spill would have happened anyway. Of course, with even more regulations on the books, it would have been easier for kindly, loving, tree-hugging libs to tell their constituents that at least they had tried and therefore they deserved another term in office to finish what they started.
On climate change there is definitely a difference in attitude between libs and conservatives. Conservatives don't generally claim that climate change isn't or doesn't happen. Our thinking (libs should try this sometime!) is that the climate has changed dramatically over the life of the planet. Most of those changes happened when man didn't even exist! So there is no way possible that man could have had an effect or affect on the climate, but it changed anyway. It's possible that the climate is changing now. Wouldn't be the first time. But how much of an impact has man had on the current change? How much of an impact could man have if we simply changed our lifestyles to accommodate the lib plan? What is the lib plan, anyway? Are we all supposed to knock down our homes, quit driving our cars, stop working for a living, live in caves and all become independent farmers? Other than this, what exactly is it that libs are wanting us to do that will make climate change stop altogether? If libs claim that destroying my lifestyle will solve global climate change, then how do these same libs account for all the changes over the millenia? If the climate is going to change anyway, is it worth destroying the global economy? Is it worth destroying my lifestyle? Is it worth me living in a cave? Should I start driving an all electric vehicle? What good does this do? It makes me feel good, perhaps, but has no affect on anything as it concerns global climate change. My electric car needs to be charged somehow? Where does the electricity come from? Disposing of all those batteries over the years is going to have a major impact on the environment! Heck, creating those batteries in the first place causes an impact on the environment.
So, do the libs have a plan for eliminating global climate change? No? Then what? Conservatives appear to want a reasonable response to the potential for man-made global climate change. Reasonable regulations make sense, and is not thwarted by conservatives. Reasonable energy production makes sense, and is not thwarted by conservatives. Wind power generation off the coast of Massachusettes was opposed by none other than the lib, greenie, killer, Ted Kennedy. Add to wind power the death of birds who fly into the huge propellers that are required to catch the wind. This is a reasonable loss of life for libs? What about the dirt toad that prevents farmers in California from continuing to farm their land? (or whatever other thing it is that environmentalists go nuts over and try to stop farming!) Libs/environmentalists love to protect the feathered lizard but seemingly don't care about birds who die by wind power. Does this sound like a confused person to you? Of course it does, because confused is an excellent description of the average lib. They tend to want their cake and eat it too. They want their electric cars that have an extremely limited range but they don't want to have electric production facilities. See, confused. They want to be able to eat their veggies but don't want farmers to be able to use their land. They want to protect the environment, but only if it doesn't directly impact them, as in the example of the electric car.
Show me a reasonable plan to impact global climate change, something that man has control over, and I'll show you a whole group of conservatives that go along with you. Until you can present something reasonable, logical, don't expect me to get on board. And if you continue to put forth people like Algore and Harry Reid, don't expect me to even give them 10 seconds of listening time. People who lack intelligence don't deserve to be listened to. I don't have time!
