Blog Action Day is asking blog authors to write about the environment. Since I’m a fan of communal action, it seems appropriate for me to participate, even though I have no idea what good it might do.
This is hardly an original observation, but surely the strangest thing about the environment today is that it has become a partisan political issue. It’s not like the political parties fall naturally on either side of the environmental position (as they do in Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Memory of Whiteness” which had Red Mars and Green Mars political parties, later reprised in his Martian trilogy). For some reason Democrats have become associated with environmental support, and Republicans have become associated with its absence. This makes no sense.
Only a fool would argue that environmental degradation can not occur, when we so many historical examples. While I suppose it’s possible to argue in a principled manner that environmental degradation does not matter, I hold no brief for that position. Our children deserve to live in a world at least as good as ours, and that means one with a livable environment. In any case, few people actually make that argument, except perhaps the Christian millenialists (as in James Watt’s comment “I do not know how many future generations we can count of before the Lord returns.”)
One can of course validly discuss whether environmental degradation is happening today, and one can validly discuss what to do about it. I think the first question has been long settled. The only people who still claim that the Earth is not warming up, or that human activity has nothing to do with it, simply aren’t paying attention.
What to do about it is much less clear. But there is one argument which absolutely does not hold water: the claim that it would be too expensive to do anything about it. That is a complete misunderstanding of how a modern economy works. Money spent on improving the environment is not money buried in holes; it is money spent on productive activity, money which employs people and spurs investment. It is certainly true that spending money to improve the environment would cause money to stop going to some people and start going to some other people. But that happens all the time as the economy and technology changes.
So why are Republicans opposed to working to improve the environment? I really and truly don’t know. One could argue that it is because they are being sponsored by the people who have money now, and therefore might stand to lose it; however, the truth is, the same is true of the Democrats.
We may have to solve this mystery before we are able to do anything effective to help the environment.
By the way, I should add that I’ve seen the argument that we are destroying the planet. That of course is not true. But we are in the process of destroying the habitats of literally billions of people. Those people aren’t going to quietly accept it, which means that we are heading toward massive warfare. Let’s try to avoid that if possible.
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