Green conservatism became relevant when Newt Gingrich said “there has to be a green conservatism” in a debate on global warming with John Kerry.

Elements exist that define green conservatism such as “to conserve,” which reflects older Rooseveltian elements of conservation. However, Republicans—as embracers of conservativism—have done a poor job at conserving our natural resources.

Green conservatives also embrace market-based elements such as quotas, taxes, and trading (emissions trading or cap-in-trade) schemes. Certainly, these mechanisms have merit and have proven successful in solving conservation and environmental problems.  The Alaska halibut fishery has successfully used a quota-based system, and cap-and-trade has been successful at mitigating acid rain.  However, these market-based environmental management systems must exist under a strong regulatory framework.  Otherwise, there is no accountability, since corporations and people cheat.

Furthermore, green conservativism seeks to resolve the dichotomy between needing an ever-growing strong economy through consumption and development, and the need to conserve the natural landscape. However, a paradox inflicts this attempt of reconciliation, because the current model of economic growth and development is not sustainable. Additionally, since we live in a largely closed system, we are at mercy of the Laws of Thermodynamics.

It must be stated that both Rooseveltian elements of conservation and market-based tools of environmental regulation are embraced by liberal environmentalists. As a promotion or propaganda tool, conservatives and/or Republicans are taking these elements of environmentalism for themselves as does Andrew Sullivan here:

Yes, I saw Gore’s persuasive movie, An Inconvenient Truth. But no, I’m not some sudden convert to environmentalism. Twenty-one years ago I worked at Margaret Thatcher’s then-favourite think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, and wrote a policy paper called Greening the Tories. It struck me then, as it has dawned on David Cameron two decades later, that the environment is not an inherently left-wing topic. It is, in many ways, a quintessentially conservative issue.

At the core of conservatism, after all, is the word “conserve”. The earth is something none of us can own or control. It is something far older than our limited minds can even imagine. Our task is therefore a modest one: of stewardship, the quintessential conservative occupation.

Sullivan’s early epiphany that conservatives need to openly embrace both the environment and conservation was reflected in his paper Greening the Tories. Certainly, the environment must be a conservative issue if conservatives want to be taken seriously, and the environment must be a Republican issue if Republicans want to be taken seriously.  However, we live in a world with limited resources and an increasing population, where environmentalists are often left asking the hard questions and making the strongest cases for saving the environment. Furthermore, although there has largely been a lack of political will, politicians are at the mercy of voters, since poorer people in addition to portions of the middle class are influenced most negatively by environmental degradation and the access to natural resources.

Sullivan claims “conservatives tend to like things as they are and have been,” but the so-called liberals seek the same. They do not want to loose a large old oak tree no more than he claims conservatives do. Sullivan further claims:

This kind of green politics is not anti-human or impractical. It’s humane and pragmatic. It’s not ideological; it’s empirical and prudent.

However, green conservatism can inadvertently and surreptitiously be inhumane and impractical. Sullivan does not directly say that liberal environmentalism is anti-human or impractical, but the right often portrays the left as anti-human in order to impose their agenda. However, the left is very humane and pragmatic. Empirically, I have observed both the right and left being inhumane and impractical. Reading much of Sullivan’s work on green conservativism and his Times article entitled Wanted: a practical guide to saving the warming planet, I recall many of the same ideas that are part of the holistic environmental frameworks or portfolios, which many liberal environmentalists such as myself embrace. As a result, either I am a conservative or Sullivan is a liberal.

Personally, I have worked in fisheries where we use a mix of quota trading or market-based, regulatory, and voluntary mechanisms, and I agree with this type of holistic approach. Additionally, when these mechanisms fail, it is generally due to factionalism, impositionalism, poor management, or how implementation is carried out by the stakeholders, and the unknowns that we cannot control. Ultimately, command-and-control mechanisms are the checks that legitimatize the market-based management systems. David Roberts parallels my thinking here:

The obvious point to make here is that virtually every green I know supports “shifting tax code incentives and shifting market behavior.” It may have once been true (’70s? ’80s?) that greens were disproportionately and stereotypically liberal in that they relied too much on punitive regulation and demonized markets. But that moment has long since passed. For many years now, the most innovative market-based environmental strategies have come from greens. Greens are now entering the corporate world in huge numbers. Greens run companies and investment funds; they sit on corporate boards; they coordinate business/nonprofit coalitions; they focus on eliminating perverse gov’t subsidies. Etc.

The difference is not that greens oppose tax shifting and market mechanisms — the difference is that greens also support legislative, regulatory, and legal strategies. Their primary concern is solving the problems, not with the mechanisms for doing so. After all, why fight with one hand tied behind your back?

Demagogues, conservative and/or Republican (depending on how you perceive conservatives, neoconservatives, republicans, or right-wingers—whether they are distinct or contemporarily somewhat interchangeable) bloggers, in addition to pundits commonly accuse liberal environmentalism of hating humans, being irrational, loathing capitalism, and development. This negative portrayal of a movement, which has saved and is saving the world from environmental degradation, is simply false and not fair. Beliefs, perceptions, and thoughts are arranged on a great spectrum. As a moderate, I believe answers exist from both the left and right, but neither provides a complete solution. A holistic, moderate, and properly negotiated approach will always be best. In fact, Sullivan recapitulates my point below:

What traditional conservatives can uniquely bring, however, is a way of improving environmental policy to embrace more market-friendly structures, and a better appreciation of how the private sector is most likely to come up with new energy sources. There’s a fruitful right-left synthesis here if we can all grow up and find it.

Litigation and regulation are needed. Both liberal and conservative elements are needed in order to remedy environmental degradation, because environmental degradation is inherently complex. Sullivan quoted Roger Scruton in his 24 July 2007 entitled “Green Conservatism”:

Environmental issues seem to lend themselves to statist solutions. The problems seem so large, so diffuse, so without local definition that the only way to solve them must be by some gesture of control from above in which enlightened intellectuals direct the benighted profiteers. That is a cherished motive on the Left: the hope that progressives will be able to take hold of the state and use it to dictate to the rest of humanity, supposedly for the benefit of everyone.

Every group wants to impose their agenda to “dictate to the rest of humanity, supposedly for the benefit of everyone.” That is what groups do—advocate their position—but their advocacy should be part of a holistic approach that produces a solid and well-negotiated framework. Sullivan is somewhat correct in his analysis that environmental issues do “lend themselves to statist solutions,” since a strong regulatory framework is needed to enforce regulation, oversee market-based regulatory schemes, and foster meaningful voluntary regulation. However, regulation isn’t the devil.  The United States uses a successful mix of these regulatory methods (command-and-control, market-based, and voluntary-based initiatives), but the Bush administration has used its power to pollute the system and make it somewhat ineffective—especially by diluting the system with too much market-based management by weakening regulation.  Deregulation isn’t wise, because societal, and environmental problems are too complex.

Environmentalism describes a belief where environmentalists subscribe to and advocate for the protection of the environment. Republicans who want to conserve natural landscapes often describe themselves as being conservationists. Conservationists seek to preserve natural landscapes, as do environmentalists. Therefore, environmentalism to a point is synonymous to conservationism. Perhaps conservationism is nothing more than a type of environmental movement. Environmentalism as an idea, envelops initiatives such as limiting unsustainable development, promoting renewable energy sources, and limiting or eliminating dirty energy sources, in addition to linking social issues such as health to environmental degradation. A conservationist seeking to preserve any natural landscape should support many of these ideas, in order to save their idea of wilderness.

Additionally, since environmentalism is a very broad mass movement, it can be argued that environmentalism exists as being either very liberal or conservative with many varying degrees in between the two ideas. Theoretically, as a phrase conservative environmentalism is probably synonymous to green conservativism. However standing alone, green conservatism does not provide the complete answer to environmental degradation. In reality, green conservativism may contribute to environmental degradation, because as an idea there is nothing wrong with green conservativism (especially when considering the Rooseveltian and market-based elements), but it may be used as a greenwash for unsustainable development, therefore causing environmental degradation.

Ideas that green conservatives embrace have already been used by liberal environmentalists. Green conservatives cherry-pick the elements from environmentalism that fit into their idea of conservativism. In Green Conservatism: A New Way of Thinking About the Environment Newt Gingrich on Human Events.com claims that if you answer yes to any of the questions below “you’re probably in the environmental mainstream [and] you may even be a green conservative.”

Do you believe a healthy environment should be able to coexist with a healthy, growing economy?

Do you believe investments in science and technology will generate solutions to most of our environmental problems?

Do you believe incentives should be offered to encourage corporations to clean up the environment?

Do you believe corporate and private philanthropy is essential to the success of a global and environmental movement?

These questions embrace very clear liberal ideas that are used to fight environmental degradation. These ideas were not developed by green conservatives and are not “new ways of thinking about protecting our environment” as Gingrich claims “to introduce you to a new way of thinking about the environment.” These ideas are not new as any scholar of environment and development will point out. Gingrich is claiming old ideas from traditional environmentalism as his own. In fact, I studied many of these ideas at the University of East Anglia’s School of Development Studies, where such ideas were accepted as part of a holistic framework and were not considered separate left versus right ideas, so all ideas should be utilized as potential remedies to environmental degradation. Gingrich further states on Human Events.com:

The time has come for the development of a mainstream environmentalism as an alternative to big bureaucracy and big litigation environmentalism. You could call it “green conservatism,” but it’s really the mainstream environmental approach that has worked so well in the United States. President Theodore Roosevelt epitomized this approach when he said, “The movement for the conservation of wild life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose and method.”

Gingrich uses the phrase “mainstream environmentalism” to describe reworking the current holistic model into a more streamlined narrow and useful conservative environmentalism. He goes on about “big bureaucracy and big litigation environmentalism” and the need to replace this tool in order to sucessfully fight environmental degradation. In reality, litigation and regulation are needed, since non-governmental organizations act as watchdogs and often force existing environmental law, when the government fails to do so. Certainly, litigation is costly but it is necessary. Gingrich further quotes former President Theodore Roosevelt, but Roosevelt was not a green conservative. He represented an idea called fortress conservation or Rooseveltian conservation.

Newt Gingrich’s demagogic statement from Human Events.com lacks sincerity and focuses on prejudices rather than creating rational dialogue:

The left would have us believe that to be an environmentalist you have to believe in catastrophic threats, dramatic increases in government power and economically draconian solutions. Such a big-government bureaucracy, trial-lawyer-litigation and excessive-regulation “environmentalism” does a poor job of protecting the environment while it erodes individual freedom, destroys jobs and weakens our country.

We must separate ourselves from narrow movements and become more moderate and holistic in our thinking. We must adopt both right and left elements and formulate new ideas of thinking. This should be the trend, since it is becoming increasingly harder to separate conservatives and liberals amongst us, because the ease of which we communicate, exchange ideas, and knowledge has created individuals that think more sophisticatedly.  Therefore, individuals may express a mix of both liberalism and conservatism. How we perceive the words “liberal” and “conservative” has been further muddled as pundits try to force these ideas as synonyms for “Democrat” and “Republican”. Therefore, it is very difficult to analyze an idea such as green conservativism. However, I do know that green conservatism alone is not a remedy to environmental degradation. In fact, green conservatives are just poseurs, and if they were left alone to manage the environment, they would create nothing more but an environmental disaster.

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