Marching for the climate is the most conservative thing I do.
Caution is a fundamentally conservative impulse, but Republicans are steering us straight for climate disaster. Why the blind spot?
After years of denialism and kowtowing to fossil fuel companies, it’s easy to overlook just how bad the GOP’s 2016 candidates are on climate change. Most of them totally reject the limits to carbon pollution scientists tell us are necessary. Voting to repeal the Clean Power Plan — the closest thing our nation has to a plan for dealing with climate change — is simply daily business. It’s not even that interesting to talk about their views about climate change, because they’re generally just: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That numbs us to just how strange the GOP’s platform of climate denial is. Not just strange relative to science, or public American opinion (99% of the counties in America agree that climate change is happening). Strange relative to conservatism. It’s far from clear, historically and ideologically, that conservatives shouldn’t be some of the strongest advocates of climate action — and, in fact, a 2015 study concluded that American Republicans are the only major conservative party in the world that rejects the need for climate action.
One exchange, early this election season, sheds light on how the GOP has departed from the blueprint conservative tack on climate. CNN’s Jake Tapper relayed Republicans a question from George Shultz, which concluded, “Why not take out an insurance policy and approach climate change the Reagan way?”
The answers were so dismissive that Tapper had to ask Senator Marco Rubio if he was calling Schultz, who was Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, “left-wing.”
It’s tempting to hope that Republicans would come around if only the problem were “phrased in their terms,” which political psychologists Robb Willer and Matthew Feinberg called the “key to political persuasion” in a recent New York Times op-ed.
That’s what Shultz, who has long stumped for a “climate insurance policy,” was trying to do—to frame climate as fitting in with the conservative tendency towards caution. “A policy of ignoring [climate] risks and hoping for the best is inconsistent with risk management practices conservatives embrace in other, non-climate contexts,” writes Jerry Taylor, president of the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank that supports a carbon tax.
Conservatives inherit a rich legacy when it comes to risk management. Liberal environmentalists constantly cite the precautionary principle, but it has deeply conservative roots. Edmund Burke and Blaise Pascal — intellectual polymaths and political conservatives — both articulated conservative versions of it. Michael Oakeshott, a 20th-century English political theorist, called caution the calling card of the conservative disposition: “To be conservative…is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the limited to the unbounded…[Conservatism] asserts itself characteristically when there is much to be lost, and it will be strongest when this is combined with evident risk of loss.” That sounds quite a bit like our current predicament: much to lose, and evident risk of loss.
Burke’s 1790 anti-revolutionary tract, Reflections on the Revolution in France, outlines a cautious conservatism, one concerned with preserving known solutions. Our climate, while always in flux, is also in an equilibrium that has worked for humanity pretty well so far. Into that equation, we’ve introduced an unknown variable — CO2. The implications took a century to become clear, but now are scientific consensus: in Burke’s words, they appeared “at first view of little moment, [but] on which a very great part of prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend.” Byron Kennard, founder of the Center for Small Business and the Environment and an organizer of the first Earth Day, says in a post about Burke and climate change, “The only thing we can be sure of is that this radical change is not a good idea.” That would be the radical change to our atmosphere — the solution to which would seem to lie in curbing, one way or another, carbon pollution.
Several decades later, French polymath and political conservative Blaise Pascal solved (some might say eluded) the question of high-stakes faith by turning it into a logic puzzle. In “Pascal’s wager,” he assumes he cannot know whether God is real or not — all he can control is his choice, to believe or not believe. By mapping outcomes, subjecting the puzzle to the “second look” Oakeshott describes as central to conservatism, Pascal can see that believing in God will prudently serve his self-interest. Dr. David Orr, a leading environmental scientist, wrote in 1993 that Pascal’s wager offered a useful shorthand for understanding the risks and rewards of climate action. In particular, Pascal’s wager tells us how to weight the probability of an event against its payoff — especially when that payoff is exceedingly bad, like going to hell (or creating an unlivable climate).
These ideas about risk find their modern synthesis in the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, decision science guru and author of Black Swan, which he calls all about how “not to be a sucker.” On climate, Taleb says, we need to pay attention to two principles: One, stick with what works (Burke). Two, avoid big blowups (Pascal). We shouldn’t disturb the atmosphere, because it has worked fine for us so far. Runaway emissions invite the possibility, however opaque, of tail-end risks (big blowups) on a much more massive scale than the costs of a transition to renewable energy.
Tellingly, Taleb calls himself “hyper-conservative, ecologically — meaning super-Green.” This statement makes no sense in today’s GOP, but comes into focus when contributions from Burke, Pascal, and the like are taken into account.
Climate disruption is a tale of human arrogance, uncertain risks, and known solutions. In an email, Orr averred to me that the risk-reward thinking outlined in his essay is “still pretty much on target, but the climate science reports a much grimmer future while the technological capacity to power economies by renewable energy and efficiency has improved considerably.” In other words, according to Oakeshott’s definition of a conservative, the case for climate action should be stronger than ever. Under these conditions, Burkean caution seems to be exactly what is called for.
John Kerry, in a speech at the Lima COP20 talks, describes climate change quite conservatively, by these accounts. What’s “the worst thing that can happen to us” if we transition our economy away from fossil fuels? “Create a whole lot of new jobs. Kick our economies into gear…But what happens if the climate skeptics are wrong? Catastrophe.” Avoiding the sucker’s payoff is the imperative, just as in Pascal’s wager.
Why do Cruz and company disagree with Shultz? Why not take out an insurance policy on climate?
Climate change is happening. Most Republicans recognize that. But even Republicans who acknowledge the reality of climate change may not think of it as a risk. A Stanford poll, broadly cited for showing that 60% of Republicans support climate action, also describes 45% of Republicans as saying future climate change posed no danger to them. And Burke and Pascal’s analyses fall apart if there’s no personal risk involved.
These graphs of Republican response data show the exact disjuncture.
Republicans know climate change is a problem, for the world and for America. But they just don’t think it will be a problem for them. (A different essay might ask whether this illustrates that conservatives don’t act on problems that afflict other people—but this is not that essay.)
Why is that? Scientists working to understand the psychology of modern political responses to climate change have found that conservatives are more likely to engage in “system justification,” a tendency to deal with overwhelming conflict or stress by justifying it in a way that maintains the status quo. For many conservative voters, the GOP’s twin religions — Christianity and capitalism — offer a way out of worrying about climate risk. Either we’ll innovate our way out of this bind, or God will cover for us.
We should give also give conservatives credit for their skepticism. As Stephen Turner, a professor at the University of San Francisco, reminded me, conservatives might see the hullabaloo against carbon pollution as reminiscent of the arguments for Prohibition:
The thing is, this has happened before. For me what is amusing is the way these arguments and the formats of the social movements that advance them have repeated themselves over and over. There is a great book by Daniel Okrent, Last Call, about the movement for alcohol prohibition, which was the crown jewel of progressivism. It had all the elements [that the climate movement has today]— experts, experts, and more experts, alcohol science, propaganda based on this “science” forced into school textbooks, decades of hammering at the same themes, promises of the fantastic benefits of prohibition for everything. Sobering.
But the entire premise behind Burkean caution is that it’s better to have a Prohibition for twenty years and discard it than it is to lose your entire civilization, whatever the risk.
A bigger factor: Many people can’t afford to think this far ahead. Catrina Rorke, from the conservative R Street Institute, put it to me this way: climate risk “seems fictitious, basically, to people operate on ten-year cycles of action.” To most Republicans, the salient unknown is clean energy, not climate disruption; the institution to cling to is the fossil fuel economy, not a clean atmosphere.
Something to keep in mind: the Republicans who highlight climate risk tend to be the ones privileged enough to be worried about the future past those ten-year cycles. Wall Street Republicans like Michael Bloomberg and Hank Paulson helped launch the “Risky Business” project, based around curbing climate risks to American businesses. The IMF and World Bank have become vocal proponents of climate action. The biggest pro-climate PAC on the conservative side is run with money from, yes, a businessman. Most of the rhetoric from conservative think tanks that embrace climate action centers around letting entrepreneurs solve problems without government interference.
Isn’t that how we got here?
Even though a majority of voters want to act on climate, most aren’t ready to risk anything to protect their future — because they don’t own any of it.
We should see this kind of pro-climate, anti-regulation support as the mixed blessing it is. It’s really just the latest iteration of the internecine war between oligarchs that we endure during capitalism—one faction, the bankers and businessmen, turning on their oilman brethren in the fratricidal war that is the various industries struggling for control of the economic system. Why burn the world down when there’s still profit to be made?
To give the capitalists credit, yes, it’s great that this safety measure is baked into the system. But the planet may already be irretrievably fucked, so, thanks? And how awful is it that the 1% are the only ones with enough skin in the game to be threatened by an apocalyptic future?
Bottom line: Even though a majority of voters want to act on climate, most aren’t ready to risk anything to protect their future — because they don’t own any of it.
Rorke told me that she doesn’t think worst-case scenarios are helpful to think about. I disagree, pretty strongly, and I think that makes me conservative, to a degree, on climate. In threat identification, conservative principles help us surface existential risks. In threat response, liberal principles help us build an inclusive process that does not aggravate or perpetuate inequality.
To bring things back to more familiar ground for climate activists, we close with Slavoj Zizek, who wrote in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce of the need to wrest control of history: “We should fearlessly rehabilitate the idea of preventive action (the “pre-emptive strike”), much abused in the “war on terror”: if we postpone our action until we have full knowledge of the catastrophe, we will have acquired that knowledge only when it is too late…There is only one correct answer to those who desperately await the arrival of a new revolutionary agent capable of instigating the long-expected radical social transformation. It takes the form of the old Hopi saying, with a wonderful Hegelian twist from substance to subject: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
The conservative thing to do is to protect our planet from this immediate and existential threat. If we don’t want to face another one, though, we’ll need to build a future everyone wants to protect.
