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April 21, 2004

Religion and Politics

Jon Reisman, a professor at the University of Maine at Machias has penned a good summation of the differences on environmental policy from the Left and Right. Contrary to what many on the Left seem to believe, the environment is actually a pretty important topic for many people on the Right.

Reisman lays out four basic principles of President Bush's environmental policy that make a pretty good baseline for how to handle the environment:

Wealth makes health. Growing successful economies are essential to environmental quality because they provide both the means and the desire to protect the environment. The worst environmental problems are in the third world; the cleanest environments and highest longevity are in developed countries.

Socialism is not sustainable. Policy prescriptions which decrease private ownership and control of the economy (capitalism) are not consistent with economic growth and will ultimately decrease both environmental quality and human well being.

Good stewardship is based on facts not fears. Careful cost and risk-benefit benefit analysis should govern decision making, as opposed to emotional fear mongering designed to "sex up" the case for aggressive intervention. The standard environmental policy agenda setting procedure is to hype worst case scenarios and focus on the affects on children and seniors.

Technological innovation and entrepreneurship are critical for human progress. Policies that discourage prudent risk taking and new technologies out of excessive risk aversion and/or fear of technology (the precautionary principle) should not be adopted. Requiring that new technologies prove their safety first means no new technologies and condemns much of humanity to poverty and hopelessness.

It's hard to dispute any of these points, although I'm sure people will try particularly hard on #2. For me, however, #3 is the real key: environmental policy should be as hardnosed as any other. When the evidence suggests a particular course of action is favorable and it would be cost-effective to pursue it, we should do so. If these gates are not met, we shouldn't. Kyoto, everyone's favorite, is a no-go on both of these. The science of global warming is by no means settled, first of all (if global warming is anthropogenic, why is it warming doesn't track with increases in CO2?). Second, the costs of implementing Kyoto are higher than the projected benefits. The Senate and the President were correct in rejecting it, and we would all be far better off if people could move on from it.

But that seems an impossible task, due to the Left's embrace of environmentalism as a religion rather than a science. Support for Kyoto is no longer a matter of addressing evidence, it's just dogma for a certain segment of people. You might as well try to prove to a Catholic that the Pope fallable as to demonstrate that Kyoto isn't the right treaty for the perceived problem to an environmentalist. So the complaints about the Bush administration's refusal to embrace Kyoto continue to roll in, and we all continue to waste time on a treaty that will never be implemented and wouldn't solve the problem it's purported to address if it was. I suddenly find myself sympathizing with atheists much more than I used to...