Tag: climatechange

2020 Election, Domestic Policy, Environment, Politics

An American Nationalist Voting Index – Conservation and the Environment

Bob Claude |
Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir in Yosemite

Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as the farmer behaves with reference to his own children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation.

Theodore Roosevelt, The New Nationalism, August 31, 1910

Score

Biden +.5 Trump -.5

The two men pictured above represented different conservation philosophies reminiscent of today’s environmental movement. Unlike Roosevelt, John Muir believed that conservation and development could not be reconciled.  Despite Muir’s famous overnight camping trip with TR in Yosemite Park, he voted for William Howard Taft in the 1912 election.  Muir eventually went on to found the Sierra Club.

The contrasting philosophies of TR and Muir are reflected in the environmental approaches of Biden and Trump. However, in the end, their policy differences largely even out.

Climate Change

The differences here could not be more stark.  Trump’s denial of climate science would have met with nothing but scorn from Roosevelt, but Biden’s elevation of the Paris Accord to totemic status despite its wholly voluntary nature would also have met with his disapproval (see my post “Theodore Roosevelt and Climate Change”). This earns Trump a -.5 while Biden receives a +.5.

Environmental Regulation

The Trump Administration embarked on a campaign to spur economic growth by rolling back environmental regulation, especially regarding climate change.  In the process, they threw out a lot of long-standing rules that provided important protections. For example, there was no need to relax auto emissions standards that were not affecting car sales but reduced our gasoline consumption. The withdrawal of rules limiting toxic air emissions from major industrial polluters will expose hundreds to mercury and other known hazardous air pollutants. These unnecessary rule changes mean the Administration deserve a -.5

Biden would restore both the necessary rules, but pursue its climate agenda through more rule-makings similar to those of the high-handed and elitist Obama EPA.  This would likely be a net drag on the economy and so earns Biden  a- .5 as well.

Parks and Public Lands

Here in Montana and the West, we have a love-hate relationship with our parks and public lands. We love the spectacle and the solitude of the wilderness but resent the arbitrary limits on agriculture and other uses imposed from Washington.  For example, the Wilderness Act of 1964 allowed the federal government to temporarily designate thousands of acres off limits to even some recreational use for decades.  The Trump Administration decided it was time to finalize those designations and begin to release some of the land for other uses.  This caused a huge controversy and became an issue in the campaign. Biden has established a goal of designating 30% of US land as wilderness, which would potentially end this review.

Trump has generally been a friend of the parks system, vetoing an attempt by his Interior Secretary to raise the entrance fees to national parks to $70. He also signed the Great American Outdoors Act, which dedicated $2 billion per year to rebuilding park infrastructure (see this post for more). However, he also has reduced the size of some new national monuments previously established by President Obama.

Both Trump and Biden earn +.5 scores on this issue.

Conclusion

Conservation was dear to Theodore Roosevelt’s heart precisely because he loved America and the beauty of its land.  A true American nationalist would seek to protect that beauty for both the present and future. Trump’s denial of climate change hurts his standing on the subject, while Biden’s commitments to the Muir wing of the environmental movement suggests a potential radicalism on environmental regulation and public lands that would stifle development.  Instead, the next administration should adopt the practice of Roosevelt’s farmer and seek to responsibly reconcile the many competing uses.

Domestic Policy, Environment

Theodore Roosevelt and Climate Change

Bob Claude |

Theodore Roosevelt’s devotion to the preservation of American natural resources is legendary.  The challenge of climate change speaks to the depths of and potential conflicts between TR’s interests in conservation, social justice and national security.  While it is always risky to speculate about how a historical figure would deal with current issues, applying his philosophy to the problem may be helpful as we develop the national consensus necessary to address the issue.

First, as one of the foremost natural scientists of his day whose works are still used as references, TR would have accepted the basic science of global warming and been alarmed by its effect on forests and the environment.   He would have had nothing but contempt for climate change deniers. Indeed, he probably would have come up with one of his pithy insults to describe them.   

At the same time, his sympathy for the common man and inherent nationalism would cause him to bristle at the idea that Americans should bear the primary sacrifice of reducing world carbon emissions.  The man who rode with poor cowboys and led them up Kettle and San Juan Hills would have remembered the average American’s sacrifices to win two world wars, defeat communism, and build an international system that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty.  He would not ask them for further sacrifices without being able to assure them with a straight face that others were sacrificing equally.

However, as a student of international relations dedicated to keeping America safe and strong, he would know he could not make that kind of guarantee while China and the rest of the world continued to increase their rate of emissions.   The man who foresaw the rise of Japan would have understood the desire of these nations to develop their economies and gain respect in the international community, as I discussed in a previous post.  He would hesitate to embark on an international crusade to force them to reduce carbon emissions if it would significantly damage American national security and create an equally damaging economic upheaval at home.

So how would he have reconciled these conflicting priorities?

Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and vitality of the nation.

Theodore Roosevelt, The New Nationalism, August 31, 1910

Because of Roosevelt, America led the world in natural resource conservation. He would have expected it to do so again on a threat like climate change, but only to the extent other nations were willing to follow.  He would remember it was China and the developing world, not the United States, that insisted the limits in the Paris Accords be voluntary and unenforceable.  The agreement was a start, not a sacred totem, that bound the United States no more than other signatories. Instead, it freed us to negotiate as the great power we are to develop more stringent limits that were enforceable.  TR would have pushed carbon emission limits in bilateral trade and other agreements with China and other leading nations.  In particular, he would not have entered into the Obama Administration’s climate agreement with China that allowed them to avoid any real limits on their emissions until 2030, effectively ceding economic leadership to them for the next decade.

Nevertheless, he would have insisted it was our moral duty to reduce America’s emissions as much as possible.  In addition to phasing out coal generation plants, he would have pushed for stringent leak detection systems on energy facilities, though he would not have sought the immediate end to oil & gas production because of the economic shock it would cause.  Roosevelt would have been a fan of distributed electric generation in the form of rooftop and small solar and hydrogen fuel cell units, mainly because they give the common man, not corporations, control of a family’s energy supply.   Any mandates and subsidies for preferred clean energy sources would have come with corresponding utility-style rate and quality of service regulation of those industries to prevent excess profits. Displaced workers would be re-trained and new clean energy companies would have been expected to hire them at decent wages. Hopefully, these initiatives would have been accomplished through congressional legislation, though TR would not have hesitated to use the “bully pulpit” of the presidency and executive power to achieve them if necessary. 

All of this would have been contingent on the effect on the American family and our national and economic security, even if it extended the goal of carbon neutrality another few decades.  Carbon reduction goals would have been calibrated to the reductions of other nations to insure the American people were not carrying too much of the load.  The “big stick” of tariffs and other trade sanctions would always be available for use against willfully profligate countries, but it would have been used only when it did not damage other national security goals.  

These limitations, however, would have caused the scientist and political realist in Roosevelt to reluctantly admit that the Paris Accord’s goal of reducing the increase of global temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius was unattainable.  To protect both our resources and our people, adapting America to global warming would have been his highest priority.  In addition to flood control and other infrastructure projects to protect communities from future sea rise and temperature changes, federal funding would have been made available to move people to safer ground.  Agricultural research would concentrate on developing crops that could withstand higher temperatures.  Smart, energy–efficient construction would be required so long as the average family could still afford their own home.  Some of these programs already exist, but they would have been a central plank in any Roosevelt political platform.

Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us, and training them into a better race to inhabit the land and pass it on.

Theodore Roosevelt’s career proves that responding to climate change is not just a globalist mantra.  It is an American nationalist issue that affects our own economic and national security.  Nationalist solutions exist that meet the future needs of the American people without enslaving us to globalist guilt or greed.  They are not without sacrifice, but the preservation of our independence and the American Dream for ourselves and our children are worth it.       

Foreign Policy, History and Future of Nationalism, Realist Theory

The Inconvenient Truths of International Relations

Bob Claude |

Nationalist Foreign Relation – A History, Part 4

Indian schoolchildren in a rural classroom

In 1963, the economist Robert Heilbroner wrote The Great Ascent, a prescient analysis of the challenges facing the former European colonies after achieving independence. He began by saying that, if world history is defined as the common story of the majority of mankind, then world history did not exist before 1948. Since then, it has been the story of the struggle of these new nations to cement their national sovereignty and spur economic development after decades of colonial exploitation. With the end of the Cold War, this struggle became the primary motive force in international relations. The apparent achievement of these goals by China and India has only whetted the appetite of other nations to reach the same level of international respect and burgeoning power.

Meanwhile, post-Cold War American foreign policy was based on the Wilsonian liberal vision of spreading democracy, social responsibility and capitalism throughout the world.  A “new world order” under a watchful American eye would eventually erase the differences between nations and their constituent ethnic and religious groups.   The engine powering this new system would be globalization and the Internet.  It would effectively mean, as Thomas Friedman and historian Francis Fukuyama argued, the end of history.

It meant something very different to the newly developing countries.  To them, it appeared to seek their acquiescence to an unprecedented world hegemony.  Far from rejecting history, China, India and other developing nations have clung to and embraced their respective histories. The climate change debate, the COVID-19 pandemic and other security threats take place in the midst of this new nationalism driving the majority of the world’s domestic and foreign policy.   To effectively address transnational  issues, America must accept an approach that respects these nation’s national rights and aspirations while, at the same time,  vigorously defending its own.  

As I mentioned in a previous post in this series, the realist theory of international relations offers the best model for such a policy by recognizing that states are the most important actors in the international system. Whether democratic or authoritarian, they must always be building their economic and military power since it is the only way to survive in an anarchic world.  While non–governmental organizations like the UN, multinational corporations and social and environmental groups can have an impact, achievement of their goals will always be subject to at least the acquiescence of nation–states.    A sustainable American foreign policy would recognize these realities and focus on goals that could be supported by affected states without compromising our own fundamental goals of national and economic security.  The Trump Administration’s new National Security Strategy is a welcome and important step in this direction (see this post).  

I began this series by noting that how the COVID-19 pandemic has driven nations to restrict exports of medical supplies to protect their own people from the disease.  Like the US and the rest of the world, the developing nations find themselves scrambling for the kind of equipment they formerly manufactured themselves.   They only recently began opening up their economies after fostering local manufacturing of critical products through high tariffs and otherwise protecting infant industries.   This new reminder of their past dependence will not soon be forgotten. 

In the climate change arena, a realist approach would accept that the Asia-Pacific nations can never agree to any reductions in their carbon emissions that will interfere with their economic development.   To developing countries, the demand to reduce the use of coal smacks of a new form of colonialism designed to prevent them from achieving economic independence.  They have been building one new coal plant per month to provide the energy necessary to grow their economies and satisfy their people’s needs. 

The Paris climate agreement essentially recognized this fact by allowing participants to comply by stating their Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) of carbon reductions, which are only voluntary in nature.  China’s INDC allows it to avoid seriously limiting its emissions until 2030.  This modest contribution by the world’s largest carbon emitter, coupled with the general lack of transparency of most developing countries’ economies, means even these commitments will be conveniently difficult to verify, much less enforce.   

Since the Asia Pacific region alone now accounts for nearly half of the world’s carbon emissions, this means it will be impossible to avoid the 2-5 degree Celsius increase in world temperature originally targeted in the Kyoto accord without damage to the U.S. and developed countries’ economies that would be domestically unacceptable.   Adaptation, as well as carbon reduction, must become an integral part of our response to climate change.  The only alternative is imposing tariffs and trade sanctions on China, India and other developing countries to immediately force them off the path of ever-increasing carbon emissions.

In the end, the majority of the world’s nations understand that utopian ideals will not save them from a determined foe or domestic threat.  Their history has taught them otherwise and made them the ultimate realists.  The sooner Americans understand this, the sooner we will be able to make sustainable progress on the climate change and other national security goals.  

Continue reading “The Inconvenient Truths of International Relations”