A Conservative’s Climate Crisis Fight

Against Climate Panic, for Climate Hope

David French, July 25, 2019 (National Review)

“We must craft a conservative, ecomodernist vision of environmental action…[W]e are in a crisis, an emergency. And my kid won’t solve it, and your kid won’t solve it. If they are empaths they will feel just as trapped as I do, just as complicit in something they cannot solve — and they will pollute and harm and gobble up the world because that is what it means to live in the 21st century…I cried two times when my daughter was born. First for joy, when after 27 hours of labor the little feral being we’d made came yowling into the world, and the second for sorrow, holding the earth’s newest human and looking out the window with her at the rows of cars in the hospital parking lot, the strip mall across the street, the box stores and drive-throughs and drainage ditches and asphalt and waste fields that had once been oak groves. A world of extinction and catastrophe, a world in which harmony with nature had long been foreclosed… I could see no way to shield her from the future…

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…I’m reminded of the nuclear fears that haunted my generation…[But] there’s a key difference between climate-change anxiety and nuclear anxiety: There is far more cause for hope for the future now…We did not have concrete reason to hope for the peace that did, in fact, come…[One does not have to buy the doomsday scenarios] to be concerned about humanity’s impact on the climate and the climate’s impact on humans…The same human ingenuity and industry that has extended life expectancies, slashed extreme poverty by 74 percent in 25 years, and also reduced carbon emissions in numerous advanced economies can advance the twin, interconnected goals of human flourishing and planetary flourishing…[There is] ample room for political disagreement about costs, approach, and policy…[A] challenge exists but…panic is counterproductive and polarization should be shunned…[Our] ingenuity and creativity can craft the instruments of our own environmental rescue.” click here for more

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