A good overview of this brand of environmental consciousness.
ENVIRONMENT
For green solutions, Earth needs a right turn
By NEWT GINGRICH
For the Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/06/07
For the last 36 years, I have watched the pro-regulation, pro-litigation, pro-taxation liberals label themselves as the only Americans who care about the environment.
Their left-wing machine would have you believe that to care about clean air and water, biodiversity and the future of the Earth, you have to both buy in to their catastrophic scenarios and sign on to their command-and-control bureaucratic liberal agenda as the only approach to solving environmental challenges. Their future involves dramatic increases in government power and draconian policies that will devastate our economy.
The time has come to define a fundamentally different approach to a healthy environment and a healthy economy. The time has come for the development of "Green Conservatism" as an alternative to big bureaucracy and big litigation liberal environmentalism.
So what is Green Conservatism?
Green Conservatives favor clean air and clean water.
Green Conservatives understand biodiversity as a positive good.
Green Conservatives believe that economic growth and environmental health are compatible in both the developed and developing worlds.
Green Conservatives favor minimizing carbon loading in the atmosphere as a positive public value. And while we don't buy into the doomsday scenarios currently being peddled by the left, we believe there is sufficient scientific evidence to tell us that carbon loading is occurring. But as to what we can and should do about it, there is still a lot to learn.
And lastly, Green Conservatives believe in energy independence. A new generation of clean energy will enable us to achieve three simultaneous conservative goals: To be liberated from dependence on dangerous dictatorships; to be effective in worldwide economic competition; and to provide for a much cleaner and healthier future.
Of course it's easy to talk about achieving lofty environmental goals without damaging either our liberty or our economy. But how do we actually make Green Conservatism a reality? We do so by taking advantage of markets and incentives to achieve our environmental goals far more effectively than is possible through higher taxes. We emphatically reject as ineffective the liberal environmentalists' focus on bureaucratic command-and-control regulations to preserve our natural world. Instead, Green Conservatism believes that we can realize more positive environmental outcomes faster by shifting tax code incentives and shifting market behavior than is possible from litigation and regulation.
The United States is ideally suited to achieving tremendous environmental progress precisely because we have such a dynamic and economically efficient free enterprise system. In this way, Green Conservatism builds on our inherent strengths as a nation, whereas liberal environmentalism actually undermines the very economic growth and efficiencies that so decisively contribute to environmental progress.
