The GOP goes green: how Republicans can adopt an environmental agenda that is also a conservative agenda

National Review, May 6, 1996 by Jonathan H. Adler

How Republicans can adopt an environmental agenda that is also a conservative agenda.

EARTH Day, April 22, has the Republicans running scared. The GOP leadership is scrambling to develop a pro-environment image and respond to charges that Republicans are "anti-environment." Republican leaders urged members to seek tree-planting photo-ops for Earth Day, and environmental videos have been requested for the Republican Convention in San Diego. Newt Gingrich, for his part, garnered an appearance on Larry King Live with animals from the Columbus Zoo.

On March 21, the Speaker announced the formation of an Environmental Task Force. Co-chairing the panel are Reps. Richard Pombo of California and Sherwood Boehlert, the New York liberal who has led the charge against environmental reform. The Speaker hopes that the Task Force will develop a "unified environmental message that will lead us into the twenty-first century," and perhaps a plank that can be added to the GOP platform in August. In the meantime, there is increasing pressure to pass a National Heritage Area "park barrel" bill over the strenuous objections of property-rights activists, in order to demonstrate an "environmental victory." Little else is going forward.

Republicans are trying to avoid angering the environmental lobby because prominent members of the party like Boehlert and pollster Linda DiVall have convinced them that they "overreached" in their reform efforts and that there is little popular support for overhauling environmental laws. This conventional wisdom is correct about the public's perception of Republicans as uninterested in environmental protection, but wrong about what to do about it. The GOP's environmental problems are mainly the result of its failure to articulate the ways in which environmental protection can be achieved through reliance on traditional conservative principles.

Offering a moderated version of the conventional green agenda would be a sure recipe for disaster. Republicans will never out-spend or out-regulate the Democrats, and efforts to "me-too" the issue will look lukewarm and insincere. Why vote for a half-hearted environmentalist when you can vote for the real thing? George Bush tried this strategy -- issuing more environmental regulations than any previous President -- without any increase in environmentalist support.

The challenge to Republicans is to articulate an environmental vision that rejects extensive federal bureaucracies and embraces traditional principles of free enterprise and limited government.

Sound stewardship begins with private property. Therefore protecting private property must be the cornerstone of any conservative pro-environmental agenda. America's proud conservation tradition -- as practiced by conservation groups, community associations, and even the occasional corporation --relied upon private stewardship and helped protect numerous species, including egrets, wood ducks, oryx, bluebirds, and bison, from threats to their survival.

Today, environmental decision-making is overly centralized in Washington, D.C. Most environmental problems are regional or local in nature, and they should be dealt with accordingly. There is no reason for Beltway bureaucrats to direct air-quality controls in Texas or hazardous-waste cleanups in Colorado. Washington bureaucrats cannot hope to set rational priorities for every community in the nation, nor should they be allowed to try.

This agenda may sound radical to some, but it is one that Americans are ready to embrace. Poll after poll shows that Americans support greater protection of private property and are willing to devolve responsibility for environmental concerns. This is recognized even on the Left. According to former Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg, "For ordinary citizens, devolution is a way of making the environmental regime more responsive, more flexible and sensible."

Perhaps the best evidence of this comes from polling conducted by Kellyanne Fitzpatrick on the question of endangered species. She presented voters with three policy options: 1) regulating private land when necessary to protect endangered species and their habitat (the status quo); 2) regulating to protect species but compensating landowners for any property devaluations that result; and 3) forgoing land-use regulation and relying solely upon incentives to encourage private protection of endangered species. Thirty-seven per cent preferred the second option, a staple of most GOP reform plans, and 35 per cent chose the third. Only 11 per cent opted for the status quo. If anything, Republican efforts to reform the Endangered Species Act are too modest, not too extreme.

A new and conservative green agenda cannot be enacted overnight. The prerequisite for enacting a new agenda is changing the terms of the debate. So long as it is perceived to be anti-environmental to oppose existing environmental programs, true reform will be impossible. But conservatives can take heart from the way they have changed the terms of the debate in other areas.