Upside-down world, part 3: Conservatives are progressives too?
"I normally don't pat myself on the back, but today global warming is an issue that has the concern of 30 percent of the American people, and years ago it was over 50 percent. That's because somebody spoke up day in and day out and said, 'This is a hoax. This is BS.' That somebody was me."
-Rush Limbaugh, May 11, 2009 (quoted by Environmental Defense Action Fund)
If you're like me, your first thought on reading the above quote was "Oh crap! What if that's right? What if the success of An Inconvenient Truth and all the ubiquitous 'go green' sentiment of the past few years was all a mirage, and we've really been losing ground all this time, thanks to Rush's evil plan to prevent us from saving the world?"
On reflection, I realized there are two things wrong with that statement. The first is that we know global warming deniers can't do stats. The above statement, without even a definition of what "years ago" means, is even less meaningful that claims like "2008 was about as hot as 2001 and cooler than 2005, so the entire multi-decade warming trend must be reversing itself." Two or three data points simply don't make any kind of valid statistical case. If only the average American (or humans in general) were better at this kind of thinking...
The second problem is that in all likelihood, Rush doesn't have an "evil plan," he's just genuinely deluded into believing the story his own cherry-picked numbers tell. From the other side of the hurdle it can be easy to forget this, but in the face of impending global catastrophe, denial is extremely hard to resist -- especially when getting over it would mean accepting that the only plan to save the world involves huge benefits to your political opponents. After all, if we demonstrate that government action can contribute to a green economic recovery, millions of new jobs, reduced air pollution, independence from Middle East oil, and saving the world from climate catastrophe, it says something pretty positive about government -- which would undermine standard conservative rhetoric and help cement the current Democratic majority. And anything that can do that, a conservative will naturally assume, must be "unfounded alarmism used for political gain." (We certainly used that line against the Bush administration over his "War on Terror" rhetoric often enough.) So why not tell everyone that any real government action on climate will necessarily fail, while simultaneously doing everything in your power to ensure that it never gets the chance to try?
Which brings me to the real topic of this post. Conservatives claim that a greenhouse-reduction policy would harm the economy. This is their answer to a lot of policies they don't like. Why? Because as it happens, conservatives are in love with progress.
That line was mostly just to get your attention. The definition of progress here is narrowed to economic progress, defined as unlimited growth in numbers like the Dow Jones and especially the Gross Domestic Product. And our entire economic system does indeed seem to be built on this concept. Everyone knows economic shrinkage is bad, but even a leveling off or "stagnation" can hurt living standards, so we have a Red Queen paradox: we have to keep running up those numbers as fast as we can just to stay in the same place.
Now, you might think that with the standard conservative lines about innovation in business that's somehow "stifled by government," they would count technological progress as a good thing too. This isn't as true as you'd think. Libertarians do love futuristic technology, which is why they push nuclear fission power plants: they look like a stepping-stone to fusion and all the marvels of tomorrow. Main-line conservatives, by contrast, mainly push nuclear because it "has a fifty-year track record." Solar arrays and electric cars are too futuristic for them, too untried, too risky. They would prefer to have economic growth without the innovation that drives it, the "creative destruction" where people in obsolete industries (e.g. record players, typewriters, leaded gasoline, and now coal mining) lose their jobs and have to find new ones. Progressives aren't big fans of this process either, but if the new industry is demonstrably better than the one it replaces, we're okay with it as long as appropriate job retraining programs are available.
"I'm not the guy who sings the hymns, no bleeding hearts to mend,
But I like the part where Icarus hijacks the Little Red Hen."
-Lyrics to "Last Plane Out" by Toy Matinee
There are two main progressive objections to the doctrine of economic progress to the exclusion of all other goals: we claim it's detrimental to both social progress and progress toward a sustainable civilization. On the social side, we're suspicious of the claim that "a rising tide lifts all boats" -- which may be just barely true according to this chart of income trends since 1947, but with some pretty serious stagnation for those at the low end of the spectrum. Like the Little Red Hen, so the story goes, these are the people who do the hard labor no one else is willing to do, but unlike her, they have no way of keeping the benefits for themselves; instead, their contributions to the economy tend to join the general flow trickling gradually upward toward the massive concentrations of wealth at the top. Without government policies like progressive taxation and social safety nets, progressives argue, the problem would be even worse. But we're almost powerless to reverse the trend, because any actual narrowing of the rich-poor gap is demonized by conservatives as "spreading the wealth, a.k.a. socialism, a.k.a. evil."
Meanwhile, the dogma of limitless growth in the physical economy, of "conserving the way things are" by consuming progressively more of the planet's resources, looks to progressives like a good way to guarantee our doom as a civilization. Although recycling has begun to replace needless extraction of natural resources, this would probably never have happened without government mandates. And as population growth and urban sprawl continue apace, along with the clearing of vast tracts of land to use for things like tar sands mining, we have to wonder if a system based on untrammeled economic growth is like Icarus, flying higher and higher without regard to the approaching danger of burning to death.
-Rush Limbaugh, May 11, 2009 (quoted by Environmental Defense Action Fund)
If you're like me, your first thought on reading the above quote was "Oh crap! What if that's right? What if the success of An Inconvenient Truth and all the ubiquitous 'go green' sentiment of the past few years was all a mirage, and we've really been losing ground all this time, thanks to Rush's evil plan to prevent us from saving the world?"
On reflection, I realized there are two things wrong with that statement. The first is that we know global warming deniers can't do stats. The above statement, without even a definition of what "years ago" means, is even less meaningful that claims like "2008 was about as hot as 2001 and cooler than 2005, so the entire multi-decade warming trend must be reversing itself." Two or three data points simply don't make any kind of valid statistical case. If only the average American (or humans in general) were better at this kind of thinking...
The second problem is that in all likelihood, Rush doesn't have an "evil plan," he's just genuinely deluded into believing the story his own cherry-picked numbers tell. From the other side of the hurdle it can be easy to forget this, but in the face of impending global catastrophe, denial is extremely hard to resist -- especially when getting over it would mean accepting that the only plan to save the world involves huge benefits to your political opponents. After all, if we demonstrate that government action can contribute to a green economic recovery, millions of new jobs, reduced air pollution, independence from Middle East oil, and saving the world from climate catastrophe, it says something pretty positive about government -- which would undermine standard conservative rhetoric and help cement the current Democratic majority. And anything that can do that, a conservative will naturally assume, must be "unfounded alarmism used for political gain." (We certainly used that line against the Bush administration over his "War on Terror" rhetoric often enough.) So why not tell everyone that any real government action on climate will necessarily fail, while simultaneously doing everything in your power to ensure that it never gets the chance to try?
Which brings me to the real topic of this post. Conservatives claim that a greenhouse-reduction policy would harm the economy. This is their answer to a lot of policies they don't like. Why? Because as it happens, conservatives are in love with progress.
That line was mostly just to get your attention. The definition of progress here is narrowed to economic progress, defined as unlimited growth in numbers like the Dow Jones and especially the Gross Domestic Product. And our entire economic system does indeed seem to be built on this concept. Everyone knows economic shrinkage is bad, but even a leveling off or "stagnation" can hurt living standards, so we have a Red Queen paradox: we have to keep running up those numbers as fast as we can just to stay in the same place.
Now, you might think that with the standard conservative lines about innovation in business that's somehow "stifled by government," they would count technological progress as a good thing too. This isn't as true as you'd think. Libertarians do love futuristic technology, which is why they push nuclear fission power plants: they look like a stepping-stone to fusion and all the marvels of tomorrow. Main-line conservatives, by contrast, mainly push nuclear because it "has a fifty-year track record." Solar arrays and electric cars are too futuristic for them, too untried, too risky. They would prefer to have economic growth without the innovation that drives it, the "creative destruction" where people in obsolete industries (e.g. record players, typewriters, leaded gasoline, and now coal mining) lose their jobs and have to find new ones. Progressives aren't big fans of this process either, but if the new industry is demonstrably better than the one it replaces, we're okay with it as long as appropriate job retraining programs are available.
"I'm not the guy who sings the hymns, no bleeding hearts to mend,
But I like the part where Icarus hijacks the Little Red Hen."
-Lyrics to "Last Plane Out" by Toy Matinee
There are two main progressive objections to the doctrine of economic progress to the exclusion of all other goals: we claim it's detrimental to both social progress and progress toward a sustainable civilization. On the social side, we're suspicious of the claim that "a rising tide lifts all boats" -- which may be just barely true according to this chart of income trends since 1947, but with some pretty serious stagnation for those at the low end of the spectrum. Like the Little Red Hen, so the story goes, these are the people who do the hard labor no one else is willing to do, but unlike her, they have no way of keeping the benefits for themselves; instead, their contributions to the economy tend to join the general flow trickling gradually upward toward the massive concentrations of wealth at the top. Without government policies like progressive taxation and social safety nets, progressives argue, the problem would be even worse. But we're almost powerless to reverse the trend, because any actual narrowing of the rich-poor gap is demonized by conservatives as "spreading the wealth, a.k.a. socialism, a.k.a. evil."
Meanwhile, the dogma of limitless growth in the physical economy, of "conserving the way things are" by consuming progressively more of the planet's resources, looks to progressives like a good way to guarantee our doom as a civilization. Although recycling has begun to replace needless extraction of natural resources, this would probably never have happened without government mandates. And as population growth and urban sprawl continue apace, along with the clearing of vast tracts of land to use for things like tar sands mining, we have to wonder if a system based on untrammeled economic growth is like Icarus, flying higher and higher without regard to the approaching danger of burning to death.