Rhetoric, as has been widely acknowledged, has taken the place of fact and discussion - a carbon tax is patently bad because it is both a tax and, we are repeatedly told, an anti-jobs extremist idea.
Though Roosevelt later sided more with conservationists, who advocated “wise use” of resources rather than the stricter approach of preservation, there’s no doubt that his tenure as president established the validity of government’s role in environmental issues.(Photo source: Library of Congress via Wikipedia)īut a basic tenet of EcoOptimism is that environmentalism and the economy are not at odds, that the portrayal of the issues as a tradeoff of one for the other is not only a false dilemma, but is just flat out false. Republican Teddy Roosevelt was famously taken camping in Yosemite by John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and father of preservationism. (Less frequently noted is that environmentalism used to be a Republican platform, dating back at least to the days of Teddy Roosevelt.) Lost in this is the observation that environmentalism is really a partisan issue only in the eyes of the corporate interests who fear (often incorrectly) that they are threatened and in the mouths of the candidates who perceive those interests as the voice of the populace.
The evolution of environmentalism from a grass roots populist movement to being cast as anti-jobs and anti-capitalism has been well documented. Of course, that isn’t actually the case and I wrote recently about how this political strategy may not be accurate. The Republicans have given the issue such a pariah-like image that even the formerly supportive Dems have been cowed into believing it’s a non-starter politically. In a way, that makes the whole topic non-partisan: neither party is talking about it. Nor am I holding my breath in anticipation of their resurgence at the Democratic convention. (Note: I wrote this before Romney’s spectacularly ill-received joke about Obama’s promising to stop rising sea levels.) So it has been no surprise that the words climate or carbon or, say, endocrine disruptors are not even footnotes, let alone headliners. No one expected to hear anything about the environment or climate disruption at the Republican convention.
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