The Conservative Environmentalist: Common Sense Solutions for a Sustainable Future - Hardcover

Backer, Benji

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593714008 ISBN 13: 9780593714003

Verlag: Sentinel, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

A young, conservative environmentalist provides an intrepid vision for both solving our climate crisis and prioritizing the American national interest.

Politicians, pseudo-experts, and other partisans have led us to believe that there are only two approaches to climate change: doomerism or denial. Benji Backer, Founder and Executive Chairman of the American Conservation Coalition, argues that both are dead ends. In The Conservative Environmentalist, he delivers an entirely new strategy to take care of the planet while putting put the economic interest of the American people first. 

Backer makes the compelling case that conservative principles are the key to climate solutions that actually work. In this book, you’ll visit the country’s most diverse ecosystems and consequential manufacturing hubs—from Utah coal mines and Texas oil fields to Louisiana wetlands and Rhode Island offshore wind farms—witnessing the power of individual entrepreneurship and local problem-solving. You’ll be inspired by groundbreaking efforts to strengthen earth’s ecosystems (that Green New Dealers and other Big Government advocates would prefer to keep hidden), like partnerships between oil and gas companies and environmental nonprofits to preserve thousands of acres of wetlands. 

Drawing on cutting-edge science, a deep understanding of local community needs, and his experience rallying politicians on both sides of the aisle to take action, Backer offers hope for everyone who cares about the state of the great outdoors. Fascinating, clear-headed, and full of surprises, The Conservative Environmentalist is the fresh, audacious approach needed to ensure a sustainable future, and particularly one that works for America.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Benji Backer is the founder and executive chairman of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), the largest right-of-center environmental organization in the country. For his work spearheading the ACC, he has been named to the Fortune 40 Under 40, Forbes 30 Under 30, GreenBiz 30 Under 30, and Grist 50 lists. A frequent contributor to national media outlets, he’s become one of the leading environmental voices in the United States. Above all, Backer is an avid outdoorsman who spends most
of his free time in the mountains out West.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Overcoming
Our Political Divide

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a farmer. If it's winter, your day begins before sunrise when you check the temperature in your greenhouse to ensure your indoor crops aren't overheating. If it's summer, the rest of your morning may consist of cutting, raking, and drying the hay you'll use to feed your livestock. If it's planting season, you may spend your entire day seeding, fertilizing, and spraying your fields; and if it's harvest season, you'll be spending long, long hours in a combine reaping your corn, soybeans, cotton, and other invaluable resources Americans need for everyday living. Each of these complex processes requires its own piece of expensive, specialized equipment, and all of it runs on-you guessed it-fossil fuels.

Not only does all farming equipment run on fossil fuels, but the pesticides and fertilizers that have increased crop yields tenfold and allowed us to feed the country at record-low costs are made with them. The small planes used to efficiently spray large fields run on fossil fuels, the trucks farmers use to haul equipment run on fossil fuels, and the farmer's house runs on fossil fuels. Your fuel costs have always been high, but you've been able to make your business work thanks to the subsidies that the government provides to the farmers who feed the nation.

Now take a moment to think about how you, a farmer, might feel about the government ripping away the subsidies you've relied on for years to run your business, and introducing sweeping, top-down regulations to combat carbon emissions. Your fuel costs double or triple because of a new tax that penalizes users of fossil fuels. You're also paying a higher electricity bill as electricity companies raise rates to cover the installation of thousands of new EV charging stations across your state. If you're a corn farmer, you'll soon find yourself with a lot of excess crop on your hands, as 40 percent of our nation's corn goes to making the now-useless ethanol that powers gas engines. With soaring costs and a superfluous crop, you decide to sell the farm that's been in your family for generations to a foreign solar company who will build thousands of solar panels on what used to be crop fields. As more American farms go under, more and more food is imported from foreign countries, instead of being planted, grown, and harvested on American soil. On top of all this, you find yourself being ridiculed as backwards and ignorant for daring to voice any kind of opposition against the new climate change legislation, even though you support green policies and alternative energy. Truthfully, farmers have more cause than most to be concerned about climate change-as our weather becomes more volatile, the business of planting and harvesting becomes less and less predictable.

As you can see, top-down energy solutions simply do not work in a country as big and diverse as America. If you believe in our democracy-and I very much do-then you believe that we need to implement solutions that work for everyone, not just the folks for whom buying a new EV and adding solar panels to their house is convenient. Introducing sweeping, one-size-fits-all policies that harm local communities and ruin the livelihoods of thousands of rural dwellers is simply anti-democratic and anti-American. In thinking about how to solve climate change, it's imperative that we give farmers, oil field workers, and coal miners a voice too.

If you stop to think for one moment about the plight of a fossil fuel-dependent worker in our current political climate, you begin to see that the political division surrounding this issue is material, and not just rhetorical. Fossil fuel-dependent workers are concerned about their very survival in a world that is rapidly transitioning to alternative energy sources-they aren't backwards, ignorant, or stupid, as much as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might say they are. Politicians and the media have effectively made green energy into something you're for if you're a Democrat and against if you're a Republican. This simplistic distinction only serves to divide the American people and further the political careers of a few bad actors on both sides of the aisle.

In a cheap effort to gain voters, conservatives and liberals have both adopted equally dramatic approaches toward climate change. Oklahoma senator James Inhofe's 2015 snowball-tossing stunt on the Senate floor-dismissing global warming-still makes the rounds on the internet. We've heard outspoken individuals such as Tucker Carlson and President Trump repeatedly purport that climate change is one big hoax. Just as ridiculous was New York senator Charles Schumer blaming climate change for tropical storms occurring in the southeast during that region's normal hurricane season, and climate activists blaming Texas's 2021 snowstorm on it. (Just to be sure we're on the same sheet of paper, a cold, dry snap is exactly the type of weather that global warming is expected to create fewer instances of.)

When I share my beliefs about how climate change is affecting the environment, I brace myself as I anticipate a blow from the Left or the Right. I'm not the only one. Politicians and business leaders dread the shame-and-blame game too, and adopt positions they don't really believe just to avoid attacks. One politician explained to me that even engaging in rational discussion about climate change would appear to their constituents as the equivalent of joining the other side.

By the time President Trump took office, partisanship regarding environmental stewardship had been well established. A far cry from the work of his Republican predecessors, the focus for President Trump was to hammer environmentalists and roll back environmental policies. At the same time, climate change was soon lumped in with other important issues that dominated the airwaves such as the #MeToo movement, pandemic protocols, and the Black Lives Matter movement, issues that further polarized the nation. If you glance at just about any election map since 2016, you'll notice that there's a stark red/blue divide-the urban areas are blue, and the rural areas are red. People assume that anyone in a blue area cares about climate change, and anyone in a red area doesn't. While it's undeniably true that rural areas tend to skew conservative, it's absolutely not true that these voters don't care about the environment.

The Urbanite Bias

Growing up in a small Midwestern city nestled among dairy farms and forests as far as the eye can see, I witnessed rural Americans hard at work. People there wake up at the crack of dawn, and business owners and laborers get their hands dirty to feed the rest of the country. Our local cheese stores shipped to all parts of the States and were the source of many people's livelihoods. I assumed that everyone else recognized rural America's value too.

When I moved to Seattle to go to college, I learned how wrong I was.

Three-quarters of Washington lies east of the Cascade Mountains, and is too frequently dismissed and mocked by those living along the Pacific coast. When I first heard my friends from Seattle, Tacoma, and Bellevue belittle their eastern neighbors, my stomach turned. (To this day, it still does.) Even though residents of Eastern Washington grow the food we eat and provide the energy powering our homes, many of them lack the bachelor's degree that makes them relevant in the eyes of their urban neighbors.

I often think about the highly skilled agrarian and mechanical workforce in my home state of Wisconsin, who needed very specific training to do their jobs effectively and safely. While a liberal arts education is not high on the priority list of many rural workers, the technology needed to remain on the cutting edge is. Unfortunately, even basic modern conveniences that the rest of the country takes for...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Sentinel
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593714008
• ISBN 13: 9780593714003
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar