Conservative Republican argues for bipartisanship on the environment

Here & Now's Peter O'Dowd speaks with Benji Backer, author of "The Conservative Environmentalist", about why he'd like to see Republicans and Democrats find common ground and work together on protecting the environment.

By Benji Backer

A bove New York City’s Union Square looms an eighty-foot-wide digital display known as the Climate Clock that is counting down, second by second, how much time the planet has before it hits 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming above pre-industrial levels. This number marks Earth’s so-called deadline, the designated threshold at which catastrophic changes in the environment will become irreversible. At this point, sea levels are predicted to engulf all coastal cities, ice sheets will be completely lost, and all animals will begin disappearing.

Sounds ominous, right? It’s supposed to. Alarmism sells, and a realistic discussion about climate change doesn’t, so I’ve learned.

You need only to look at the content on your social media feed to know that fear is the number-one tool used by political influencers and news reporters to elicit thousands of vicious tweets, disparaging comments, and shock-faced emojis. With outspoken
voices on the political right calling green energy “deadlier than the coronavirus” and those on the political left predicting a fast approaching end-of-the-world date, it’s understandable that fear and outrage about our future characterize our generation.

I don’t agree with their tactics, or the idea that Earth will be an apocalyptic wasteland by 2050, but alarmists are right that we have a problem on our hands. While I’ve clashed with my fellow conservatives over whether climate change is real, the science—as well as the empirical evidence of record-breaking temperatures and the increased frequency of natural disasters—tells us definitively that the Earth really is warming up. And though the planet has been steadily increasing in temperature since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve seen significant increases in recent history.

Over the past seven decades, carbon dioxide levels have climbed nearly five times as fast as in the decades prior. To put those changes in some historical context, the amount of rise in carbon dioxide levels since the late 1950s would naturally have taken somewhere in the range of 5,000 to 20,000 years. We’ve managed to do it in about sixty years. At the same time, the rate of warming averaged 0.14 degrees Celsius per decade. The nine years from 2013 to 2021 rank as the warmest ever recorded. The rapid rate of temperature rise over such a short period of time points to only one thing: greenhouse gases.

That said, reacting with despair is the last thing we should be doing. In times of trouble, the best thing we can do is think logically and act methodically. Instead, the conversation has been dominated by Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Green New Deal, and calls for panic-and-despair-driven measures like the immediate and total ban of fossil fuels. Unlike Greta and many well-known climate activists, who call for governments around the world to take extreme and drastic measures that will impact our liberty and economic security, I’m a conservative. I want to change the narrative surrounding climate change—and spread the good news that there is so much we can do, and are already doing, to fix the climate without sacrificing the things that are important to us: economic security, an open and free market, and our liberty. I want to take care of the environment with local solutions, capitalist incentives, and innovation—all of which are compatible with conservatism. “Conservation” and “conservative” are cognates, after all.

Excerpted from "The Conservative Environmentalist: Common Sense Solutions for a Sustainable Future" by Benji Backer in agreement with Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Benjamin Backer, 2024.