Reclaiming Environmental Policy from the Left

Americans of all political stripes care about the environment. What does a better policy paradigm look like?

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a three-part series on how the Right should think about environmental and climate policy. Read Joseph Majkut on What the Science of Climate Change Really Looks Like and Taylor Myers’s Against Climate Piety.

Nearly two decades of modern climate politics has produced one durable result: Most Americans stopped listening. Conservatives now have an opportunity to build something better.

The coalition that centered climate change as the crisis worth organizing over no longer commands the electorate. There is little to show for the billions of dollars and a decade of their near-total institutional capture. Even among Democrats, climate change now ranks near the bottom of priorities voters want solved by Washington. The era of the climate hawk is over, leaving behind it a vacuum.

The autopsy of this era of environmentalism is often misdiagnosed by conservatives. Climate change is not an invented problem, and saying so costs us nothing. All the same, the climate alarmists took a real problem, wildly exaggerated it, poorly explained it, and answered it with policies that many Americans didn’t want.

Climate politics became hopelessly abstract. Nobody can visualize a carbon emission, intuitively understands what “parts per million” means, or has any clue why 2050 is the deadline by which we are supposed to have fixed everything. The “facts” given were frequently, substantively, wrong. Consider extreme examples like RCP8.5, a worst-case climate scenario that assumed the world would burn five times its proven coal reserves. Despite its detachment from reality, many environmentalists treated it as the business-as-usual forecast, and the alarmism trickled into large swaths of journalism, litigation, and policy-making.

What voters did see on climate came in the form of personal costs and sacrifices. Climate policy arrived on the doorstep of the average household in the form of a tax, a ban, or a lecture. Carbon taxes, mandates phasing out the internal combustion engine, or bans on gas stoves are all deeply unpopular. Predictably, 68% of Americans told pollsters they wouldn’t even pay $10 a month to fight climate change. All the while, activists shut down emissions-free nuclear plants, blocked forest management projects, and fought LNG terminals whose product displaces coal in Asia and dirtier Russian gas in Europe. Each one of these decisions, made by people who claimed to be fighting emissions, raised them.

It’s clear that something went awry. What can we replace it with?

The Conservative Conservation Instinct

In spite of, or perhaps because of the collapse of climate politics, classic conservation issues are as popular as ever.

My organization’s own polling emphasizes this. Eighty-one percent of voters support an agenda organized around clean air, clean water, and beautiful places. The pollution of drinking water has been the top environmental concern every year since 2001. This gap only grows among younger voters. Fully 59% of voters aged 18-35 prioritize clean water, and 41% prioritize air quality, while their concern about climate change plummets to 24%. Climate change no longer has a grip on voters’ attention, but they still clearly care about tangible conservation issues.

This becomes evident in the environmental fights that attract the most attention. When Senator Mike Lee’s (R-UT) public lands sale provision surfaced last year, the fiercest objections came from hunters and anglers within his own coalition. County-by-county resistance to data center siting looks similar, and Gallup now finds 46% of Americans worry a great deal about their environmental impact, more than say the same about climate change.

It is clear, then, that conservatives should grasp this opportunity to pivot the conversation away from a singular focus on climate change and abstract, impersonal issues like parts-per-million or far-away ice caps, to a more holistic environmental vision that personalizes these issues for the everyday American.

This approach captures a deeply conservation-minded instinct among conservatives. The angler who keeps an eye on fish populations and creek pollution, the rancher for whom water and topsoil are part of his bottom line, or the duck hunter who doesn’t need a climate model to tell him migration patterns are shifting.

This is fertile ground for conservatives. The attachment to place that comes naturally to Americans is deeply grounded in the conservative intellectual tradition. Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot gave this idea of intergenerational responsibility a tangible expression through the principle of wise use, the common-sense and human-centered philosophy that our land should be stewarded toward the greatest good for the greatest number over the longest time.

All of these ideas form the basis of a distinctly conservative conservation ethic, one that now begs to be synthesized into a coherent governing philosophy for the modern era: call it abundance conservation.

Environmentalists have constantly preached that economic development is inherently antagonistic to environmental health. This is false on the merits. Research shows a clear, long-term correlation between economic prosperity and environmental conservation. Economists call this the Environmental Kuznets Curve: As economies grow, they initially degrade their environments (think of the Industrial Revolution, for example), but once they reach a certain stage of development, the relationship inverts and additional economic growth leads to greater environmental outcomes, either through innovation that reduces pollution or enhances efficiency, or through higher disposable income to spend on ecological goods like national parks.

We can and must advance an approach to stewardship that reflects this reality: increasing both human prosperity and the long-term productivity of our natural resources through wise use, technological innovation, and policies that treat human flourishing as the goal rather than the problem.

Take, for example, a forest in New England. The Left’s preservationist approach would demand fencing it off in the name of “protection.” A purely extractionary approach, in contrast, would log it flat with no regard for its ecological or inherent value. Abundance conservation would result in a more creative approach with a forester marking the stand, a logger taking the white pine while leaving the sugar maple, and allowing the landowner to lease tapping rights to a local sugar maker.

This serves human needs, but it also serves the deer and turkey with diversified habitat, the fuel load comes down, and local families keep a productive forest for hunting, syrup production, and their daily enjoyment. Every party’s material stake in the forest being healthy in 50 years is internalized. Properly ordered, economy and ecology reinforce one another—a central concept of wise-use policy.

Abundance conservation isn’t confined to a single forest. The same principles that shape it apply across conservation, resource management, and even climate. Ultimately, it is a framework for trade-offs rather than a way of pretending that they don’t exist.

Of course, downsides exist. Energy development won’t magically stop having an environmental impact—which is as true for carbon-emitting fossil fuels as it is for land- and material-intensive renewable resources. Many important and good projects will have harms that we might have to more or less tolerate for economic or geopolitical reasons: critical mineral mining that scars the landscape, transmission lines that cut through ranchlands and forests, nuclear plants that have to store their waste on-site.

The point of abundance conservation is not to deny these trade-offs or downsides, but to make sense of them in a framework that seeks to maximize human flourishing—which sometimes errs on the side of development, and sometimes on the side of conservation. Most importantly, these trade-offs should exist in a market structure that incentivizes positive-sum trade (for example, a community negotiating a settlement with a hyperscaler to allow data center development in exchange for investment in the local grid, water-saving technology, and lower property taxes for residents), rewards innovation, and empowers the local decision-makers who will bear the brunt or reap the reward.

The strongest argument against this approach is that human flourishing is elastic enough a concept to theoretically justify anything. Frameworks that promise to weigh competing priorities have the propensity to fall on the extractive side more often than not. That’s obviously not the intention, but it’s worth being upfront about. A helpful way to address that dynamic is by incorporating certain checks and balances that give serious consideration to the environmental side of any given question: community engagement, common-sense subsidiarity to states and localities, doing policy via legislation rather than court cases or administrative power, carving out certain absolute exemptions (e.g. National Parks), and the like.

No instance of environmental policy can or should exist in a vacuum. We should instead invite a healthy tension with energy prices, wages, industrial capacity, and national security in order to build durable policies and politics.

Realigning the Environmental Agenda

If conservatives seek to lead the next era of environmental policy, we must invite that policy into the foundation of the New Right’s agenda rather than relegating it as an afterthought. Reindustrialization, energy dominance, decoupling from China, affordability for families, and a renewed appreciation for beauty and the frontier in the American tradition; all of these priorities already animate our coalition, and all of them tie directly to environmental policy.

That’s doubly true because, even if America alone somehow achieved zero emissions tomorrow, it would make little difference to the overall trajectory of climate change. China and India would continue dwarfing the rest of the world’s contributions to global emissions, and the U.S. would never successfully convince developing nations to trade their own growth for the sake of UN emissions targets. Our priority should instead be to make clean technology so cheap, abundant, and exportable that the rest of the world adopts it out of self-interest.

In an essay Isaiah Menning and I wrote for American Affairs, we made the case for a common-good energy framework with three pillars. The first is permitting reform. An environmental impact statement takes three-and-a-half years on average (with litigation adding nearly four more for energy projects). These burdens fall hardest on the technologies the climate movement claims to want: Roughly 90% of major projects delayed under the National Environmental Policy Act are clean energy ones. Making it easier to build in America would not only reduce energy prices and increase our industrial capacity, but also disproportionately favor cleaner sources of energy.

Capital deployment is the second pillar. We need the federal government to help finance nationally critical energy infrastructure that private markets alone are ill-equipped for. Whether it’s competitively financing coal-to-nuclear conversions, or next-generation deep geothermal wells, there is a legitimate role for the government through the Office of Energy Dominance Financing and other vehicles to help commercialize critical supply chains or derisk first-of-a-kind technologies.

Innovation is the third, for which there is no better recent example than the shale revolution. The federally supported fracking boom not only made America energy-independent for the first time since the 1960s by tapping previously inaccessible natural gas resources below the ground, but it also displaced much of America’s coal industry, which is the largest source of our emissions reductions over the last two decades. The same innovation model it was borne of, with national lab-based research partnerships and milestone-based awards, is the path forward toward commercial geothermal, next-generation nuclear power, and long-duration storage.

This kind of energy addition is the precondition for any serious attempt at reindustrialization. Following nearly 20 years of flat demand, American electricity consumption is finally climbing again. While gas will continue playing a critical role for the foreseeable future, solar paired with storage is the fastest option available for new capacity in the short term. Long term, our plans should orient toward the pursuit of clean firm power in the form of advanced nuclear and geothermal energy that run around the clock and scale quickly.

Like many other facets of smarter environmental policy, this approach would have additional benefits. These changes would produce not just cheaper, cleaner, and more resilient power for American families, but would also decrease reliance on China. At present, China dominates critical mineral processing, battery manufacturing, and the lion’s share of the solar supply chain—all with unscrupulous environmental and labor standards. American industry is among the cleanest on earth, which makes reindustrialization and onshoring good national security policy, economic policy, labor policy, and environmental policy all in one.

Data centers represent the convergence of all of these issues. Demand growth, reindustrialization, and the ability to underwrite behind-the-grid power plants all represent generational opportunities if pursued seriously. Yet, the data center conversation is stuck in an all-or-nothing power struggle between AI-accelerationists and skeptics calling for a moratorium. Local communities are rejecting data center developments across the country, in large part over environmental and land use concerns.

The better answer is to build more creatively, not to block building altogether. We should encourage data center development on brownfields and Superfund parcels rather than farmland, in exchange for developers cleaning up those areas. Similarly, we could structure their power contracts to pay for clean firm power generation, such as advanced nuclear reactors. Such an approach would put communities first, while still enabling economic development and unlocking environmental co-benefits in the process.

The same logic can and should be extended to all corners of the American ecosystem. Active forest management can reduce catastrophic fire, protecting communities in the process. Precision farming practices can cut costs for farmers while improving soil health and water downstream. Adaptation, too, in the form of cloud seeding or terraforming or inventive strategies for crop durability, each of these represent ways of building resilience in the face of a changing climate rather than just squabbling over it. Solutions like these offer concrete answers and tell voters that our side is serious about their futures.

Don’t Repeat the Left’s Mistakes

Defining the next era of environmental policy comes with pitfalls. For all the Left’s failings, the Right has developed reflexes that risk falling into many of the same traps, leaning too much on tribalism or political purity tests..

Where the Left catastrophized, the Right has often been tempted to deny the reality of these challenges outright. The same dynamic has become true of our approach to energy and conservation issues. Conservatives have spent a decade correctly criticizing the Left’s energy obstructionism. We cannot now turn around and practice it ourselves. Issuing stop-work orders against offshore wind projects already under construction or inventing bureaucratic hurdles for solar permits shares the exact same roots as the Left’s drilling pauses and LNG moratoria.

Likewise, propping up uneconomical coal to “own the libs” is unserious energy policy. While coal still makes sense in certain developing parts of the world, it is one of the most expensive and dirtiest sources of domestic energy. And on the conservation side, trying to sell a parcel of Yosemite to a private developer or running bulldozers through Big Bend National Park despite opposition from local Republican sheriffs does little to instill faith in voters that we care about the places they consider special.

This moment also requires more than just victory laps around the last breaths of the climate hawk. Yes, we should reform the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. Yes, we should continue calling out climate alarmism and cutting funding from meritless projects, but an affirmative vision is also required of us.

Filling the Vacuum

Abundance conservation gives conservatives a coherent framework for aligning environmental policy with human flourishing, economic strength, and national pride. We must unapologetically place Americans and future generations at the center of that policy while treating wise use, technological innovation, and productive natural resources as mutually reinforcing parts of the same agenda.

The era of the climate hawk has passed, and it has left a vacuum that gives conservatives a historic opportunity to define the next generation of energy and environmental policy and progress. It should be grounded in our confidence in America’s ability to grow, build, and innovate while responsibly stewarding the natural wealth on which we depend.