Bryan Griffin’s article “Individual action key to conservation” seems to strongly evoke his Republican role model, Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, and his limp response to President Obama’s State of the Union address. In his piece, he manages to convey such base ideas as “Liberals bad” and “Regulation bad.” OK, so you can’t blame him for paraphrasing the GOP manifesto. But beyond the standard partisan hackery, Mr. Griffin offers several gems that are simply too precious to ignore.
His first example of liberalism run afoul is the result of environmentalist group’s lawsuit to protect the spikedace population in the Verder River in Arizona. The pinko commie hippies won, but ultimately their intervention put the nails in the spikedace coffin. No, I had never heard of this either.
I mean, if you’re nitpicking like this you could very easily point out examples of conservative “drill, baby, drill” doctrine resulting in environmental ruin (e.g., the ongoing rape of the Gulf Coast).
He further claims that Nancy Pelosi, or as the right wing prefers to call her, “Satan,” mandated the use of compact fluorescent lamps under the guise of environmentalism, when in fact the new bulbs contain enough mercury to harm fetuses if broken. In other words, the use of energy-saving bulbs is really just a liberal ploy to increase the number of abortions.
All kidding aside, CFL bulbs can be moderately dangerous when broken. You need to be careful when cleaning a broken CFL, and they need to be recycled properly to ensure that mercury doesn’t enter landfills. However, the entire argument is dishonest since, per hour of light produced, incandescent bulbs release three times the amount of mercury into the atmosphere than CFL bulbs do.
If you’ve been keeping score, almost everything in his piece so far is B.S. The remainder of the article is B.S. as well, but I’ve got to stop because rereading it is giving me a headache.
On the one hand, I am disturbed to see that a young law student of all people has such trouble making a rational argument these days.
On the other hand, I am relieved to know that the job market for lawyers is in the toilet these days.
The real fundamental problem with his arguments, and the reason why it will be a long time before we see a real conservative environmental movement, is that the biggest threat to nature is a failure of the free market. If there is negligible cost associated with dumping chemicals in a river, industrial giants will do it.
There is a liberal desire to correct this imbalance and ensure that nature, which has a public value, be preserved to some extent.
Conservatives will argue that the left goes too far, protecting small endangered species and plants that nobody’s every heard of at the expense of human well-being.
There are arguments worth having. Is it more important to feed and house the Third World or protect the ozone from carbon emissions? Is it more important to keep a natural habitat preserved or build housing developments? Should you buy a seven-seat SUV to drive your friends around even though the majority of the time you just drive by yourself?
These are questions that can’t be answered with a simple yes or no. Clearly, liberal guilt shouldn’t stop underdeveloped parts of the world from getting power. Furthermore, people need homes, and who cares about the mountain rat anyway? And if you have five kids, you’re going to need a big car, so MPG be damned.
But if you listen to what passes for conservatism these days you hear quite a strange song: Tea Partiers complain about immigrants and the recession while the recession hits immigrants exponentially harder. Right-wing figureheads fight against the tax burden on the elite as the separation between rich and poor grows faster and faster.
There are actual flaws with liberalism as well as with our government. It’s just that with the conservative mindset today they will never get fixed, and that’s a problem for everyone.
Frederic Spieler is a first-year grad student in the College of Engineering.
