Can someone explain to me why conservatives are against renewable energy?

Great Debates
102

It’s a two sided answer:

First, since conservative ideology is based on exploitation and abuse, then exploiting and abusing the environment for the financial benefit of the abusers is a central tenet of any and all conservative ideologies.

Second, people have an innate need to be subservient to who they perceive as a higher authority. History is replete with examples of royalty, kings, dictators, mass killers, and the countless numbers of human mental drones that willfully supported their criminal acts just because they wanted to be surfs.

That’s why conservatives are against alternative energy. The big oil corps may loose some money so any attempt to do so is against their core principle of inflicting damage for monetary profit, proving that they are superior to the ones they are inflicting damage to.

All conservative ideologies throughout human history are slight variations of the main idea and innate psychological drive of destruction for profit.

That’s why conservatism is a mental disorder.

103

People accept plenty of other things that cause a lot more cancer. Like, say, most non-nuclear power plants.

104

Whereas liberals are just plain idiots. Conservatives are evil. Liberals are idiots. So what’s new.

105

I haven’t been really interested in following this thread, although I rolled my eyes at Der Trihs’s blaming on religion. Most religious folks I know are very eco-friendly. But anyway, I have a very politically conservative Facebook friend who posted this yesterday which goes to the OP’s question:

“I believe that the govt pushes alternative forms of energy because they control them, and through them they can control us. The quest for power (control) has been the downfall of nearly every nation.”

No, it doesn’t make sense.

106

Thanks for using a famous quote from Dr. Michael Savage. There is hope! :stuck_out_tongue:
Amazing how the original question about use of new forms of energy, turns liberals into a slave race. WOW

107

It isn’t as eye-rolling as you might think, depending where in the US you are. The very common religious position here in the non-metro PacNW is that “God’s bounty” was created for the benefit of man to exploit as he sees fit, and that there is a judgment day. So with those two facets as part of a core belief system, it is easy to see why someone would oppose “wasting” investment on anything alternative when there is still plenty of oil and coal left.

108

I’m a fan of renewable energy. I love driving near the Pincher Creek wind farm - I think it’s beautiful. Clean, modern energy. Yahoo. I wish everything we have could be powered by wind and solar and unicorn tears.

Unfortunately, I live in the real world. As a skeptic and an economic conservative, I demand actual plans that lead to reasonable outcomes before I’ll give people my money to ‘invest’.

And this is where the left goes wrong. In their zeal to get away from the dreaded oil, they’ll buy into every bloody scheme cooked up by a charlatan looking to bilk the taxpayers. They think that all you have to do is sign a bill that promises to ‘invest’ more money in research, and magically the future will arrive and we’ll get rid of that pesky oil and coal.

But throwing money around willy-nilly does not solve problems. If anything, it creates waste and the establishment of new entrenched special interests that block further reforms and make the problem worse.

For example, let’s look at biofuels. They were all the rage a decade ago. The left was marching in lockstep to demand more ‘investment’ in ethanol production. Lots of us raised the alarm that ethanol wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, and that there was really nothing on the horizon that you could ‘invest’ in that would make it a great source of energy.

But by this time, the smart boys at the big agriculture companies realized that congress was about to rain soup on them so they went into their best lobbying mode and starting extolling the virtues of corn ethanol. Since they were the only big game in town capable of producing ethanol in large quanties, they were listened to. And the left, the guys who are supposed to be skeptical of big business and lobbying, happily trumpeted and helped to sell every piece of crap ‘report’ they were handed, because they were told what they wanted to hear.

The end result - billions of dollars in subsidies diverted to big businesses. Food crops diverted to ethanol production - which turned out to be a net energy sink and made the problem worse. But now that ethanol’s out there, it’s hard to get rid of it. Now that these companies have organized their activities and business plans around subsidies, it’s hard to kill them without causing more economic havoc. So now there’s yet another piggie sucking on the government’s teat, making it less able to deal with all the other problems it needs to deal with. Well done, boys.

I don’t want a repeat of that. I want to proceed methodically. If you want a billion dollars from the taxpayers to ‘invest’, show me the business plan. Explain exactly where that money will go, what research will be funded, why that type of research needs more funding, what the risks are, what the potential benefits are, what the timelines are. I’ll accept plenty of risk - I understand how basic research works. But I want it quantified.

I want that because if the alternative energy crowd cannot come up with those plans, then I have to believe they have no freaking clue and they’re just throwing darts at a board hoping something will stick. And that’s no way to run energy policy. All you’ll do is create distortions, reward the wrong people, and pour money into the big special interests who will use it to squash innovation elsewhere. You’ll do more harm than good.

Presidents have been promising an end to dependence on foreign oil since Nixon. Every one of them ‘invested’ in the solution. None of it has amounted to anything. If you want to play that old tape again, you’d better be able to tell me how it’s going to be different this time.

The fact is that there is already a large amount of R&D going on, driven by the market. Business people aren’t stupid. They can see the opportunities in cheap alternative energy. Show me that the amount they are currently investing is inadequate, and explain why and where you would add more money. Stop handwaving and speaking in generalities.

I’ll give T Boone Pickens some credit here - he actually has a plan. It’s a lousy plan and it won’t work, but at least it’s a plan. Bring more of those. Maybe one of them will make sense. THEN we can talk about investing in it.

As for just taxing people and using the money to pay for current alternative energy - that’s the kind of answer people give when they are innumerate and incable of or unwilling to examine the consequences. As I pointed out in another thread, if the U.S. wanted to replace its energy with solar PV today, it would cost somewhere on the order of an additional 2.8 to 4 trillion dollars a YEAR. And I hate to break it to you, but you’re not getting that money out of the rich - because they don’t have it. You could take ALL their income, and you couldn’t pay for half of that. Then they’d be broke or gone, and you’d have nothing except a big smoking hole in the budget where their tax revenue used to be.

Wind is cheaper, but there are a limited number of places where you can get it cost-effectively. There aren’t enough good wind locations to provide more than 5-10% of America’s power. After that, wind starts to go up dramatically in cost.

Solar Thermal is more expensive than wind, and cheaper than solar PV. Maybe we could move to that, and it would ‘only’ cost an extra trillion and a half per year. Except that solar PV is also sensitive to location, and that leaves out all the areas of the country where solar PV doesn’t work.

Wind is already being built rapidly in areas of highest efficiency. Solar thermal plants are also being constructed. But combined they’ll never provide more than 20% of America’s power needs. Trying to force them past that will bankrupt you.

Finally, let’s say you managed to pass a law that added a 20% VAT to everything in the country, and you used that money to build out all these current renewable projects. You would be locking the U.S. energy infrastructure into today’s technology. You might be crowding out investment in newer energy sources. High taxes could kill entrepreneurship and prevent the radical breakthroughs that we really need to crack this nut.

If you kill economic growth, you will make it harder to deal with the consequences of global warming - which will happen anyway, because if America drives its energy costs through the roof it will raise the price of manufactured products and drive down the price of oil, and countries like China will happily exploit both changes to their benefit. And they aren’t as energy efficient as the U.S., so every product that moves from the U.S. to China will help to increase global fossil fuel consumption.

It’s not conservatives’ fault that energy is a really, really difficult problem that currently has no easy answers. You can put your head in the sand and just repeat words like ‘investment’ as much as you like, and you won’t make the problem go away. You can throw as much money around as you want, and you won’t make a solution magically appear. It’s time to get real, get hard-headed, and stop blaming conservatives and calling them names because YOU don’t like the kinds of energy sources we have to live with.

109

I’m sure that is true, but it does not reflect mainstream Christian attitudes about environmentalism.

The Episcopal Church and Environmental Issues
Evangelical Lutheran Church of America Social Statement on Environmental Issues
American Baptist Churches Policy Statement on Ecology
United Methodist Church: Environmental Justice for a Sustainable Future
Seventh Day Adventist Statement on the Environment
His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew (Orthodox Churches) Speech to the Environmental Symposium
Presbyterian Church USA Environmental Ministries
Reformed Church of America Perspective on the Environment
Roman Catholic Church: “Environment and sustainable development: Protecting of global climate for present and future generations of mankind”
Mennonite Central Committee Care of Creation ministry

So I call BS on Der Trihs’s claim that they are “religious fanatics, who either think that there’s need to worry about using up natural resources because Jesus is coming back any time now; or they are actively hoping for an apocalypse because they think that’s when Jesus will come back, so they want massive climate change and a collapse of civilization due to energy running out.”

110

Thanks for providing some of the math examples that I’d so far been too lazy to dig up.

The baseline assumption that the right has some irrational romance with oil or coal for their own sake is where things first start going off the tracks. Ecoliberals go wrong when they first begin implying that there is not A WHOLE LOT to be said for oil and coal as stores/sources of energy and that their widespread use was not a highly rational, and massively beneficial to mankind, development in human history. Oil is the original biofuel. It’s energy-concentrated, readily-portable and storable, somewhat abundant, and its economics are well-understood. Humanity (not conservatives – liberals can criticize the f out of long-term reliance on fossil fuels, but until they start tooling around on Razor scooters, no fair indulging in ad hominem against conservatives as the face of oil and coal – we’re all fossil fuel pigs if we’re enjoying modern Western life) would have been foolish and irrational NOT to have exploited petroleum when the opportunity arose. Life would have been much different (hint: worse, from our modern perspective a century and change into the Age of Oil). Now we face the fact that this excellent technology, which has benefited us so much, has known and possible drawbacks. Gee, it’s almost as though the economy has multiple moving parts, and we have to make choices that have unintended consequences.

Sam Stone’s example of why the most beloved alterna-energy sources don’t, never really can, scale to the extent econuts dream/demand, points this out, and largely does away with the need to posit some nefarious right wing motive for opposition to pissing away money we don’t have on almost-certainly-counterproductive pipe dreams. You may not agree with conservatives, but the conservative saying, “Don’t just do something, stand there” is worth pondering as a defensible response to the liberal mirror image demand. Mind you, not by coincidence, the word “just,” as I’ve said before in this thread, is tricky indeed.

111

As usual good points from Sam Stone in a long screed ruined by the wide brush squeak point.

Solutions have been pointed before, do not require the end of progress, and many liberals are not like that.

As for not taking conservatives to task, it would not be an issue if it wasn’t for the fact that almost all do deny that there is a problem on relying on fossil fuels or that the issue is a small one.

As mentioned by others that have come around to approve of taxation of CO2 emissions like Lomborg is, the big stumbling block to assign the true cost of fossil fuels so then we can use the revenue to invest on more realistic solutions and technologies (including nuclear) is the current Republican party.

112

Straw manning in an attempt to get a point across does not work well either.

I have not seen a serious liberal here say that there is “some irrational romance with oil or coal for their own sake” the stakes from the oil companies are the same the tobacco industry had, and it is their bottom line and interest in seeding disinformation when controls are coming due to the harm they cause to the public.

Just as the tobacco industry had many politicians in their pockets willing to stop for decades any legislation to control tobacco, the current romance is not with the oil but it has always been with the money and support they get from industries that are at risk of getting taxed or controlled for the common good.

113

I think anyone who has been on these boards longer than a week knows that any sentence from Der Trihs that contains any form of the word “religious” is bullshit.

Regards,
Shodan

114

I’m going to toss out another example of where environmental zeal may have done more harm than good:

Here in Canada, we’re following the U.S. in banning the use of incandescent bulbs. Starting with general purpose 60-150W bulbs, we’ll be phasing them out. This is supposed to help with global warming.

However, Canada is a cold country with long winters, short summers, and lots of daylight in summer and not as much in the winter. And incandescent bulbs are inefficient because the energy they don’t convert into light is converted into heat. But Canadians heat their homes for a large portion of the year (all winter, plus cool summer nights). So incandescents aren’t all that inefficient after all in Canadian use, because replacing them with CFL’s means we have to replace their heat with furnace heat.

Those little stickers you see on CFLs that tell you how much you’ll save in electricity are incomplete - if they included the extra money you’ll have to spend to replace the heat from the bulbs, the savings drops. It’s not entirely eliminated, but it may drop to the point where the bulbs make no economic sense.

But here’s the kicker for the environmental crowd: Some of our provinces produce electricity from nuclear and hydro, but almost all Canadians heat their homes with natural gas - a greenhouse gas. So the move to CFLs has the effect of maybe saving Quebecers a little money (because gas heat is cheaper than electric), but it will actually increase Quebec’s output of greenhouse gases. The same is true in BC, which produces most of its electricity from hydro. But the federal government is forcing people to spend money in those provinces to make those changes.

In the southern states in the U.S, the opposite is true. The savings from CFL bulbs is understated, because if you air-condition your home, the heat energy from the incandescent is not only wasted in the production of light, but you have to spend even more electricity on air conditioning to remove the waste heat.

So CFL bulbs should not be a one-size-fits-all solution, and should be regulated by the individual states, not the federal governments. Or even smarter, incandescent bulbs could have a tax applied to them that varies from region to region depending on how the specifics of the local climate and energy mix affect their carbon footprint. Hell, Quebec might even want to tax the CFL bulbs and subsidize incandescents to move more energy consumption to hydro and away from gas. But those of us who oppose federal CFL mandates are assumed to be oil-loving haters of the environment to be opposed at all costs, and any such arguments shouted down in favor of universal big government solutions.

In the meantime, incandescent bulb factories in the U.S. are being closed, so that CFL bulbs can be imported from overseas (CFL’s are labor intensive, and hence almost all are imported). Think about that next time you whine about America losing manufacturing jobs.

Here’s another, potentially very destructive possibility where big environmental plans could result in unintended consequences that make things worse; Carbon taxes or caps. The environmental movement assumes that any move to a cap and trade system anywhere is a good thing. Anyone who opposes them is the enemy.

But consider this thought experiment: Let’s say the U.S. imposes carbon taxes on business, and China doesn’t. What will happen? On the margin, products that used to be made in America will be moved to China. China gets over 70% of its energy from coal. The U.S: about 25%. In addition, the U.S. overall is significantly more energy efficient than China in manufacturing. China’s advantage is in labor costs. So every dollar in GDP that transfers from the U.S. to China will increase world energy consumption. Every product that moves from an efficient U.S. factory to an inefficient Chinese factory will increase the energy budget of that product. Every product that moves from a factory that gets its energy from hydro, nuclear, or gas to a factory that gets its energy from coal will increase the carbon footprint of that product.

In addition, if a carbon tax reduces the consumption of oil in the U.S., that will have the effect of lowering oil prices (or slowing the rate of increase in oil prices), which in turn will stimulate other countries to use more of it (or not reduce their use as fast as they otherwise would). Wouldn’t it suck if carbon taxes did little except act as a subsidy for Chinese or Indian oil consumption, delaying their efforts to clean up their own houses?

Or another way to look at it - carbon taxes applied only in the U.S. have the effect of punishing the most energy-efficient producer of goods, and subsidizing the least efficient producers of goods. Is that a good thing?

So how does that come out in the wash? Can someone point me to a study that attempts to quantify this? Do advocates of carbon taxes on the left take this into account? Shouldn’t this disparity be priced into the externality cost used to set carbon taxes, since the externality may not be reduced by the tax, or maybe not be reduced as much as thought?

I suspect that carbon taxes would still reduce overall carbon output, but that’s not the point - the point is trying to figure out a policy that is optimal. Maybe once you factor things like this in it will become clear that another plan would have a better bang for the buck.

As for Bjorn Lomborg, he made a simple and very valuable point, and got attacked by the environmental movement for it. His point was that at some level of cost, it may be more expensive to try to stop global warming than it would be to simply ameliorate the effects of it. Especially since the money to stop it has to be spent today, but the money to ameliorate it doesn’t have to be spent for decades. Thus the time-value of money calculation becomes a big factor. And even further, what if you can’t stop it? What the economic pressures are so great that it’s just not going to happen, and attempts to try will amount to little more than flinging all your wealth down a rat hole and impoverishing yourselves so that when the day comes when you need to protect yourself from the warming, you’re not wealthy enough to do so? Wouldn’t that just suck?

Lomborg has always been an environmentalist, and he’s always been a believer in global warming. What he isn’t, is a believer that the environmental movement necessarily has the right solution to it, or even any solution at all. And he’s right about that. But that didn’t stop the left from excoriating him and trying to destroy his reputation for daring to speak out. Of course, now that he’s somewhat back on the reservation, he’s being used as a tool to tell the other skeptics to shut up and get in line.

115

If that’s a reference to my post, screw that. Maybe you can explain to me how one post can “ruin” another. On second thought, keep whatever loopy theory you have on that to yourself.

The OP expresses incomprehension at why conservatives (allegedly) don’t buy in to alternative energy, going so far as to suggest that their “real” motivation is not that they really believe it has a lot of hurdles to overcome to be viable/worth it, but that, for instance, they’re randomly espousing an energy policy solely because it’s opposite to that many liberals take (clue to libs: we’re not thinking of you as much as you think we are). The simplest, much more Occam-friendly explanation, is that they have the policies they do because they believe in them. Sam did a good job spelling out what some of their specific beliefs/rationales were. I’m allowed to agree with him.

Put differently, the OP was flawed from the outset in assuming that all conservatives opposed all alternative energy and that their reasons for doing so were self-evidently not real or sincere ones. That’s not the recipe for a really great debate, if you’re looking for the source of any broad brush.

116

What GIGObuster said.

I’m a liberal, but kind of in the liberaltarian camp. I think free markets are generally peachy at allocating resources, but they have a tendency to do much less well when dealing with the Commons (the atmosphere) and when there are imbalances in power between economic actors.

When it comes to energy, I think we’re dealing with both those problems. And, for whatever reason, the Republican party in the US is nearly unanimous in their denial of the science behind the Commons problem. I also realize that the power imbalance between huge corporations and individuals is applied in a fairly bi-partisan manner. The Left in the US, inasmuch as it is organized, pretty much consider both parties to be right-of-center, but mostly support the Dems because they are the least bad option.

The government, if it were functioning properly as a proxy for the best long-term interests of the population, should act to price in the externalities of the use of all forms of energy, to the extent that they can be known, and only then let the market pick winners. I believe that, at the moment, the burning of non-renewable carbon compounds is woefully underpriced. Probably makes me a Commie.

117

Easy to do because what you are missing is that it was not a reference to your post. It was also an inside joke with Sam.

Once again, that would be it if it wasn’t for the fact that there is evidence that virtually all conservatives currently in power are being manipulated by industries into ignoring the science so as to them not seeing even the need to look for solutions to the issue.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/books/reviews/2010-06-01-deathmerchants01_ST_N.htm

118

Okay, so if the OP wanted to single out “those conservatives who have refused even to consider AGW, specifically because co-opted by industry,” I doubt I’d have had a problem with that. I don’t consider the debate over the existence and/or extent of AGW to be absolutely closed (I know YMMV), but that OP’d have been a much narrower and fairer target. I’ve not disputed the fact, made well by others here, that by treating non-immediate ill effects of oil/coal (IBNLT any degree of AGW) as absolute non-factors/externalities in the cost-benefit calculus, you don’t really get an honest cost-benefit conclusion.

119

The carbon tax will also go to deal with adaptation efforts, if the China government wants to let millions be at the mercy of extreme weather changes and not invest in taxes to deal with it, I would not be opposed to see that government go under.

Do I detect once again the denial of science? Currently fossil fuels are efficient but their economy is in reality an illusion when taking into consideration the real price that will be paid. Assigning a more reasonable price for their use with the real costs included is needed, specially since it is clear that not much will be done soon.

You are still missing that the tax also includes using the revenue with preparations to deal with the expected effects.

BTW I’m beginning to to doubt you are following the science, there is already an expected level of disruption that is coming even if we stop using fossil fuels completely, the efforts now are geared to prevent an even worse future.

Nope, Bjorn Lomborg is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School.

His environmentalism is not his main angle on the issue, his approach and his group is formed by economists.

Once again, are you still trying to dismiss the science? The big problem is that what the current Republican leadership and almost all others are doing is to be skeptic not only of what economists that deal with the issue are recommending, but also what climate scientists are recommending.

BTW you did notice who that scientist was the one that made the note to Orrin Hatch? Leftists are not the only ones telling the conservatives to stop ignoring science.

120

Since I’m on a roll, I’m going to toss out another example of unintended consequences of supposedly ‘green’ technology.

High Speed Rail is a favorite of the left. When you ask someone why they support it, they’ll give you several reasons, but the two biggest are that it will lower congestion and that it’s a ‘green’ technology and highly energy efficient.

But HSR is a rent-seeker’s dream. There are hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. So the pro-rail side has been inundated with reports generated by special interests which show tremendous energy efficiency. These same people, who would be highly skeptical of a report by Exxon or the NRA or the tobacco industry will swallow these reports whole and not bat an eye.

The reality is very different, for several reasons. The first is that trains are extremely heavy. The passenger load is an inconsequential part of their fuel efficiency, which means to get the highly touted fuel efficiency per passenger mile they claim, they have to run at full capacity. That rarely happens. In fact, there are a lot of public transit systems that are huge energy sinks because they run lightly loaded. In addition, heavy trains use a lot of energy to start and stop - even with regenerative braking. So energy efficiency figures that assume non-stop trains collapse when the inevitable political compromises add stops along the way.

The second reason passenger trains aren’t necessarily as energy efficient as proponents would have you believe is because in the real world in the U.S. they inevitably wind up running on existing track. This means they may displace freight trains. Freight trains ARE efficient. They’re the most efficient means of moving goods around on land. The U.S. has a highly optimized rail freight system - the best in the world. It’s optimized because it was deregulated in the 70’s and has made constant Pareto improvements since. The routes are complex, but it works very well. Throw passenger trains into the mix, and you will drive up the cost of freight. That will push some freight off the trains and onto the roads, where the energy cost will go up and road maintenance costs will increase because more heavy vehicles will drive on them.

Those heavy vehicles also play havoc with congestion. The offloading of rail freight onto the roads in Europe has been a big contributor to traffic congestion there.

This has been the experience in every country where passenger rail has increased and shares track with freight. In a dispute between the two, passenger always wins because it’s politically more popular and because politicians have a vested interest in seeing their highly visible grand plans ‘work’.

In my experience, pro-rail advocates never include this factor, but it is potentially huge. Read this article in The Economist for more details.

Finally, the improvements in auto technology have caught up to trains. According to the Transportation Energy Data Book, passenger cars on the highway averaged 3437 BTU per passenger mile in 2008. From table 2.3 in that same data book, heavy rail passenger trains ranged from 1697 BTU per passenger mile in Atlanta to 5411 btu per passenger mile in Cleveland. The median for all the heavy passenger rail looked at was 3396 btu per passenger mile - almost identical to cars.

But that table also shows that if you’re overzealous about high-speed rail and you build it in a place where the passenger traffic can’t support it, not only will you subsidize it financially but you’ll be burning a hell of a lot of extra energy. You will make the U.S. less green. A passenger train running at half capacity has the per-passenger fuel efficiency of a large SUV.

And again, those figures do not include the losses incurred by shifting the much more efficient rail freight onto the roads - which would happen whether the passenger trains are running full or empty.

Finally, train technology is fairly mature, but we’re currently in the midst of making large gains in automobile efficency. If President Obama’s CAFE standards are met, there won’t be a passenger train in the country that can move people with as much energy efficiency as cars will, even if the trains run full.

So you environmentalists are hitching your wagon to a big, heavy, energy inefficient transportation mode which will by the time it goes into service burn more energy for every passenger that it offloads from cars.

That’s what happens when you don’t take the time to be careful and think things through.

Now to be fair, the right does exactly the same thing when it comes to the issues they care about. It’s easy to be scientific and skeptical when the science agrees with you. Not so much when it’s telling you things that are uncomfortable and that you don’t want to hear.

This applies equally to people on the right and left.

121

Nah, it is clear to all that you did not see the video nor the references explaining that alternative electric cars are also part of the solution.