By REP President Rob Sisson, published December 10, 2009, in
the Hawaii Reporter
My Danish ancestors
homesteaded in the rugged Tug Hill area of upstate New York.
Stewardship of the forests, streams, lakes, and wildlife was a
life-giving and sustaining proposition, not altruistic.
Those
conservative roots were passed from generation to generation. Anyone
who can trace kinship back to Dane Hollow, the original farm, also
claims membership in the Republican Party.
My ancestors were an
independent breed. I am sure they would be filled with pride that their
homeland is hosting the most important environmental conference in a
generation.
I’m equally sure that they would not put a whole lot
of stock in the half-truths and misinformation emanating from talk
radio and cable television today. According to the likes of Rush
Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, climate change is a myth and Ronald
Reagan—God rest his soul—would purge the party of anyone who deigned to
believe the science or act upon it.
Reagan is not remembered as
an environmental leader. Yet, the course he set during his eight-year
presidency may have greater impact on future society than the
remarkable conservation achievements of Theodore Roosevelt and Richard
Nixon combined.
At first skeptical of the danger of
stratospheric ozone depletion, Reagan studied the science, believed it,
and was the force behind the Montreal Protocol, the worldwide treaty
that put the world on a firm course to solving the problem.
When
he approved the treaty, Reagan said, "The Montreal Protocol is a model
of cooperation. It is a product of the recognition and international
consensus that ozone depletion is a global problem, both in terms of
its causes and its effects. The protocol is the result of an
extraordinary process of scientific study, negotiations among
representatives of the business and environmental communities, and
international diplomacy. It is a monumental achievement."
The
Montreal Protocol was not the only environmental hallmark of Reagan's
presidency. During the 1980s, acid rain, caused by emissions from power
generating plants, devastated forests and lakes across the Northeastern
United States and eastern Canada.
Reagan’s team, led by C.
Boyden Gray, developed a market-friendly mechanism to help solve the
problem. Back then, it was called emissions trading. Today, we call it
cap and trade.
Their approach was far different from the
standard government "command and control" process in which layers of
regulations are imposed on polluters. Instead, the Reagan plan let the
free market determine the best and most efficient solutions, and for
companies to profit from their innovations.
Reagan’s successor,
President George H. W. Bush, signed the Clean Air Act amendments of
1990, which made cap and trade the law of the land for reducing
emissions tied to acid rain. According to the Journal of Environmental Management,
the cost to utilities is about $3 billion per year, nowhere close to
the $25 billion predicted by the talking heads of the day.
Acid
rain cleanup also generates an estimated $122 billion per year in
benefits from avoided deaths and illnesses, healthier lakes and
forests, and improved visibility on the Eastern Seaboard. Rather than
sinking our economy, as the critics predicted, the innovations created
by the utility industry helped spur a nearly two-decade bull run in the
United States.
What would Reagan do in Copenhagen? I think he’d
pull his team into a conference room and tell them that the United
States must be the leader in the effort to solve global climate change.
Reagan
would say that he no longer wanted the citizens of the United States to
send a billion dollars a day overseas to buy foreign oil, and that he
no longer wanted U.S. dollars subsidizing dictators and radical regimes
funded by oil sales.
He would tell his diplomats that he wanted
to create thousands of new jobs for Americans by using the ingenuity of
our own industries to innovate and manufacture the technological
solutions needed to solve climate change. He would remind them that he
wanted to protect God’s creation from those too selfish to think of
future generations.
But don’t take it from me. Let President Reagan tell you in his own words, from 1984:
"What
is a conservative after all but one who conserves, one who is committed
to protecting and holding close the things by which we live. And we
want to protect and conserve this land on which we live – our
countryside, our rivers and mountains, our plains and meadows, and
forests. This is our patrimony. This is what we leave to our children.
And our great moral responsibility is to leave it to them either as we
found it or better than we found it."
What would Reagan do? He would lead the world to a solution in Copenhagen.
