What Exactly Do Conservatives Want to Conserve?
Today’s ‘conservatives’ are just regressive — even by 1908 standards.
The Republicans running the show in West Virginia want everyone to believe that they’re doing everything in their power to attract people to the state.
To me it seems that they are either oblivious to what is attractive to human beings, or these lawmakers have hidden intentions. This is my sense only because their proposed plans would do nothing to reverse the population loss trend, and more likely their proposals would accelerate the current trends.
I wrote about Gov. Justice’s plan to eliminate the income tax earlier this week, and now I’d like to take on another proposal, this one from the legislature.
As Erin Beck reports for Mountain State Spotlight,
“House Bill 2598, sponsored by Del. John Kelly, R-Wood, would finally give the oil and gas industries what they’ve wanted for years — a sweeping exemption from the Above Ground Storage Tank Act. That measure became law in 2014 in response to the Freedom Industries chemical spill.
[…]
While West Virginia lawmakers have already exempted many oil and gas industry tanks from the law, this year’s bill exempts an additional 887 tanks, according to the West Virginia DEP. Those tanks are in areas deemed most dangerous because they are closest to intakes and therefore most likely to contaminate the drinking water supply.”
This would be good for corporations, and bad for humans.
A healthy corporation does not depend on breathable air or drinkable water, after all. A healthy corporation depends on profits, and profits rise when costs are eliminated. Regulations exist only as costs to a corporation because the benefits of drinkable water, for example, do not translate into profitability.
Those costs don’t just disappear though. They are passed on invisibly to humans in the form of cancers, heart diseases, endocrine disruption, and organ failures.
And so, rolling back environmental regulations always leaves human beings with the short end of the stick, in favor of corporate profits. It should go without saying that dealing humans the short end of the stick is a bad way to attract a growing population of humans. That’s one reason I believe that this bill is not really designed to benefit human beings.
In any case, rolling back environmental regulations comes at a cost to the environment. The environment is made up of lots of finite resources.
Take soil for instance. In a recent geoscientific research paper authored by Evan Thaler, Isaac Larsen and Qian Yu out of the University of Massachusetts, the researchers found that the United States may have already lost nearly half of its topsoil in the Corn Belt.
Yale Professor Verlyn Klinkenborg summarized the findings,
“At best, 24 percent of the topsoil in the Corn Belt has been completely removed by farming. At worst, 46 percent has been lost.
It’s worth being clear here. The authors aren’t talking about reduced soil fertility or loss of mineral nutrients. They’re talking about the complete removal of the medium in which crops are grown — the utter bankruptcy of the organic richness that lay for centuries under the tallgrass prairie.”
Soil, as it turns out, is a limited resource. Can West Virginia benefit directly from the collapse of the Corn Belt? I would recommend we use our land to grow other crops beside corn and soy, but it is nonetheless illustrative of the point that West Virginia’s natural resources become inherently more valuable over time, if we maintain them and foster their responsible use.
Then there is the climate. I’m going to sidestep the carbon issue and look simply at how warming over time is expected to shift optimal zones for humans towards the poles, northwards in the northern hemisphere, southwards in the southern. According to pretty much any projection, over time West Virginia is going to get longer summers, wetter in many places, and more suitable to longer growing seasons. This will make it appealing as a place for people to move to for much the same reason that people move to South Carolina presently.
West Virginia could benefit from climate change, if we plan for it. Current Republican proposals seem to thumb their nose at this idea.
Then there’s the simple population pressures and sprawl from Baltimore & DC in the east, and Pittsburgh and Cleveland in the north. Along with the urban sprawls, West Virginia is centrally located between the Midwest, South, and Northeast. This should create a natural hub for businesses that want to be close to these urban areas, much in the same way Germany’s economy is underpinned, ultimately and simply, by being in the middle of Europe.
All of those pressures that should push human beings toward West Virginia are rendered moot though, if we further roll back environmental protections.
Why are conservatives willing to give up all of these factors that make up our future competitive advantages?
Apparently, just to allow today’s special interests to make more money by passing their costs onto today’s West Virginians.
If we earnestly want to attract more human beings to the state right now, we would need to immediately reverse the trends of environmental degradation and begin reclamation and rehabilitation of our natural resources. When humans have a choice, they rarely choose to live in places with unhealthy environments. Even better, invest in upgrading our infrastructure and public services to attract human beings and non-extractive businesses.
At the barest minimum though, all we have to do to eventually have population growth would be to keep the state only as habitable as it is now. Supplies of arable land, breathable air, and drinkable water are all decreasing over time everywhere, while population in the US is increasing over time. So the barest minimum thing to do is just not make things less livable.
Which isn’t a new or radical idea. That’s the conservative position, established over 100 years ago by Republican Theodore Roosevelt.
In May 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt opened the “Conference of Governors” with a speech titled “Conservation as National Duty”, observing to the conference attendees that “we have become great because of the lavish use of our resources and we have just reason to be proud of our growth.”
Then, Roosevelt asked a rhetorical question that seems to elude today’s establishment politicians in West Virginia (on both sides of the aisle, frankly), “what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted?”
In summation, he declared “In the past, we have admitted the right of the individual to injure the future of the Republic for his own present profit. The time has come for a change.”
That was 1908.
In 2021, West Virginia’s Republican legislators are pushing legislation that can only be described as making it easier for corporations to make present profits at the expense of our state’s future. These are such backward proposals that Theodore Roosevelt would have considered them regressive for the year 1908, let alone 2021.
More immediately, this proposal would make it easier for out-of-state corporations to profit at the expense of our residents’ right to life and liberty. What is a right to life if not a right to drinkable water and breathable air? What is freedom if we are not free from poisons in the water, pollutants in the air, and carcinogens in the earth?
So far as I can tell, the Republicans governing in West Virginia only genuinely care about conserving two things: profits for their donors, and power for their party.
