Ten Fiscally Conservative Ideas to Address Climate Change

The Premier of Ontario has reportedly asked for “conservative” ideas to address climate change.

https://www.thespec.com/news-story/9764445-help-wanted-ontario-government-seeking-suggestions-to-deal-with-climate-change/

I have no formal qualifications to advise the Premier of Ontario. (U.S. readers, think Governor of California, or maybe Texas.) I studied science at Berea College, where it’s rigorous, but the science I read was psychology. That makes me an ecological maven. I’ve written this post in a bloggy and mavenish tone. People with Ph.D.’s in geology and meteorology and so forth, who are qualified to advise Premiers and Governors, may read it for a laugh. Then they can use this basketful of ideas to do formal studies...

Some Twits wailed that “conservative ideas about climate change” was an oxymoron. I beg to differ. These ideas are “conservative” in the sense that they’re skeptical about global climate change theory, and in the sense that they don’t demand that governments raise taxes and build bigger bureaucracies.

The global warming theory that was publicized ten or twenty years ago is so-o-o over. Apart from being tied to a political agenda for turning the United Nations into a global dictatorship, it was based on the claim that Miami was going to be underwater by 2010. Let us lay that theory to rest beside the impending ice age theory that scared my generation when we were the age of Greta Thunberg.

By “climate change” we also don’t mean weird weather. Weird weather does not represent a pattern of change. “The hottest, coldest, wettest, driest, whatever in – number of years” means similar weatherquirks were taking place forty or a hundred years ago. Weird weather sometimes creates emergencies to which some people out there may be moved to respond, so I retweet and share reports of it, but it’s a separate category from any pattern of human-made climate change.

What I have watched happening, as a pattern over the years, is known as “local warming” or “the greenhouse effect.” It’s destroying the glaciers and arctic wildlife in northern Europe; it’s making cities in the temperate zones death traps in summer. Talk of the greenhouse effect was buried under the panic about global warming theory in the 1990s but, while global warming theory has disproved itself, local warming has been increasing...slowly in big cities where the effect rose faster in the 1960s, more alarmingly in small cities these days.

I live in a forest on one of the hills above the town of Gate City, Virginia, population about 2500. Gate City is about five miles north of the Tennessee border. Kingsport, Tennessee, population about 30,000, is about three miles south of the border; Gate City is sometimes perceived as a suburb of Kingsport. In the 1970s the rule was that the temperature at my home was usually three degrees (Fahrenheit) below the official temperature reported from Kingsport. In the 1980s I observed that the temperature in downtown Kingsport was usually two to five degrees above the official temperature. Last summer I had two opportunities to ride back from Kingsport in the afternoon, by different roads, past businesses that display thermometers. The ride took ten or fifteen minutes; the walk from the paved road to my home might have added ten more. I rode past thermometers showing temperatures in downtown Kingsport that were close to 40 degrees Celsius—98 and 102 degrees Fahrenheit. Then at my home the outdoor thermometer was showing 75 degrees Fahrenheit. We are talking about Code Red days when older or hypertensive people could actually have died from the heat, downtown, while people ten miles away would hardly work up a sweat. This increase in the temperature gap is a cause for concern. And it does seem to be happening all over the world.

Here are my ten ideas about fixing it. Those who may have wondered when I’m going to write that Green Tea Party Manifesto may consider this a draft of it.

1. Make walking fashionable.

New Yorkers walk. Washingtonians walk. Torontonians walk. In the small towns, however, many people think they need to drive distances nobody in a real city would consider risking a car to city traffic for. The primary fear seems to me that if they walk to work or school, they’ll arrive looking less “fresh” than they looked when they left the house. My generation started the trend for walking to work in sport shoes, carrying dress shoes. The young could start a trend for commuting in sweats and shorts, storing a “fresh” suit at the office where they could put it on after washing at least their feet and faces.

I walk. Of the twenty or thirty good reasons for walking the strongest is probably my astigmatism, and reluctance, as long as I can see more than most people do without them, to pay for special glasses. I get constant reminders of the social stigma ignorant people have put on walking, from people who’d do better to thank me for never having smashed a vehicle into theirs. Every time some piece of trash identifies itself as trash with a stupid remark about walking, I feel that I’m enduring persecution for righteousness’ sake. It’s a good feeling though it leaves me with low opinions of my townsfolk.

If we’re going to reverse undesirable climate change, we need to shift the balance of opinion from “Anybody would drive everywhere if they could, so there must be something wrong with people who walk around town” to “We choose to walk because we can, though of course we have to try to be inclusive of those poor old people who have to drive.” It wouldn’t cost much money for local governments to start a trend toward thanking pedestrians. It might help if, for instance, a few elected officials noticed pedestrians (dusty, sweaty, with their hair messed up) in stores and restaurants and boomed, “Please, Sir/Ma’am, won’t you go ahead of me,” or “may I pay for your coffee,” or just “may I take this opportunity to THANK YOU FOR NOT DRIVING! I salute your public spirit!” That’s enough to stop many small-town social bullies; it might be enough, all by itself, to start the trend. If not, a few competitions with cheap trophies or fifty-dollar cash prizes, scholarships, dinner at local restaurants, would probably get the trend going.

We can leave it to the Bright Young Things (like Thunberg) to call the attention of the young to the idea that walking is sexy. For my generation, I’ll say this: The reason why I’ve worn the same dress size since grade nine, and the reason why my Significant Other has fended off diabetes past age 70, is that we get out and walk and move our bodies. If you don’t want to be obese or diabetic, start walking now. (And a country that has a National Health Service could appropriately publicize the thanks of the National Health Service to adults who avoid putting a burden on it.)

2. Keep walking feasible: Don’t herd people into slums in the name of “walkability.”

Slums are not “walkable.” Crowding creates craziness, so nobody needs to hope that just packing newer buildings with more competent people does not amount to constructing slums. If people are subjected to New York, or Hong Kong, or Rio de Janeiro living conditions they will at best start acting like New Yorkers. I think the consensus in Toronto, as in Washington, has always been that the world needs no more of that. Densely populated neighborhoods are too hostile and too hot to be “walkable,” whatever their builders may have fantasized.

So we need to think back to the traditional model of sparsely populated, self-reliant communities where “walkability” meant schools, grocery stores, and home-based businesses within one mile, and offices within five miles, of people’s homes. The Internet can add so much to the transition away from the twentieth century aberration of “zoning for maximum use of motor vehicles.” Most people don’t need to commute every day and, once or twice a week when they do meet or physically exchange goods, most people should be able to walk to most of the places where they do business. Most families should have a choice between one-acre gardens and five-acre mini-farms, around houses where everyone has a room of his or her own, with green space around and between their homes.

How much does government need to do to promote this trend? Probably, just step out of the way. This is the lifestyle “conservatives” want.

3. That means marketing the idea of better lives for fewer and healthier babies.

No, of course nobody wants—or needs—to think about mandatory abortions, or even penalties for those who have too many babies. All government really needs to do is call attention to the advantages of growing up in a one-child home, and the maturing value of being the mother of one child (as opposed to the perhaps irreparable damage done by repeated childbirths). And, perhaps, the idea that the physical consummation of love does not necessarily mean making babies.

4. Also the ideal of a calmer, more bucolic lifestyle.

Where I live a lot of people, if asked why the 1970s “back to the land” movement failed, will answer, “It didn’t.” The first few years of organically farming soil where vicious chemical cycles were going on were unprofitable, but if people were prepared to work through that, every year was better than the one before.

“Going back to the land” failed people who weren’t willing to do it right, like the Sick Greens who, when their water lines didn’t work for them, declared their rebellion against the bourgeois notion of bathing, then shuffled back into town—probably as welfare cheats—with fungus infections, nutrient deficiencies, and often drug-related brain damage. What would have helped them? A good healthy public laugh at the idea that “back to the land” was a counterculture movement for people who rejected hard work, personal hygiene, and similar “conservative” values...when in fact nothing is more “conservative” than a sustainable move “back to the land.”

5. Canada is generally perceived as a cool country, but it has something to crow about if people choose...

Sustainable dry-flush toilets! What a concept! As the home of the Sun-Mar company, Canada leads the world in toilet technology.

I’ve always been glad that, when Associated Content was buying all those “I love my [name-brand product]” pieces, my blog buddy laid claim to “I Love My Sun-Mar Toilet.” But I do. For sheer woo-hoo and yee-haa braggadocio there’s nothing quite like being able to neutralize all the nastiness we and our animal companions inevitably produce, without adding one drop of pollution to what people in Tennessee have to drink. I may not have much respect for a lot of my townsfolk’s opinions, but I am protective of their health. Water-flush toilets are so-o-o over.

6. Solar power is cheap, and could even be made hoardable, if people don’t waste it.

Thomas Friedman and other corporate-brainwashed people have fantasized at length about using electrical power grids to micromanage people’s behavior in their homes. “Conservatives” naturally hate that idea. So, as a conservative alternative, why not market energy independence? In Ontario, in Virginia, in points between those and to the north and south, most people get enough sunshine that a row of solar collectors in a one-acre garden could run the gadgets they really want to use every day—say a small refrigerator (but not a huge deep-freezer for unreliable storage), cooking stove or heater (but not both at the same time), one computer, but they have to make their own acoustic music and set their non-electric clocks by their computer. They could put a Lasko fan near their chair rather than run an air conditioner in summer. Those who really wanted more electricity could plug back into the grid and pay for it...but the utility companies could be required to pay the ones who collected more solar energy than they chose to use. “Conservatives” love basing things on business transactions, especially the kind that are profitable for them. If those big inefficient heat pumps that heat or chill whole houses, while pumping heat into the air, cost money to run, while controlling the climate in only the room where they’re actually working pays “conservatives,” they’ll scale their energy consumption back waaay beyond what Agenda 21 advocates would have demanded.

Solar power is a hard sell anywhere north of Orange County, California, as long as it’s being marketed as “roof-mounted panels, which may trap rain and damage the roof, and won’t lower your bills by enough to pay for themselves in twenty years.” Most places just don’t get enough sunshine to make solar power seem cost-effective—on the terms the corporations and agenda-pushers offer it. But try “Put a row of panels in the garden and tell the greedhead electric company to stick their monthly fees in their ears,” and panels will go up—and heat pumps and air conditioners will go down.

7. Less crowding could eliminate one of the most acrimonious of the current political issues, too.

Few conservatives actually hate, or even dislike, large groups of people (group-thinking does not fit the conservative style), but conservatives have abundant reason to hate the way various "sexual minorities" have been exploited as distractions by the Extreme Left. “Sexual minorities” appear whenever almost any animal species is overcrowded. Nufsed.

8. Less crowding could eliminate the felt need for glyphosate and other “pesticides,” as well.

The argument in favor of spraying poison on food crops is that “It’s the only way we can hope to feed ten billion people.” A better argument would be “Let’s work on getting the world’s population back to sustainable levels.” More individuals living closer to their land can control nuisance species without poisons. Most of North America’s most persistent “weeds” are actually edible. Why poison dandelions when you can eat them? Again government’s role could be to encourage, rather than force, vast fields of “factory-farmed” single crops, cultivated and harvested by machines, to mutate back into small family farms where people appreciate companion planting, crop rotation, and irregular produce.

9. Which could also reduce the risk of fires.

I discovered the Premier’s call for content while browsing someone else’s Twitter page to refresh my mind after last Tuesday’s Glyphosate Awareness chat. I found photos of wildfires in Australia. Funnily enough Australia has been the home of most of the glyphosate apologists who’ve joined the chat.

Yes, there is a connection. Glyphosate is a desiccant. Desiccants dry out plants. Dry plants burn more easily than green ones do. Even when they’re not desiccated by poison, huge fields of one kind of grain in which every individual plant dries out at the same time of year are tinder boxes. However, studies have already quantified the way chemical pesticides promote bigger and more destructive wildfires.

While plants are green, they hold water and resist fire. In much of Ontario, in Virginia, and in most places between, we have certainly had destructive, out-of-control fires...but our fires never reach the appalling sizes of wildfires in California or Australia, because, when there’s a mix of bare earth, dry plants, green plants, and trees in between buildings, fires come to things that won’t burn easily. Deserts, and huge monocropped factory farms, don’t present natural barriers to fire. Today's big news headline from Canada seems to be a recent quantitative analysis of how this is working in British Columbia. It's relevant to the wetter eastern side of the continent too.

10. And about all those other pollutants...

I don’t think plastic has much to do with climate change, actually. I think Soros is funding attention to plastic, and to climate change, by way of distraction from the real problem of glyphosate. But plastic is an ugly mess these days, so why not throw in a few “conservative” thoughts about plastic.

Conservatives have never had a problem with the ideal of tidiness. I remember when right-wingers objected to tax money being used to fund “Sesame Street,” to a kid my age “regressing” far enough to laugh at it whenever I got a chance to watch it, to its being aired at times when right-wing children were supposed to be out in the fresh air.One song from “Sesame Street” I’ve sung all my life builds up to a dynamic climax with the lines, “Making a mess may be all right, and quite a sight to see, but just be quite sure, before you mess things up, that you can CLEAN UP YOUR MESS BEFORE IT MESSES UP ME!” I would have expected some older conservatives to object to the way those lines are written to force singers to yell. They don’t. Some of them scream those words right along with the music. They don’t want the playground, or the ocean, turned into a “grungy glop garden” any more than anyone else does. As Mike Savage puts it, conservation is a deeply conservative idea.

But it looked to me, last week, as if the teachers who still cling to some revised version of the global warming myth are falling down on their job of teaching the real observable facts of conservation to the young. On the Saturday, when it wasn’t raining, there was a holiday parade on Kane Street. Hygienically wrapped candies were distributed to children. On the Sunday and Monday, it rained. I walked down Kane Street on Monday afternoon and, if I took one step without passing a hygienically wrapped candy a child had opened, licked, and dropped on the ground, I did not take two. The side of the street really looked like Candy Land. What happened to all that wasted sugar? It was melting down in the rain already, probably sticking to my shoes. What happened to all the plastic? By now some of it’s already choking fish in Tennessee, or maybe dissolving into the water that people in New Orleans are about to drink. Somebody failed to tell those children that, if you taste a hygienically wrapped candy, and you don’t like it, the purpose of the wrapping is to wrap tightly around it while you put it in your pocket and hold on to it until you get to a proper place to dispose of it.

Littering can be so much easier than tidiness is, at some times and for some people, that government needs to do more than merely verbally endorse tidiness. An idea that worked brilliantly, at no real cost to local government, in Maryland was regular “Clean-Up Days.” At first small prizes were offered to those who picked up the most litter in a certain park. Then, to eliminate any possible incentive to dump litter in some part of the park on a Friday in order to collect more of it on the Saturday, the cash prizes were replaced with free use of rental bicycles or rowboats. How many afternoons I’ve spent rowing up and down the Anacostia River, harpooning stray plastic bags and styrofoam cups, but reflecting that the amount of litter still there to be collected had really dropped to levels that hardly justified the cost of an afternoon’s boating. (Rowing on the Anacostia River has become a pleasant way to spend an afternoon now; in the 1980s, when I first joined “Clean-Up Marches,” nobody could imagine that that would become the case.) Town and neighborhood “Clean-Up Days” could become pleasant outdoor social events in other places too. If it worked on the Anacostia River, it’ll work anywhere.