Blurts & Spasms

From Quora discussion: "Why do conservatives oppose environmental causes?"

Only a few decades ago, you couldn't generalize about this topic as you have in your question. There were, for example, a lot of conservative hunting groups lobbying Congress, happy to be in league with various "liberal" conservation movement organizations, to preserve wilderness. There were Nixon's extensive efforts as Tom Buczkowski mentioned. And further back you may recall that it was the conservative railroad industry that teamed up with "liberal" folks like John Muir to secure our National Park system. More recently, though, you will see phrases like "Green is the new Red" bantered about by both conservative and progressive pundits. There's a lot more vitriol and polarization than ever before. It seems the natural antagonism between those who wish to prioritize profit in unsustainable ways, and those who wish to preserve natural resources for future generations, is heading for a climax. And I think this is actually a fairly predictable development, for one simple reason: natural resources that were once easily obtained are becoming less plentiful and harder to procure, while at the same time the environmental damage of unregulated (or poorly regulated) industry is reaching a scope that was never imagined. To put it another way: at the same time that profits a naturally constrained by resource scarcity, the negative externalities of current and historical industrial activities are threatening to undermine new avenues of profit. [Think petrochemical companies vs. Colony Collapse Disorder (bees); fertilizer companies vs. massive fish die-offs in the ever-expanding "Dead Zone" in the Gulf (Mississippi Delta, etc.); timber companies vs. soil depletion (can't grow trees); mining companies vs. toxic runoff and silt clogging (decimated fisheries); pharmaceutical companies vs. medical efficacy (drugs that do more harm than good, or don't perform as well as placebo); fracking vs. toxic aquifers, etc.]

So it makes perfect sense that this has become a more aggressive ideological battle, and one on a much grander scale, than it has ever been before. It is in this context that Exxon-Mobile (and other Big Oil) spent millions to promote skepticism about climate science - until they were called out on it and the CEO resigned. It shouldn't surprise us at all that there is a sort of panicked groupthink that reflexively pushes back on scientific consensus, environmental concerns, corporate whistleblowers, outcomes resulting in human disease or loss of life, or other obvious negative externalities, because the engines of industry need to keep running full speed ahead, the coffers need to remain full, and the shareholders happy...and all of this is becoming a lot more difficult. Remember when the Tobacco industry insisted that a) tobacco wasn't hazardous to human health, b) adamantly denied that their companies had carefully researched how to create a more addictive product, and c) declared that nicotine wasn't addictive at all? Yeah. They even lied to Congress about it - right before all those internal documents were leaked revealing their hypocrisy. As you suggest in your question, that is indeed the psychology of profits over people, profits over the environment, profits over the future for our kids, and profits over all forms of sanity. But because the stakes are now so high - because the tensions between profitability and environmental concerns are so great - the rhetoric is that much more hyperbolic, and the lies and distortions that much more pronounced.

As an afterthought...you may be interested in reading about the Precautionary principle. It makes sound, reasonable, agreeable sense in every regard except one: it slows down capitalism. Slightly. And why is that bad...? And that there is the crux of the issue, IMO.