Why is Global Warming a Partisan Issue?

I did not watch Sunday night's premiere of The 1/2 Hour News Hour on the Fox News Channel. I can barely tolerate hearing Jon Stewart make jokes about the sad state of American politics, and so I was sure that the "humor" of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter on Fox would be more than I could stand.

But I did read Alessandra Stanley's advance review of the new show in Saturday's New York Times. According to Stanley, whose job as TV critic must entail a lot of suffering, the premiere episode had a Weekend Update-style mock news segment that poked fun at Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, global warming, Hollywood liberals, politically correct children's books and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Global warming? That kind of commentary has long infuriated me. Why is global warming a partisan issue? Why do the large majority of conservatives (John McCain is a notable exception) steadfastly oppose taking meaningful action to slow down climate change?

Traditional conservatism, whether you agreed with it or not, was a coherent ideology. The conservative agenda had an internal logic: fiscal responsibility, a less intrusive federal government and states' rights. Of course the modern conservatism represented by George Bush is not conservative at all. We now have a Big Brother government, a runaway federal deficit and a U.S. Supreme Court that prevented the Florida Supreme Court from running its own state's election in 2000.

You would think that a "conservative" would want to "conserve" natural resources and keep the climate as close as possible to its present hospitable state. So why are Republican lawmakers like Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe and California Congressmen Dana Rohrabacher still standing in the way of progress on global warming? The answer has been obvious for a long time. Modern conservatism is not a logical, coherent ideology, but a grab bag of agenda items that fulfill the needs of major Republican campaign contributors and interest groups and the think tanks they have financed. (The same might be said of the liberal Democratic movement, but that's a topic for another day.) Prominent among the Republican contributors, we know, are the oil and coal companies, whose profits will plunge if we reduce our use of fossil fuels.

It's been encouraging to see some breaks in the Republican ranks. Last year, for example, a group of 86 evangelical Christian leaders launched an initiative to help fight global warming. Believing in the Bible doesn't mean that you have to disbelieve everything scientists say.

We need more of these thinking conservatives and thinking conservative commentators, like David Brooks, the New York Times columnist. On Feb. 4, three days after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported on the "unequivocal" evidence that humans are causing global warming, Brooks appeared in the panel discussion on This Week, ABC's Sunday talk show. When George Will began spouting his usual nonsense about global warming, Brooks stopped him. "I used to be very suspicious about [global warming]," said Brooks, "but I spent my life getting a C in science classes. [The scientists are] all in agreement now so I've got to defer to their collective judgment." Brooks went on to say that the debate about the existence of global warming had "ended," and now the debate was over what "you do about it."

It's nice to see a conservative putting aside partisanship when it comes to climate change. Maybe someday even Rush, Ann and Fox News will realize that true conservatives don't trash their planet.