Having grown up conservative and with a deep concern for nature, Chris Barnard found it odd that only people on the left were talking about the environment.
“But if you look at the history of conservatism around environmental protection and conservation, there's been a very strong and rich legacy,” Bernard, who now serves as president of the American Conservation Union, told Fox News Digital.
With the modern left dominating the environmental movement with what Bernard sees as “apocalyptic” visions and disastrous policy proposals, he and other right-wing environmentalists are pressuring the Republican Party to re-embrace its conservationist roots.
“Conservation and conservatism are two sides of the same coin,” Bernard says, “and we know that the true conservationists are hunters, farmers, ranchers — people who live on the land and have a direct, personal connection to the land.”
As the environment becomes a defining issue for young voters and independents, Republicans risk losing a generation
A young Theodore Roosevelt is pictured here during a visit to the Dakota Badlands in 1885, some 16 years before he became president. Roosevelt's efforts to protect millions of acres of public lands earned him the nickname “the Conservation President.” (Photo by TW Ingersoll via Getty Images)
Republican President Ulysses S. Grant established Yellowstone as the world's first national park in 1872. Fellow Republican President Theodore Roosevelt was known as the “conservation president” because he designated approximately 230 million acres of public land for national parks, forests, monuments, and bird and wildlife refuges.
President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, and President Ronald Reagan signed the Montreal Protocol, a global agreement to reduce the production and use of chemicals that deplete the ozone layer.
“In the last few decades, [the environment has] “It's going to be a more liberal or left-wing issue,” Bernard told Fox News Digital.
Heather Reams, president of the center-right nonprofit Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions (CRES), began noticing changing attitudes toward environmental protection in the late 1990s and early 2000s after she graduated and worked in Congress.
“This has become kind of a mantra that we need to change the way we live in ways that we've never seen before,” Reames told Fox News Digital.
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Former Vice President Al Gore has sounded the alarm about global warming, first in flip-chart presentations and then in the hit 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” in which he predicted that world sea levels could rise by as much as 20 feet in the “near future” and warned that the United States must embrace renewable energy.
“Al Gore's kind of approach has seriously polarized this debate,” Bernard said, “and I think one of the reasons is that he misrepresented some of the science and made predictions that didn't come true.”
“A lot of conservatives look at that and say, 'Well, that didn't happen, so why should we believe anything else?'” Bernard added.
In a speech in Denmark in 2009, he highlighted a study that claimed there was a “75 percent chance that the entire Arctic ice sheet will be completely ice-free during the summer months” within seven years. NASA reported In 2022, Arctic sea ice will shrink but will still not disappear completely in the summer.
A representative for Gore did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Former Vice President Al Gore won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work advocating for climate change, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Nobel committee called Gore a “great communicator.” (Andrew Haller/Bloomberg)
More recently, Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has taken the reins on climate change, pushing for policies like the Green New Deal.
Reams told Fox News Digital that liberal politicians are tying climate change to “social welfare and Democratic policies”, alarming conservatives who advocate for smaller government.
“If you accept that the climate is changing, then you're asking big government, international government, to solve the problem,” Reames said of the left's view. “I've seen a lot of Republicans say, 'I don't want anything to do with that.'”
As Democrats have become more vocal on environmental issues, polls have shown Republican interest declining.
Only 14% of Republicans are over 55. Gallup Poll Seventy percent of 2019-2022 voters say they are “very” concerned about the environment, compared with 40% of independents and 64% of Democrats in the same age group.
One in five Republicans ages 35 to 54 say they are not concerned about the environment at all, the highest rate among any political demographic surveyed.
Green New Deal could cost up to $93 trillion, or $60 billion per household, according to a new study
Chris Bernard, president of the American Environmental Union, called on Republicans to stop ignoring voters' concerns about the environment and instead advocate for conservative solutions. (Fox News Digital)
Republican politicians have been largely silent or completely ignored, Bernard said. Former President Donald Trump Called repeatedly Lawmakers like Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) have also called it a “hoax.”
“There is no climate crisis. It's a hoax,” Good said in an impassioned speech opposing the Anti-Inflation Act of 2022, which would allocate $369 billion to combat climate change.
“This is a crisis that even Democrats could manufacture,” the Virginia Republican continued. “They've been screaming about climate collapse for 40 years, predicting the end of the world in 12 years. That's a lie.”
Such rhetoric is unhelpful, Bernard argues.
“Many conservatives are understandably skeptical of current climate change policies because they see them as weakening America and making life harder for them,” Bernard said.
But, he added, “just because you don't like the solutions or you don't like the extremism doesn't mean you can completely ignore the fact that there is a problem.”
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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that 2023 will be the year when global temperatures and greenhouse gas concentrations reach their highest on record. New reports.
“The fact is, emissions are increasing, and we have the technology to reduce them,” Reames said, arguing that the U.S. is one of the cleanest energy producers when it comes to fossil fuels and other sources that many on the left denounce. CRES takes an “all of above” approach, meaning expanding domestic production of fossil fuels, renewable energy, nuclear energy and mineral extraction.
She described the issue not just as a climate issue but “a geopolitical game that the United States can win if we engage.”
“We need to leverage American ingenuity,” she said. “We need to leverage American innovation and all of our resources to be competitive in the world. We need to beat China, we need to beat Russia, we need to stay on top, and we need to help developing countries rely on countries like the United States for their resources, not on our adversaries.”
