Who lost the arctic?

Yesterday I wrote about the possibility of climate changes that are even more sudden and catastrophic than anyone is expecting.  You might think that this would be a national security issue of the first order.  You might think that conservatives and Republicans, who have made national security their top issue, who have yelled and screamed about various threats posed to our nation, who have insisted that absurd sums be spent on the national (military) defense, and who have attacked Democrats without restraint – often by calling them traitors implicitly or explicitly – you might think they would be pushing for immediate action. 

Yeah, right.

The same conservatives who have been cowering in fright at every potential shoe bomber, pushing for expanded defense budgets since 1947 just in case we have to fight two and a half wars simultaneously (which – at least before Iraq – has been our defense preparedness doctrine) and just in case the Soviets took the extremely unlikely step of rolling their tanks across Europe toward Paris – want nothing but more studies when it comes to this particular threat.

Now why would that be?  The obvious conclusion is that we shouldn’t take conservatives seriously when they prattle on about the security of the nation, stability, the need to avoid radical change, etc.; that as I discussed previously they’re just not serious and not sincere.

To flesh this out a little more, I think there are several factors at work:

1. Politically, conservatives are not honest when they pump up the threats to our nation.  They are doing it for partisan purposes, and to distract people from the fact that while they wave the flag with one hand, they are stealing money from the poor to give to the rich with the other.
2. Financially, certain sectors of the wealthy, whom conservatives and Republicans ultimately represent, have been benefiting enormously from the military-industrial complex for many years, and the inflation of perceived military threats helps them, while taking action against global warming would hurt business by leading to regulation.
3. Ideologically, conservative fair-weather anti-statists are permitted to accept an enormous defense and security establishment (even though nothing exemplifies the raw power of the state than these).  But regulations of the kind needed to deal with global warming do not jibe with their ideology.  Why would their ideology be shaped in this particular way?  See #2.
4. Psychologically, conservatives need an enemy to hate, so they can easily get themselves worked up over Reds (1848-1991), the Japanese (early 1990s), Chinese (mid-1990s-2001), “Islamo-Fascists” (2001-?), the French (2003-2004), or other human antagonists – but global warming just doesn’t push their buttons; the enemy is us.
5. Existentially, conservatives are frightened of the possibility that we, human beings, might be stuck here on a planet in space, in charge of our own destiny, with no adult supervision, and no God or other absolute around which to orient ourselves.  They prefer to rest upon absolute foundations, can’t deal with the possibility that the future could be so open-ended, and are frightened of confronting the responsibility implied by the lack of foundation and fixity of our situation.