Pavlich: Not deniers, private sector environmentalists

In the age of global warming hysteria and the $93 trillion “Green” New Deal, leftist advocates for more government intervention in the economy under the guise of environmentalism have engaged in a new smear: If you don’t buy into climate change hysteria, you’re a “denier” who doesn’t care about the environment. Further, those who don’t think monolithically about the issue are responsible for the earth’s imminent demise. 

This couldn’t be further from the truth and is meant to blunt the debate about the best way to care for the environment. 

Big government, global environmentalism cannot work unless everyone pitches in. With China, Russia, India and a number of other countries constantly cheating the rules of international climate agreements, it makes staying in them an expensive — yet fruitless — cause. 

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Take for example the Paris climate accord. While many European countries continue to shame the United States for leaving the agreement, Americans are reducing their emissions voluntarily and at higher levels than countries still signed into the deal. 

During a recent trip to the 11th Ministerial Meeting of the Arctic Council in Finland last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made this point. 

“The facts speak for themselves: America is the world’s leader in caring for the environment. Our energy-related CO2 emissions fell by 14 percent between 2006 and 2017. The rest of the world’s rose by more than 20 percent during that same time period. Our black carbon emissions are down 16 percent since 2013 and are on track to drop by nearly half by 2035, the best of any Arctic country. It isn’t clear that Russia, meanwhile, is reducing emissions at all, despite being the largest emitter of black carbon in the Arctic,” Pompeo said to a room full of diplomats, officials and reporters. “We’re achieving our reductions the American way: through scientific and technological innovation that enhances our energy security and our economic growth, rather than stifling development through burdensome regulations.”  

Back here at home, while Democratic politicians cite climate change “experts” who dwell in federal grant dependent academia, there are a number of private institutions working on environmental issues through the private sector. 

For decades the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) has worked to find real solutions to environmental challenges and problems through the free market, entrepreneurship and individual stewardship. 

“In 1980, a group of conservation-minded economists posed the question: ‘If markets can produce bread and cars, why can’t they produce environmental quality?’ PERC was born in Bozeman, Montana, with a simple idea: Economic freedom can improve environmental quality. Throughout the 1980s, PERC scholars examined the shortcomings of government responses to environmental problems and challenged the idea that they could only be solved by the public sector,” PERC explains. 

On a local level, hunters in states around the country have provided billions of dollars for conservation efforts. Money collected from hunting license sales, taxes on ammunition and firearms and other hunting equipment often goes directly to properly maintaining land and conservation efforts. They help manage wildlife populations to ensure stable animal populations and bolster scientific projects about habitat, food sources, gene pools, impact studies and more. Nearly two-dozen national hunting organizations, in partnership with local chapters, work to conserve the environment for everyone.

Most importantly, hunters regularly pass down education about the outdoors, environmental stewardship and sustainable practices to future generations. 

“Hunters are the largest contributors to conservation, paying for programs that benefit all Americans and wildlife. Many private organizations, large and small, are working to sustain and improve the quality of our natural resources,” the National Shooting Sports Foundation reports. “Sportsmen contribute nearly $9.4 million every day, adding more than $3.4 billion every year for conservation. Hunters and target shooters have paid $11 billion in excise taxes since the inception of the Pittman-Robertson Act in 1937…For more than 80 years, sportsmen have paid more than $20 billion for on-the-ground projects in every state, protecting our natural environment and our fish and wildlife. The $6.4 billion in annual federal tax money generated by hunters’ spending could cover the annual paychecks of 210,000 U.S. Army Sergeants.”

Conservative Americans care about the environment, they just happen to have a very different approach. They aren’t “deniers,” but instead have a real stake in conserving the land and environment for the future. 

Big government solutions to “climate change” are ineffective and smearing those doing the most good — without government intervention — only hurts the environmental cause the left claims to believe in.

Pavlich is the editor for Townhall.com and a Fox News contributor.