In this guest post, Daniel Braaten discusses the research from his recently published article in Environmental Politics, co-authored with Albert Shihyi Chiu and Ridwan Rashid Noel: Anti-environmentalism as conservative coalition maintenance: an automated text analysis of National Review.
The unofficial energy and environmental policy slogan for the Republican party is “Drill, Baby, Drill.” It was first uttered by Micheal Steele during the Republican National Convention in 2008 and gained prominence later that year when the Republican Vice-Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin used it in a debate. The phrase encapsulates Republican environmental policy as overwhelmingly in favor of expanded fossil fuel extraction by seeking out new oil, gas, and coal deposits to exploit and the removal of environmental regulations to facilitate that process.
The slogan is not merely one of the Republican party but it also nicely summarizes a key binding element for the conservative movement in the United States: Anti-environmentalism. It is both an idea and a social movement. As a social movement it formed as a counterpoint to the environmental activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s focusing on the promotion of conservative ideology and the unrestrained use of fossil fuels. Anti-environmentalism is therefore a counter movement to stall, stymie and roll back environmental regulations, and a binding element in the conservative movement that connects fossil fuel interests and small government ideologues.
Anti-environmentalism and the conservative political movement
In our recent Environmental Politics article, we examined decades of issues of the conservative magazine National Review to analyze and understand how anti-environmentalism cements various elements of the conservative coalition together. Using automated text analysis, we identified ten main environmental / energy related topics prominent in the magazine: Reliable energy, renewables, fossil fuels, climate change, regulation, natural world, natural disasters, science, public lands, and agriculture. Of these topics, we found that the two most prominent in the magazine were reliable energy and regulation. These two topics represented the twin elements of anti-environmentalism, namely regulation as representative of small government conservative ideology and reliable energy as representative of pro-extractive energy sources. Reliable energy as a topic is pro fossil fuels in that it highlighted the reliability of fossil fuel energy sources, especially compared to the perceived unreliability of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, and emphasizes the relative cost of fossil fuels over renewable energy sources as the former much cheaper than the latter. For example, every year the National Review published what they described as an “Energy Issue” which often focuses on both the costs of renewable energy and the reliability of fossil fuels.
The other side of anti-environmentalism, specifically small government ideology, is also represented well in the National Review in the topic of regulation. The top keywords under the topic of regulation are: “environmental”, “government”, “federal”, and “epa” the latter standing for the Environmental Protection Agency a longstanding bête noire of the conservative movement. It’s no surprise that the EPA comes under fire in the pages of National Review as it represents multiple elements of ire for the conservative movement namely environmentalism and government regulations. What we find in our article is that in the United States the conservative movement is bound together with anti-environmentalism and that it serves as a glue to keep potentially disparate elements of conservatism together.
“Drill, Baby, Drill” in the era of renewables?
What is interesting now is that American energy prices are spiking as growing data center infrastructure consume more energy. On the flip side, the price of renewable energy, especially solar energy, is dramatically decreasing. As President Trump and the Republicans struggle with a political message on affordability, shifting to a dramatic increase in renewable energy could provide a way out. However, the likelihood of that happening is almost nil as it would strike at the heart of the anti-environmental core of the conservative movement. It seems, “Drill, Baby, Drill” will be Republican orthodoxy well into the future, even if for the rest of the world renewable energy is the more abundant and cheaper choice.
Bio
Daniel Braaten is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University – San Antonio. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2012. His research interests are in the areas of international human rights, international organizations, environmental politics, and migration politics.
