No Thanks, No Eco-Friendly Light Bulbs For Me, I'm a Conservative

A couple generations ago, concern for clean air and water and a desire to preserve open spaces and living things had enjoyed wide support across the political spectrum. Starting with the Reagan administration, however, the idea that you could be both a conservative and an environmentalist became as rare as Birkenstocks on bankers.

Reagan got the ball rolling, labeling environmentalists as extremists. And places like the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and other “think tanks” that do the PR work for large corporations and GOP politics have continued to shoe horn concern for the environment into a politics of left-right. Now we have more evidence of the success of their work.

            In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, people were given information on the benefits of compact florescent light bulbs over incandescent bulbs. In a shopping situation created by the researchers, the more conservative individuals in the study were less likely to buy a costlier florescent bulb when it was labeled with an environmental message than when it was unlabeled. In other words, the environmental label motivated the conservative shoppers to not purchase the more environmentally friendly product.

            So what is going on here? What are the motivations of people wanting to avoid buying a more environmentally friendly product? Although in some ways I might be considered to be politically conservative, I don’t believe that would be a term to describe my entire political outlook. And I cannot claim to have the ability to climb inside the minds of these conservative shoppers. My guess—and that is all it really is, a guess—is that the rhetoric of Reagan, conservative “think tanks,” Fox News, and talk radio has so poisoned the idea of environmentalism for people who identify themselves as conservative that many of these folks will avoid anything to do with eco-friendly anything, even if it is at a cost to them.

            For these conservatives environmentalism is anathema. It is comparable to the way people in this country felt about communism or the way segregationists thought about black people. It goes way beyond anything that they have experienced or what they may be able to reason and has gone into the deep-seated realm of prejudice. So as they are weighing the costs and benefits of buying a new light bulb and they see an environmental sticker on the product, that strong feeling in the gut goes off that says environmentalism = bad.

            So they buy the incandescent light bulb.

            Of course the implications go beyond what people screw into their light sockets. When you have enough folks to have these sorts of prejudices, as long as you have organizations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute carrying on the legacy of Ronald Reagan, it means that any sort of progress on energy policy or fighting climate change is a difficult uphill battle.