Philosopher Roger Scruton has a pretty good piece on conservatives and the environment in the latest American Conservative. He mostly avoids the ususal conservative pitfalls when talking about the environment, namely snarky dismissal or ad hominem attacks against Al Gore and dirty hippies.

Scruton does make some solid points about the dangers of any “movement”: how it can take on crusade-like qualities. He contrasts this with a genuinely political approach to environmental problems that assume the legitimacy of various interests and try to reach a reasonable accomodation among them.

He also emphasizes conservative distrust of centralized statist solutions but also points out that it is a cardinal conservative principle that one should take responsibility for the consequences of ones actions. In other words, costs should be internalized wherever possible. He also thinks that a specific contribution that Anglo-American conservatives can make is the idea of our environmental inheritance as a “trust” – something that we received from earlier generations and will pass on to the generations after us.

One criticism I have is that Scruton seems to underestimate the degree to which legal remedies are a necessary part of environmental stewardship. He’s certainly right that popular grassroot initiatives are preferable to the heavy hand of centralized top-down control other things being equal, but regulation has acheived a lot, especially in terms of clean air and water. If the state has a role in ensuring that people don’t foist the cost of their actions off on others, then this applies to the environment as well. And if climate change is as serious a problem as we’re led to believe, it will likely require government action and coordination between nations, even though Scruton is rightly skeptical about some of the proposed approaches.

Further reading here and here.