Environmental Conscience: Not Just For Liberals

Spearheading the world’s battle against climate change, Denmark’s Climate and Energy Minister Connie Hedegaard has all the markings of a liberal – she’s a die-hard environmentalist, a former newspaper columnist, a woman and a Scandinavian. But the young Hedegaard is a staunch member of Denmark’s center-right Conservative People’s Party, and as she moves rapidly toward the Copenhagen Climate Conference, she’s the ultimate proof that climate change is an issue that transcends political ideologies.

For better or worse, rarely has Hedegaard’s political alignment been emphasized in media coverage of her crusade against climate change until yesterday’s New York Times piece called “Danish Conservative Prepares for Climate Debate.”

“I’ve never understood why the environment should be a left-wing issue,” Hedegaard was quoted in the article. “In my view there is nothing as core to conservative beliefs – that what you inherit you should pass on to the next generation.” Hedegaard contradicts two potentially destructive stereotypes that overwhelm the environmental debate in America: that of the environmentalist as a tree-hugging liberal idealist, and that of the conservative as someone who favors political ideologies to the grim reality of scientific observation. She's also been recently named as one of Time's "2009 Time 100" as a "Scientist and Thinker."

Hedegaard, a conservative who is rigid in her commitment to set ambitious goals to combat climate change, might be the perfect woman to host the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December. It was the American conservatives who posed one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the Kyoto Protocol – and while the Obama administration appears to have advanced from that mindset, lingering hesitations still cloud the American desire (or non-desire) to save the environment. Perhaps Hedegaard can strike the right balance in Copenhagen with those who haven’t been able to get on board. But it won’t be easy.

For science bloggers like Fred Bortz, the knee-jerk pairing of environmentally friendly policies with the liberal agenda is a dangerous one. “Any proposal to limit carbon dioxide emissions will require changes in the way people do things, but life is always changing,” Bortz wrote to one of his conservative friends in 2007. “You look at the changes and see their costs today. I look at them and see their value in the future … When I put it that way, I can’t understand why my view is not considered ‘conservative.’”