2. Conservatives care about waste, fraud and abuse, and there have been many examples of abuse in programs to protect the environment
3. Steps taken in the name of protecting the environment often end up doing more harm than good. Conservatives are inherently skeptical of any large organizations ability to do what they say they will.
4. Environmentalism often has an unrealistic view of nature. It's dynamic, constantly evolving, and "preserving" it is a hopeless undertaking. I would recommend the books of Daniel Botkin on this issue: https://www.danielbbotkin.com/books/the-moon-in-the-nautilus...
5. We have a limited budget and fiscal responsibility requires not spending what you don't have. (This is an element of conservative ideology not represented in either of today's political parties)
A better approach is to speak in terms of paying for what you damage. The economy matters, and you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet... but you pay for anything you break.
So you end up charging a price, preferably to be paid to those who are affected, and the market responds by cutting pollution. It's almost like fine or cap-and-trade, but without the arbitrary limit that would cause offense. The result may even be better, since you won't always end up exactly at the limit.
Tainting and spoiling are usually bad to the conservative mindset, but watch out for property rights. You get to mess up your own stuff. If you bought it and you own it, you can ruin it. Arguing for restrictions that infringe on a person's property won't get you very far at all.
Sure, it's your land.
> What happens when 10 years later it starts leaching into the soil and poisoning nearby streams and farms?
Those impacted landowners now have a tort claim against you, which they should pursue.
> What about the animals who eat on my land and then run back into the forest where they get shot for someone else's dinner, and that someone else ends up consuming elevated levels of heavy metals?
They now have a tort claim against you, which they should pursue.
> What about the person who buys the land from me? Do I have to disclose the presence of the waste to them?
Yes, you should. If you don't, the purchaser now has a tort claim against you, which they should pursue.
---
I know I'm being a bit trite with the above, but I mean no offense. The difference here is one of strategy, not base ideas. I (and other libertarians) believe that people who harm others through their action should be responsible for that harm. Proponents of the EPA believe that people should be limited by government regulation to a minimal level of harm.
I'll also grant that, prior to the EPA, the tort system in the US was ineffective at resolving these issues. I don't believe that was a problem with the process itself; it was (and remains) a problem with the courts.
I think it's also very inefficient to allow people to do things that we know for sure will be harmful. If all that stuff is allowed and ends up in court you will need a gigantic court system to handle all these cases.
As an example, shale gas did more for US CO2 reductions than any policy ever did while at the same time providing cheap energy and to conservatives, cheap energy is just as important as clean environment some would even claim those two go hand in hand.
Coal should and will lose once there is a cheaper, cleaner, more reliable and more effective solution out there. Just like coal replaced the burning of trees and made it possible to provide energy from outside instead of people having to use a fireplace inside their homes (which was very unhealthy).
There actually are better solutions than coal one is nuclear yet an absurd amount of pushback from environmental organizations and too many politicians have kept coal around because of their unsubstantiated fearmongering. Another is shale gas which has reduced the CO2 of the US substantially but despite that is also getting a lot of pushback from environmental organizations and politicians
Neither wind nor solar can provide enough energy at scale and at a realistic price for the US let alone for the entire world yet that is what is being forced rather than the much better alternatives.
As someone who is broadly centre left in outlook, I do actually agree that there is some truth to this. From what I've seen, many environmental campaigners do talk in terms of complete economic and political transformation. And they are often conflate environmental issues with other issues of social and economic justice, even when the actual links between them is questionable. For example, do we have to solve issues of gender, racial, and income inequality in order to stop climate change?
Personally, I think that these issues are not inextricably linked. I'd like to see improvements in all of them. But I also think that climate change is a more pressing issue, because while human-scale problems can always be fixed with more time, runaway climate change is likely a one way process, and one with a very narrow window of opportunity to address. I think many environmental campaigns would find a more receptive audience amongst conservatives if they focused more narrowly on the specific issues of pollution and climate change.
Of course, campaigners do have a answer for this. They argue that these issues are inextricably linked. That the capitalist system is incorrigibly rapacious, and all these different problems are really just products of the underlying dysfunction, and cannot be tackled in isolation. That "evolutionary" improvement is simply an emollient that cannot address the fundamentally catastrophic impact of the free market and the global supply chain on the biosphere, and as such, revolutionary change, even though very difficult, is the only solution that can work, and therefore the only thing worth campaigning for.
My take is that, while some of the fundamentals of modern capitalism are basically broken, with respect to environmental impact, they are still delivering results, in terms of general reduction of overall poverty and improvements to quality of life for the very poorest, and security for the richest. As such, it's not realistic to expect to achieve major changes through campaigns focused on policy. Instead, campaigns to influence policy should focus on specific issues that mitigate the worst of climate change and pollution. Their purpose should be to buy us enough time as a species to solve the other problems using technology. Technological change can deliver genuinely transformative changes to the economy, as we're seeing with the adoption of renewable energy and electric vehicles, but not always fast enough.
As someone who left a part of the country that votes Republican to Dem 9:1, this is the mindset of most rural voters (where I'm from at least).
They think pollution and grime are "city problems" because city people are just "dirty sons of bitches". These are people who, once their car breaks down, they just put it into the woods/a creek and forget about it. Old tires? Do the same. Loads of plastic garbage? Slow burn it outside since they don't want to pay the monthly garbage fee. These people think they're clean, but they never stop talking about how it's getting dirtier these days because "those city people are buying up houses here and bringing their shit with em", and not that their waste has just accumulated. In my chunk of rural America, the only reason it's not a total wasteland is because the population density is so low. For how many people live in cities, they're pretty clean. If they were to adopt more rural lifestyles, waste would be everywhere.
To be frank, I just don't think it's as big a problem as GP. It doesn't hurt me if my neighbor has a pile of broken down pallets and yard waste in the corner of his yard - his property is not my problem. If I don't like the way it looks I'll build a fence.
I recently bought a house, and there's a concrete pad in one corner of the property that was once a basketball court. It's mostly buried in a thin layer of dirt now and there's everything from old plumping to odd pieces of granite from the previous owner's construction business piled on it. I'm looking forward to cleaning all of that up this spring and building a shop building on the pad.
Part of the reason for this is that it's quite expensive to deal with it. Even doing the work myself - collecting, hauling it to the dump, and unloading it there - it will still likely cost me a few hundred dollars to deal with it. People here don't have a few hundred dollars to spare for things that aren't necessities, so you end up with what are effectively personal/family dumps on every small piece of property.
Moderate changes here and there, while they may make you feel like your doing something, is merely a band aid on a mighty cut.