Gop: It Is That Easy Being Green

As American conservatives struggle to find a new identity, British Conservatives have succeeded in defining theirs. A poll conducted just before Gordon Brown became Prime Minister showed that Conservative leader David Cameron enjoyed a 14 point lead in response to the question of who is “greener.”

By now, the story of Cameron’s green rebranding is familiar on both sides of the Atlantic. He dumped the Conservative’s famous blue torch logo, replacing it with a tree, and routinely ensures that party conventions are bathed in green lighting and imagery. He installed a wind turbine on the roof of his London home, embarked on a widely publicized dog-sled trip to a shrinking glacier in the Arctic, and cycles into work at Parliament. While Republicans were sinking to mid-term disaster in 2006, he led his party to victory in municipal elections that year by urging voters to “Vote Blue, Go Green.”

Some old-line British Conservatives have mocked Cameron for (in the words of Norman Tebbit) “clever marketing.” Caroline Jackson, Conservative Member of the European Parliament, has condemned green rebranding as “cosmetic.” One internal party pressure group, The Taxpayers’ Alliance, has published a warning to American conservatives arguing that the attempt to reposition Thatcher’s tax-cutters into Dave’s tree-huggers had “enormously backfired.”

Has it? Really? Conservatives hold a double-digit poll advantage over Labour, with a 7-point lead on the crucial issue of economic management.

Cameron’s green policies are not the reason for this lead. But with 75% of Britons agreeing that climate change was an important issue, Cameron’s green policies were crucial to his project of “decontaminating” Conservatism after three back-to-back election disasters.

If the Republican Party hopes to attract segments of the electorate from which it has become dangerously disconnected, it needs to present itself as similarly concerned with the environment. A recent Gallup poll revealed that attitudes in this area are highly partisan, with Democrats overwhelmingly more likely to hold a pessimistic view of environmental conditions and to be more receptive to green messages. Crucially for Republicans, it also found that women are “more likely to worry about the environment, to take a dim view of environmental conditions, to be active in or sympathetic to the environmental movement, and to give precedence to the environment over economic and energy concerns.”

David Cameron’s greening of the Tories should not simply be seen as a triumph of style over substance. In this case, the style is actually continuous with the substance, which is a blueprint for an environmental and energy revolution that is at once radical in its ambition and conservative in its conception.

Last month, this plan to “decarbonize” Britain was outlined in a policy paper in which the central idea is to create the conditions for a new “electricity internet,” based on smart grid and smart meter technology. Consumers would be able to use the latter in their homes to interact with the former so that supply and demand can be managed efficiently. For instance, they could enter their electricity needs for a certain appliance (or even an electric car) into the smart meter. The supplier would use this information to offer the cheapest possible rates, which would in turn allow for greater use of renewable energy due to more predictable demand. Just as Web 2.0 technology empowers users to generate content, the electricity internet would offer people the opportunity to make money from their own small-scale low carbon energy production. So power companies could reward anyone who generated energy through wind turbines or solar panels.

In an economic downturn, perhaps it is unwise to dwell on green concerns. On the other hand, it is not as if US Republicans got very far with their 2008 election message, “drill, baby, drill.” Cameron has taken the time to establish his credibility on green issues, to position his party at the forefront of the debate rather than denying its significance, to base his vision of a low carbon Britain on principles of decentralization, localism, private initiative and choice that animate his entire platform, and to understand and act on the insight that the environment, while ostensibly a latent concern, speaks to fundamental issues on immigration, energy independence, quality of life and the safety and security of voters’ families.

The GOP must also speak to those issues in a constructive manner, or discover that time in opposition is one resource that has a habit of renewing itself.