Government attempts to help the environment often backfire. The swamp programs are doubly expensive because the government also props up the price of sugar, which makes it far more expensive to return Florida real estate to the alligators. The Superfund program has become a massive boondoggle for lawyers, its principal effect being to paralyze practical efforts to clean up chemical wastes. Conservatives can make these points. But they must have a positive environmental agenda, too.
Environmentalism is too important a matter to be left to the radicals.
Start with solid support for local and state-based cleanup programs as substitutes for federal management. But many environmental matters, including the ones most important to ordinary people, are managed best when managed close to home. Let the Left debate climate and ozone. With those matters at the top of the agenda, it then makes sense to move environmental money back to states and cities. Conservatives must also initiate and support positive programs to promote sustainable development as an alternative to one-shot decimation.