A Conservative Case for Conservation CHOICE

Bekkieann had a post up last week that sparked a little conversation - how low is "too low" when it comes to setting the thermostat at home in order to conserve energy. Well it turned out that this conservative was the "bravest" (in Bekkieann's words) enough to set the thermostat (overnight anyway) to 60 chilly degrees. My family and I love to snuggle down under heavy blankets at night which is one reason for that. However, another reason does have to do with a certain sense of conservation - both of the environmental and fiscal variety. From an environmental standpoint, we do try not to use more energy than needed so we keep lights off until absolutely necessary, we keep the thermostat set a little low (unless one of us is sick that is), we try to minimize the driving that we do, we utilize water conservation practices (good habits that were formed before we moved to a "desert" state) etc, etc. We do this in part out of the mindset of stewardship - we want to be good stewards of the environmental resources that God has given us. The other resource that we try to be good stewards of is our finances and environmental conservation helps there as well. If you are not spending hundreds of dollars on electricity or heating, you have that money to spend on other things - necessities or extravagances - whatever YOU choose and therein lies the sticking point for most conservatives when it comes to environmental protection laws.

Most conservatives who chafe at the idea of government dictating environmental protection are not against protecting the environment, they are against the government telling you that you must do it and how to do it. In some cases, you can not turn down the thermostat because you have young children or the elderly in the house - people who can not handle those temperature "extremes". In other cases, they may have a job that requires that they drive a vehicle that uses a lot of gas or prohibits them from car-pooling or riding a bus. There are millions of reasons why a person may not be able to abide by mandated lifestyle changes and there are just as many of us out there who are more than willing to pick up the slack - people like Mark Miller.

Mr Miller runs a local car dealership and they use a LOT of water so he thought he could use rainwater that he collected to do things like wash cars and the like. However, Mr. Miller ran afoul of a government who claimed that it "owned" the rainwater and that Mr. Miller was somehow in violation of the law. The water rights laws that Mr. Miller was breaking were laws that were put into place to keep people from diverting streams from their natural flowage and did not apply to rainwater use. This lead Sen. Scott Jenkins, R-Plain City, to announce that he was going to propose a common sense bill allowing individuals to collect rainwater for private use (with limits).

Which gets back to the original objection - government fiat. Government dictat causes a problem which necessitates further government intervention to "fix" which requires further government intervention.....you get the picture? Why not let the people decide what conservation methods work best for them? In my case, setting the thermostat a little lower works - for others maybe not so much. Is it really that hard to let the people figure out how best to run their lives?