Climate strikers expose their irrational nature, but conservatives still need answers of our own

Millions of people took part in protests in support of action on climate change in an impressive array of countries across most of the world on Friday.

The protests began in Pacific island nations said to be threatened by rising sea levels and were followed by demonstrations attended by hundreds of thousands in New York, London, Berlin, and other Western cities. The developing and Third World took part too, with people marching in Thailand, Pakistan, Ghana, and even Afghanistan.

It's the last place, Afghanistan, that really stands out. In Kabul, women led a small climate change demonstration guarded by armed security forces to protect them from the war violence that's plagued the country.

There's an interesting anecdote about a survey that measured the things people fear the most in countries around the world. Of all things for Afghans to choose, not war, disease, or oppression, the landlocked Afghans chose sharks. It turned out that bootlegged copies of Jaws had been popular in the country around the time the question was asked.

Climate change is a real problem, certainly not as irrational to anyone on the planet as the threat Afghans face from sharks, but the situation in Afghanistan is dire, with an inevitable pull-out of Western forces and the Taliban only gaining in strength, increasingly likely to recapture the country and subject its women to a state of extreme oppression again. Climate change is a non-issue in comparison. Are Afghans absorbing similarly irrelevant concerns from Western media on climate change like the shark menace?

There are echoes of this problem in the response to the issue all across the world. Is climate change really an issue that worries Pakistanis all that much? Not blasphemy riots, war with India, or the enduring third-world conditions of the country? In the West too, where so much action has already been taken, and China and India increasingly develop into the biggest greenhouse gas polluters, protesters are either unaware or uninterested.

There's much to oppose in this movement – many of the U.S. protests were in direct support of AOC's Green New Deal – but we're left vulnerable because the conservative movement still has no good answer to these things. In fact, it doesn't want to talk about it at all.

Some popular conservative beliefs are: A) climate change isn't happening at all, that B) as far as it is, it's due to natural causes and not humans, and C) that we shouldn't do anything about it because whatever we do will be a drop in the bucket compared to China and India anyway. It's common for a single person to cycle seamlessly between those partly contradictory positions because it's more about denying the left's environmentalist agenda than having a well-thought-out stance. That's a huge problem because until we have serious answers of our own on climate change, the left will continue to dominate the issue.

I don't have all the answers to this problem, nor am I in a position to set policy for us, especially in just this column. You often hear from conservatives about nuclear as a source of carbon-free power. Nuclear is proven power source and highly useful for the base load of an electrical grid. The left has a largely irrational and anachronistic aversion to it, developing out of the anti-nuclear weapons movement of which it's been unfairly associated with. Nuclear power would allow us to decarbonize the economy and not affect our quality of life.

There is a difference though between talking about something every now and then, only in response to the left's actions, and actually putting it forward as part of a serious, comprehensive solution to climate change. Young people clearly care quite a bit about climate change and it looks like they'll continue to for the foreseeable future. They're not right about everything but we'll need a stronger position, something more than just dismissing the problem out of hand, if we're to answer them.

This is the work that needs to be done. If we don't, enjoy being subjected to endless protests with bad slogans and terrible green new deal policies. Let's develop our own solutions so that we don't have to eat bug burgers and pay for unreliable renewable electricity.