Tim,
First of all thanks for the opportunity to post here. It's a fine venue with a fine crowd. For my first post I thought I'd add some thoughts to what you have to say below. It is right and, indeed, essential, for conservatives (of all stripes) to involve themselves in "environmental" issues. However, to do so by borrowing a set of policies from a movement that is opposed to conservativism in virtually every sense is just foolish, and that is what most conservatives who talk about environmentalism have in effect done. They have ignored not just the conservative tradition of stewardship that you mention, but also the important and respectable theories of Free Market Environmentalism (FME). One of the many reasons why the Quality of Life policy group went so far off the rails was because it failed to include, or even reach out to, leading British thinkers on FME like Prof. Julian Morris of the International Policy Network.
The fact is that we can tackle virtually every "environmental" issue without going down the road to ecological serfdom (and actually inducing environmental disaster as a result) by applying these two principles - even the vexed subject of global warming. In fact, that's the subject of the last chapter of my book. We conservatives have the will, and we have the principles, but the party has not put the two together. I've offered before privately, but will do so now publicly, to come over and brief the party on the principles of stewardship and FME and how they can produce a credible, proven, genuinely conservative environmental policy. I'm not expecting any response, however.
