I was raised in a conservative Republican home with strong beliefs in free markets. My dad was raised on a North Dakota farm, where success depended on hard work and independent problem-solving skills. I grew up believing that government intervention in our personal lives should be limited to things we cannot effectively do as individuals, such as law enforcement, national defense, and protecting the public from unfair business practices and negative externalities.
Sea ice is essential to polar bear survival because they can only reliably catch their main food source, seals, from its surface. In essence, the platform of ice is their dinner plate. When forced ashore by melting ice, polar bears must live off the energy in their fat reserves until the ice forms again in autumn. Longer ice-free seasons, driven by global warming, are stretching the limits of those reserves.
It has become increasingly clear that if societies do not halt global warming, none of our other societal and environmental concerns will really matter. Yet the more obvious and expensive our changing climate has become, the greater has been Republican resistance to doing anything about it. This, even after Nobel Prize-winner William Nordhaus showed that a big part of the solution could lie in free markets — a historic bastion of Republican platforms.