Port CEO, Jeff Bishop admitted during a Coos County Urban Renewal Agency meeting that even if all the permits are in place the Jordan Cove LNG facility may not be built for twenty years. Despite this long term prediction Bishop assures the group that Jordan Cove Energy Partners will still move on the land deal. They may even wait fifty years but don’t worry, he said, “These guys take the long view”.

Tying up North Spit property for twenty years or more certainly qualifies as a long view but a lot can happen in twenty years, like a wider implementation of renewable energy sources and nasty carbon taxes that makes dirty natural gas uneconomical. Bishop, himself has acknowledged that the process of extracting natural gas pollutes local ground and drinking water. Twenty years should be ample time to progress away from fossil fuel dependency to renewable energy alternatives and clean storage technology.

The real long view should be to acknowledge that fossil fuels will not last forever and cause costly job killing environmental degradation today. The responsible and prudent long view would be to preempt that degradation and the associated job losses and build toward the future rather than holding on to provably damaging 18th and 19th century technology.

So why do so many conservatives fight this inevitable move toward the future in favor of a fossil fueled and extractive past? Why do local business groups work to kill high paying renewable energy jobs, (banning wind energy comes to mind), while at the same time accusing renewable energy advocates of being job killers and anti-development?

The technology exists now and is successfully implemented by forward looking communities around the globe, particularly in Europe. It works, it isn’t an experiment and it is profitable so what makes doing innovative new things like renewable energy microgrids in Coos County so scary to local business groups?

In John Dean’s excellent book, Conservatives Without Conscience, he notes that conservatives have become increasingly dependent upon the guidance of authoritarian figures that push the nature of “political discourse, which has become disturbingly confrontational, vicious and hypocritical. Demagoguery is increasingly supplanting responsible dialogue, self-righteousness is replacing conscientiousness, and the victim is democracy”. Dean says that conservatives today define themselves less by what they stand for and more and more by what they oppose, “which is anything and everything they perceive to be liberal”, like for example, renewable energy.

In short, a handful of conservative business people are actively working against a sustainable future and hundreds, if not thousands of long term family wage jobs because it is seen as a liberal agenda. What it really boils down to though is fear, fear of no longer being in power and control which is a thoroughly anti democracy perspective.