Not all conservatives have it in for polar bears. South Carolina state senator John Courson (R), for example, loves to photograph them. "I've been to Churchill, Manitoba," the former campaign director for the late senator Strom Thurmond (R) told me a year ago, "and I've seen global warming happening." Since that visit, Courson has played a major role in getting his state to come to grips with climate change. You might think that devotees of traditional values would be natural defenders of a traditional climate, but Courson's commonsense, conservative approach is sadly rare. On the contrary, pundits and politicians on the right largely scorned the Bush administration's belated listing of the polar bear in May. The Heritage Foundation suggested that the listing would hurt conservation efforts, reasoning that less oil drilling in the bear's habitat would result in less revenue for Alaska, and thus less funding for its environmental programs. In a policy brief, the American Enterprise Institute weighs Alaska's 3,500 "conveniently charismatic" polar bears against an estimated potential of 7 billion barrels of oil in the Beaufort Sea: "With oil at over $100 a barrel... these are some very expensive polar bears."
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