I conjecture that many Republicans seek to maximize their own income and to then spend it on the goods (including environmental services) that they want to buy. They prefer this outcome to giving government a larger % of their income and then delegating a purchase decision to government officials who they do not trust to do their job efficiently. So, in a nutshell --- Republicans understand the concept of opportunity cost and anticipate that if government is smaller that they will have greater after tax income to spend on private goods that they seek to consume. This group recognizes that public goods are not "free" to purchase and instead are actually expensive because the public sector inefficiently supplies them (i.e monopoly power for public transit and high public sector pay and clumsy command and control regulations). Rather than purchasing such inefficiently supplied public goods that are not likely to be targeted to their needs, Republicans tend to support a smaller government that gives the $ back to the earners who can then spend it on the private goods they want. Several of these goods will be related to environmental protection but will be privately provided.
Back in 1997, John Matsusaka and I studied voting on California's environmental initiatives. California engages in direct democracy and this allows researchers to learn something about the preferences of different groups. A challenge arises because the unit of analysis is not an individual voter so there are legitimate questions about what to learn from such ecological regressions.
By including an income quadratic in our regressions, we found that richer people were more likely to vote against public goods focused on the environment than middle class people. We conjectured that the rich use private markets (Club Med) rather than relying on public goods to meet their desires for environmental goods. We also found that Republicans consistently voted against the environmental public goods initiatives. This doesn't mean that they are anti-environment. We interpreted these results as saying that Republicans support the private provision of environmental services. In such a setting, you get what you pay for.
This old work of ours relates to what Paul Krugman says at the end of his piece in the NY Times.
"And environmental protection is, in part, a class issue, even if we don’t usually think of it that way. Everyone breathes the same air, so the benefits of pollution control are more or less evenly spread across the population. But ownership of, say, stock in coal companies is concentrated in a few, wealthy hands. Even if the costs of pollution control are passed on in the form of higher prices, the rich are different from you and me. They spend a lot more money, and, therefore, bear a higher share of the costs.
In the case of the new ozone plan, the E.P.A.’s analysis suggests that, for the average American, the benefits would be more than twice the costs. But that doesn’t necessarily matter to the nonaverage American driving one party’s priorities. On ozone, as with almost everything these days, it’s all about inequality."
Krugman gets a B+ for this discussion. He is making the cliche statement that "fat cat Republicans" own shares in the fossil fuel economy and would lose capital gains if they face new environmental taxes.
This is an incomplete answer. He is forgetting Tiebout sorting. Yes, every regulation has "aggregate costs" and "aggregate benefits" but individual voters will compare their costs and their benefits from a specific piece of regulation. Even in Beijing residential areas differ with respect to their air pollution level on the same day. Within Los Angeles, there is huge variation in air pollution levels with the wealthy living in areas with much lower PM2.5 than the poor who live closer to freeways and further from the beach. This separation means that the rich know that they have good air and that enforcing Clean Air Act regulations is a type of redistribution to land owners whose real estate is located in areas (such as homes close to highways) where pollution will decline if new regulations are enforced. Such land owners will be able to charge more their apartments near highways if highway pollution declines due to the regulation.
In the case of climate change adaptation, richer people have access to more self protection strategies and this provides implicit insurance. I recognize that not all rich people are Republican but a correlation exists. If one anticipates that one can adapt to environmental challenges, then this diminishes the "all for one and one for all" spirit of tackling a challenge using government.
The answer to this blog post's title is that the Republican party is a mixture of libertarian, who foresee that government policy often has unintended consequences and creates dangerous precedent concerning the growth of the state, and individuals who can use markets to protect themselves from environmental hazards.
Supporters of environmental regulation would be more likely to attract Republican support if they pursue cost-effective aims such as using pollution permit markets rather than command and control.
Paul Krugman (who won the Nobel Prize in part for his work on economic geography) needs to think about the residential geography of where different people live and how they are affected by different environmental threats. How much of suburban home value is due to its nice environmental conditions that are in relatively low supply? Dr. Krugman can't forget general equilibrium. If successful environmental regulation reduces pollution then the scarcity value of such suburbs would decline and they may actually lose some value! So, there is an element of redistribution taking place as local environmental policy is enacted.
Matt Holian and I discuss some of these issues in this 2014 NBER paper but we focused on carbon emissions not local pollution issues.
I must admit that Republican opposition to carbon pricing slightly surprises me but I believe that the answer is that Republicans tend to live in the suburbs (and thus Holian and Kahn 2014 argument matters) and that Republicans tend to have greater access to income and thus to private adaptation strategies for coping with changing conditions. Al Gore's embrace of climate change also didn't help as this became a partisan issue rather than a national security issue.