How would libertarians respond to climate change?

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The invisible hand of the free market has solutions. Obviously government intervention is a nonstarter for libertarians. First of all, if a libertarian believes global warming will soon become a crisis, he or she should buy up tracts of land far from the sea. As coastal populations are dispossessed by rising sea levels, demand for the land will go up, enabling tidy a profit to be made! The added income will make it far easier to deal with the changes imposed by global warming and maybe even to live in luxury while less rational minds deal with the terrible consequences!

Not at all. Sweden has already cut it's emissions by 20% whilst growing its GDP and I think they have plans to cut their emissions a further 20% over the next 10 years. That's with a carbon tax and some government programs. Nothing totalitarian. They could do a great deal more than that before you could consider it totalitarianism. Also, you should consider whether we can afford to do nothing. Most indications show that it would cost far more to adapt to climate change than to mitigate it.


How are any of the policies that I outlined totalitarian? Well, maybe the carbon quotas are a little bit, but otherwise I don't think that they are. So long as the government enacting them is democratically elected, of course. In any case, if we do nothing it is quite possible that the hardship will result in totalitarian regime anyway. And large parts of Africa (as well as other areas) are committing to carbon neutral development paths. In India solar panels are becoming competitive with diesel generators. China is the worlds' largest investor in renewable energy (although I admit that their rapidly growing pollution is a huge problem). China has also expressed a willingness to take on definitive goals if everyone else does. And keeping your CO2 emissions low does not require you to take a permanent vow of poverty. It just requires development to proceed differently.


Sin taxes have no effect on democracy. Democracy is about your power over government, not your power to do whatever you please without being taxed. As for freedom, why should you be free to harm future generations (or your generation, for that matter--we'll be living with climate change in our lifetime). That's besides the ethical quandary of whether it is morally acceptable to damage the Earth.


Nothing is inherently wrong with them, although they can not be the long term solution because eventually we'll run out of oil. The main problem is, though, that they're still more expensive than doing nothing, so regulation (such as a carbon tax) would probably be needed to ensure that it is in place.

All of this is confirming what I thought: Libertarians don't have a viable solution to climate change (except possibly the breeder reactors, although I find it hard to believe that that would work without government programs to get them built). As such, unless they can deny it or claim that there is nothing to be done, it means that large parts of their ideology can not be implemented.

Sweden is the size of California with about a quarter of the population. It cannot be compared to countries like the US, China, India, or even the the UK. It doesn't even matter what they do, they're not relevant on a global scale.

What do carbon taxes or cap and trade do to reduce these supposedly dastardly emissions? It's just a money grab and nothing more but reward the big corporations and punishes the consumers.

What was the other 'final solution' to global warming you came up with? Personal carbon quotas? Essentially rations, even you admit that's going too far.

And yes, all with in democratic confines right? I'm pretty sure people aren't going to vote for reduction in their quality of life.

You're better off praying to "Gaia" for mercy

Do people specifically support the government's excuse of using the environment to extract yet more tax from people? And what possible good will cutting emissions do? It's not like any of this has been proven beyond reasonable doubt, so frankly I think this is more about political control. We don't want the plebs enjoying themselves.

Good thread. It is indeed true that libertarian parties all over the world are strongly allied with climate change deniers. This says to me that either they are being irresponsible in order to gain the votes of a certain demographic, or that even the true believers can't really imagine how a libertarian society might reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The fact of the matter is that it is more profitable to produce energy in a way that creates externalities. In a libertarian society, profitability is the only thing that can ever count. So there are only two ways in which a libertarian society might reduce greenhouse emissions:
(1.) Consumers care so much that they refuse to buy from companies that produce high levels of emissions,
(2.) New technology is discovered which makes it more profitable to produce energy in a cleaner way.

It seems to me that relying on either of these to come true is the height of hubris.

Why the use of the term "deniers"? That's a nasty bit of smearing right there. How about "sceptics"? As that's what most of them are.

And anyway, I don't deny climate change, not one iota of it - the climate changes all the time, always has done, and will continue to do so.

I am sceptical of the received wisdom that humans are the root cause of all of the universe's problems.

Because "sceptic" means "requiring evidence in order to form beliefs". A "climate change sceptic" is simply somebody who requires evidence in order to form beliefs on the subject of climate change. It does not mean "someone who agrees with me".

Calling climate change deniers "climate change sceptics" is like calling them "the people who are not brainwashed on the topic of climate change". It's a propaganda term.

Also, maybe I should say "deniers of the current scientific consensus on climate change" instead of "climate change deniers" so as to make it clear that some "climate change deniers" do believe that the climate is changing. But that's just nitpicking. Okay, make it "climate science deniers" then.

Calling someone a 'climate change denier' is pretty much a backhanded way of equating someone who doesn't support their far out ideology with a Holocaust denier.

Not really the Holocaust did happen and climate change is real.

No one said it isn't. The question is whether or not humans are the cause of climate change and whether or not reducing emissions will prevent climate change.

A lot of factors play into climate change humans are the ones that damgae the earth so yeah hunmans cause climate change.

Wouldn't it be considerably less draconian to have companies buy carbon sequestration gear on their heat outputs and let them have a choice of which brand than to come up with a penalty-trading system? To boot it tangibly *does* something.

I don't claim to know whether or not the term "denier" was popularised by the rise of Holocaust denial. Maybe it was. But it seems like a perfectly sensible term to use in this case. In fact, the parallels with Holocaust denial are very strong.

Holocaust deniers claim that the mainstream historical consensus on the Holocaust is wrong. Climate change deniers claim that the mainstream scientific consensus on climate change is wrong. In both cases, the historical or scientific field in question claims that there is overwhelming evidence to support the mainstream consensus. In both cases, most people are only vaguely aware of what this evidence is, but accept the authority of the historical or scientific field.

You might think that the parallel is unfair because it is usually assumed that Holocaust deniers are Holocaust deniers because they hate Jews, whereas climate change deniers are climate change deniers for much less reprehensible reasons. But this isn't quite right. Some Holocaust deniers are Holocaust deniers simply because they are stubborn iconoclasts, and some climate change deniers are climate change deniers for very reprehensible reasons indeed.

I prefer the words "critic" and "skeptic" to the word "denier".

Currently there is no solid -climate science-. We have climate models which are derived by an process of curve fitting, or formulating hypotheses to data. The real question is how good is the data. Much of the data is surrogate data. Example: We infer things about the climate of the planet thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years ago from tree rings, the conditions of very old ice and such like. This type of data is necessarily indirect and inferential for the simple reason that no one was around to directly measure the weather and climate of those days past. The question arises, just how accurate is the surrogation. Obviously surrogate data has to be predicated on some theory to enable us to infer just what caused the various residual effects that we see today. So the evaluation of the surrogacy is a fair issue to raise.

Another point is that climate is average weather. But weather is a phenomenon exhibiting what is called chaotic dynamics. Its description is highly non-linear and very sensitive to initial or boundary conditions. Dealing with chaotic dynamics is touchy and tricky.

Third, there is the matter of how much flexibility should be allowed in fitting models to data. If there are too many free parameters and model can be made to fit a wide variety of data sets. The fit is much tighter in such areas as subatomic physics. Physicists do not have that much freedom to make arbitrary models fit the data resulting from measurement and experiment.

Last, there is the issue on anthropic causation. How much of the climate is due to human activity and how much to natural drivers over which we have little or no control.

So any criticism of the current hypothesis that the current warm era is largely the result of human activity can reasonable be criticized and questioned. The skepticism is based squarely on the technical issues and can be posited without having a particular economic or political axe to grind.

All of the above issues are fair questions which ought to be addressed in a scientifically sound manner.

ruveyn

I don't like "sceptic", for the reason I outlined above. Calling deniers "sceptics" is like calling atheists "rationalists", and is inflammatory for the same reason. It confuses the method of reaching a conclusion with the particular conclusion that is reached.

I don't mind "critic". My only problem with it is that a "critic" sounds like somebody who is informed enough to have an genuine argument with a climate scientist about the data and the methods. You personally seem like you are probably a "critic" as opposed to a "denier", but I wouldn't want to extend that courtesy to some guy who just believes all the denier opinion columns he reads in some right-wing rag.

Countries with densely packed populations are often easier to deal with because it means that more mass transit can be used. Yes, there are certainly things that might make the change easier for Sweden than for other countries, but for that matter even Europe as a whole has done a pretty good job of reducing emissions. That despite increasing quality of life in Eastern Europe.

Carbon taxes raise the price of polluting energy sources to the point where it is cheaper to buy from non-polluting ones. Since people would start buying these cleaner sources of energy it would create increased demand and competition, hopefully bringing the price down substantiallly. I don't really see that it would reward the big corporations, especially considering that industry is the big user of electricity. And the parties that advocate a carbon tax don't usually advocate a reduction in corporate tax. The reduction is normally proposed in personal income tax, particularly for the people in the lower tax brackets.

Yes, carbon quotas are essentially rations. I'd prefer that that was not necessary, but if it is then I will accept it. And perhaps no one will vote for anything like this, but I will support something that I believe in whether it is popular or not.