How would libertarians respond to climate change?

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Lots of people do (although if you read a bit more carefully you'd see that I mentioned carbon taxes normally being proposed as being revenue neutral): myself, MasterPedant, 57% of British Columbians (they actually have one, and I don't think that there's is revenue neutral). Some people believe that taxation is useful, remember. And climate scientists are pretty damn certain about their data, from what I know. In any case, I'd prefer not to take the risk. Oh, and cutting emissions would probably generally improve air quality and people's help, so even if climate change isn't an issue it certainly wouldn't hurt.

Isn't the solution property rights?Article It is the violation of free market principles that lead to these problems. Because the government has socialized air, water, and other resources it encourages other (in the case of air, airliners) to pollute at society's (everyone else) expense. So technically since a person should own from the ground to the sky, there should be no problems.

You are referring to what Garret Hardin called "The Tragedy of the Commons". The sky and sea cannot be subdivided like the land. Neither can rivers. The waters that run do not care about whose land they run through.

ruveyn

Using red tape to make green energy cost-effective (for use of a better word) is anti-democratic, breeds corruption, and causes massive inflation that causes market instability, which in turn kills off business and makes energy unaffordable. If that's not bad enough, green energy technology is generally not as good as existing technology. If green energy technology is ever going to succeed, it needs to be able to compete with fossil fuels and nuclear power in a lassez-faire market.

Sounds good to me. Though it doesn't take libertariansim to do that, just lifting the nuclear moratiorium.

Why? Green technology will become better as soon as their is a mass market for it. From that perspective it won't matter whether the market is a result of carbon taxes or not, surely. In any case, you still haven't proposed a solution to climate change.

And I still don't see how a carbon tax is anti-democratic, so long as it is supported by a majority of people. And Sweden's economy isn't in anything like the state you describe. They were hit hard by the financial crisis, true, but there were places hit a lot worse and I don't think it had anything to do with their carbon tax.

I agree that moratoriums on nuclear power should be lifted. But you can hardly get rid of all regulation--we need it to maintain safety standards. Whether there is a moratorium or not the safety check processes take up time. I for one do not want to get rid of them.

That's fine that green energy will get more cost-effective as soon as it's more marketable. But in the meantime, if people have to use extremely expensive technology that's not as good as the cheaper ones it replaced, at best stunts economic development that would help improve such technologies. At worst (and more likely), it will cause a severe recession from the amount of money being spent on less efficient energy sources, the inflation it would cause, and the subsequent weakening of the dollar from the inflation. Carbon taxes will not help build an economy that can switch to green energy because companies can barely stay afloat in the existing economy and existing taxes. Additionally, right now the biggest saving grace to our employment numbers and economy is the new oil/gas boom. Last of all, if the government is coerced into mandating a technology that only a few people can produce, that requires cronyism and outright corruption. By any chance, did you read anything on the recent house oversight hearings into that very problem? That is where your green energy policy becomes undemocratic.

My solution for climate change is to keep letting the earth handle it! I know the environmentalists have worked themselves into a panic based on meteorological data from the last century, but on the geological timescale, our co2 is high compared to recent epochs, but still within normal, the same can easily be said about our atmosphere, and there is still no need for concern about our melting ice caps since there is still nothing odd about that. Seas may rise and flood cities and low islands, but that's about the only major problem, and no one is at fault for that. It won't be a mass exodus- people will slowly trickle off to other places while other people will make high-risk investments gambling that they will have profitable beachfront property for at least a few decades. The earth has always handled even far greater temperature extremes and it always balanced them out. When the sea level rises, the earth eventually cools. When it falls, it eventually warms. Freaking out about it is not constructive!

This is insane logic! You are starting with the premises



and



and your conclusion is



But this logic is totally backwards! Your premises should be



and



and your conclusion should be

Even in Libertopia the insurance companies would have a thing or two to say about how reactors are built and operated.

ruveyn

Why? Consider a hypothetical scenario in which we force third world countries to use green energy, and as a result they are plunged back into the stone age because they can't afford it. Should we still use green energy in such a scenario?

I don't know how it works in the US, but in Canada and Britain at least there is no insurance company willing to touch nuclear energy. At least, not without absurdly expensive premiums. The only way we've ever been able to build nuclear power plants is by having the State guarantee them (that is, sign a contract saying it will shoulder all the costs if there is an accident).

Wow. You completely missed the point of this thread. My question was, what would you do about it if we had undeniable proof that anthropogenic climate change was real and that we needed to dramatically reduce CO2 emissions relatively quickly in order to mitigate it. Implicit to that was the idea that not mitigating it would lead to famines, flooding, massive loss of industry (a study estimated that by the end of the century we'll be losing $2 trillion a year globally, just from loss of maritime industry), an more frequent and violent natural disasters. You didn't address that.

I'm not even going to get into the other flaws in your post. There are so many that I wouldn't know where to begin. It was incorrect assumption built on incorrect assumption based on misunderstanding, built on blatantly ignoring what has happened in Europe when these sorts of measures were introduced.

Initiate a crash program to get lots of nuclear reactors online.

ruveyn

I've admitted that that would work. I am open to it. I'm just not convinced that sticking only with nuclear is the best way forward. I'd use nuclear for the baseload and encourage renewables for domestic use (solar roofs etc.), so as to reduce how much nuclear we need.

How can anything like that possibly be "initiated" in a libertarian economy? The market either does it, or it does not, in a strictly libertarian scenario. If there's no immediate economic incentive, it just doesn't happen. You can't initiate any sort of plan at all.