via email from LPHQ:
Dear Friend of Liberty,
Last week we sent a poll asking for your opinions on global warming. If you haven’t already taken it, you can still take the poll here.
The poll has proven to be popular. Below is the poll question, responses, and results after one week.
Which of the following statements best matches your view of global warming?
* 28% (1785 votes) This whole global warming thing is a hoax.
* 6% (347 votes) I don’t know whether global warming is real, but the government should limit carbon dioxide emissions just to be safe.
* 10% (639 votes) Global warming is real, it’s a threat, and the government should limit carbon dioxide emissions.
* 27% (1676 votes) Whether or not global warming is real, it doesn’t justify more taxes or regulations.
* 29% (1835 votes) Global warming is mostly natural and there’s not much we can do about it.
6,282 votes total
Several people sent comments about the poll. People asked why they couldn’t select multiple answers. One person suggested the questions were biased.
For those of you skeptical about our poll, I’ll be the first to admit it is an unscientific poll written by a biased author (me).
My natural inclination is to distrust politicians’ proposals that grow government. I also distrust the scientists who live off government grants and benefit from generating hysteria over global warming.
However, just because I distrust politicians and government funded scientists doesn’t mean I’m inclined to trust the business community. I certainly understand that big oil companies have an incentive to mislead the public about the impact their products may have on the environment.
This poll question was interesting to me because even though Libertarians generally agree that government should not gain new powers because of popular global warming worries, we don’t always have exactly the same reasons.
In any case, I think the vast majority of you agree with me that government should not start restricting people’s energy use, whether it’s “cap and trade” or some other scheme.
We will continue to advocate against these kinds of schemes for government growth. I’d like to ask you to help support us by making a donation. When you donate, let us know if we’re communicating the issues you want to hear about.
Sincerely,
Wes Benedict
Executive Director
Libertarian National Committee
Note from Paulie: for previous IPR discussion about this poll, see comments here.
Hmm Brian, what about class action lawsuits against auto manufacturers, petroleum companies, etc? http://mises.org/daily/2120#13
Wow! Libertarians are geniuses. I hope they win more elections…
Brian why don’t you suggest to the legislature and other units of government that they open the market to competition? Maybe that would help reduce pollution, put a dent in poverty and help lots of other people and save some tax dollars as well.
There are plenty of examples where private firms are in the transit business but no where is it there specifically a libertarian venture in place. Most work with a government agency to some degree or another. But that shouldn’t stop us from taking a step in the Libertarian direction.
Every weekday hundreds of thousands of commuters here in Silicon Valley commit aggression against me by emitting smog from their cars. There have many other instances of aggregated microaggression. When has a “market in direct action” ever put a dent in such a problem?
To an anarchist, this means setting the default court-contestable penalty for pollution microaggression to zero, and wishing that markets won’t systematically ignore polluting acts whose damages are less than the cost of suing the polluter.
Not necessarily. If some people take direct action against accused polluters, the legal onus of proving they were wrongly attacked and recovering damages would fall on the alleged polluters. In fact, it is possible that there would be a market in such direct action.
The answer to pollution is well-known in the economics literature: internalize negative externalities through Pigovian taxes, as in a Green Tax Shift.
“Free” markets systematically fail to internalize negative externalities. A market isn’t truly free unless aggression in it is policed, and negative externalities are naked aggression.
Market prices should include the measurable costs that products and actions demonstrably and physically (not psychologically or sociologically) impose on non-consenting third parties.
To a minarchist, this means setting the default court-contestable penalty for pollution microagression to its estimated average cost, and then letting markets find the most efficient way to reduce aggregate pollution.
To an anarchist, this means setting the default court-contestable penalty for pollution microaggression to zero, and wishing that markets won’t systematically ignore polluting acts whose damages are less than the cost of suing the polluter.
Communists/socialists took over quite a few countries.
A truly free market would provide the proper incentives for dealing with energy and transportation issues:
1. Without the military-industrial complex subsidizing petroleum imports, other forms of energy would become more competitive
2. Without the government road construction subsidies, housing might be built more compactly, cutting down on sprawl, commute times and the resulting pollution
3. Without government monopolies on transit and protectionist measures such as expensive taxi medallions, airport shuttle style minibuses might provide more urban/commuter transportation; it would be cheaper than taxis and less time consuming than taking city buses (which often ride at or near empty along many routes)
4. Many energy solutions may be provided by startup companies; however, the combined weight of taxation and regulation creates incentives for would-be entrepreneurs to remain employed by established large corporations instead, and kills many business startups in their infancy
This isn’t comprehensive by any means, but I think that ultimately, free minds and free markets are best equipped to overcome any major challenge, such as climate change.
If state socialism or state corporatism were better equipped to solve problems, they would do better economically, or win their many “wars” (against poverty, drugs, terrorism, etc).
Libertarians need to have an answer to the global warming threat whether or not its real. As long as global warming is arguable and libertarians have no response, then the validity of the libertarian point of view is arguable. Simply shooting down every authoritarian proposal of the left on ideological grounds does not cut it. Refusing to engage in a hypothetical discussion is both intellectually dishonest and politically astute. Take your pick. If you prefer politically astute, then become a Republican. Libertarianism, like communism, is a method of analysis. Pure libertarians, like pure communists/socialists, will never acquire significant political power as long as they remain intellectually honest. All they can hope to do is influence the power-parties, like the Republicans and Democrats with the strength of their arguments. Everybody hates FDR but he may have prevented a communist revolution by co-opting the socialists. So, assuming global warming is real, what is the libertarian answer?
MHW
Good ideas.
So why not use the so-called crisis to our advantage?
Let’s reduce the U.S. overseas commitment and a couple of carrier task forces thus reducing the fossil fuel the military uses and also call for opening the urban transit marketplace and allow private bus companies, jitneys and ride sharing cabs to operate thus reducing the number of cars on city streets. We do those to things and maybe over time the CO2 emissions will decline. This of course can be done without taxing anyone.
It only takes paying attention to what the Sun’s been doing to tell that we’ve had natural conditions for a “mini ice age” only since about 2006. These conditions persist. The Sun remains unusually quiet. Now, a “mini ice age” (meaning a few decades of weather as cold or colder on average than anything since the last mini ice age, the “Dalton Minimum”, of the early 1800s) is rather likely, and becoming a stronger likelihood with each passing day of weak solar activity.
The climate trend over the last decade, and especially the last few years, shows that it is very improbably that anthropogenic warming is the dominant factor in climate change. People aint makin it any cooler, but the extent to which we make it warmer is somewhere between moderately significant and negligible. Probability puts it more toward the latter.
Monday, December 7, 2009, 6:40 PM
Citizens For A Better Veterans Home, struggling to warn the public about the ongoing failure of veterans programs, not just more lethal, politicized, uncaring programs that create hack patronage jobs, spend taxes in constituent communities, while doing little or nothing for real veterans, their real families, with their real problems……
“Deep down, we know that you are not really listening,” the Maldives’ Mohamed Nasheed told fellow presidents at September’s summit:
Nasheed’s tiny homeland, a sprinkling of low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean, will be one of the earliest victims of seas rising from heat expansion and melting glaciers. On remote islets of Papua New Guinea, on Pacific atolls, on bleak Arctic shores, other coastal peoples in the 2000s were already making plans, packing up, seeking shelter.
The “big oil companies” have “gone green” to large degree (rent-seeking green, not red-tinted green, but is one really any worse than the other?). Chevron and company have been running ads for more than a year telling consumers to use less of their product. And Big Oil has been funding “mainstream climate science” for years, which always gets me because Exxon et al. funds to free-market groups = industry-funded lies.
Having personally chatted with R. Buckminister Fuller, Bore Gore, and Roger [UCSD] Revell, I can give you a different take on run away global warming! We are naturally in the middle of a mini ice age and yet the window of opportunity to impact the avalanche of climate change has come and gone. I do not wish to curtail efforts on pollution, but modifying human behavior to eliminate planetary heating is ‘too little too late’.