Can the Free Market Solve the Problems Posed by Climate Change?

Children are more of a strain on the earth than simply CO2. Still, why would they get your own share?

Why would the earth care whether you or your kids are generating the CO2? How is it fair that John McName is fined for generating x grams of CO2, yet you are allowed to create more people in order to create x grams of CO2 by proxy?

miksirhc:

The truth is that global warming, in the opinions of the people who have studied it the most, is a threat and does exist.  I certainly hope that it is untrue, but to ignore the warning because the 'Government' holds the view is foolish and simply shows another Libertarian weakness. 

 

This has been nuked by some others, but perhaps you can help me with something....

 If CO2 is the direct cause of global warming, then how come it does not parallel with global mean temperatures?  For example...

 From 1900 to around the same time as WWII, CO2 and the global mean temperature rose significantly.  Then, from about 1940 to 1970 or so, CO2 went up exponentially, while global mean temperature went down.  Then, in the last 1/3 of the century, CO2 continued to rise and global temperatures rose again.  In the last 10 years, CO2 has again rose exponentially, while global mean temperatures have fallen to the level they were at the start of the last century.

I don't know much about science... and sometimes I get confused when trying to interpret graphs... but perhaps you can help me understand the conclusion you reached based on this data, that CO2 directly impacts the earth's temperature. 

Capitalist, your children would get their own share because they're people, and the whole idea of the shares is that each person gets one.  I'm just leaning on the notion identified by Locke's proviso.  The idea comes from the fact that CO2, by itself, is harmless.  As I've written elsewhere, climate change is an emergent problem.  Breathing, for example, does not cause climate change, in the sense that everyone on the planet could breathe without ever producing any objectionable effects.  I'm reasonably certain that you wouldn't even have to live a primitive life in order to emit an amount of CO2 such that everyone could emit it without problematic consequences, even ignoring ways of generating energy which don't increase overall levels of atmospheric CO2.  It seems to me that if you lived that way, you wouldn't be at fault for any objectionable impacts of climate change, even though you emitted CO2, and CO2 contributed to climate change.  That's the intuition I'm trying to capture with the idea of "shares."

I should make clear that the whole thing has nothing to do with "the Earth."  It has to do with other people who are going to be harmed by climate change.  Perhaps we have direct obligations to the natural environment itself which are not indirect duties owed to other people, but what I'm talking about has nothing to do with that.

Snliii, you might be interested in this. I don't directly answer the question you raise, but it still might be helpful.

I started another thread when I should have commented on this one. So I will just cut and past what is on the other thread:

Deist, even if it were known that more biomass would be grown in a laissez-faire world than in the current one (which I'm not sure would really be the case), the difference would need to be enormous in order to make much of a dent in the problem.  While increases in forest cover would conceivably be part of a solution, I don't think there's anyone who thinks it could completely mitigate climate change.  If this really interests you, though, I'm aware of no better resource than this (at least with regard to domestic issues; the rainforest discussion is a whole other story).

For some reason my computer will not allow me to view that link.

As far as biomass increasing it has in the developed world. We use to rely on horses and had less technology to protect our crops. This meant more land to feed humans and to feed our work animals and part of this was due to the fact that crops could be eaten by pests or other natural issues so we planted more in order to cover the loss. Since certain innovations came about we do not rely on as much land to mantain ourselves. Forest cover AND green land has steadily increased more and more since the early 1900's.

As far as sprawl and what not just check out zoning laws they have a huge effect on spreading out development, especially in my state. Agriculture is one of the worst things that can effect an environment and the less land devoted to it the better (at least in the context of global warming since agricultural activity is a carbon emitter and takes away from green land and forests at the same time).

Also I have a small lot of property in Maine and I once contracted with a Timber company about taking some trees down. They paid me for some trees and I also demanded proper managment of the area for long term use and development. So they cut some trees down in a sustainable way since I do not want to lose the value of my forest land. The problem in the past was because forests were a commons who no one owned so everybody just cut everything down to grab more than the other guy who would come along. This is the present situation in the tropics and in Africa.

All in all wealth and innovation is key.

Amazing. So, there's no 'better' resource for the 'science' of 'climate change' than a propaganda piece at epa.GOV ? I think that commies are enlightened, caring and know economics, I mean, www.pravda.ru says so - therefore it must be true.

I forgot to address how the expansion of property rights and free trade could mitigate climate change. I would not say it would totally take care of the issue but if all the resources in the world were utilized more efficently (by the market) it would have strong effects upon the global environment.

Donny with an A:

Capitalist, your children would get their own share because they're people, and the whole idea of the shares is that each person gets one.  I'm just leaning on the notion identified by Locke's proviso.  The idea comes from the fact that CO2, by itself, is harmless.  As I've written elsewhere, climate change is an emergent problem.  Breathing, for example, does not cause climate change, in the sense that everyone on the planet could breathe without ever producing any objectionable effects.  I'm reasonably certain that you wouldn't even have to live a primitive life in order to emit an amount of CO2 such that everyone could emit it without problematic consequences, even ignoring ways of generating energy which don't increase overall levels of atmospheric CO2.  It seems to me that if you lived that way, you wouldn't be at fault for any objectionable impacts of climate change, even though you emitted CO2, and CO2 contributed to climate change.  That's the intuition I'm trying to capture with the idea of "shares."

I should make clear that the whole thing has nothing to do with "the Earth."  It has to do with other people who are going to be harmed by climate change.  Perhaps we have direct obligations to the natural environment itself which are not indirect duties owed to other people, but what I'm talking about has nothing to do with that.

Snliii, you might be interested in this. I don't directly answer the question you raise, but it still might be helpful.

 

Danny, I realize what you are saying regarding each person getting his/her own share. This is what I am getting at:

Let's say that each person is allowed to generate 7 tons of CO2 per year. If you generate 8 tons, you get slapped with a fine.

Why would it make sense, from the earth's perspective, that I can't generate 8 tons alone, but I can create 6 children who each generate 7 tons on their own? As far as the earth knows, I have generated 49 tons of CO2.

I am sorry to litter this thread with small posts but as far as the effects of property needing to be enormous to mitigate climate change the same would go with government regulations. After all even by it proponents the Kyoto protocol does very little to curb climate change but has enormous economic costs. Is having a more poor economy really good at conserving the environment when innovation and efficency fueled by wealth are what conserve resources? Property rights have lead to huge advances in the well being of resource managment but government regulations leads to all sorts of malinvestments and damage.

Deist, I don't think that any libertarian denies that we should have freer markets and less government interference in our societies.  Further, I don't think any libertarian, presented with evidence that a free market would spontaneously mitigate climate change without anyone trying to do so, would advocate attempts to coerce people in the name of fighting climate change.

I agree with you that a freer market could potentially result in more land being covered by forest.  I would also point out that a freer market could potentially result in more people being able to afford to eat meat on a regular basis, which would likely produce the opposite effect. I can't say what would actually happen.  But either way, changes in land use practices are not widely thought to have the potential to singlehandedly stop climate change, especially if not consciously directed towards enhancing the sequestration of CO2.  After looking over the IPCC's chapter on this issue, I think they probably did a better job than the EPA of addressing the area.  It's not that long, and it's pretty clearly laid out.  If you know of contrary evidence, I'd be more than happy to take a look.

On your latter post, I'd point out that climate change is not only vaguely an issue of conservation.  That is, perhaps the problem is one of efficiently using the atmosphere's capacity to store CO2 without objectionable consequences.  If we look at it that way, then it does become reasonable to think along the lines of, "It will be much easier to mitigate climate change when we have better technology, so we should delay some of our mitigation efforts until it is most economical."  The problems with this thinking are somewhat familiar: it doesn't take into account the separateness of the people involved, it implies that our rights violating actions are okay, it involves a measure of uncertainty that will only harm others if we guess wrong, etc.  But I definitely see the point being made.  I guess I need to think about it some more.

Juan, I'm glad to see that without any apparent knowledge of the issue discussed in the chapter, you're already willing to toss it out as garbage because it was the result of a government funded project.  I suppose, then, that you would have no problem with me rejecting every bit of "propaganda" produced by the libertarian think tanks of the world who are partly funded by the oil companies?  Of course we should be skeptical of anything the government says about climate change, because the government is full of alarmists.  Pay no mind to the fact that the US government has historically taken a much more skeptical stance on the issue of climate change than the mainstream scientific community...  It's almost depressing to see fellow libertarians sound like this.

Capitalist, the difference is that there are more people; that seems pretty significant to me.  If there were a food shortage, and you were eating 5 times as much as everyone else, I feel like it would be different than if you had 4 children who each ate exactly as much as everyone else.  I take it that it is not unjust to have children, and that it is not unjust to be born; if you disagree, then that's another issue.  I'm thinking this conversation might be worth having as a separate thread, though, since it's only loosely related to the issue of climate change.

Speaking of big oil and ecoterrorists, here's a nice bit of infornation.

http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/who_we_are/organization/presidents/index.cfm

"1981-1996 HRH The Duke of Edinburgh served as International President of WWF for 16 years "

"1976-1981 Better known as "the Grand Old Man of Shell", John H. Loudon, a Dutchman, headed Royal Dutch Shell from 1951 to 1965."

"1962-1976Known as the "Flying Prince of Conservation", HRH Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands is the Founding President of WWF, a position he held from 1962 to 1976."

My admitedly deranged take on this is that the old oligarchies of old Europe just keep playing the conservative game. They devote themselves to 'wildlife' while the serfs pay carbon tithes.

Donny with an A:

I agree with you that a freer market could potentially result in more land being covered by forest.  I would also point out that a freer market could potentially result in more people being able to afford to eat meat on a regular basis, which would likely produce the opposite effect

But people do eat more meat in the developed world then ever before and with less land devoted to this industry due to technological improvments and better and more efficent land use. I know I am sounding redundant and fanatical but I am positive on this. Also comparative advantage must be recognized in this. It prevents over use of resources. This has great potential to conserve AND sequester. This would also cause capital intensive industries (more pollutant prone) to contract and focus on other areas thereby lowering types of emissions and this has happened in many empircally validated cases. Just imagine if countries did not protect their domestic industries, the effect would be enormous on amount of world emissions and land use.

As far as it being a violation of rights to emit carbon dioxide I just think that is not inherently a given since Carbon Dioxide does not act as a directly damaging emission such as Sulfur Dioxide which acts as an acid. But if it is a rights violation than this is something the common law instead of the special interest laden legislatures could deal with much better. This is because the common law can deal with and reason on the facts given in the courts instead of politically charged legislation. The common law has been quite capable of dealing with microscopic pollutants, just check out the case history.

I know that a radically free market would not inherently reduce global warming to zero but I do think since deforestration is one of the principle culprits in global warming, that sequestering would certainly be a huge help. Remember the "plant a tree" campaigns of the late eighties and early to mid nineties? Since Kyoto came about everyone dropped that idea and jumped on to that policy proposal. Also the ocean can be improved as a massive carbon sink if we fertilize it with iron. This would help out farmers with fish stock (who already want to do this) AND would suck out carbon from the air. This is presently not allowed since the ocean is a commons and what fisherman would stand to gain from this investment since everyone can fish there.

I know these techniques of dealing with global warming are not direct as a cap and trade scheme but it is a fact that it does boils down to an issue of resources which the market system is the best at dealing with. Also as I already mentioned if it is a problem that deals with rights violation then a class action suit (not an individual suit) in court could address it using past precedents and reason.

What worries me about your analogy of carbon emitting (mostly due to the nature of carbon dioxide) as a rights violation is that hypothetically lets say I wave my hands which creates a wind effect and then that wind builds up into a storm and that storm causes massive waves on the coast that then leads to a tsunami on Japan. I put myself in the place of the butterfly parable to chaos theory.

Carbon emission is directly benign but on a collective, massive scale it is potentially dangerous. I just worry about the absolutism of your theory of rights violation and justice. For instance could I be sued for getting someone sick if I passed them by and coughed near them?

Danny, I don't think that having kids is unjust at all, I'm just trying to to show you another way of looking at your argument.

If it's bad enough for "the world" when I produce x tons of CO2 to deserve punishment, it should be equally bad for "the world" if my kids produce it instead of me. Especially if I have several kids and they produce several times as much CO2.

 This conversation is going to go in circles, I fear.

As I read the the link you gave me it is worth pointing out that they say it is the third world having the largets amounts of deforestation. Generally the areas with most commons, most government intervention, and most poverty. It also states the developed world is having more growth in forest and carbon sinks. Also as ineffectual as a blade of grass is they still suck in carbon.

On a side note repeal of Zoning laws would allow for more compact living areas and cheaper costs for housing and less land needed for infrastructure.