Topic: Seriously, though, how would a libertarian society address global warming? (Read 30176 times)

Actually the Russia/Ukraine war is paving the way for a better earth. All that burning of fossil fuels in the military machines, is producing more and more CO2. The earth is becoming greener from it, because plants need CO2 to grow.

It's a shame all those guys (and gals?) have to die over there in that silly war. But the CO2 being produced will grow more plants so that those who want to live rather then kill themselves off will be able to.

Freeman Dyson: The whole Earth is greener as a result of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - https://expose-news.com/2023/12/28/freeman-dyson-the-whole-earth-is-greener-as-a-result-of-increased-carbon-dioxide-in-the-atmosphere/.

Solar Slump: The Sun Has Been Blank For Two Weeks Straight







Read more at https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/03/no_author/sun-slump/.

Carrying on from the posts I made in the past refuting AGW:

It's possible. It's also not worth assuming it's possible.

It's possible that we could reach the point in less than 100 years where we could engineer the global climate and hold it more or less where it is, at least as far as average temperatures go.

Because the climate changes on its own, we can conclude that humans are incapable of also doing things that change the climate? That does not logically follow.

What about the cost of preventing any changes of climate.

Not that I believe humans are capable to control global climate. This is usual communist megalomania.
This is so silly because climate has been changing since the beginning of Earth.

everyone's light bulb purchase, type of car, etc.  There's two problems with this question
#1 I'm an electricity trader by profession and very little confidence in meteorological forecasts and am very skeptical of global warming.  We have had substantial climate in past before humans started burning fossil fuels.  There are 20 and 30 year ocean oscillation cycles that may or may not be causing the fluctuations.  On a much a much longer time frame, there a shifts in the earth's tilt and its orbit that cause major climatic changes.

#2 ... and this is my beef about any kind of group/communal joint action coercive arrangement.  Why is it that (not necessarily you) that most leftwing type of people want to solve a problem by taking the most intrusive, privacy destroying solution to solve a problem.  Now we have light bulb restrictions, toilet size restrictions and are promoting carbon trading schemes that are extremely difficult to measure, difficult to allocate but yet it seems that most of the Democratic party supports such as thing. 

If reducing carbon is your objective why don't you enact a BTU tax at a couple of the central locations that fuels flow through.  You could collect revenue but not have to collect dossiers and micromanage the lives of individual people.  Same for taxes - put a consumption tax at large businesses, but let everyone remain private and anonymous without having to self-report their personal dealings to the IRS every year?

It makes me wonder if the people advocating such schemes aren't more interested in spying on their fellow man (ME!) than saving the planet.  If the planet can be helped without busybody tactics then why are these tactics usually advocated?

In Super Freakonomics they suggested a system of tubes tied to weather balloons could be used to convey sulfur dioxide up to the trophosphere in the upper atmosphere where it would have a profound cooling effect - like volcanoes. It would be cheap to do and wouldn't require a police state.  Then again, mankind could keep on converting tar sands, etc. and people could live in privacy.  Why wouldn't a serious-minded lib attempt such a low-cost potential solution in the first place if they were TRULY CONCERNED ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING?

Just my hunch, but I suspect they get a much bigger kick out spying on people's money or shutting down industry than saving the planet.  Any feasible solution that doesn't let them stick their noses where it doesn't belong isn't much fun for them.  If you can have a less intrusive, anonymous arms-length tax why don't they ever get proposed?

And my response is, so what?  A century is a long time to make such adjustments.  It's simply not a 'crisis' by any rational definition of the term.

Maybe the question should rather be "how does the government address global warming". Well it does so for example by banning the age-old cultivation of a plant that could for the most part set us free from fossil fuels and plastic, chemicals and deforestation.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/the-billion-dollar-crop-56183

And pretty damn useless for most purposes too, regardless of temperature.

the low and middle boreal forests are rather dense, so to get any farming done you'd need to fairly much clearcut that, which would require decidedly nontrivial amounts of time, money, and energy.

the high boreal thins out and would probably work for farming.

then you get into the permafrost, which will become a muddy mess when it thaws, and barren rock.  it doesn't matter how warm it gets, you ARE NOT going to be farming on either of those.

Those calculations explicitly do not include two kinds of costs that make the result that there's no positive benefit. You can't use that argument to reach that conclusion.

One of them is the cost of everything being in the wrong place. Humans have built farms, dams, ski resorts, cities, and all kinds of other things based on the current weather. If the Earth warms up, all of these things will be reduced in effectiveness.

The other is the cost of everyone being in the wrong place. When the water and food moves, the people who are the beneficiaries of the the climate change and now have surpluses of food and water and not going to donate to the people who now have shortages. Food and water will be on the other side of a border and political unrest and likely even wars will break out. People will starve. Crops will die.

It's not the argument that a warmer climate is good for the human race is incorrect. It's just that it only refutes the argument that a colder climate is somehow inherently bad or that the current climate is inherently perfect. It's only perfect because we've built ourselves and our world taking it into account.

Any change in climate is spectacularly bad for the human race. And that's very unfortunate because the only thing almost everyone does agree on is that the climate is going to change.

Not going to read 24 pages...

Honest answer: Move north (or south), Canada, Russia, and Antarctica are pretty damn big.

Let's say that a warmer earth actually is good for the human race.  How will CO2 producers receive a subsidy equivalent to their positive benefit on society in a libertarian world?

It's obvious the government can't realistically stop CO2 production, prove that warming is caused by said CO2, and conclusively say if this warming is a bad thing.  Technology and the advancement of human society can most likely solve this problem if it truly exist.

Short answer: It wouldn't deal with global warming. It would fall victim to it.
Long answer: No part of the libertarian Ideal says that it must be able to defeat global warming. Why should Communism, or Capitalism, or Socialism be able to defend against global warming? That is irrelevant to the ideals of the market theory.

There is nothing smart about a 'smart grid'.  The power grid is just a passive bus, the power goes where it goes, the 'smart' part is the ability to track what goes where.

Well, if the subsidizing is really necessary in that village, then it is probably because there is already existing infrastructure in place that needs to be maintained and that was originally intended for the old kinds of energy. Siemens and other corporations are actually working with the villagers to implement a "smart grid". The involved corporations and the government of course want to sell an eco-image too, mind you.

Either way, the village merely shows what can be done with renewable energy today. What I regard among the highest values in my understanding of freedom and liberty is self-sufficiency and decentralization, i.e. independence from governments and big corps. The possibility of being able to produce my own clean energy for me and my neighbors in a small-scale "smart grid" surely does provide a strong incentive for me and I'm sure for many others as well.

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Aaaand we have an answer to the question in the thread title. Thank you

Libertarians shouldn't promise a utopia, and generally they don't. The problem of creating a legal system that's fair to people regardless of wealth is pretty much the same in a Libertarian society as it is in any other society. Most Libertarians accept that taxation will be needed to fund the legal system.

probably, but I'm not really sure how