Topic: Seriously, though, how would a libertarian society address global warming? - page 2. (Read 30065 times)

You have things backwards.

That kinda sounds like the current society


I'm guessing that in libertarian utopia, everyone would be equal in the eyes of the law and not the people with more expensive lawyers... That sounds even less libertarian then the current society

One commonly proposed Libertarian solution to the problem of things that cannot be owned (such as climate and air) is to use the legal system. Essentially, you would create a cause of action for harming an unowned resource. So people who harm the climate or pollute the air could be sued. In other words, there's really nothing un-Libertarian about government protecting resources that cannot be owned.

I believe this is the majority Libertarian view. There are some Libertarians who believe that if it cannot be owned, anyone is free to trash it as they please.

The standard answer is if the river is owned, then the owner(s) of the river will have the right incentives to keep it unpolluted.  See, for example: http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj1n2-6.html

If you care about clean rivers, then buy them (or donate money to an organization that buys them; the Nature Conservancy is one of my favorite charities).

It is the Chinese government's river, not the free market's, why are they tolerating all the pollution?

Global Warming and air pollution is a stickier problem because nobody owns the climate or the air we breathe, and nobody CAN own them. Personally, I think we do actually need good government for some things, which is why I describe myself as "mostly libertarian".

And if I were King, I think I'd implement the Cato Institute's suggestion and give all of our National Parks and public wilderness to private environmental organizations to take care of (or sell, if they decided they could put the money to better use for something else).

Then the short answer is that nobody knows. Markets create the information needed to solve problems. Without that information, the solutions are unimaginable. Nobody alive today has anything more than a guess as to how a Libertarian society would deal with problems like global warming or water pollution. The trick is simply to create the right incentives and then let people respond to them.

What's interesting is that the criticisms of Libertarianism has tended to move from the things existing governments do well to the things existing governments do very, very badly. If your only issue with Libertarianism is that it it might not do a great job on things existing governments royally screw up anyway, you should probably become a Libertarian.

My country lived in communism for 50 years, so I know perfectly well what that looks like (spoiler: it sucks)

I'm just questioning the opposite extreme because I like questioning

I'm to lazy to search for a freely available document concerning every claim i made but this might be more then enough:
http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=391&catid=10&subcatid=66
This is what an unregulated market looks like. As much as I'd love for people to be free to reap all the benefits of their hard work, I really don't want to live surrounded by red poison or feed my grandkids with suspicious algae

I don't think anybody has any idea how a libertarian society would handle it. But that's the point. But that's the beauty of solutions that don't involve central planning -- they work even when nobody has any idea how to solve the problem.

Imagine if our entire food distribution system was run by the government. It would likely do the mediocre job that's typical of governments. The system would be running multibillion dollar deficits each year. There would be occasional serious shortages, long lines, poor selection, and so on. Now suppose I proposed a simple solution, let anyone who wants to sell any food they want to any place they want to for any price they want to.

You would get the exact same kinds of responses. What would ensure that anyone actually sold any food? Who would make sure Denver had beans? What would stop people from just selling the most profitable foods and driving the government food distribution into deeper deficits during the transition?

Before you set up such a system, nobody could tell you that the answer included a national chain of stores that sell a $4 cup of coffee. Nobody could predict, or even propose, Costco or McDonald's.

You can't even guess what the solutions might be until you have a system that allows people to test solutions and rewards the good ones and punishes the bad ones. So, I admit it, I have no idea how a Libertarian society would deal with pollution. I have a few guesses, but I'm pretty sure they're wrong. It's hard to imagine it could be any worse than a society where the government just permits people to pollute.

First, support this claim.  I have no incentive to respond to this based upon your assumptions.

the minority of people that care about the environment rather than getting stuff for the cheapest price possible will buy from the mythical non-polluting company and magically, other companies will spend unprofitable amounts of money to cater to that tiny minority rather than spending smaller amounts on look-good measures and advertising or simply continuing as before.

or perhaps the non-existent owners of the damaged land are supposed to sue the polluting company.

You know what? Screw global warming for now. How would a libertarian society handle the current level of water poisoning? Fish are dying out, more and more beaches fill with algae, rivers are full of waste (from detergents to artificial manure) etc. None of these things visibly influence businesses that make the mess. How free should this market stay?

Alright, let me try a completely different take on this.

I'm assuming that by libertarianism we mean anarcho-capitalism, since a minarchist libertarian society can still justly enforce carbon taxes and the like as CO2 emissions are a form of harm/aggression against others.

Just a few weeks ago, the governments of the world managed to make significant progress toward addressing the climate change issue in Durban, laying the foundations for a cap-and-trade agreement to be made in 2015 and to take effect in 2020, potentially including commitments by the US, China and India. Now, international law respects the sovereignty of nations, so theoretically any country could pull out and keep polluting, and setting up the treaty to shut down if any party reneges on its agreements, while a valid strategy for bilateral agreements, would not be viable in this case. So what would be in place to dissuade polluters? Economic sanctions - essentially everyone would put tariffs on their goods. With that penalty in place, it's in everyone's interest not to pollute.

But why would anyone put tariffs on goods? It's well known that tariffs introduce economic inefficiency and ultimately hurt more than they help due to deadweight loss, so why would anyone take the hit for themselves to punish others? Two factors are at play. First, the specific mechanism of a tariff has the very attractive property that the disincentive to trade with the cheater scales linearly with the tariff (by definition) but the deadweight loss scales with the square (since with a 10% tariff everyone with less than a 10% profit margin has to stop trading, losing out on approximately 5% profit, but with a 20% tariff everyone with less than a 20% profit margin (about twice as many people) has to stop trading, losing out on approximately 10% profit - see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss and notice how the harm is in the form of a triangle), so it's worth it for large players like the US to impose reasonably small tariffs that carry a medium amount of push at very low cost. Second, tariffs can be enforced recursively - if anyone refuses to implement punitive tariffs, the WTO might decide to implement a punitive tariff against them, and everyone would be similarly pushed to implement that punishment as well.

So how would all this translate into a libertarian society? All that the previous explanation required is the existence of powerful market players that are motivated by a large number of people's welfare and that has control over a powerful economic output. The lever of control does not have to be a tariff - taking a model of a country as an atomic unit (stay with me here for just one second libertarians, I know why that perspective is so philosophically wrong, but it's useful here), a tariff is really a country stealing from itself and cutting down on a certain one of its actions. A person or institution can, instead of a tariff, implement a partial boycott. To illustrate the principle, an business might reduce its electricity consumption by 10%, cutting out only that portion of its usage that provides only a small marginal benefit over not using electricity (eg. turning off the lights when it's not too inconvenient) but still pushing down his demand for electricity by a considerable amount. But organizations enacting such measures do not have to be governments with monopolies over large land areas. Possibilities include:

* A corporation, choosing to support voluntary pro-climate moves as a side benefit to its customers and workers
* A cooperative democratically voting to support such measures
* A voluntary mutual aid society
* A health or home insurance company seeing an interest in reducing how much it will have to pay to deal with the diseases that global warming helps spread or hurricane activity

Such large groups would agree on a treaty to reduce their emitting activities, and also reduce their use of products from businesses outside of the treaty. With large companies being more willing to work with pro-environmental players, a degree of enforced environmentalism trickles down into medium sized businesses and groups and even small businesses as well.

And so far all this assumes purely materialistic self-interested agents. Once you add social peer pressure, environmentalists who actively desire seeing the earth not being polluted just as strongly as we desire our homes not having dirt all over the place, and other psychological factors the scale tips even further.

The primary reason lower cost to provide means more profit is because it enables you to sell at a lower price and therefore generate a higher volume. Unless you have a very atypical situation, costs will be roughly comparable across competitors, so a lower cost for one company to produce will mean a lower cost for their competitors as well. Every restaurant charges less for hamburger than steak because every restaurant can produce a hamburger for less than a steak. You're treating the exception as if it were the rule.

I live in California where State law requires nonsensical electrical pricing. You can read more about it here: http://www.pge.com/myhome/myaccount/rateinfo/ and here http://www.pge.com/myhome/myaccount/charges/

It does mean it's inefficient. Power companies didn't drop from the heavens. They exist because they invested money to build and maintain transmission facilities. This investment was made only because they expected a profit from those investments.

You seem to think that you can somehow make the right decisions if only you had the power. You *can't*. The information needed to make the right decisions simply doesn't exist in one place like that.

You need incentives because the only thing people really respond to are incentives.. If you take away the handicap of being born poor, you take away the incentive not to let your children be born into poverty. Being born without musical talent is having the deck stacked against you too, but leveling the playing field would mean giving music lessons to those with the least natural talent.

You're trying to push a ball uphill. You've stacked the deck so that all the incentives work against the direction you're trying to go. You want excellence, but then you reward excellence and mediocrity the same with a level playing field. You want to find the big rocks and push on them until they're at the top. And you insist on starting each ball at the bottom. It just won't work.

What you need to do is roll the balls downhill. Align incentives so that things go in the direction you want them to go. Fortunately, nature pretty much does this automatically so long as you stay out of its way. The main thing you have to fix is broken incentives -- essentially cheating. You don't have to make the world fair, just the system.

The solution is to become so rich and prosperous such that our problems continue to rapidly become irrelevant and forgotten, joining the shortage of whale oil and streets filled with manure.

Yes, in less-regulated industries, they do. In a competitive industry, you would generally expect that products that cost less to provide have a lower price.

They charge me the price the State compels them to charge. They have no leeway.

I know it's inefficient because if it was efficient, it wouldn't have had to be compelled. If the prices they were getting for electricity were negotiated prices rather than compelled prices, they would be operating at a loss.

If you're going to do it by forced central command, taking it from one person to give it to someone else, you will almost always wind up doing the opposite of what you want to do. In general, people wind up with money because they are being productive. Forced, centralized redistribution is not the way.

But you think that they do in other industries?

The same is true in the power industry. Large consumers get better deals. You're not a large consumer, so they charge you whatever they can.

How do you know it's inefficient? The government has successfully managed to create a village that is self sufficient and given incentives to others to break free from the power companies. Yes, it's a shame that the money instead isn't in the pockets of the power companies, where it would do so much more good. 

That brings us back to how we find the next Einstein/Beethoven then? How to provide education and a level playing field for all so that everybody can reach their maximum potential. Except we should only look after ourselves, unless we feel a little charitable around Christmas and donate a little to some poor fellow.

Not in the electric power industry.

That's not quite what I said. The price to an individual customer should go down as their usage goes up. But higher total usage across all customers will cause prices to rise. It's the same with any other product. If you want to buy 10 Volvos, you can probably negotiate a rock bottom price. But if everyone wants a Volvo, they're all going to pay more.

Right, but it's promoting inefficient innovation and change. It's not clear that producing power that costs more than people are willing to pay for it is beneficial. Meanwhile, the resources that went to producing this miniscule amount of unprofitable power can't go to other things.

The right way to deal with global warming is to become so smart and rich that we forget it ever even was an issue. This is the same way the human race has solved every problem it's ever solved.

Do you still live under the delusion that what you pay and what cost the company have are somehow connected? Here a private company raised their prices because people were using their service, when according to you logic prices should go down. The only connection there is, is when their cost is higher than what they can charge.

What I find interesting about the German village discussed is that the Government have actually set a price that the power companies have to buy power back to. Without that law there would be no buyback and no incentives to produce power for small communities. The government is acting as an enabler here, promoting innovation and change.

Not what people would call libertarian I guess. Let's see a way a libertarian could address global warming, this one wasn't it.

You won't find many Libertarians who think that the government would be competent to engineer the economy and the climate in that way. In your view, what is mechanism Libertarians would accept for how the government should decide how much CO2 there should be in the air? And, of course, unless you imagine one world government, you still have the problem of the conflicting self-interests of various nations (whether Libertarian or otherwise).

A libertarian/Ron Paul society should support a gas tax.  If there is a specfic amount of CO2 in the air you want, just increase the tax until you reach that goal.   The money raised from the tax can be deleted.