This is half-formed, at best, but I want to hit "publish" before I get pulled away to other things.
Many of my (primarily left-leaning) friends like to challenge me to articulate a coherent libertarian view on the environment, and specifically, on climate change. I'm an inadequate spokesperson for the "libertarian view" of anything; for me "libertarian" is an adjective that describes how I generally tend to think, rather than a noun that says what I am.
But I digress. I ought to be able to articulate some ideas about the role of the government in dealing with climate change that are, if not strictly "libertarian", at least my own. So here goes that.
One point where I tend to wander off the libertarian reservation is that I'm willing to credit the government with being effective and occasionally justified at engaging in some Big Projects. Historically, it is actually quite good at addressing difficult, but nonetheless well-defined problems with fairly obvious (if expensive) solutions. Need a large water supply and lots of electric power generating capacity for the exploding population of Southern California? Build Hoover Dam. Need to produce an atomic bomb before the Nazis do? Fund the Manhattan Project. These are clear problems with clearly defined endpoints that tend to require near-limitless funding and manpower in the solving. But the point is that they can be solved.
The prototypical boondoggle occurs when the government tries to marshal these kinds of resources to address a complex, ill-defined problem with lots of variables and no obvious solution. The war on drugs is a pretty clear-cut case of this. I think the "war on terror" is another. In both cases you spend lots and lots (and lots) of money with a professed goal that is essentially impossible to define (how will we know when either "war" is "won"?) In the place of tangible solutions, you create institutions that develop their own inertia, and the inevitable self-interest in their own perpetuation. If we went 100 years without a single hijacking incident on an American airliner, does anyone seriously expect that the TSA will declare victory and disband?
This is what troubles me about the groundswell of support to "do something" about global climate change; I'm fairly convinced that this is a problem that falls in the latter category.
1 comment:
What is the goal of a global warming agenda? Stabilization of current climate? Restoration of a previous climate? Establishment of an "ideal" climate?
The natural history of our planet is rooted in constant change. It may be hard to believe that southern Georgia was once an ocean floor but there is much geologic evidence that it was. It is also strange to think that at one time on our planet some of the "hills" of the Appalachian were once taller than Mt. Everest is today, much less that Mt. Everest is a pretty young mountain. And it is likely that several ages ago, most of our continent would have been very difficult to inhabit by humans due to widespread glaciation and an arctic landscape year-round. The flight from NY to London gets just slightly longer distance-wise every year, though the results are imperceptible.
It's not something that we have control over. The atmosphere was primarily carbon dioxide when the atmosphere first formed. Somehow, life still seems to have emerged from that environment. And it was that life that changed our atmosphere to it's current composition of mostly nitrogen and oxygen, some of the simplest gaseous molecules at Earth temperature and pressure.
It's also interesting to note that the average temperature has supposedly increased something like one degree on the Fahrenheit scale in the past 100 years. Is it statistically significant? It's a lot easier to exaggerate the "change" if we're referencing the freezing point of water as opposed to absolute zero.
Something tells me that we'll manage to survive a slight increase in global temperature if it comes along, regardless of the cause. In the meantime, I'm off to create some carbon onsets. Biologic respiration requires it.
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