Libertarians and global warming

The oddness cuts both ways.

Right libertarians go for cost-benefit assessments when the rights based approach appears to call for too much and mainstream economic choice theorists abandon utilitarianism when the intergenerational characteristics of the problem call for ‘too much’ from us.

What they all can agree on is the convenient self-full filling prophecy timon offers.

as usual John and like too many left-wing commentators, you give libertarians too much credit.

Libertarianism is a psychotic, anti-social ideology based on greed. Because it is psychotic, it can only appeal to people through bribing them, and because it is anti-social the bribe it offers is based on selfishness. In exchange for the destruction of society libertarianism offers unfettered economic growth and wealth for all. Global warming puts a big brake on simplistic versions of this bribe, because it says we can’t have unfettered use of the resource which underpins it.

Faced with a contradiction between reality and its anti-social vision, libertarianism either has to walk away from reality or from its vision. Since the vision is fundamentally psychotic it has no problems walking away from reality – and so we get global warming denialism.

Sure there might be a few libertarians who want to take a more constructive view of the problem, but for them this is going to mean pie-in-the-sky schemes such as you mention, or vague hopes of carbon sequestration. This is why you will never see libertarians engaging with the debate about how to have economic growth without unlimited resources (as you recently did), but screaming instead about how we are all hair-shirted environmentalists. The existence of a few people in the libertarian “movement” (lol/gag) who make shallow first guesses at solutions to these problems doesn’t make the ideology worth debating or engaging with. I am continually surprised that reasonable leftists do. The only time they need to be engaged is to attack their denialist shilling. The rest of the time they should be left alone in their asylum, and they should never ever ever be allowed to think they have a serious opinion to offer on serious topics.

John, to a first approximation there are no intellectually honest libertarians. Why bother to try to make sense out of their fringe ideology? Essentially all of the libertarian movement is just a shell supported by corporations for the purpose of making it seem like they have a constituency, just like tobacco supports its tame experts to create doubt. But there is nothing there. Even in the U.S., they’ve never broken half a percent of the popular vote.

Anthopogenic global climate change is going to demand certain changes in the way we do things. The chance most particularly demanded of liberal intellectuals is that they are going to have to finally get over their desire to treat every ideology seriously.

“First, I’m a bit surprised to find libertarians on the wrong side of this debate. Global climate change is one of the few instances where lots of environmentalists (not all, by any means) are supporting a property-rights based solution (tradeable emissions permits), despite starting from a position (in the leadup to Kyoto) of almost uniform opposition to anything that didn’t rely primarily on direct and detailed regulation.”

I wonder if you answer isn’t in your question. People’s long term opinions are strongly influenced by how they are introduced to something. The fact that their initial exposure to global warming proposals was almost certainly the rather hyper-regulatory Kyoto is likely to make libertarians reflexively very cautious. They should get over that reflex as the debate changes, but the market-oriented solutions have only come to the front in the last few years, so I’m not surprised that it has taken a while.

Actually, if I were a glibertarian, this would be a moment of quiet triumph for me. Bush, their main man, is proving to be one of the great environmentalist presidents. By radically shrinking the value of the dollar and making the oil producing Middle East a vastly more insecure place, he has managed to increase the cost of petroleum dramatically. Every time he threatens Iran, the price of a barrel of oil makes another bold leap upwards and another endangered species can breath a little easier. And this is a win win in another way too – oil companies, which (besides the fact that they are vast monopolistic structures floating on the government subsidizing the cost of their doing business via tax breaks enjoyed by nobody else) are paragons of Ayn Randianess, are enjoying a renaissance of profits, and using those profits wisely by not investing them in future exploration or the “development” of some “alternative” energy source, which would be a namby pamby socialistic thing to do, but are giving that money back to the upper management and the investors, as God, or rather, the Invisible Hand, intended.

Bless our greatest president! Looking back, we will see that he was the true John Galt+Truman+Churchill of our time!

5: “My name is Dwight Thieme and I am a libertarian.” Or former libertarian. In regards to libertarianism being an American phenomenon, are there any good histories of libertarianism out there? Something relatively objective? I ask because my sense from my own very limited perspective is that the character of libertarianism changed somewhere in the late 70’s to early 80’s. I encountered it the first time in 1976 when I attended college(in the flesh so to speak; I had read about it before, albeit science fictionally – Rand, Heinlein, etc.) and it seemed then that it was much more about personal rights, the sovereignty of the individual, yadda yadda. The people I met seemed more – to put it quite frankly – intellectual than today’s cadre’s, and a lot more liberal as well. But somewhere along the way, a quantitative difference in membership composition became qualitative. The people around me seemed to be much more conservative, and seemed much more focused on property rights. To put it more colloquially, it was a lot less about the right to smoke dope and to be free of police interference, and a lot more about the freedom to treat your employees however you wished. They also seemed, ahem, to be a lot more narrowly educated, and a lot less playful so far as ideas were concerned. In fact, much more concerned with enforcing a certain orthodoxy.

My question is, was this just random drift on a local level, or was libertarianism deliberately co-opted? Would this be the time when libertarianism ‘was put on life support by plutocrats’? And if so, is there any sort of documentation?

Quiggin:

“First, I’m a bit surprised to find libertarians on the wrong side of this debate. Global climate change is one of the few instances where lots of environmentalists (not all, by any means) are supporting a property-rights based solution […] it seems as if the ideological opponents are upset because the government-created nature of the property rights in question will be self-evident […]”

I still think libertarians’ hatred of the AGW theory is probably just a special case of their hatred of environmentalism in general. You can see it when they talk of AGW theory proponents as “greenies”, “enviro-whackos”, “activists”, etc. along with Ayn Rand. The meme that ‘greenies are commies’ goes back a long way (at least 1962, from what I’ve found), and even now it seems some people are still stuck in this mindset, where they keep thinking that the US is waging some sort of Eternal War against a phantom Soviet Union that’s everywhere and nowhere.

And of course, there are the conlibertarian think-tanks to egg them on…

 – bi, Intl. J. Inact.

Environmental concerns imply a “commons” as part of the real world. Economic “libertarians” cannot accept such a concept and so have no choice but to wander off into crazyland. How somewhat intelligent people have managed to live so long with the glaring contradiction between radical so-called individualism (ie, selfishness) and the destruction faced by individuals when social constructions fail is one of life’s more entertaining mysteries.

Part of the problem with discussing this breed is its elusiveness. I suggest that writers take care to distinguish between big-L Libertarians and small-l libertarians ( John Quiggin, this one’s for you). The former consist of Party members and are largely composed of tax-hating plutocrats and gun nuts — far closer to fascists than to defenders of liberty.

The latter encompass a much broader range including those whose devotion to human and civil rights is absolutely essential to the survival of free society. They have somehow lost the libertarian brand to the big-Ls, making rational discussion near-impossible because. Suffice it to say that few traditional libertarians, like ACLU types, go off the deep end with nuttiness like Climate Change denial or dismissal.

There is no sense in making painstaking distinctions between big L and little l libertarians, or any of their multitudinous fringes, when discussing actual matters of policy. They are irrelevant. Getting bogged down in discussion with them is a waste of time.

The truth is that “global warming equals socialism”, while ridiculous, does accurately describe their worldview. They have no solution to problems like global warming — all they have is denial. As denial becomes completely untenable, their position does as well. We just happen to, unfortunately, be living at the time when their footnote to history is stuck at the bottom of its text.

One of the most striking things about libertarian thought is that it is almost exclusively a US-based phenomena (there is a bit in the UK as a result of Thatcherism).

The epicenter is in the US so you won’t find them as strong anywhere else but there are a few other places.
The UK partly because of Thatcherism but also because of the language connection (which explains Australia and NZ too).
There is a surprising number of them in Eastern Europe. You can blame “real existing socialism” for that and probably the fact that the “movement” invested energy (and money) in that ideological battleground.
In Latin America, there ideological battleground thing had an effect too but there is an ex-ante conversion of members of the ruling class. Basically, they were statist when they owned the state and switched as they were loosing that ownership.
They’re growing in India and Africa, mostly through expats and US-educated people. There too the word “backlash” should be used.

It’s helpful, I think, to separate the species libertarian into two sub-species*: libertarianos consequentianos and libertarianos non-consequentialists. Consequentialists are those, like Milton Friedman, who seem to believe that a small state will lead to the best outcomes in terms of utility. Non-conseuqentialists are those like Nozick who justify libertarianism by appeals to absolute property rights.

A problem like global warming is anathema to the non-consequentialists because leads straight to a thorny issue for anyone who adheres to non-consequentailist political philosophies. That is: would you really cling to your deontological beliefs if they had the consequence of lowered welfare?

If your answer is ‘no’ then you’re really a consequentialist after all. If it’s yes than you’ve just exposed your belief system as something rather nasty**.

Far easier to simply attack the science.
___________________________________________
*One could also, perhaps, identify a third camp: no coherent philosophy. Which may well be the majority group but let’s be kind here. Oh, I can think of a fourth too – Randoids. I have no idea where they’re coming from. Which is also the only thing I have in common with them.
**If my memory is correct Nozick himself mentions somewhere that he’d ease up on property rights in the case of a preventable humanitarian catastrophe. But he kind of mumbles this and, I think, switching camps like that is pretty dodgey philosophy.

A couple of things:

1. Most libertarians are skeptical of any sort of claim which implies the government needs more power. Why? Because of we’ve seen enough of them turn to bullshit over the years. “Crisis,” James Madison noted, “is the plea of every tyrant.” Global warming strikes a lot of us as another Chicken Little scheme to concentrate more money and power in the hands of the rulers.

2. Property rights are good only insofar as they derive from just acquisition. If an entire country were conquered, and the land divided among 4-5 people and everyone else reduced to serfdom, it would be unjust to defend that property arrangement. Defending property rights does not entail defending the actually-existing property distribution. Sadly, too many libertarians miss this point. The property-rights GW “solutions” upset libertarians because there’s no right to property in the thing being granted.

3. Interestingly enough, governments everywhere are subsidizing pollution through things like the Green Revolution, fuel subsidies, interstate highways and expressways, zoning, etc. A radical free market isn’t likely to have any of these things, and is likely to be far more energy efficient.

4. Consequentialism is stupid.

@17 – are they really two different faiths, or just different degrees of dedication, going from mere sympathy to enthusiasm to outright fanaticism? I mean, almost anyone is a libertarian to some extent; it’s only the true believers who are troublesome.

“I mean, almost anyone is a libertarian to some extent; it’s only the true believers who are troublesome.”

The amusing thing is, the same is true of utilitarians.

Satellite Microwave transmissions, EHF and Higher, are causing Polar Ice cap melting and Global Warming. This is due to radio frequency heating on a global level. See article at http://globalmicrowave.orgfree.com/.
Thank You
James Richardson

A libertarian is just someone who refuses to ever use the word ‘we’, but carries straight on making universalist and absolute ideological statements anyway.

‘We can do something about global warming’ is disallowed, as it contains the deadly two-letter word.

‘I can do nothing much significant about global warming’ is true. Quietly universalise that, without appealing to a collective, and you get ‘effective action against global warming is impossible’.

Take that as an axiom, and you end up with a choice of two positions:

1. global warming doesn’t exist.
2. global warming is inevitable.

These might seem opposing views, but politically they are the same: you’ll often see one person switch from one to the other.

Amazing how many persons know nothing about Libertarians, yet comment?

I think libertarians generally think that tradeable permits worked quite well for sulfur dioxide / acid rain, but will not scale well. There are several major reasons — sulfur dioxide is a relative trivial issue (technically and economically) in comparison to CO2. Also acid rain falls relatively close to the source, so countries have a strong incentive (their own healthy lakes and forests) to be serious about acid rain prevention. But CO2 acts globally, so every country has a strong incentive to free ride, game the system, and seek competitive advantage for its economy and industries. And unlike national markets for SO2 there’s no effective world government to enforce CO2 violations. All of these negative tendencies have been on prominent display in the first 10 years of Kyoto.

So libertarians see a danger global warming will provide a justification for a major expansion in the size and scope of national governments, a major obstacle to international trade (imagine what happens when countries start imposing carbon tariffs on each other), but do little to actually address the problem (or possibly even make it worse).

The clearest example of this is the U.S. corn-ethanol program — billions in subsidies for farmers and ethanol producers, tariffs on imported ethanol (to protect domestic producers), and the end result? Higher food prices causing hardships in poor countries, the waste of billions of dollars, and no benefit to climate change (possibly even making the problem worse).

So when they hear the proposal for the U.S. government to sell carbon permits and invest the money in alternative energy, libertarians fear the corn ethanol program on steroids.

And the politics just don’t work. We’ve seen a primary season where the leading Democrats (supposedly the strongest advocates for action on climate change) have been demagoguing trade and calling for the renegotiation of free trade agreements to be more advantageous to U.S. workers and industries. Given this, why does anybody expect this same party to negotiate a climate change agreement that would make the cost of carbon (and therefore the cost of industrial production) much higher in the U.S. than China, India, and other developing countries?

If the Democrats gain full control of the U.S. government, they will certainly want to be seen to be doing something about climate change, no doubt. But they won’t actually do anything that raises energy costs to consumers and U.S. industries in any significant way. And without raising those costs, there will be no reductions.

In my mind, what it comes down to is simply…coal. There doesn’t really seem to be enough oil left to worry about — come up with a way to either produce carbon-free energy at a cost on par with coal, and/or a way to use coal without emitting the CO2, and you’ve solved the problem without any treaties, trading schemes, harmonized carbon taxes or whatever. But fail to either come up with energy as cheap as coal or a way to use cheap coal, and climate change treaties just aren’t going to work — the temptation to exploit cheap coal will prove irresistible. Not just in the U.S. and China, but even in the E.U..

So if I were a benevolent libertarian despot, what I would do is establish a series of very large government and philanthropy-funded prizes rather than large government-funded programs. The advantage is there is no opportunity for politicians to distribute environmentally useless but politically valuable alternative energy pork. And no money is spent until the terms of the prize are met (practical carbon sequestration at a specified cost, practical advances in thorium reactors, solar cells at a specified cost per KWH, etc, etc). In exchange for the prize money, the funder gets the patents and releases them into the public domain.

if they don’t believe in AGW, in which case the market value of CO2 permits will fall to 0.

You are confused.

The market price of permits will depend solely on the marginal cost of reducing carbon emissions (with the relevant margin determined by the quantity of permits issued.) The reality or otherwise of climate change doesn’t enter in. How would it?

Jared Diamond writes that he sometimes wonders what was going through the mind of the Easter Islander who chopped down the last tree on the island. I’d guess it was something like “this is my tree, and I’m going to get a whole lot of things for this wood”. Libertarian thought in microcosm.

The libertarians have simply been wrong about every issue that they have influenced. (They may be right, although simplistic, about the drug war. But they don’t have corporations funding them to attack that.) They are wrong on environmental issues. They were wrong on the war. Before that, they were wrong about civil rights — remember all those libertarian screeds about how a white person should be allowed to refuse to serve black people if they want to because it’s their business? They weren’t and aren’t even unequivocally on the right side about torture.

I’m glad the libertarians reading this think that we’re being unfair. They aren’t “classical liberals”. They are tools of the Right, nothing more. History, if it remembers them at all, is going to remember them with scorn.

And, once again, who cares what they say? Their arguments against permits systems aren’t “surprising”. They argue against whatever big business is against.

We should be moving towards a zero emissions policy for all systems. By this I mean zero emissions as a goal the way zero defects on a production line is a goal in Deming’s Total Quality Management. Greenhouse gases are only one part of our waste stream but we need to stop all waste streams. It should be unacceptable to pollute, period, unacceptable to create unused or unusable waste. We don’t have the luxury of our ignorance of the consequences any more.

An added bonus is that trying to create a zero emissions system is a hard but rewarding problem. It will make our brains sweat but it will also be a great deal of fun, if my observation of the factory EHS folks who are approaching the problem this way is any indication.

We should be moving towards a zero emissions policy for all systems.

Sure, but where do we start? Carbon permits and carbon taxes are both ways to reduce emissions where the cost of doing so is lowest — where technical solutions are cheap, substitutes are available, or the activity itself is of low value.

I wish I could remember the source for the line that libertarian criticism of proposed state action usually rests on the assumption that every slippery slope must be slid down. And we do slide down a lot of them; it’s worthwhile to point out cases.

The problem for the criticism comes when the slope is not slid down. It’s really easy for an inclination to suspect trouble to slide into the dogmatic insistence that there must be trouble, and if there isn’t, it’s being hidden. The libertarian silence about the example of Taiwan whenever health care is discussed, for instance. (Taiwan converted to a single-payer system in the ’90s and it’s working as well there as in Europe.) Conversely, many libertarian critics are equally sure that some things won’t or can’t happen, and thus are left with nothing much to say when (for instance) there’s massive food contamination in part thanks to subversion of official inspection. Reducing regulation plus tort reform to put all the burden on individuals or private groups to run their own tests and then try to press suits in an environment rigged against them is ludicrously, obviously not the answer, but there’s nothing else to say if you’re convinced that all regulation ends in complete capture and never does any net good.

“Why does honest libertarian thought on this always end up here, at the magic pony solution?.”

Because it doesn’t actually violate any physical laws, and therefore isn’t magic; There ARE energy sources out there which will produce enough energy to run industrial civilization, without significant CO2 releases. Only the application of sufficient ingenuity is lacking to make them cheap enough.

Oh, and I’ll note that ponies actually exist. The left really needs a new metaphor here.

Why does honest libertarian thought on this always end up here, at the magic pony solution? Is it really so impossible for libertarians to compromise their beliefs on an important practical issue that they have to fall back on magical ideas?”

If we do get a cheap alternate energy, it will make a big difference. Worth trying for. It’s happened before — england got a big burst of energy when they were running out of firewood and found they culd use coal.

It isn’t practical to make that the main plan because there’s no basis to guess whether it will work. But we need to make our best effort at that one, too. Hydrogen fusion has been making steady progress for 50 years, and there’s some reason to think we could have working fusion power plants within another 50 years. Possibly somewhat quicker. We have a lot of classified research that might aid that effort but which is not available because we’re afraid someone might use it for weapons.

Given an alternative of coercing large numbers of people, it makes sense for libertarians to want a magic pony approach. “I don’t just believe in miracles, I depend on them.” But remember that the odds are unknown. It makes sense for nonlibertarians too to put as much research money as we can afford into alternate energy. It might pay off.

look at the unwavering belief in the Kyoto process. In the expectation of global political organization that has no precedent—nothing even close. In the expectation that countries are going to agree to do something that they never do—agree to to intentionally put themselves at a distinct energy cost/economic disadvantage with respect to their economic, political, and potential military rivals.

But this is going much too far. You seem to be saying that countries never submit to binding international agreements when doing so would be costly to them. But the whole history of the modern world is against you.

Look at the enormous effort at developing the Breton Woods system of international trade and finance and its more recent liberalized variant. Whatever you think of the specifics, these agreements unequivocally put certain countries at a cost disadvantage, and yet they get agreed to regularly.

Look at all the arms control treaties negotiated during the Cold War (or non-proliferation today) — all involved countries whose interests might have been served by building (more) nuclear weapons refraining from doing so.

Look at the EU — there countries have given up a great deal of their freedom of action, and accepted many particular terms that were disadvantageous, in the interests of deeper integration (and let’s not forget, of avoiding another catastrophic war — a motive with close parallels to climate change.) Not only are countries willing to be bound by this agreement, they are lining up to join it.

Of course there are serious political and institutional obstacles to putting in place a global system to limit carbon emissions — it’s a big problem! But absolutely, there are precedents.

…without some combination of incentives and direct compulsion (or magic), no-one will implement the technical advances.

The trouble is, when we do things like Kyoto we are engaging in one of the slowest feedback loops human beings notice. I mean, get much slower and we won’t even see it happen.

Agreements among multiple governments are so slow that they might as well assume that private businesses will react instantly to whatever they do. Any loophole will be exploited immediately.

They have to design a system ahead of time with no loopholes. If they don’t do it right the first time it will take a long time to fix it. They have to do it right the first time and get a whole lot of governments to agree to it.

The whole process looks kind of hopeless to me. But I don’t see an alternative. Without a comprehensive international agreement, businesses can stage auctions to see which government will give them the best terms to outsource there. Without everybody onboard it doesn’t work.

Could maybe the UN do it? They fund some of their operations with a carbon tax? They collect the data to decide how much the tax will be, and then collect it? And when a nation doesn’t pay its taxes the UN can declare a tariff on their imports and exports sufficient to pay the debt?

I could imagine something like that working, except that the USA, russia, and china wouldn’t put up with it.

#21

Classical liberalism has been around for centuries, much longer than the social democratic ideology popular here. It deserves a seat at the table of the reasonable.

… You mean like Alchemy and Astrology?

“You do realize that no so long ago, emissions trading itself was a “crazy” libertarian idea that plenty of lefties considered beyond the pale.”

Libertarians favored emissions trading because an emissions trading regime is the easiest to subvert, pure and simple. Emissions trading regimes were a crazy idea not so long ago, but then the Right took over. Once the Right is quashed, people are going to rediscover that they are a crazy idea. They are no less “government interference in the market” than anything else, and take a large number of government employees to enforce, so there is no principled argument for them. They do have the singular property that whenever the traded rights get expensive, all of a sudden there are magically more of them — because after all, we wouldn’t want to hurt industry. The separation of a permits system from anything that people usually interact with makes this easier to do than with some other method of enforcing agreed-on technological change.

So, yes, still a crazy idea. The fact that suckers have bought into it doesn’t make it less of one.

I’m with Roger:

By radically shrinking the value of the dollar and making the oil producing Middle East a vastly more insecure place, he has managed to increase the cost of petroleum dramatically.

It occurred to me some time back that the neocon ideal — nukes launched against the entire Middle East, less Israel — would actually be a very effective way of sequestering petroleum for a few thousand years while we figure out how to use it efficiently. Once the rad levels of Saudi Arabia and Iraq reached workable levels, we’d have generations upon generations of insight into how to make the most of scarce oil resources.

It would help if we also nuked Texas, a thought few outside that state should find objectionable.

What about storing the daytime solar electricity (whether from photovoltaic or solar thermal) as potential gravitational energy, for nighttime release? Use some of the generating capacity to lift enormous concrete weights up inside silos hydraulically; fix their positions with ratchets; let them go again at night and direct the hydraulic pressure to the electrical generators. A completely self-contained fuel cycle! You could even put up a few extra “power silos” to reserve for a rainy day. Scalable for village use. Is this any nuttier than building a nuclear power plant, dreaming that you’ll fix the waste problem, and pretending that it doesn’t have an ongoing massive federal subsidy?

Josh:

I’m confused by your position. This:

2. Property rights are good only insofar as they derive from just acquisition… Sadly, too many libertarians miss this point.

strikes me as a dramatic understatement. The number of libertarians I know who advocate the return of wealth built on genocide and slavery is exactly zero. Yet you seem to agree that, in the case of New Mexico raised above, this is exactly what should happen. If so, that makes you distinct from every libertarian I’ve ever met or read, which makes me skeptical that your views represent what most people understand as “libertarianism”.

brett bellmore:

There ARE energy sources out there which will produce enough energy to run industrial civilization, without significant CO2 releases. Only the application of sufficient ingenuity is lacking to make them cheap enough.

Remember: when speaking to libertarians, use the word “ingenuity” in place of “magic” or else they won’t understand.

as if the mainstream scientific view on global warming renders libertarianism untenable

Global warming does render Libertarianism untenable. At least Libertarianism as it currently defined by its mainstream adherents. Global warming means that a massive global government intervention into the free market system would result in a more optimal outcome then otherwise. That’s fundamentally incompatible with Libertarianism.

Picador, if “ingenuity” and “magic” were the same thing, we’d still be chipping flint and soaking hides in hollow oak stumps. Try to understand: The human mind actually comes up with useful ideas once in a while.

I think people obsessed with politics must really hate the idea that most of the improvements in the living standard of humanity have come from engineers and scientists, not politicians.

“It”

BTW, does it occur to you that the vote for women was in large part a consequence of economic changes brought on by technological advances?

Was that before or after James Clerk Maxwell invented not keeping slaves?

Slocum, in addition to the point made above that international agreements are made regularly, and often against the interests of some of the countries involved, don’t you think it’s possible that agreements like Kyoto might actually offer potential economic benefits? Energy efficiency is a good thing, it reduces the cost of doing things. Yet strangely libertarians have a real bee in their bonnet about this energy efficiency thing, it’s as if they were all still living in some 50s (simonian?) worldview where the only possible way to get economic growth is by burning more oil. Look at their ludicrous response to that carbon-offsetting foot pump – it’s as if they want poor people spending their entire disposable income on fuel.

You don’t want that do you Slocum?

At the risk of getting bogged down in discussion of the practicalities of a completely irrelevant policy, do you have any evidence that lack of big cash prizes is holding back researchers from finding these wonder weapons miracle technologies? I suspect a bigger bottleneck may be a lack of research infrastructure, one of those market failures which libertarians hate to admit exist and whose cure they refer to as “pork”.

And why do you suggest spending govt money on prizes for this, instead of just recommending subsidies or tax credits for energy efficiency investment? Why do libertarians always object to the cost-saving, carbon-saving technology and point their engorged willies at the sexy projects that will never work?

And what do we do about global warming if we rest our whole future on this quixotic quest, but after 10 years discover that no research institute or company has bothered because (as you suggested) they have decided it is infeasible and not worth investing infrastructure on? We will still be 10 years away from solving the problem, without having worked on an alternative, and without having found any way to encourage anyone to do any kind of carbon-saving research. Meanwhile we could have invested in energy efficiency projects for 10 years…

lemuel pitkin: Well yeah, but we’re not talking about ethanol, or about subsidies for or direct public investment in particualr technologies. We’re talking about carbon taxes/permits. All they do is internalize an externality.

No, we’re not only about that. Auctioned permits (or carbon taxes) generate large new revenue streams. What will the government do with that revenue? What’s to prevent pumping a lot of it into more subsidies for bogus alternative energy pork like corn ethanol?

But the issues they address are really orthogonal to the ones permits/taxes address. E.g. even if you developed a vastly improved carbon sequestration technology, you’d still need some incentive for power generators to adopt it.

Yes and no. If sequestration raised the cost of using coal by 5%, providing the incentives to use it would be a trivially easy political problem. But not so if it raised the cost of using coal by a factor of 10.

Christopher Colaninno: Global warming does render Libertarianism untenable. At least Libertarianism as it currently defined by its mainstream adherents. Global warming means that a massive global government intervention into the free market system would result in a more optimal outcome then otherwise. That’s fundamentally incompatible with Libertarianism.

I think you’re confused about Libertarianism. School vouchers are a libertarian idea — but they presuppose government funding for education. The EITC (negative income tax) is a libertarian idea, but it presupposes a government safety net. And emissions trading is a libertarian idea (which is the source of Quiggin’s puzzlement about libertarian attitudes toward Kyoto). It’s simply not the case that government interventions of any kind are incompatible with libertarianism.

sg: …don’t you think it’s possible that agreements like Kyoto might actually offer potential economic benefits?

It’s conceivable. But emissions restrictions offer net benefits to countries implementing them, then there’s no reason to worry about agreements. Those countries that restrict their emissions will grow faster than others and then the laggards will catch on and start reducing their own emissions out of pure self-interest.

However, I have to say that given the first 10 years of Kyoto, that seems a green pipe dream. Those countries that artificially jack up the price of energy in their economies will not grow faster than countries with cheap energy.

At the risk of getting bogged down in discussion of the practicalities of a completely irrelevant policy, do you have any evidence that lack of big cash prizes is holding back researchers from finding these wonder weapons miracle technologies?

One of the main things holding researchers back is a fear that their technologies won’t pay — that the cost of conventional energy will plummet again and their efforts will be useless. There are various ways around this. One is a government guarantee that energy won’t get cheap again by imposing taxes or emissions limits. Another is a government guarantee to fund the research regardless of what energy markets do. And another possibility is a government promise not to subsidize the ongoing research but to pay for objectively defined results.

And what do we do about global warming if we rest our whole future on this quixotic quest, but after 10 years discover that no research institute or company has bothered because (as you suggested) they have decided it is infeasible and not worth investing infrastructure on?

And what do we do if we spend 10 years trying to create a successor to Kyoto that will only then create the incentives for alternative energy development — but fail to get an agreement? Or get another agreement like Kyoto with no enforcement mechanisms that countries continue to flout at their convenience? Or an agreement that looks good on paper, but raises energy costs very little and, therefore, provides very little actual incentives to innovate?

76 – wait, I thought it was capitalism that is most responsible for the improvements in living standards.

That’s politicians!

We should be moving towards a zero emissions policy for all systems.

Sure, but where do we start?

You start by recognizing that this is the goal and beginning to do the thought experiment of what that might look like within the constraints of ecological design, the simplest expression of which is Bill McDonough’s four principles:
waste equals food
use only available solar income
respect diversity
love all the children.

If you want to go deeper, Nancy Jack Todd has a good list of principles based upon John Todd’s work designing restorative ecological systems in her history of the New Alchemy Institute, _A Safe and Sustainable World_.

Twelve principles fundamental to the practice of ecological design:

1. Geological and mineral diversity must be present to evolve the biological responsiveness of rich soils.
2. Nutrient reservoirs are essential to keep such essentials as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium available or the pants.
3. Steep gradients between subcomponents must be engineered into the system to enable the biological elements to evolve rapidly to assist in the breakdown of toxic materials.
4. High rates of exchange must be created by maximizing surface areas that house the bacteria that determine the metabolism of the system and facilitate treatment.
5. Periodic and random pulsed exchanges improve performance. Just as random perturbations foster resilience in nature. in living technologies altering water flow creates self-organization in the system.
6. Cellular design is the structural model as it is in nature where cells are the organizing unit. Expansion of system should also use a cellular model, as in increasing the number of tanks.
7. A law of the minimum must be incorporated. At least three ecosystems such as a marsh, a pond, and a terrestrial area are needed to perform the assigned function and maintain overall stability.
8. Microbial communities must be introduced periodically from the natural world to maintain diversity and facilitate evolutionary processes.
9. Photosynthetic foundations are essential as oxygen-producing plants foster ecosystems that require less energy, aeration, and chemical management.
10. Phylogenetic diversity must be encouraged as a range of aquatic animals from the unicellular to snails to fish are as essential to the evolution and self-maintenance of the system as the plants.
11. Sequenced and repeated seedings are part of maintenance as a self-contained system cannot be isolated but must be interlinked through gaseous, nutrient, mineral, and biological pathways to the external environment.
12. Ecological design should reflect the macrocosmos in the microcosmos, representing the natural world miniaturized and reflecting its proportions, as in terrestrial to oceanic and aquatic areas.

brett:

I think people obsessed with politics must really hate the idea that most of the improvements in the living standard of humanity have come from engineers and scientists, not politicians.

Thanks, my first few degrees were in electrical engineering and neuroscience; I don’t think I am unappreciative of the contributions of those people to human progress, such as it is.

That being said, “ingenuity + scarce resource = non-scarce resource” isn’t some magical formula that will hold true in all situations. Thermodynamic miracles aren’t physically impossible, but it’s best not to formulate policies that rely on them. Ditto for unlimited, renewable, clean energy.

Homo sapiens hit a pocket of cheap energy a hundred years back and our population exploded. Now that cheap energy is getting less cheap at about the same time that we’re choking to death on our own excretions. The explosion of humanity in the 20th century is no different in principle from bacterial growth on a surface with a pocket of glucose in the middle. Look at the shape of that curve; it does not bode well for continuing human expansion.

“Wouldn’t it be better to let the system fail and adjust the population downward until we get to a level we can have a good society?”

Great idea. You go first.

Thanks Nabs, took the words right out of my mouth (and preempted a possible Godwin violation.)

The view that we should do nothing and let technology save us is a bit like a young smoker arguing that he should keep smoking and hope that medicine advances sufficently to cure him of the lung cancer he will get 20 years down the line. The notion of quitting hasn’t occured or seems too difficult to contemplate.

lemuel:

How would it? @ 40

Sorry, I should have been clearer. For those who don’t believe that AGW is true, they should believe that one day it will be proven false, at which point the value of CO2 permits will drop to 0.

Still, odd that you think the value would be driven entirely by the marginal cost of supply. No interaction with demand? Related: isn’t the demand entirely driven by policy, irrespective of cost? In other words, the number of permits will be artificially set. I’d set the odds of there being some rent-seeking (read:corruption) at at least 85%. Last I read on the subject, the EU market was getting poor marks.

BB
Surprisingly, I agree with some of your points. Engineers and scientists are the source of most advances. Yes there is plenty of energy available, but we need complex (and therefore potentially fragile) technology to use it. What makes you think that science (that works best in an co-operative open source like environment, the best advances often coming accidently as a result of trying to do something else) is subject to the normal target-oriented market approach with competition and secrecy? It may well be that lots of basic science is needed first.

Slocum – re your prise. What is the difference between a prise (that rewards one party but makes lots of other lose – and who says luck doesn’t play a big part in research) and research grants, that ensure competition and make sure a number of people are gaining expertise in the area in question. Better still – why not do both (and the prise could go to an institution to encourage even more research).

My father was a scientist, I don’t believe for science motivation has much influence on success.

sg, are you concerned that if we do look for technological solutions that we’ll depend on finding them and so not try anything else?

I see nothing wrong with trying as many approaches as we can manage in parallel.

My own prejudice is that if for some reason we have a choice between new technology and international agreements — one or the other — I’d rather gamble on technology than gamble on working international agreements. They both look like long shots to me. But why can’t we try both?

Social

‘Tother side of the population debate is to note, as George Monbiot did recently [alas, I can’t find the link], that economic growth at what the West has come to accept as ‘normal’ rates, let alone the explosive rates achieved in China, will consume resources at a faster, and more disastrous, rate of increase than any plausible projection of global population growth. From which two things follow: a] if you think things can be stopped ‘before it’s too late’, reining in resource consumption is more important that stopping poor people having babies; b] if you think we are doomed to go ‘over the top’ into systemic collapse, it will be the disastrous loss of available resources to the rich world that hurts us most, not more poor babies….

Dave, yes, the big consumption is in the rich first world. Traditionally we have suggested that instead of reducing our consuption of resources we will provide hints to the third world so they can become rich like we are. Now that this is happening in china and some other places, we find that it doesn’t work — that nonrenewable resorces are slipping away even faster.

Currently the limiting factor is fossil fuels. If we could solve that problem — if we could find a lot of cheap renewable energy — then we would run into another limiting factor that isn’t as limiting.

Currently our food production depends on fossil fuels. We could in theory put a lot of people on the land to do subsistence farming without fossil fuels, and they might produce enough of a surplus to feed a lot of others. In practice a free market won’t do that until agribusiness has shrunk to the point it doesn’t need that land. We can expect a lot of dislocations as fossil fuels get more expensive and particularly as they get priced out of range of all but military uses.

It has already reached the point where americans aren’t particularly increasing our standard of living, except for rich americans and except for tech advances. We are declining now. How fast are we willing to decline to save third world lives? Don’t ask me, ask a politician who’s running for office.

If we have to adapt to a world without cheap alternative energy, it will almost certainly be a world with a considerably smaller population. We could make heroic efforts to save people by carefully restricting usage of resources to their optimal purposes to save lives. We will not do so. As china builds up its defenses it’s predictable that the USA will also increase military spending — if the USA can raise the funds. Throughout the cold war the USA and USSR consumed resources for war that could have made a great big difference. Any reason to think that pattern will change now that russia is a regional power?

And so — if we somehow can get cheap renewable energy, we will have found our pony. We are betting a great big part of the world population on that, whether we fund it or not. Following the Kyoto protocols won’t save those people, it will at best reduce global warming and save a larger remnant.

We lose without tech advances. We should try to get them. We also lose by global warming. We should try to slow that down. Why do people act like these are incompatible goals? We should do both in parallel, as best we can.

It’s plausible that whatever we do the world population might be back to 3 billion or less within a few generations. I don’t much like that and I’d be glad to stop it. I’d be willing to help create a plan for the USA to cut our fossil fuel use by 80% in whatever time we can reasonably do that. Any chance that plan could be politically feasible? Well, depending on circumstance the world economy might cut US fossil fuel consumption by 80% without a plan. We could turn into the world’s best-armed third world nation pretty quick, if things go particularly wrong.

“It’s plausible that whatever we do the world population might be back to 3 billion or less within a few generations.”

It’s going to do that, especially if we solve our energy problems: Demographic transition, and all that: The most advanced nations aren’t reproducing at replacement, it’s poor countries where the population growth is happening.

“I’d be willing to help create a plan for the USA to cut our fossil fuel use by 80% in whatever time we can reasonably do that.”

Cool. Just drop all the current obstacles to building nukes and reprocessing the ‘wastes’. It’s the only industrial scale non-CO2 producing energy source we have that can be scaled up fast. If the alternative to nukes is really a lot of people dying, then all the complaints about radiation leaks are irrational. The KWHs will save more lives than the rads will cost.

Just take France’s most recent plant design, and go into mass production.

There are two ways for the population size to decline. One is some kind of calamity (a pandemic of some sort), the other one is a welfare society, where the government provides all the necessary support for the old and/or disabled.

We could have a series of calamities. Some parts of the world have traditionally had one every 20 years or so. For example northeast brazil. A lot of subsistence farmers, each family living on barely enough land to support them. Then a drought comes and when it’s over there’s land to go around until the next drought.

We could have a combination welfare state/calamity. A rickety welfare state that supports people most of the time but occasionally breaks down, and then when it recovers it supports the survivors.

Suppose that fossil fuel gets more expensive so international transportation gets more expensive, and food production gets more expensive, etc. Global warming results in some unpredictable weather changes so it’s hard to grow crops reliably. If local harvests aren’t very reliable and it’s also too expensive to store lots of food in good years (and there isn’t that much to store) and too expensive to ship large amounts of food from places with surpluses to places with lacks, we could easily get local famines.

And a nation which spends too much of its resources keeping useless citizens alive may have trouble supporting a strong enough military to keep their freedom to make that choice.

And a nation which spends too much of its resources keeping useless citizens alive may have trouble supporting a strong enough military to keep their freedom to make that choice.

Let it be noted for the record that J Thomas is a loon.

Lemuel, are you sure you’re up on how to reason in times when the value of human life is negative?

Speaking for myself, I think we’d be a lot better off if we can arrange that the value of human life stay positive. But how can we do that without cheap alternate energy?

“…are you sure you’re up on how to reason in times when the value of human life is negative?”

You’ve been practicing for such circumstances haven’t you? You sly dog JT.

J, as a general rule people starve in the third world because they’re stuck with really nasty governments, which either view famines as a way of killing off political opponents, or are so wildly incompetent they destroy the agricultural sector. See Zimbabwe for an example of the latter. I don’t think eating more lentils and less prime rib is going to save any lives in Zimbabwe.

J, … you sound way too pessimistic.

Abb1, I sincerely hope you’re right.

SG, it sounds like some libertarians are demonising some worthwhile ideas, and then you are demonising them.

I say we need international agreements and we need new technology, both. And neither is assured, we can try for both and maybe not get either one.

Prizes area few arrows in the quiver. You don’t want a hundred-million-pound prize for various reasons. There aren’t a lot of private organizations that can afford to compete at that level, and fewer still that can afford to lose. Better to ask for something smaller and offer 1 million, or possibly 10 million. Make it a relatively small project that is likely feasible but not certainly so. If it isn’t risky, better to assign a contract with a penalty clause.

I was briefly involved with one of the competitors for the DARPA self-steering vehicle prize. An experienced guy led a bunch of college engineering students who could use it on their resume. He had a lawnmower they could use if they couldn’t get access to a better vehicle. He looked one of the girl engineers in the eye. “If you go to the Jaguar dealership and ask them for a transmission and tell them what you want to use it for, they’ll probably give it to you.” They were heading to spend possibly $20,000 and a lot of unpaid time, and they’d have a small chance to win a million dollars. A lot of fun for them, for DARPA, and for the media. No giant downside if they didn’t win.

Of course you can’t depend on that kind of thing to get super results. It’s just one more method to try.

I don’t have a lot of hope for protecting forests. You put money into saving a forest and it looks like it’s working, and then in a few years there’s some social breakdown and a drought and the forest burns down anyway. But it’s worth a try anyway. It might work sometimes, and each surviving forest saves some diversity. If 10% of the forests you try to save remain, you’ve done something worthwhile even if you haven’t helped CO2 much.

About nuclear power, BB is right that we probably need it. You are right that our nuclear power industry has not developed the sort of culture that can actually carry it out. Maybe the USA could task its navy with providing power for major government installations, and then take it from there? The navy used to have the kind of culture that could do this sort of thing, and it might re-create that culture. Of course it could be argued that the Navy is a fumbling government bureaucracy that would spend too much on wasteful inefficient safety procedures of various kinds….

slocum, I was thinking of the Great Barrier Reef when I thought of tourism. Internal tourism, if you want to get all hair-shirty. Do you want to pretend that the people who would fly to that rainforest canopy aren’t going to fly somewhere for their holiday this year anyway? But it was a good way to miss the point, wasn’t it? By your little rant about eco-tourism you get to avoid talking about all the other benefits of reforestation. And we don’t have to pretend it would only happen in the Congo either – there are large swathes of Australia waiting to be reforested, the Japanese are missing a noticeable portion of their Kyoto commitments due to inability to manage the forests they have, etc. Of course, we could also try investing in improved governance in some of the countries we are offering reforestation assistance – which is probably also cheaper than pie in the sky carbon sequestration dreams.

Governments may routinely promise large amounts of money for things like pensions, but these aren’t projects people are investing in chasing. Governments don’t routinely sequester away prizes, if they are planning on giving out prizes they tend to do it regularly (as part of their budget) or they set up foundations.

Even if the government does do this, though, it’s still money not being put into a real research network; and even if we decide to make our entire response to global warming a huge increase in research funding – even with a sensible mix of policies and methods to fund it – we’re still casting all our hopes on a technological solution that a) we don’t know could happen and b) will still rely on political will when it does. And since you poo-poo any form of political action to solve the problem now there is no reason to think any of your +5 magic barrels of sequestration are ever going to be used even if they are discovered – unless we put in place some political action now. Which is what people have been trying to do for 15 years – without any help, and a lot of hindrance, from libertarians.

BB and Slocum still haven’t answered the problem with the assumption about research (which works best as a collaborative effort) being sponsored by winner take all competition.

There is competition and there is co-operation, humans can do both. It just so happens that research works best with a co-operative paradigm. And I know what I’m talking about, my father was a scientist (who had collaborators all over the world, including behind the iron curtain).

I wonder how many libertarian scientists there are?

nor have they answered the question posed repeatedly here – why should we listen to libertarian solutions when libertarians have been so dishonest about this for the past 15 years? I have yet to encounter a libertarian who has a constructive solution to the problem of the Libertarian Trust Gap, or who can point to their own contrarian willingness to buck the trend of their fellows. Even those like slocum (and I don’t really know if slocum is an avowed libertarian) who seem to accept the reality of the problem are still touting solutions that have been proposed and discussed by a bunch of lying shills. So though slocum’s defense of them may be heartfelt and passionate, the ideas themselves are still suspicious, in my view.

Let us take them at their word that libertarians are against carbon taxes because it opens the door to ‘government interference of unprecedented size and scope’. If this is the case, I would assume that all these libertarians are voting for Democratic candidates this fall (in the U.S.)

This is attacking the messenger. We need to look at the message independent of whether the person who delivers it is a lying stooge.

It might be useful to build a FAQ dealing with the messages that keep getting spread by lying stooges even after they are definitively shot down each time. When the stooges keep repeating the same lies even though they’ve been shown that it’s lies, and it takes a lot more effort to shoot them down again than it does to paste them up yet again. Just refer them to the FAQ and if they do some up with something new, something the FAQ doesn’t handle, then maybe answer them fresh.

I would like to see libertarians vote democrat, but I can’t say it makes sense for them to do that this time. They see both parties making government stronger. So their best bet in the short run is to get democrats and republicans in a deadlock where they can’t agree on how to make government stronger, and that gives a little more time to convince the public to vote libertarian instead of democrat or GOP. Of course the result is better when libertarians vote Libertarian.

You want to convince me you’re a ‘principled’ libertarian who is opposed to carbon taxes or other schemes for ideological reasons? You better be telling me you’re voting the Democratic ticket this fall, you better be making plenty of loud noises to this effect, and you better be working actively to spread the gospel.

Democrats ought to be working toward IRV, Instant Runoff Voting. Let libertarians vote Libertarian first, and then whoever they least dislike second.

This not only fits Democratic principles, also I note that Democrats have lost presidential elections due to third parties more than Republicans have in recent years. It’s to our advantage to get those votes. If Nader voters had been able to vote Democratic second, Gore would have won in 2000 and Bush would be unlikely to get the nomination in 2004. We could have done *something* about the environment 8 years early.

Can I count on your support for IRV? If you prefer Condourcet or some other system, that’s fine. We can make a list of the options and let people vote as many ways as they like and then use one or more of the voting systems that win according to most of the voting systems. People who say we have to settle on one single best proposed voting system before we can argue for any change are people who are unclear on the concept.

“So—nuclear fusion. We barely know how to do that.”

Nah, we know quite well how to do it, with very high energy gains. The problem is that nature doesn’t WANT to do it on a small scale. The smallest practical “fuel pellet” is in the tens of kilotons yield.

The problem with fusion isn’t that we don’t know how to do it, it’s that we don’t desperately need it. We’ve got too many other options at this point, to bite the bullet. But we could start designing plants tomorrow if we had no other options.

Sorry, thomas, but working towards adopting alternative voting schemes falls somewhat below resurrecting the ERA in terms of _my_ priorities. That sort of tilting at windmills has just about as much chance of passing in the next fifty years as adopting proportional representation . . . and would be even less effective in changing outcomes for the better, imho.

My point is the complete lack of consistency of libertarians in following through on their avowed high-and-mighty ‘prinicples’. The gits want me to accept on their word alone their complex epicycles within epicycles reasoning that somehow always ‘coincidentally’ align with the Powers that Be interests over the simpler hypothesis that they’re shills. And if I question this, rather than try to be persuasive, I am labelled a ‘Statist’, a parasite that is so insecure that he prefers the Nanny State over the liberty that strapping he-men such as themselves naturally crave . . . and not only do I want these free thinkers to labor beside me for the good of that state, I want to compell them to pay for it as well.

I would like to see libertarians vote democrat, but I can’t say it makes sense for them to do that this time. They see both parties making government stronger.

Uh-huh. If there are any ‘sincere’ libertarians out there, about the only way they could convince me of this fact would be to admit that a lot of their buds do exactly that, and really are shills for Interests that do not my best interests at heart. They’d also have to be a little bit more persuasive than calling me a ‘Statist’, either overtly or obliquely, every five minutes or so.

And no, the two parties are not remotely alike at this time. Even if both want to make the government stronger – a proposition I do not concede in the slightest – one wants to make ‘government stronger’ by pursuing things like cap & trade. The other wants to have the power to spy on citizens and political opponents, wants to be able to torture with impunity, and wants to be able to invade other countries at will. Anyone who wants to equate the two types of government interference is either a robot or just plain dishonest.

Scent, every libertarian I’ve met in person has seemed completely authentic except for one who was deeply involved in the election process.

The trouble I see here is that they don’t have much of a political platform. Once you assume that everything government does is negative and you want to stop it, there isn’t a lot to campaign *for*. So you can do pro-gun and pro-abortion, pro-prostitution and a few more such things, and after that it’s all anti.

The social freedoms that people argue tend to be symbolid things like abortion. The economic freedoms tend to be things that big business can exploit better than anybody else. It’s easy to come out as a shill for big business without intending to.

I’m not clear where a libertarian should come out about privacy. Should a libertarian object to government eavesdropping, or should he object to government restricting private eavesdropping? Do we have an innate right to privacy or do we have an innate right to know what our neighbors are up to?

‘Libertarianism’ is most certainly hooey – it is the glorification of economic coercion over the possibility of political liberation, argued for by suggesting exactly the opposite. The supposition that, without political constraints, the majority will in some way be able to prevent a minority acquiring almost absolute power over their lives through the deification of ‘private property’ is magic-pony thinking of the highest order.

ScentofViolets, thank you. It occurs to me that I haven’t met as many libertarians IRL as I used to. (I moved to a different part of the country, that might account for it. But maybe there aren’t as many.) And my online experience fits yours, most of the libertarians I see online follow a straight big-business approach.

Could this be astroturfing? If libertarians have been declining they could be replaced by fakes. Or the media could ignore real libertarians and pay attention to fake ones. For example, libertarians who support the Libertarian Party could be considered irrelevant because of that.

When I google news “libertarian party” I get about 3500 hits, compared to 141,000 for “democratic party”, 50,000 for “GOP” and 80,000 for “republican party” so that’s probably about right.

The issue is more prominent bloggers and commentators etc who speak as libertarians but who actually represent big business.

Tokyotom
Your post in intelligent. Perhaps your last sentence could be used as a starting point for dialog. In some ways I see Libertarians and social democrats as natural allies rather than enemies (see David Brin on this).

This is a shame but human), because it blunts the libertarian message in explaining what libertarians understand very well – that environmental problems arise when property rights over resources are not clearly defined or enforceable, and also when governments (mis)manage resources.

The key point of disagreement here seems to be the understanding that property rights are only given and protected by states (and should have a cost to prevent hoarding) and that governments are not all the same (i.e. government is improvable). Surely you are not suggesting that the atmosphere and oceans should be in their entirety privately owned? And if so who should get those rights and who has the right to grant them.

I know many Libertarians don’t take a pragmatic approach to these issues but treat it as a question of “natural” rights. But if we look at the real natural world, the accumulation of territory comes at a (-n energy) cost that imposes a natural upper limit.

Speaking of Libertarians (and David Brin) this link via David Brins blogspot is absolutely Brilliant:

Try again
http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/393124.html