Climate change and the strange death of libertarianism

“that property rights are natural relations between people (owners) and things (property)” Has a npt dropped out of this sentence?

As one CT commentator (whose name I have now forgotten) stated in a passing comment:

‘Markets got us into this mess. Markets are not going to get us out it.’

Or to put it another way: markets. generally speaking, with some highly specific exceptions, are not going to be part of the solution. And this is because markets are a (large) part of the problem.

I really like Extinction Rebellion: who wouldn’t? But one thing that they state clearly on their website is: ‘Extinction Rebellion is not political’. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, bollocks.

There was a 13 point evaluation of the positions of the UK political parties on the environment, held last year. The Corbyn led Labour Party got a ‘good’ mark on 12 of these (the only exception was to do with nuclear power) (more than the Greens!). The Johnson led Tory Party got (if memory serves) zero.

The most radical (i.e. effective) plans to deal with climate change (e.g. the Green New Deal etc.) invariably and in all cases come from the left, and from the radical left most of all. The greenest prominent American politician (except for Jill Stein) is Bernie Sanders. The right has nothing to offer except lies (e.g. Johnson’s ‘promises’), equivocation, climate change denial and so on, and this is because they are all, without any exceptions whatsoever, in the pockets of fossil fuel Capital, and this cannot change (at least in the near future, when we need it to change).

Like so many problems of today (inequality, war etc.), climate change was caused by the Right (facilitated by Centrists, as always) and can only be solved by the Left. Anyone who says different, is simply not serious about climate change. And this is because climate change is a market failure, and can only be solved by what amounts to anti-market legislation (‘planning’ taxes on relevant businesses and industries, progressive taxation (NOT flat taxes) to fund green energy, anti-corporate legal action, nationalisation etc.).

Ergo, green libertarianism is a contradiction in terms.

“That would imply an acknowledgement that property rights are natural relations between people (owners) and things (property).”

Is there a “not” missing? “…property rights are [not] natural relationships bteween people (owners) and things (property).” Or am I misunderstanding?

“That would imply an acknowledgement that property rights are natural relations between people (owners) and things (property).”

You wanted a “not” in there, right?

I don’t see any death of libertarianism. Maybe a quieting when there isn’t a Democrat in the White House.

In my Introduction To Libertarianism, I divide libertarianism into 3 realms: political, individualistic and philosophical. I don’t see any reason for any of them to decline, only that it is not an opportune time for the political to make much noise when they are getting what they want (reductions regulation, reduction of taxes, etc.) from Trump.

For lots more, see my site Critiques of Libertarianism.

‘That property rights are not natural relations’, surely?

Is there a ‘not’ missing from the antepenultimate sentence?

“That would imply an acknowledgement that property rights are natural relations between people (owners) and things (property).” You left out the not.

“That would imply an acknowledgement that property rights are [ not ?? ] natural relations between people (owners) and things (property).”

I think part of what has happened is that the intellectual world has realized how out of touch we are with the general population. As far as I can recall, most people who bother to distinguish an “economic” left/right or liberal/conservative axis from a “social” one does so because they want to say they are “economically conservative and socially liberal”. However, when researchers have done actual studies of the population by asking for responses to particular questions that are meant to identify people’s positions, this quadrant is by far the least popular, while the “economically left and socially right” quadrant is actually slightly more popular than the ones that are paradigmatic of the two major political parties. The key to Trumpism has been unlocking this set of voters (who we used to call “Reagan Democrats”).

Any serious analysis of this should minimally argue that the motivation for the motivated reasoning of those who reject the ‘constructionist’ arguments is not at all the arbitrary whims of a personality cult leader, but instead an attempt to avoid being subject to the equally arbitrary whims of manifest dictators who will use any excuse to redefine, regulate, and confiscate. The reasoning is no less motivated, but the motivation makes more sense.

Wishing don’t make it so.

Well I managed to put a typo into my correction of your slip, which I think is worse.

In the face of these facts, I think most libertarians just retreat into dogma. The one libertarian I actually interrogated closely eventually retreated to “the primacy of property rights is axiomatic” — and of course, he didn’t recognize any property rights related to clean air/water/etc.

The… driving animus, I guess, of libertarianism is to produce a model of social relations that prioritises simplicity over anything else. Everything is reduced to rigid rules and the rules are reduced to a minimum; a libertarian society is a simple society, one where you can’t get into trouble unknowing.

So of course it neglects externalities. It’s not that it’s an oversight, or a theoretically-tricky point that wants proper integration. Externalities are complex; externalities can be incurred inadvertently; externalities require thinking about how your actions impact others.

The whole point of libertarianism is to produce a society where not thinking about that shit and doing what you like is perfectly OK.

Absolutely no amateur psychology, please. Last warning on this

The assumption that a libertarian philosophy was anything other than a polite wink and nod to rapacious rent seeking has become clear. Of course they have outed themselves as Trumpistas. Permission was granted.

Speaking of typos: “Second, the effort to deny this inevitably result in denial of the scientific evidence that climate change was necessary.” The scientific evidence that climate change was necessary?

“If someone had started up a ‘Propertarian Party’ in 2016 I don’t think it would have taken many votes away from the Libertarian Party…but I could be wrong.”

If someone had started up a Propertarian Party in 2016, it wouldn’t have taken any votes away from the Libertarian Party, because its pool of potential converts would already have been getting what they wanted from the Libertarians. Why switch?

“…the effort to deny the necessary implications of climate change inevitably resulted in denial of the scientific evidence that climate change was occurring. That contributed to a situation where most former libertarians are now Trumpists, happy to deny the evidence of their own eyes if that’s what the leader requires of them…”

This seems sloppy and poorly substantiated. First, plenty of people who don’t support climate change advocacy (let’s not call it ‘alarmism’) acknowledge that climate change is occurring and that human actions play some role in these changes. Which leads to a second problem: your ham-fisted blanket mischaracterisation of the motivations of libertarian Trump supporters, most of whom, AFICT, don’t like Trump as a person, or persona, but are entirely behind Trump’s successful efforts to de-regulate the state, which would be a really good topic for discussion at some sort of left-leaning academic website.

The (damaging) knock-on effects of federal de-regulation include de-regulation at the state and local level – a crass exercise in cultism and self-interest trumpeted by the cynical and greedy and beloved by corporations, capitalists, the GOP in general and right-wingers across the globe.

I realize you’re formulating your ideas for a larger piece, but including nuance and detail will, I’m sure, increase the accuracy and utility of your piece, and very likely win you some readers outside the cloister.If you’re trying to actually convince people of the quality of your thinking, that is, and I’m certain you are. My own view is that libertarianism is a nonsense form of right-wing virtue signalling. They’re all happy enough to benefit from state funding and tax-breaks when it suits them.

Another axis-of-fracture for libertarians has been migration, where the split is roughly between those who take freedom and individual rights seriously and who therefore become anti-restrictionist, and those who want to affirm a form of national collective property against outsiders (with all the problems that national collective property also entails for libertarians). Trump (and Miller) have forced people to take sides. But notice that this split is also mirrored on the left between the social democratic version of national collective propertarianism and cosmopolitan leftists affirming human rights against the state or prioritizing global equality over equality-within-borders.

Well I managed to put a typo into my correction of your slip, which I think is worse.

Good old Muphry’s Law!

@ Chris Bertram “Another axis-of-fracture for libertarians has been migration,”.

The migration issue for many UK voters is that if you simultaneously have a generous welfare state open to all people resident in a country and have freedom of movement into that country, then you will fairly quickly go bust. At some point you have to make a decision on which of those principles you are going to abandon, and saying that you can, so to speak, have your migration/welfare state cake and eat it, was overwhelmingly rejected at the last GE (and the GE before that and the EU referendum before that).

I think another factor operating now, for instance maybe in Cowen’s case, is the emergence of a right-wing approach to material assistance for the “white working class.” I’m thinking of Kristof’s recent book with his wife. I’ve read excerpts and reviews of this book, read and listened to interviews, and nowhere does he express regret for even possibly having contributed to the appearance that nobody in ruling circles was concerned about such people, not even for mistakenly having thought they didn’t present a real problem. Instead, he claims that both pro-business* libertarians and social-reform liberals hate such people, *but assures the reader that he counts himself among neither of those*, and comes very close to proclaiming that nobody had the idea to care about white rural drug addicts before he personally thought of it, certainly not the Democrats.

* thus excluding liberaltarians

@Dipper: the issue I was drawing attention to is the consistency of libertarian principles (or social democratic or liberal ones, for that matter) with immigration restrictions. The opinion of UK voters about whether there should be such restrictions or about whether immigrants are a burden or a benefit to the welfare state, even if correct, is strictly irrelevant to that question of consistency. (Tax-paying immigrants are, in fact, vital if we are to pay for the upkeep of unproductive old people like you. But you probably won’t recognize that until it is too late, if then.)

From the linked article at reason.com about Justin Amash:

The influential DeVos family from Amash’s own district, which has been his second-biggest donor over the years and with whom his family has various longstanding relationships, announced last year that its days of officially supporting the hometown libertarian were over, too.

Am I the only one who thinks it’s weird that somebody wrote that sentence without mentioning that a member of the DeVos family is now a member of Donald Trump’s Cabinet?

Is libertarianism very popular in the UK? I often feel, reading Brits (especially my age, 50s, or older) that what passes for “left” is more libertarian than would go in the US, very “socially liberal and economically conservative” in the US sense of being in favor of legalized drug use and low taxes and low regulation. US libertarians love The Economist but I can’t remember reading a British “classical liberal” writer ever referring to themself as a “libertarian.”

Hidari @ 50

Thank you for your comments here and on the “consumed by fire” thread. If I may, I would like to slightly disagree. This might seem like a minor quibble – and to be clear I don’t think I fundamentally differ to a degree worth noting in the generals – but you have made very strong claims regarding the necessity of fossil fuels which I’m not sure are warranted, and seem to go against my experience as someone working (tangentially) in this area.

I would say that civilisation and capitalism (two different things, of course) are dependent on energy, not fossil fuels. This might sound like nit-picking, as fossil fuels are admittedly currently the go-to choice. However, I haven’t seen anything to show that fundamentally it would be impossible to transition to alternatives powered by a mixture of renewables and thorium reactors. Now, to be clear, I am not saying this would be easy, or that there should not be big changes in our approach to living (better planning, decreasing our environmental impact) as this would seem to be just good common sense. But, when you suggest that there could be no air travel without fossil fuels, I wonder if that is true – for example, hydrogen could make it feasible, even if the ranges were more limited and people would have to plan for stopovers. In short, while we should make big changes, and we need to cut CO2 emissions rapidly and soon, it would not seem impossible that advances in appropriate technologies could make it an adaptation and readjustment rather than an end to life as it is.

Of course, I could be wrong – perhaps you have more expertise in this field than me – but it seems to me as though the opposition to mitigating climate change is more about short term profit and ideology, than the practical requirements.

@53

Vis a vis flying, I was going by this article:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/sep/19/aviations-flight-towards-low-emissions-only-fuels-the-crisis

The whole thing is worth reading but the general gist would seem to be that genuinely electric planes (i.e. commercial passenger planes) aren’t really going to be possible before 2035 at the earliest and won’t be in a position to take over form ‘normal’ planes until some years/decades after that.

Vis a vis thorium, yes it looks interesting. But you really can’t get away from this (to quote Wikipedia): ‘As of 2020, there are no operational thorium reactors in the world’.

See also this, which thorium advocates tend to glide over:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Possible_disadvantages

There is no real reason to think that, whatever the physics, the economic and political path to building a thorium nuclear reactor will be any shorter and quicker and easier than the path for any other kind of nuclear reactor.

So that’s a problem.

@51: It’s very rare for a Brit to call themself Libertarian.

The writer George Orwell (in for example, Animal Farm or 1984) might be considered a fairly typical British leftist: note, especially, the opposition to Soviet Union-style Communism.

However, there is some political distance between George Orwell and Ayn Rand,

Hidari @ 55

Thank you for your response – much appreciated!

I certainly agree that there are huge problems with electric planes (and I say this as a battery person), but I believe there are possibilities via hydrogen fuel cells. Certainly it is also true that nuclear power is difficult and takes a lot of time to institute. However, it is worth noting that even if we had to plan ahead for nuclear but began pushing renewables more, combined with carbon capture, etc., it would still be a significant improvement on the near-nothing being done now. There could also be interesting alternatives in terms of improving distribution grids and the like (though that too has its own challenges).

Of course, I don´t want to suggest that technology alone will be a panacea – action, at the individual and collective levels, will likely also be necessary – but I think that there are ways of mitigating climate change via improvements at both the societal and technological levels, some of which are more immediate than others :-)

Again, I don´t think we fundamentally disagree on this topic – and what now follows is just a very personal opinion (and please feel free to agree to disagree on this point, as it probably isn´t so important as to be worth quibbling over).

My concern (and this is my genuine concern, based on the anti-AGW propaganda being churned out) is that by framing it as fossil fuels are inherently necessary, we run the risk of implying that the choice is “everyone lives in a cave again” vs. “climate change”, which then plays a bit into the hands of those who benefit by saying “well, we could mitigate climate change, but it probably won´t be that bad and besides you don´t want to give up driving do you?”.

I think my preferred framing is “mitigate climate change, which will involve some lifestyle changes” vs. “let global warming continue, which will involve huge, unpredictable lifestyle changes and the eventual collapse of civilisation” – the point being, of course, that the costs of mitigation only seem large when you don´t compare to the costs of not.

Again though, maybe this isn´t the best approach – so feel free to ignore me, as I certainly will understand if you don´t agree regarding this.

As a general comment – and this is not aimed at you! – it is perhaps also worth pointing out to the “let´s not do anything now” crowd that the sooner we push the technologies, the sooner we are prepared. If those in power had pushed in this direction when climate change was well established, we would probably be looking at more-or-less being ready by now. I must confess, given the potential financial incentives for whoever cracks the problem first, it does genuinely baffle me that the more profitable companies (for example, those in the oil business) don´t invest more in this – the money would be a drop in the bucket for them, and potentially they would then be well placed to keep turning oil into plastics (and making a profit on their current business model) and seize command of the energy market. I would have thought even hyper-capitalists should appreciate that. Sadly, it seems we are chained to the whims of a far too short-sighted system.

Anyway, in short – thank you for clarifying your position, and I very much appreciate the thoughtful discussion. I won´t post again on this thread regarding this point as I don´t want to end up sidetracking another thread with my personal tedious tendencies :-)

– and YES!

I know, I know – that:

”Everything is Politics” –

– at least that’s what Germany’s ”utmost unpolitical” author Thomas Mann – said
and so –
perhaps? –
when I was accused – just a day ago – that the only reason why I hate the Clownstick so much – is because I am this ”Crazy Socialistic Lefty” – and I had a really hard time to correct this false impression by saying that I really –
REALLY!!
HATE –
”Climate Change Denying”
and
”Politicians who don’t do anything to help fighting the Climate Crises”
AND
”Racism”
AND
”Small minded attitudes”
and as some people -(like the Clownstick) impersonates ALL of the above –
I just… hate him!
But so many people think – that if I hate Trump – It must have something to do with ”Trumps Politics”
-(which I hate too)
”but I’m still with Reich-Ranicki, who maintains that Mann was essentially an unpolitical person who judged politics JUST from an artist’s point of view.

Z @56
This reads well, but I think it ignores the actual history of Libertarianism, which predates Techno-Libertarianism by some decades and arose in a quite different period.

I am old enough to remember Milton Friedman as a public figure, and to remember his very public long distance debate against J K Galbraith as the dominant intellectual discussion of the period (the 70s). Milton Friedman was a member of the Mount Pelerin Society which eventually evolved into the Libertarian movement in the 1980s and 1990s. AGW became a major theme first much later – with increasing urgency first in this century.

I find Anon’s point about actual votes for the Libertarian Party interesting (but given the US’s 2 party system clearly not definitive – a better line can maybe be won from the Liberal Party in Germany). But at least from blogs it is noticeable that Libertarians are no longer as prevalent and confident as they were.

@62

I’d say if Trumpism is in favor of democracy, it assumes before any vote what the outcome will be: a culture most Americans will recognize as white, individualistic but civic-oriented, Christian in a worldly and civically oriented way. IOW if everyone (who’s not damaged in some way) behaves according to what the like, that white male supremacist mostly-Protestant (Christian but not too Christian, if you know what I mean) culture is what will result. Any other result is proof to them that the vote wasn’t really valid. A culture of people who are respectable and need to be recognized as better than black people (who define “respectable” as “not behaving the ways they think black people behave”), but who don’t put on airs and pretend they’re better than other respectable people . . . And know their place, don’t pretend they’re as good as the ruling class, who don’t come around to rub their noses in it. Which is less democratic. This doesn’t seem to have a European or even English counterpart.

Libertarians similarly generally feel that if the government got off everyone’s back, everyone would naturally generate something like that same culture, maybe just with a little more economic inequality.

Bianca Steele, I read that reference to “subtlety and flirting” as being about online dating, I guess trying to imply that techbros ruined online dating with things like Tinder. Except online dating is vastly better than going to seedy bars hoping to find someone, or relying on meeting friends of friends, or whatever we did 20 years ago before the internet made life easier. I don’t think it’s a coded reference to metoo.

SusanC, I have always thought Orwell was anti-communist because they personally screwed him over (in Spain), not because of a particular ideological inclination towards libertarianism.

I’ve always read libertarians as naive fascists. As middle and upper class white boys, they want the state to destroy all competition to their birthright, but unlike actual fascists, they want to pretend it’s not happening, and compete against each other in a protected social space where no one can actually lose. And they want to be able to freely use drugs, without having any solidarity with the black people who have historically suffered in the war on drugs. It’s just playtime politics before they grow up and become real fascists. It’s also facially naive and silly, and there’s no point in taking it seriously.

MarkW @ 64:
Without clicking-thru and reading the stories, I’ll just note that these sound like
government overreach being visited upon those least able to push back”, and hence not exactly solely a libertarian concern. Indeed, it’s *progressive* concern, that poor (really, not-rich) people get smacked-around by the government, where rich people are treated with kid gloves.

Shrinking the size of government won’t solve that problem — it’ll just leave rich people to do whatever they want without any limitations, and the poor won’t have what limited protection they get today.

TL;DR “stopped clock tells correct time twice a day, film at 11”

@reason 63.

I agree with you! Libertarianism/propertarianism as intellectual movement has roots going much deeper. I’m not sure I understand where Milton Friedman comes from, intellectually speaking, but as for the Austrian, this is pretty clear, well-documented and the object of many careful analyses (including Corey Robin’s here). Needless to say, these intellectual roots have nothing to do with climate disruption.

On the other hand, libertarianism/propertarianism has actual social phenomenon with an actual following seems to me quite intricately linked with the rise of the dual crisis. Sometime between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s, a group of socially favored, educated Americans found themselves in an economically ascendent trajectory that let others (say blue-collar workers or first-generation high-school graduates Black Americans) way behind and voilà! there was a ready-made ideology to explain why this was fair and why trying collective action to remedy this state of affair was bound to horribly backfire. So a French intellectual non-entity (Basquiat) and a vaguely sinister Austrian (Hayek) suddenly went all the rage.

30 years later, the pretext is transparent for anyone to see so most people have shifted to other mode of justifications. In the English-speaking world of Trump, Johnson and Morrison, classical scapegoating of the victims and the left (“Everything would fine if not for these lazy Muslims/Mexicans/Blacks/Criminals and the SJW who make excuses for them”) is at the moment prevalent, but I can assure you that the pillaging technocrat version (“We have hard choices to make in order to ensure that the 0,1% keep a 12% growth rate in estate value”) structurally functions in much the same and is not at all more palatable.

I very seriously doubt that the techno-libertarian version (“The choices of superiorly clever people expressed through proprietary apps will solve everything”) would be any improvement on either in terms of form or function.

I know it’s crazy, but I was curious about what libertarians actually *say* about climate change. Apparently, some accept the science (albeit a bit slowly and grudgingly). Then the question is, what can be done about it? Low and behold, back when, one libertarian/conservative proposed approach was something weird called a “carbon tax”. (Sounds like a terrible idea; is there anyone around with an econ background, who could explain it?)

So (some) libertarians favor action on climate change, and support reproductive rights, free speech, due process, ending the War on Drugs, and relatedly (as I noted) criminal justice reform on a variety of fronts. With the unfortunate exceptions of free speech and due process, I’d guess that “the left” has much the same goals on these topics. But after all, what’s important is not working toward common goals, it’s owning the techdudebros, so whatever.

MarkW @ 72:

Progressives often (always?) fail to notice that wealthy people and powerful corporations very often use government powers to do things to people who can’t push back (things that the powerful otherwise could not do). What Pfizer did to Susan Kelo, it could only do with New London’s powers of eminent domain. Without that government power, she would have been free to thumb her nose at Pfizer, and there would have been nothing they could have done to push her out of her house. It took expansive government power to make that possible.

The many striking workers who’ve had their heads busted-in by Pinkerton (and other) strike-breakers might disagree. Rich and powerful people and corps get their way unless government blocks them; then they go about regulatory (and other) capture. The position of libertarians is always that that last bit (capture by the rich) is the be-all and end-all of government.

“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” –Ronald Reagan

Sure. Sure.

It’s not clear to me that libertarianism was ever much of a force in American politics, or that it’s immediately clear that self-identifying libertarians would regard accepting the reality of climate change and the need for state action to fight it as a “move to the left”. As of 2017, the chair of the Libertarian National Committee was against collective action to fight climate change; I was unable to find evidence of Trumpism at that website. I don’t see how it’s possible to know whether the “rank and file” of Libertarians, or the ones regarded as notable by wikipedia, have done the “Trump or leftward” move; no evidence regarding any such general clear notion of “what libertarians are doing” has been advanced. It’s not very convincing to refute any given counter-example (Bailey, Adler, et al) as “no true libertarian”.

But mainly, I don’t understand the point of the exercise: the main claim is that libertarianism (well, maybe specifically “propertarianism”) is dead. I see *some* people and institutions who still seem to consider themselves to be libertarians, who are doing rigorous reporting and zealous advocacy in support of a various goals, many of which are worthy, as I’ve described a couple times above. (Radly Balko is doing the Lord’s work, for example.) I don’t see much point in denying their libertarian identity, if that’s what they think they are, or celebrating the death of what is declared to be their movement. Instead, it seems more useful to agree with them when they’re right, and disagree with them when they’re wrong.

Kiwanda, that article you link to by Adler is an incredibly mealy-mouthed and passive-aggressive attempt to minimize the damage done by climate change. It’s the single work of a single libertarian, and as JQ observes it doesn’t even properly recognize the role all the other libertarians have had in fighting climate science. It ends with a pissy call for a carbon tax, which is not going to be enough to fight global warming, and only after making clear that Adler thinks climate change will be “just a nuisance” and will have positive benefits that might even outweigh the negatives. And even after he wrote that piece for the article, Adler himself was still spinning his bullshit, such as this just a year later on the Volokh Conspiracy:

Meaningful GHG reductions are exceedingly costly. Stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of GHGs requires doing far more than the EPA has contemplated to date, and even that won’t be enough. Until meaningful GHG reductions are cheap and easy, they won’t happen. So until climate activists focus their efforts on reducing the costs of climate action, little progress will be made

He’s a denialist through-and-through and a single article in the Atlantic to greenwash himself as part of applying for a job at WaPo is not sufficient evidence. You know that, if you are familiar with his output, so why do you waste your time with this defensiveness?

Chetan Murphy @76

But their entire philosophy is about doing more than merely restraining government — it’s about hogtying it so that it can’t do a thing. And in such state, well, Pfizer could have done what it wanted to Susan Kelo, b/c there’d have been no government to stop them.

Neither of those propositions are true. The libertarian argument in Kelo was not that government should never do anything ever (a strawman). Nor was it even that government should not be able to use eminent domain for genuine public uses (to build a highway, for example). The argument was that government should not be able to condemn your property and hand it over to a rich, powerful, well-connected private business simply because that business would generate more economic activity and pay more property taxes. Do you disagree? Do you think the progressive justices were correct in letting New London condemn Kelo’s house and neighborhood and turn it all over to Pfizer? Or isn’t that a question you’re willing to answer?

But I think your argument nicely captures the problem with the progressive view of these cases — the reasoning seems to be that if we don’t allow the powerful to crush the weak in these specific instances, then we’ll be placing undesirable restraints on government power, so we must allow the crushing to proceed (sorry Susan Kelo, it’s not personal, it’s business).

@80 Anyone who says ‘I don’t care about politics’ invariably and always means ‘I care deeply about politics but you won’t like my politics’.

Or to put it another way, you might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.

Since 1992, incidentally, when the worst of the climate ecogeddon has happened (has been happening) the only states on planet Earth (with the possible exception of Cuba and NK) have been capitalist states. So it’s reasonable to infer that the problem of climate change is very much caused by laissez faire, fossil fuelled capitalism, and that a solution to this problem might be its removal from the political stage. Implying ‘guilt on both sides’ is to pretend that the trajectory of history since about 1979 has been anything other than endless victories for the right and endless defeats for the left. At the same time as a series of endless victories for Capital and endless defeats for the environment. A coincidence, doubtless.

‘The Davos conference demonstrates only one thing: If the billionaire stranglehold over global politics is not broken, we are all going to fry in a future climate hell…

Nevertheless, a few still have some glimmerings of a conscience — which probably explains why somebody arranged for climate activist Greta Thunberg to attend one of the discussion panels. Oligarchs always want to have some well-scrubbed youth at their conferences to talk about the importance of “raising awareness” about “the issues,” preferably in order to gather some private charity donations. The ultra-wealthy are happy to kick a few pennies to supplicant nonprofit organizations to eradicate guinea worm or whatever. It makes their near-chokehold over global politics seem softer and more reasonable….

Indeed, this is far from the first time oligarchs have attempted to co-opt Thunberg’s celebrity. Barack Obama ended a meeting with Thunberg with a fist bump, declaring “You and me, we’re a team.” Left unmentioned was Obama’s record of pushing fracking and pipeline construction to such an extent that the U.S. became the largest producer of oil and gas in the world under his watch — ahead of even Saudi Arabia and Russia. As Osita Nwanevu writes at The New Republic, “Greta Thunberg and Barack Obama are not on the same team.”‘ (Maybe not, but it would be better if it was Greta, and not Osita Nwaneyu, who was pointing this out).

‘Any climate policy worth the name will have to tear up these Mont Pelerin structures by the roots. Taxes on the rich will have to go up drastically, both to cut the vast carbon emissions of the oligarch class and to fund a crash decarbonization program around the world. ‘

This is true, and in fact, the solution to the climate crisis if fairly simple: raise income tax and corporation tax radically, with the explicit aim of bankrupting those industries most based on fossil fuels, a planned economy pursuing sustainable goals (with no concern, whatsoever, for ‘growth’), nationalisation of key industries (and shutting large swathes of them down), massive investment in nationalised firms pursuing green energy, legal action with hefty jail sentences for climate criminals (almost all contemporary CEOs, especially of course, those involved in fossil fuel production). ‘

Etc. etc. etc.

This is the only solution and anyone who says different is not serious. If ER says different, they are not serious.

Laissez faire capitalism and the continuance of the human race are antonyms.

https://theweek.com/articles/890660/davos-billionaires-are-happy-let-world-burn

Jim Henley, from the sadly defunct blog Unqualified Offerings on September 26, 2011. I was impressed enough to make an archival copy before it evaporated, and I’m glad I did.

My suggestion is that “libertarians” are like tiddlywinks discs that haven’t been flipped yet. Sooner or later, the Great Squidger, Circumstance, presses on you, and you end up in one of the cups over here on the left or over there on the right. At that point you may still be proud of your unique translucency or striking striations, but you have jumped one way or the other. You may formally renounce your libertarianism. You may insist on keeping the label while justifying what amounts to joining the conservative coalition on the grounds that “Economics is primary, and the Republican Party is the lesser of two evils economically,” or explaining away operational liberalism because, “while liberals tend to overreach in regulating the free market, at least they want to keep the Hand of the State away from your nether parts.”

For a lot of so-called neo-libertarians, the squidger was the Global War on Terror. In particular, supporting the Iraq War tended to align them with neoconservatives and “Jacksonians” in the GOP coalition, and over time they became “Republican Party Reptiles” and, eventually, just reptiles. The Global Financial Crisis and the ensuing Great Recession pushed others leftward. These people decided events had falsified the strong version of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, and demonstrated that Wealth would always be able to make the political system socialize its own risks. In such an environment, gutting such safety nets as exist for the non-wealthy amounted to unilateral disarmament by the bottom 90% of the income distribution.

And maybe you think that second category is me, and maybe I had to delete “us” and “we” from the first version I wrote, because it would have been dishonest. Because I think my real *flip* was the Bush Administration’s social-security privatization proposal in 2005-6, and the enthusiastic advocacy for it by libertarians like my, well, young friend Will Wilkinson. As long as privatized social security was abstract, I was all for it. But when it became, seemingly, a real possibility, I looked at the law, and I looked at the Henley-family finances, and I knew fear. Real “maybe I won’t sleep; maybe I’ll just stare at the ceiling all night” terror. Somewhere in there, I recovered enough other-directedness to recall that we are very far from the worst-off household I know. And I realized that my stated beliefs were a sham. A luxury. I leapt, at least in my secret heart, into one of the available cups.

@83
and by quoting the article – you quoted – you for sure knew about ”the politics” of leaving out the following:

”But Thunberg offered the Davos robber barons no such moral alibi. Instead she attacked the attendees like she always does at such events. She said world leaders are “cheating and fiddling around with numbers” with untested schemes to get emissions down by scrubbing carbon out of the atmosphere. She correctly scoffed at a new plan joined even by Trump to supposedly plant 1 trillion trees (so as to absorb carbon) as inadequate. “Planting trees is good of course, but it’s nowhere near enough,” she said. “It cannot replace mitigation.”

Right?

On my reading of history, most of the time weak government means the rich have the poor at their mercy, and most of the time strong government means the rich have the poor at their mercy.

(Most of the time, not always. Of course there’s a historical record of some victories for the poor over the rich. The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that’s the way to bet.)

So, returning to my first point, ‘more government or less government?’ is the wrong question.

I guess this is partly a glass half-empty thing; is ‘liberaltarianism’ the vanquishor of libertarianism or a new, more resistant mutation?

John Quiggen @90

Radly Balko is doing the Lord’s work, for example.” Yes he is, with the liberaltarians at Niskanen.

And before that, for quite a long time, he did the same kind of work with the libertarians at Reason. The folks at the Institute for Justice are working on many of the same issues. I specifically pointed to the efforts (joined by civil rights groups across the political spectrum) against the doctrine of ‘qualified immunity’, which enables many of the worst police abuses? Do you agree that this is the Lord’s work as well?

@89

And these are political problems that will either be solved by political parties of the Left or else made worse by centrists and political parties of the Right. You can swither and recite cliches about ‘I’m not party political’ all you want, but these are the objective facts.

@89

Oh and incidentally (and this will be the last I post on this, as I am going seriously off topic), here’s some more context.

‘The billionaire helping to bankroll Extinction Rebellion became the world’s top hedge fund manager last year thanks to major investments in firms hit by environmental scandals.
Sir Chris Hohn, who has donated £200,000 to the controversial climate change pressure group and is feared in City boardrooms for putting pressure on companies, saw his investment firm join the ranks of the world’s largest hedge funds last year after a stunning performance….

But The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the winning streak involved huge bets on companies that have been embroiled in environmental scandals. They include Canada’s two biggest rail firms which have been fined in recent years for their failings….

Meanwhile, a US rail company backed by TCI is under investigation over whether it broke environmental laws after cancers in the Houston area were feared to be linked to contamination from the company’s rail yard. ‘

And so on.

Do we think that ER would be more, or less, likely to get lots of money from rich people (and ER is, to a great extent, funded by the 1%) if it dropped the absurd fantasy that it was ‘non-political’ and accepted the objective reality that it is ONLY politicians of the left (and indeed the radical left) who are proposing serious solutions to this problem?

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-7929379/How-Extinction-Rebellions-British-hedge-fund-backer-profits-dirty-firms.html

There’s an obvious difference between how Libertarians have behaved in practice versus what the ideology says, but I always though Libertarian Ideology on pollution was straight-forward: treat it as a wrong done to someone’s person and property, and let them sue tort-style for damages or to have it stopped. Applied to climate change, that would entail allowing people to sue fossil fuel companies (and more) for damages that could potentially be high enough to bankrupt them (especially if you allowed for international suits, which the US does under the Alien Torts Act).

That’s faded out in the US because we switched to a more predictable regulation-and-fines route, as did most places. But that system is flawed as well – the inspections and enforcement of regulations tend to be major targets for political sabotage by polluters, not to mention evasion.

Couple climate tort suits with an explicit carbon permit system, and they’d reinforce each other because people and firms could be hit hard with suits if they can’t prove they had the permits to emit the carbon dioxide they did through their activities.