In case ACC is real and dangerous, what can the free world do about it? Should we just uphold property rights? I think that’s quite complicated, because you can’t easily trace a particular emission to the damage of property of a particular individual. After it all its such a long process of many decades, so how can someone really provde a sufficient evidence to justify conviction?
“Should we just uphold property rights?”
Property rights are axiomatic, they will always exist. The distinction you mean is ‘private’ property rights, and there is no “just” (as in it being something small and minimal thing towards meeting the goal of providing a solution to the “problem” of “global warming”).
“I think that’s quite complicated”
The principle is pretty simple actually. Compare it to the bs policies that currently exist.
"because you can’t easily trace a particular emission to the damage of property of a particular individual. "
You can’t? That’s one massive assumption & history proves otherwise.
“After it all its such a long process of many decades, so how can someone really provde a sufficient evidence to justify conviction?”
Problem is the state not respecting private property rights (besides it’s mere existence). Solution - get rid of the state.
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If the existence of man-made global warming is proven satisfactorily, emitting CO2 or other ‘greenhouse gases’ would become aggression.
No. If person A builds and factory and then person B builds a house on a coast, guess who homesteaded the climate. If Factory A is the only factory on Earth and can’t be causing global changes on its own, then a million other people build factories, does Factory A suddenly become aggression?
Statist “solutions” to ACC are counter-productive. They essentially want to impoverish humanity and implement a new socialistic dark age so we won’t use as many fossil fuels. Problem is that less capitalism means less technological progress, which means delaying the invention of cleaner fuels. Thus environmental socialism actually leads to more CO2 emissions by delaying technological progress and therefore decarbonization. Capitalism has always led to a lessened environmental impact, decarbonization has been going on for hundreds of years. Humanity wen’t from burning hay to burning lumber to burning coal to burning petroleum, and now solar and nuclear. That has been happening because of free markets, not because of environmentalist busybodies who wanted to social engineer the world. If ACC was real, the best thing to do about it was to let a radically free market produce more clean energy sources.
I’m afraid it does. And it doesn’t matter whether the factory was set up first: if real, man-made global warming is, well, global. So, unless one is the first to settle on a planet, no one can homestead a right to cause global warming. And even if we find out now, this does not provide a carte blanche for all prior agresisons. We might not hold those prior agressors accountable since neither they nor us knew that agresison was going on, but agresison must stop nonetheless.
After all such agresison is stopped, perhaps some general agreement on the acceptable level of emissions would be reached, and rights to emit would be sold (who’d get the money is another matter).
It does matter when someone demands restitution from someone else for something that happened.
If you think that everyone contributing to an effect is responsible for a result that occurs at a certain point, I defer to the marginal revolution.
Of course, that’s why I was careful to differentiate between restitution and stoppage. If we’ve been doing something until now which no one knew could cause damage to health or property, then of course you can’t just ask for restitution for damages incurred. Everyone will have to take the loss.
Still, this does not mean that you can continue to do whatever you’ve been doing, simply because you started before we knew it was causing damage. So, you need not pay, but you must stop. It seems sensible to me.
The discussion made me think of the huge asbestos claims that nearly brought Lloyd’s of London to its knees in the early 90’. Now that I think of it, they should not have been liable for anything, for at the time when the workers health was being eroded by asbestos, no one knew asbestos could do that. So, from then on asbestos should have been considered hazardous, but no one should have been held liable for damages incurred prior to the discovery.
Regarding asbestor, I disagree. First of all I don’t think he should be liable even if he knew asbestos is not very safe. No one should have expectations that the working environment is safe. If you want safety you need to ask for a safety certificate. However if he promised very high standards of safety, he should be liable because the working environment wasn’t safe. It doesn’t matter whether we knew about the dangerous effects of asbestos at that time or not. Strict liabiliy implies that he should be liable nonetheless. For example he could have used only materials that were proved to be safe.
Regarding ACC. Indeed you can’t homestead climate change because there always were people who lived in the coast area for example. Now Merlin, how do you suggest that in case ACC is real, we stop polluters?
It would depend on the contract. If in it the workers specifically accepted all health hazard, than indeed there would be no problem. But where the contract says nothing at all, I cannot bring myself to assume that they have made such a commitment. So, if the contract says nothing, there is liability.
Wow, you killed innovation in one fell swoop right there. Materials might be in use for decades before statistically significant data emerges to prove or hint to some connection with a disease (if we take statistics as decent proof, which Rothbard did not). So, if it can be proven at all, it can be proven only after quite some time. But if people know that this new material could turn out to cost them huge sums, they won’t use it! But if they won’t use it, we’ll never gather enough data and we’ll never know whether it was dangerous or not! All innovation would stop!
And again, please imagine that we’re in the ’80, and suddenly it is discovered that smoking causes cancer, and that second-hand smoke does too. Should all smokers be executed there since they have been actively trying to murder everyone else? Should all their property be confiscated to pay reparations? Not even Stalin would have tried that!
This is clearly unfeasible and unjust. How can you punish someone because he was ignorant of the effect of some agent while that information did not exist? It’s like punishing medieval doctors for manslaughter since they did not use penicillin which could have saved millions of lives. It nonsense.
As I said in a previous post, if some agreement on the acceptable level of emission can be reached (say, we see that the atmosphere can dispense of X tons of emission per year), than rights to emit X tons could be auctioned, or distributed equally among all members of society.
If, in extremis, every degree of emission turns out to be unacceptable, emission should stop and be considered aggression, just like murder would.
Who will make the auction? The government? What if there is no government?
Regarding asbestos. I said that if the workers have agreed to work with materials the property of which is still uknown, then the employer is not liable. He is however liable if he said that he guarantees high safety and uses materials the safety of which is not documented.
I also disagree that workers should assume that working conditions are safe. They should assume nothing. So safety was not specified in the contract, I don’t believe the employer should be liable at all if the working place was not very safe.
The idea that CO2 emissions will somehow be subject to property rights in a free market is a little absurd. The transaction costs for such a scheme are just way too high. The free market “solution” to global warming is having skyrocketting insurance premiums for areas which are likely to be flooded, thereby encouraging people in those areas to relocate.
I corrected myself. Just divide such rights equally to all, and let the market determine who’ll on whom many.
True.
Well, someone must take the loss caused by health hazard sin the workplace, and where the contract says nothing in advance, we must assume something ‘as default’. And since there is no contract, I just see the worker and the employer as two unrelated guys. If the employer’s decisions or actions (“what material to use?”) causes the damage, than he should pay. On the other hand, if some worker injures an other, or if a worker just falls of the building, that is certainly no problem of the employer. So, it will depend on the situation at hand.
Perhaps, but then we’re explicitly giving up and delivering to the sea huge tracts of land, which could be saved (assume flooding is 10% certain and irreversible). So, if the added production that could be gotten out of that additional land would be over the cost of a scheme such as what I propose, than indeed it would not be fine to let these areas disappear. Of course, no one will actually take pen and paper and calculate the costs, but the most effective way to go about this would emerge in time.
What if ACC is such significant that huge floods will cover half of the current land, and natural cataclysms will leave millions dead? Surely you wouldn’t suggest to just relocate so that the factories could continue destroying your land.
I don’t. I’m for emission quotas.
Well, that’s obviously the purpose of warmism. If you control emissions you control industrial production, and if you control industrial production there’s really nothing in modern society you don’t control. Warmism is not a particularly well disguised attempt at implementing socialism for the earth. That’s why climate change has to be manmade, if we decide it’s natural it wouldn’t work. And that’s why it has to be mitigated, if we decide that it’s better to deal with the consequences, or that it’s too late to do anything about it, it wouldn’t work either. If warming was natural it would be a problem that the market can fix, if we wanted to deal with the consequences that would be a problem that the market can fix, but mitigation requires state intervention. Warmism was designed to be a problem that the free market can’t fix, a problem that requires state-socialism. But it’s really remarkably unlikely that such a problem could exist. Just think about the likelihood of manmade emissions having an effect on the atmosphere, but not such a great effect that the damage was done and it’s too late for mitigation to work. It’s insanely unlikely, like hitting bulls eye on a dartboard from the other end of a football field. And it’s not true, the science is made up to lead to the conclusion that emissions have to be controlled. That’s why the science is fake and artificial, it has to lead to a predefined conclusion. Actual science isn’t that predictable. But controlling emissions is obviously unworkable. We don’t even know how much of a reduction would sufficiently mitigate climate change. Nobody has a clue how the atmosphere works, they aren’t even sure whether more CO2 in the atmosphere causes warming or cooling. And they definitely don’t know what rate of emission reduction would have what effect. Anyone who says they know how to micromanage the atmosphere is obviously lying. The libertarian solution to climate change is realizing that it is a political fraud.
You can’t pick an arbitrary % of transgression and apply it to everyone.
I can’t believe I wrote that! OK, I mean within the constraint of the thread. Which implies that I’d be for quotas if (in that order):
- global warming was real, than
- global warring was man-made, than
- global warming was caused by emissions, than
- global warming was reversible, than
- we could come to a generally accepted agreement on the degree of acceptable emissions, than
- we would see that implementing emisisn quotas would be less costly that actually letting global warming work its magic unhampered
Now, I do not believe that a single one of these constraints applies, with the possible exception of the first. So, I’m not really for emission quotas. But taking this extreme example of a very complex problem, a free market could still come up with a solution, and indeed a quite efficient one, given all.
I don’t. But if the arbitration industry would come to accept proof that, say, our atmosphere can disperse 5 million tons of CO2 per year, than any emission above that would be aggression. Now, in order not to punish anyone more heavily that others, we’d distribute quotas for 5 million tons of emission evenly ( say quaotas for 0.7 gramns of emision for every earthling) and then let the market decide how those rights would be distributed. So I don’t see this as a particularly arbitrary solution. Its actually as voluntary as it gets, under the assumed circumstances.