Dick, thanks for linking to this article by The Times. I’m as happy as anyone else to see environmentalist dogma outed as bunk, but what convinces you that their conventional wisdom is part of an anti-human agenda? If you are operating from premises that private transactions between resources owners is the morally preferable and most efficient way to allocate resources and to create wealth (premises I share, BTW), can you demonstrate that these premises are valid (viz., clear and enforceable property rights and functioning markets) in all contexts that concern enviros – such as in the atmosphere, oceans and with respect to wildlife? Are there any unowned resources, or resources that are ineptly managed or exploited by rent-seekers due to their “public” ownership?

Maybe some of these matters need to be analyzed a little more deeply, before we deal “death blows” to anyone.

As much as I would like to see such a blow made to the environmentalist, but the problems with the study have been pointed out.It makes the silly assumption that a human walking 3 miles is fueled by industrially produced beef alone, which is an inefficient source of energy.

It would be interesting to see the environmentalist response if such a study were valid, though.

“This article only tells me that the best way to fight global warming is to tax emissions to internalize their costs.”

Well everything including breathing is being taxed today everywhere in the world. Unless you propose a tax cut for those who stop breathing your “sollution” seems a little redundant.

How much CO2 are we slipping into the air by using computers to discuss the awful effects of CO2 on the climate?

Logically, those opposed to “excess” CO2-release should avoid online discussions, thus showing their will with their action (of lack thereof). In the same way, the socialist who denies self-ownership must remove himself from the discussion to avoid logical inconsistency by using his body to deny his (and others) self-ownership.

I guess socialism will not work in the world of logic. Hence, all the violence and statism it tends to bring about.

Tom,

Certainly many real environmental problems can and have been solved by clearly defined property rights. However, I do not agree there is such a thing as unenforceable property rights or externalities.

If an individual or group of individuals acting in concert violates your property rights you should be able to hold them accountable. I can’t think of a situation where this is unenforceable. Your property is damaged, of course, and you take the offending party to court to prove they are responsible.

Mike

Mike, my chief point was that for many of the issues that bother enviros, there simply are no clear or enforceable property rights, so that resort to private transactions or judicial mechanisms are fruitless. In part this may be the result of maniplutations by statist corporations. This has long been recognized by Austrian stalwarts, from Mises on down.

Economics tells us, and history shows us, that common, open-access resources, unless they are placed under the control of property-rights regimes that establish clear and enforceable rights of access and management, are likely to be over-used (as users cannot secure the benefits of moderating exploitation or investing in future harvests). This is easily seen in the exploitation of the great plains, many water resources and in the continuing collapse of the oceans’ great fisheries.

The success of makind in generating true wealth has been in evolving mechanisms to solve tragedy of the commons problems: See Bruce Yandle, The Commons: Tragedy or Triumph?
http://www.libertyhaven.com/politicsandcurrentevents/environmentalismorconservation/commons.shtml.

But while such mechanisms evolve over time, they take effort – especially in overcoming prisoners dilemma bargaining issues and entrenched special interests that benefit from the “free” use of unowned or “public” resources – and there is no assurance that effective private or common-property rights regimes will be crafted before valuable resources are much diminished.

Regards,

Tom

ktibuk, I’m with you on your first two-and-a-half sentences. (I note that this will require political will and state action – some state action is apparently acceptable, right?)

But are they reasons that we should deny either that the climate is changing, our role in it or the absence of property rights in the atmosphere, and say that those who are concerned have an anti-human agenda?

Or is that the approach you consider best suited to persuading people on the agenda you first advocate?

Hi, Mark. In case you missed it, I also responded to you at Dr. Reisman’s last thread: http://blog.mises.org/archives/006808.asp.

Mark, I’ll agree with your last three paragraphs even as again you have totally misread me in your first paragraph. The value of individual liberty is a strong argument that can be made in favor of keeping the government out of the business of trying to “protect” us in various ways, including with respect to the environment. I encourage you and others to keep making these arguments.

However, your retreat to ethics rather than a response on the merits with respect to the economics is puzzling, but it is one with your feeble mischaracterization of my position, I suppose.

I have not argued in favor of the State inventing property rights to unused and unclaimed resources (but hmmm, you don’t breathe or feel you have a right to continue to do so?). Rather, the “nonsense on stilts” that I have mentioned above is the rather basic observation that the regular mechanisms of resource allocation don’t function where there are no clear or enforceable property rights. Before we run away from economics to ethics, perhaps you care to address this point?

As a study guide, let me refer you to these paragraphs from a well-known environmental thinker:

“[I]f some of the consequences of [a proprietor's] action are outside of the sphere of the benefits he is entitled to reap and of the drawbacks that are put to his debit, he will not bother in his planning about all the effects of his action. He will disregard those benefits which do not increase his own satisfaction and those costs which do not burden him. His conduct will deviate from the line which it would have followed if the laws were better adjusted to the economic objectives of private ownership. He will embark upon certain projects only because the laws release him from responsibility for some of the costs incurred. He will abstain from other projects merely because the laws prevent him from harvesting all the advantages derivable.

“The laws concerning liability and indemnification for damages caused were and still are in some respects deficient. By and large the principle is accepted that everybody is liable to damages which his actions have inflicted upon other people. But there were loopholes left which the legislators were slow to fill. In some cases this tardiness was intentional because the imperfections agreed with the plans of the authorities. When in the past in many countries the owners of factories and railroads were not held liable for the damages which the conduct of their enterprises inflicted on the property and health of neighbors, patrons, employees, and other people through smoke, soot, noise, water pollution, and accidents caused by defective or inappropriate equipment, the idea was that one should not undermine the progress of industrialization and the development of transportation facilities. The same doctrines which prompted and still are prompting many governments to encourage investment in factories and railroads through subsidies, tax exemption, tariffs, and cheap credit were at work in the emergence of a legal state of affairs in which the liability of such enterprises was either formally or practically abated.”

“Whether the proprietor’s relief from responsibility for some of the disadvantages resulting from his conduct of affairs is the outcome of a deliberate policy on the part of governments and legislators or whether it is an unintentional effect of the traditional working of laws, it is at any rate a datum which the actors must take into account. They are faced with the problem of external costs. Then some people choose certain modes of want-satisfaction merely on account of the fact that a part of the costs incurred are debited not to them but to other people.

“The extreme instance is provided by the case of no-man’s property referred to above. If land is not owned by anybody, although legal formalism may call it public property, it is utilized without any regard to the disadvantages resulting. Those who are in a position to appropriate to themselves the returns–lumber and game of the forests, fish of the water areas, and mineral deposits of the subsoil–do not bother about the later effects of their mode of exploitation. For them the erosion of the soil, the depletion of the exhaustible resources and other impairments of the future utilization are external costs not entering into their calculation of input and output. They cut down the trees without any regard for fresh shoots or reforestation. In hunting and fishing they do not shrink from methods preventing the repopulation of the hunting and fishing grounds. In the early days of human civilization, when soil of a quality not inferior to that of the utilized pieces was still abundant, people did not find any fault with such predatory methods. When their effects appeared in a decrease in the net returns, the ploughman abandoned his farm and moved to another place. It was only when a country was more densely settled and unoccupied first class land was no longer available for appropriation, that people began to consider such predatory methods wasteful. At that time they consolidated the institution of private property in land.”

Can you tell me what “pathetic” green socialist, apparently ignorant of all profoundly important Austrian insights, “trots out this nonsense on stilts, not for the purpose of defending individual rights to liberty, but rather for the advancement of his utopian Big State cause: saving man from his benighted desire to create, produce, and improve”? Let me know if you need any hints.

By the way, since you are not in favor of any state action but believe that any losses relating to climate change should be worked out through private claims, I am curious how you would respond to those conservative legal scholars who would insist that the federal government should step in to forestall a rising tide of exactly the kind of private action and litigation that libertarians support:

http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2007/07/global-warming-.html
http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2007/07/global-warmin-1.html

Regards,

TT

Philemon, I’m flattered by your attention, but you forgot your thinking cap in your quest for witticism and scoring what you think are easy points.

First, it seems you don’t recognize sarcasm.

Next, clearly Garrett Hardin was painting with too wide of a brush when he spoke of the “tragedy of the commons”; what he was really talking about was un-owned, open-access resources. Your example of the English enclosure movement can be easily argued (as you imply) as a case of state-sanctioned theft of private but commonly owned and managed resources, but does this apply to the atmosphere and ocean fisheries or other UNOWNED resources? Who has homesteaded what rights in these cases? Are there any externalities relating to their usage?

I imagine you understand that to avoid ruinous use of resources they must move from an unowned state to to an owned state; common property systems that exclude others may be the initial state, followed by individual property. There are bound to be conflicts among resource users all along the way, but it is the creation of property rights, common or individual, that allows wealth-creation as opposed to mere resource exploitation that becomes destructive at high levels of use. See Yandle.

Next, it is a fact that powerful groups have enlisted the support of the state in this process, such as the English enclosures and in the enactment of laws in the US to circumscribe common law rights in favor of polluting industries. So yes, the state can easily be an instrument of theft. (And those who oppose this must necessarily approve state action to reverse the status quo.)

While some open-access resources can become privatized without state involvement, it is very difficult to imagine that happening with respect to something like the atmosphere or ocean fisheries. If you were to recognize this, would that ipso facto make you an advocate of state involvement?

Regards,

TT

Dan, thanks for your comments. On Hoppe, have you read this critique by Bob Murphy and Gene Callahan: http://www.anti-state.com/murphy/murphy19.html?

1. With respect to the topic of your post, I completely disagree with you that “the ultimate answer to the environmental question lies in ethics.” It is the mainstream Austrian position – and much more productive than simply calling people names – to see environmental issues not as fundamental conflicts over ethics, but as simple struggles over resources that are not effectively owned, such that the market catallactic mechanism is not functioning well.

You might be aware that Roy Cordato has made this case in “An Austrian Theory of Environmental Economics”, http://mises.org/daily/1760. For convenience, I quote a few relevant juicy bits:

“Humans cannot harm the environment. Instead, they can change the environment in such a way that it harms others who might be planning to use it for conflicting purposes.”

“The focus of the Austrian approach to environmental economics is conflict resolution. The purpose of focusing on issues related to property rights is to describe the source of the conflict and to identify possible ways of resolving it.”

“The starting point for all Austrian welfare economics is the goal seeking individual and the ability of actors to formulate and execute plans within the context of their goals. Furthermore, in all three approaches, social welfare or efficiency problems arise because of interpersonal conflict. … A theory of environmental economics and pollution that evolves from problems associated with human conflict then would be a natural implication of each of these welfare standards. [I]rresolvable inefficiencies, i.e., inefficiencies that cannot find a solution in the entrepreneurial workings of the market process, arise because of institutional defects associated with the lack of clearly defined or well enforced property rights. In a setting where rights are clearly defined and strictly enforced, plans may conflict but the resolution to that conflict is embedded in the exchange process. … In the absence of clearly defined and strictly enforced property rights this process breaks down and the conflict becomes irresolvable through the market process. Under … Austrian approaches to welfare economics, therefore, the solution to pollution problems, defined as a conflict over the use of resources, is to be found in either clearly defining or more diligently enforcing property rights.”

“[W]e have integrated the Austrian focus on the actor’s means-ends framework, including its emphasis on the subjective nature of value and therefore costs, with the definition of what constitutes an environmental problem. By defining such problems in these terms, both the nature of pollution and the definition of a polluter take on new meaning. Environmental problems are brought to light as striking at the heart of the efficiency problem as typically seen by Austrians, that is, they generate human conflict and disrupt inter- and intra-personal plan formulation and execution.”

“[T]he Austrian approach to solving pollution problems may face implementation problems at the margin, i.e., with certain “tough cases,” defining and enforcing property rights already stands as the fundamental way in which interpersonal conflicts of all kinds are avoided or dealt with. … The challenge for Austrians is to explain how we apply the theory in certain tough cases ….”

2. You say “I think any true Austrian would hold that if there were a problem, people would begin to act against it. And thus, environmentalists are caught in a pinch.” Besides all of the hot air, surely you have not missed that people ARE acting against climate change? They are not only preparing for and acting in the face of a changing climate, but they (individuals, corporations, utilities, universities, various associations of the above and various towns, cities, states, and international organizations) are also taking voluntary action to mitigate further climate change.

3. You believe any state involvement to be unethical and inefficient; fine. But how does this wheel hit the road? Are you against taking action to deregulate and remove exisiting laws, rules and subsidies that favor current industrial insiders and business and both block a more flexible energy system and protect insiders from private liability actions?

4. “You are criticizing acting man for not economizing something which it considers, at this time, as unworthy of being economized.” “Any austrian will tell you that individual men will consider the atmosphere and the space which considers it at the appropriate time for them. If they do not, their will be losses, psychic or otherwise, which reinforces the fact that they will be economized at just the right time.”

We agree that the atmosphere is not now presently a good, but the fact that “acting man” does not now economize it doesn’t mean that it is not a resource, but simply one for which no effective ownership rights presently exist – and that’s all. There are plenty of cases of valuable resource that have been destroyed due to lack of clear property rights, including recently the great cod fishery off the Grand Banks. Sometimes these failures are a result of the misuse of “public” resources by insiders, but in other cases it may simply have been the difficulties that the users have had in overcoming the prisoners’ dilemmas involved in working out shared rules.

And for the atmosphere and climate, now seems to be exactly “the right time”, as evidenced by all of the activities underway – including private litigation relating to climate change that some “conservatives” are using as a reason to argue for a federal solution: http://www.examiner.com/a-855349~Watch_for_the_coming_flood_of_global_warming_litigation.html.

If Austrians wish to avoid what they see as destructive and undesirable state action, now is the time that they should be actively engaged in arguing their point of view, and not ignoring Austrian teaching by simply casting aspersions or assuming that all will work itself out without a struggle.

TT

“There is no helplessness in fact. To men who use reason and are free to act, nature gives more and more. To those who turn away from reason or are not free, it gives less and less. Nothing else is involved.”

G. Reisman

Thanks, Anthony. Seldom is heard an encouraging word.