Climate crackup.

• Author: Bell, Bruce K.
• Position: Letter to the editor

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While Ronald Bailey's "Climate Crackup" and Jonathan Adier's "The EPA's Carbon Footprint" (March) were interesting, I was disappointed to find no unique libertarian perspective on global warming.

I believe the uniquely libertarian position is that those who claim harm have the burden of proof. Activists, government agencies, and the courts have tried to subvert this legal requirement of the criminal and civil justice systems for decades by imposing regulatory schemes that require actors to prove they are not harming others. Most recently, they have pushed the "precautionary principle," which in the extreme version would ban all human action if taken to an extreme.

In March 1981, I wrote a feature for reason about a fictional U.S. Supreme Court decision ("Supreme Court Overturns Saccharine...