Justice and climate change: toward a libertarian analysis.

• Author: Shahar, Dan C.
• Position: Essay

As a group, libertarians have not dent well with the prospect of anthropogenic global climate change. As most parts of the world scramble to find "solutions" to what they anticipate will be a serious problem for human civilization, libertarians have often brushed the issue aside by denying that climate change is real or, if it is real, that humans have caused it (Dolan 2006, 445-46). This position is problematic in several ways. Perhaps the most obvious is that the move to dismiss the problem relies heavily on minority views among the climate science community that may turn out to be incorrect (Dolan 2006, 450). It must be stressed that whatever case can be made in favor of questioning our ability to know the precise truth about climate change and to predict future states of the climate system, we must be careful in claiming that climate change is not happening, that humans are not causing it, or that it will not continue into the future to a significant degree (Gardiner 2004, 567). The mechanisms by which anthropogenic climate change might be occurring are firmly established; those by which it might not be occurring are surrounded by controversy and uncertainty.

A more serious problem with the libertarian habit of questioning the scientific basis for concern about climate change is that it does not indicate what position libertarians would endorse if climate change were known to be happening (Dolan 2006, 450). We have no compelling reason to believe that anthropogenic climate change or a substantively similar phenomenon cannot happen. Accordingly, it seems extremely reasonable to ask what libertarians would say about such a phenomenon if they knew that it was occurring now.

In this article, I take the first steps to identifying the kind of answer for which we should be looking. For the sake of this discussion, I assume that the mainstream scientific perspective (embodied in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC) is uncontestable. If that assumption proves to be mistaken, my analysis will be seen to have been based on flawed premises. Accordingly, the reader should keep in mind that any conclusions drawn here depend on the degree to which this fundamental assumption is correct.

Market Failures and Government Inefficacy

Mainstream discussions have typically portrayed global climate change as the product of the free market's systemic failure to bring about desirable environmental, economic, and social outcomes. The IPCC instantiates this view in its Second Assessment Report, noting that any individual contributor to climate change faces a different set of costs and benefits than are imposed on the whole of society as the result of his actions, and so individuals acting in their own interests may lack incentives to do what is best for society as a whole (Goldemberg et al. 1996, 21, 28).

To illustrate this idea, we might notice that for most individuals the personal benefits of, say, driving a car instead of taking the bus more than outweigh any costs that they will ever incur personally from their insignificant individual contributions to climate change. Accordingly, it will be in their personal interests to drive their car instead of taking the bus. But having a large number of extra cars on the road results in additional greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. As Garrett Hardin famously wrote, "we are locked into a system of 'fouling our own nest,' so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free enterprisers" (1968, 1245). The IPCC authors agree, characterizing contributions to global climate change as international externalities and the integrity of the global climate system as an international public good (Goldemberg et al. 1996, 21).

Mitigating global climate change requires the sacrifice of certain interests, and individuals' actions toward mitigation would be rendered insignificant if others did not take similar efforts. Accordingly, it seems reasonable to expect that many individuals will not take significant action to combat climate change in the absence of some kind of international agreement guaranteeing widespread participation. Unfortunately, it would be exceedingly difficult for independent market actors to coordinate such an agreement. Any attempt at doing so would face a number of hurdles, ranging from the large costs of negotiating the provisions of the accord to the pervasive incentive to "cheat."

The most obvious and widely discussed alternative, therefore, is the one that Garrett Hardin suggests: legislation (1968, 1247). If we know that we will "foul our own nest" if left to our own devices, then it might seem reasonable to impose rules on ourselves and to punish violators in order to ensure that we forestall our own downfall. On this basis, the IPCC authors argue that phenomena such as climate change "require a legal framework within which the problems they pose can be addressed" (Goldemberg et al. 1996, 21). They build on the foundation laid by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which they describe as "a framework for collective decision making by sovereign states," and their analysis focuses on the "differences in national perceptions, capabilities, and objectives" that influence the decision-making process in the international political arena (Arrow et al. 1996, 59, 61).

Many libertarians bristle at the implication that centralized planning can easily solve the problems posed by climate change. It seems unreasonable, they argue, to suggest that we can simply fix the inadequacies of an imperfect market by turning the matter over to governments. After all, governments--which are themselves composed of fallible and imperfect individuals--have limitations of their own (Pennington 2005, 40). As Gene Callahan points out, "Government interventions and 'five year plans,' even when they are sincere attempts to protect the environment rather than disguised schemes to benefit some powerful lobby, lack the profit incentive and arc protected from the competitive pressures that drive private actors to seek an optimal cost-benefit tradeoff" (2007, 9).

Accordingly, a number of libertarians have apparently taken the stance that because we cannot hope for an "optimal" level of climate stability, our best option is simply to face the realities of our suboptimal state of affairs. And because, they continue, the free market is the most efficient system for allocating resources to satisfy the needs of society, the best way to deal with climate change is to allow individuals the freedom to adapt in their own way. As George Reisman writes, "Even if global warming is a fact, the free citizens of an industrial civilization will have no great difficulty in coping with it--that is, of course, if their ability to use energy and to produce is not crippled by the environmental movement and by government controls otherwise inspired" (2007).

Climate Change: A Matter of Justice

Both the mainstream view and the libertarian response to it do not consider adequately an important consideration that is central to the libertarian paradigm: according to most accounts, climate change will produce victims. This fact brings us out of the realm of mere economic efficiency and forces us to confront the ethical issue (Baer 2006, 134). To illustrate this matter, imagine for a moment that we are trying to determine the proper social response to a particular theft. It might be true that of all social systems, an unfettered free market provides the best setting in which the victim of the theft can cope with the loss. He would not need to consult a central planning board in order to replace the stolen property, and his greater purchasing power--brought about by participation in a thriving market economy--would enable him to afford replacement with comparative ease.

Libertarians surely would not be satisfied with this "solution," however. In our story, the thief who violated the victim's rights should be held accountable for making proper restitution. Holding the thief responsible does not represent a departure from the normal course of the free market: the free market's operation is predicated on the recognition of rights (Rothbard [1974] 2000, 89-90). Therefore, when libertarians argue that the proper response to climate change is to allow individuals the freedom to adapt to it, they implicitly assume that climate change does not represent an injustice. If it did, the proper response would not simply be to allow people to adapt: libertarians would support protection of the victims' fights. But is climate change unjust? To understand how libertarians should think about climate change, we need to understand how they think about justice.

Rights and Entitlements

Libertarian conceptions of justice resolve around the idea that we may not do certain things to people because they, as intrinsically valuable individuals, are not to be used against their will whenever it would benefit others to do so (Nozick 1974, 30-31): to treat them as mere resources for others' consumption would be to disrespect them on a fundamental level. This view is often represented through some notion of individual "rights." Although the concept of a "right" may seem intuitively simple, difficulties arise as we try to understand exactly how rights are supposed to function (Thomson 1986, 33-48). Because the first step to finding a proper libertarian response to climate change would seem to involve a determination of whether causing such change violates any fights, we must stipulate precisely what it means to have a right to something.

In the simplest conception, to have a fight to something is to be entitled to it, so that its absence constitutes a rights violation, but this conception immediately leads to difficulties. For example, as surely as I have a fight to anything, we would generally acknowledge that I have the right not to have my leg chopped off. Yet if I chopped off my...