No Coercion

Today is Blog Action Day, organized to try to use coordinated blogging on a single topic to try to affect change. It seems to be focused on statist (i.e. violent) solutions to problems such as poverty, human rights, deforestation, health care, education, etc. The topic this year was declared to be “Climate Change.” Naturally, I’ll be attacking this from a libertarian, voluntaryist, market anarchist angle.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the doomsayers are right about the warming of the planet and its degree of anthropogenicity.  My response is, “So what?” Does that give you the right to hold a gun to my head and prevent me from producing, selling, or buying certain types of vehicles, light bulbs, air conditioners, etc.? Does it give you the right to use violence to force me to spend money to modify my production facilities to meet special emissions caps you’ve set? Does it give you the right to forcibly stop me from raising cattle or the right to take money from me and give it to someone else with a spiffy electric car company? The answer to all these questions is NO. Nothing other than my invading someone’s person or property can provide moral justification for him to commit any of those acts of aggression against me. And of course the State therefore also lacks such justification.

Supporters of government action (violence) to stop or reverse global warming often talk about scenarios such as rising sea levels displacing coastal populations, melting polar ice killing off the polar bears, dramatically altered weather patterns turning productive land into desert, etc. What they never seem to consider is that all of this could happen completely independently of any human action whatsoever. If that was the case, surely they wouldn’t be calling for acts of violence against their neighbors. If it was clear that the planet’s temperature was suddenly rising due to natural causes (like volcanic eruptions, solar activity, or the spontaneous appearance of an army of Megan Fox clones), would these pro-government-action folks be clamoring for the use of force to tell their neighbors how to run their businesses or what kind of TV they can have? Of course not. They would recognize that you do not punish or control people as a reaction to natural phenomena over which they had no control.

But how much different is that than the current situation as they describe it? If they’re right about the anthropogenicity of the latest warming trend, all we can say is that billions of people have interacted in the market place in order to meet each others’ needs and earn a living, thus dramatically improving their standards of living while unintentionally altering the atmosphere to the point that temperatures start to rise. This, to me, seems to be a fairly natural process, and the warming was entirely accidental. Does this call for violent solutions, the likes of which you might employ against an evil supervillian who intentionally poured carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to cause destruction? I don’t see how it can.

And the situation becomes even more untenable for the pro-coercion camp when we look at the fact that the climate system is so complex that we really have no idea if their plans to reduce human economic activity (an inhuman “solution” if ever there was one) will do anything at all to stop or reverse the trend. It’s not pleasant to contemplate all the needless misery and death resulting from the foregone improvement in standards of living (especially for the world’s poorest) if temperature trends are not affected by the statist schemes. Layer on top of that the fact that it’s entirely possible that a slightly warmer Earth, though possibly including higher sea levels, could easily result in vast amounts of currently frozen, unproductive land to become arable or otherwise incredibly beneficial to human utility. And regardless of how things turn out, individuals (again, especially the poorest) will be best able to mitigate the downsides and take advantage of the positives if they remain as free as possible to innovate, produce, and exchange on a voluntary basis, free from government coercion.

One final note is that as societies develop economically, they become ever more able to think beyond their daily survival and consider the costs of their actions on the environment. There is widespread pressure from consumers in the developed world for the companies they patronize to use ever more eco-friendly materials and production processes (even Walmart has begun experimenting with green-topping some of its stores). There are even investment funds that put together portfolios of only companies that meet certain standards of ‘greeness’ and energy efficiency (because consumers are demanding it). Advanced market economies naturally produce participants who are attuned to ever more diffuse effects of their actions, and companies will be forced to compete on those bases. There seems less and less need, even by the standards of the pro-government faction, to use force (a necessarily inefficient and thus eco-UNfriendly mechanism) to force companies to ‘be good.’

It seems to me an inescapable conclusion that the only moral position is to oppose the use of the organized, legal violence of the State to combat climate change and just allow the creation of wealth and happiness that flows from the unimpeded interaction of billions of free individuals spontaneously working together to improve their standards of living.

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