[ojc02]

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There have been a few threads about the validity of the global warming concern. I just wanted to ask about what we would do if we *knew* that they were correct and that anthropogenic CO2 has and will cause a global warming disaster.

The way I see it this represents quite a huge market failure, in that CO2 polluters are going to cause a massive disaster some time in the future. In this situation a large number of people will have done huge damage to the property of another very large number of people at some time in the future (when the sea-levels rise). Again, assume for the purposes of discussion that we know this will happen. It seems like it would be totally impossible to arbitrate this after the fact.

I think if you are a consequentialist free market anarchist this should present a bit of a quandry. At least for me, the argument could always be made that the benefit of the market was so huge that you would put up with relatively minor externality failings because the introduction of a state to deal with them would wreck the whole system.

Now we are faced with a situation where the externality is potentially so gigantic that I don't think a consequentialist could argue against intervention in this situation (eg a Pigovian tax, or some other pollution reduction measure).

I totally understand if you want to argue from a Locke natural rights point of view and call this a tragedy of the commons.

I think Borodog quoted one of the Austrians at one point saying that: (paraphrase) pure capitalism was both the most just and the most beneficial system possible. This seems to call that into question.

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I really like reading your posts, great ideas and great thinking IMO FWIW. There are those that claim that the hidden agenda regarding "Global Warming Crises" is to make government more powerful than it already is. The rational of many who claim there is an acute crises seems to go something like this:

Only government intervention can solve this problem and thus we need to make government powerful enough to do so ASAP.

You put it a little more succinclty, if there is an acute crises then the market has failed with the implication being that the government needs to rectify the failure.

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Thank you for the positive feedback [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

I'm still up in the air about this (no pun intended [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] ). I'm trying to keep as open a mind as possible because I don't want my (rightly) deep-seated suspicion of government to cloud my judgment.

Borodog makes very good points though. In general it's very hard to tell what the situation would be if government wasn't present because in my lifetime they always have been there - screwing things up, usually.

To me this situation is analogous to someone claiming they've invented something that can break a law of thermodynamics. It appeared that government was the only "solution" (from a consequentialist perspective). It's like I thought I'd found a perpetual motion machine. That's (almost) how disturbed I was.