OK.  This is going to get me hit over the head with a very big mallet by a lot of libertarians.  Screw you guys; I’m gonna talk about it anyway.  Well, actually, I’m not, because Alex Singleton did it for me on the Grauniad’s website:

We should scrap green taxes on flying and replace them with compulsory carbon offsetting. Like a tax, offsetting would add to the price of a journey. The difference would be that the money would go to actually improve the environment.

Alex is head of the Globalisation Institute, worked at the Adam Smith Institute, and previously set up the University of St Andrew’s Liberty Club (kinda like us, but they’re still waiting on global warming up there, while it’s all beach parties down here by the Thames).  So we’ve established that, despite writing for the Grauniad, he’s not a communist.

But why is he writing about climate change, then?  Let’s face it; most libertarians are smarter than the average bear, so we’re realise that debate cannot be closed by a very loud Nobel Prize-winning Vice President on a yo-yo diet.  Many of us remain unpersuaded, and (indeed) grow in skepticism every day.

But that’s not the point.  If you want an argument that climate change isn’t happening, go to this excellent site.  The point and fact are both that, if climate change does happen, and is caused by anthropogenic causes, the government will have failed its only reason to exist, its only justified task: to protect the rights of its citizens from others.  If climate change does happen, it will be just as much a government failure as if the state refused to punish thieves.

That is, unless it remedies it by an alternative method.  The traditional libertarian argument follows: we can’t be forced to accept climate change by the majority belief of society and a few scientists, so we accept the consequences of our own actions; if we’re wrong, and we do end up flooding Bangladesh, we will have committed a tort against them, and impinged the Bangladeshis’ rights to their life, liberty, and property; let them sue us individual polluters to seek compensation, as is their moral and legal right to do.

But that involves too many transaction costs, and is completely implausible.  How do they know whom to sue?  How do we know how much to compensate them?  If the government relies on that system, it seems too unwieldy, and is yet another example of a government failure.

So, for the sake of argument, let’s say that climate change is happening, is caused by humans, and can’t be ’solved’ by legal compensation to the victims.  Let’s also rule out technological cures; I’m not saying they won’t happen (I personally think a one-two of cloud-seeding yachts and fusion power is the answer: an answer that could be provided by private industry), but I am saying that it makes it a more philosophical question to eliminate the temptation of a deus ex machina solution.

In that case, we have to get involved in the debate.  We don’t have to shut up about criticising the flaws of the anthropogenic model of climate change.  We don’t have to stop yelling from the rooftops about the new technological marvels that could save the environment at the same time as saving us money.

But we also have to talk about the intellectually consistent conclusions that we would reach if we accepted the other side’s premise; if we’re truly libertarian, if we truly care about small government, we have to defend small government in the most difficult circumstances, and articulate the form that that government would take.

The current system is a crock of shit, so it’s only fair that people like Alex step up to the plate and give better, and more reasoned solutions than the arbitrary ‘climate levy’ that doesn’t achieve, well, anything.  Alex argues for compulsory carbon dioxide offsetting.  This, at least, allows companies to cut emissions in the most cost-effective way, rather than not being given an option.  It’s a flawed idea, because it allows no room for any net emissions at all: which makes its expansion across other industries an impossibility.

But, again, that’s not the point.  We need ideas.  More ideas.  Better ideas.  We need libertarians to dominate the agenda of ideas to resolve this intellectual problem.  That may be all it is - intellectual, rather than actual - but we need to be able to prove that our system stands up to the rigours of the most impossible challenge that the leftists present us, with all the ifs, buts, caveats, and restrictions that I placed above.  The worst that could happen is we get a system that’s marginally less bad.

If we can prove that we can reason within their premises, even if we don’t accept them, we can surmount the biggest threat to our ideology.  We can prove that it’s grounded in the same concerns that non-libertarians have: only grounded as well in finding both the most efficient and moral solution.  Besides, if it gets column inches from the Grauniad, it can’t be a bad thing.

I find it bizarre that there’s been even so much as muffled or murmured comment, even by the BBC itself, on the findings of the most recent BBC World Service poll. Apparently, after questioning 22,000 people across 21 countries, they’ve found that most people accept the anthropogenic climate change theory, and that most people believe that the government should take drastic interventionist action to prevent climate change.

As bizarre as it is, I find it entirely believable that they did so. This is the BBC, after all, and they’ll make a big deal of anything that supports their political beliefs and objectives: that evil humanity is responsible for past and potential climate change, and that only the white knight of government can save us all from drowning under water levels raised by our own materialistic greed.

And they sell it so well, too. The press release of the poll is titled “All Countries Need to Take Major Steps on Climate Change: Global Poll“. By doing this, not only do they attribute expert status to off-the-cuff public opinion - which is a fallacy regularly committed of worshippers of the twin Gods That Failed - but they only attribute this as an after-thought: as if it doesn’t matter that it’s only a poll, so long as it agrees with the BBC editorial line.

Furthermore, their website describes the ‘news’ as “Humans ‘causing climate change’“. As above, this is a pathetic journalistic trick committed to pass op-ed as fact. As an ex-reporter for the Sun, I know enough about dressing sewage up as something more appetising. I could just as easily title this post “BBC makes big deal out of ‘insignificant snivelling little’ poll that is statistically and political ‘irrelevant’“. Bad example, I know.  After all, what’s more truthful than that?

Whatever one’s opinion on climate change, it can hardly be seen to be just for the government to use its propaganda-broadcasting arm to lower journalistic standards by presenting its own editorial stance, on its own poll, as a newsworthy item of factual content. That is does so indicates how unfree discussion of this issue has been, and how most Western governments have decided to close this debate before it even opened.