Conservatives, John Locke, and Climate Change

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:




Conservatives, John Locke, and Climate Change
Darrel Moellendorf - July 7, 2011 12:00 pm


The Heartland Institute hosted a conference this past Friday in Washington, D.C. to support the cause of skepticism about anthropogenic climate change. I went to the institute’s website and found this: “Heartland’s mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.” If the website is to be believed, Milton Friedman once called Heartland “a highly effective libertarian institute.” Am I the only one puzzled about why anyone who believes in “free-market solutions” would be a climate skeptic?

Among American conservatives, there is now a standard anti-government line that would incline them to approach regulatory policies with hostility. But that has nothing to do with climate science. You would think that one could have a free-market economic and philosophical bent and still be perfectly sane about the science of climate change. Shouldn’t we expect the majority of free-market advocates to endorse the position of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, at least at similar rates to the rest of the public? And yet Republicans have only become more skeptical regarding anthropogenic climate change in the last decade, even as the consensus among climate scientists remains overwhelming. It starts to look like an admirable—but deeply wrong—political philosophy has been twisted by a political ideology or corrupted by industry funding, or both.

For those who take their John Locke seriously—and I am assuming that the folks over at the Heartland Institute take their Locke very seriously—the general hostility to regulatory policies is not a starting position but the result of an inference about justice, with respect to goods that morally may be owned privately and thus may not morally be encroached upon by the state. And it is by no means obvious that the atmosphere, or its capacity to absorb and recycle CO2, is such a good.

Locke starts with the idea that “God…hath given the World to Men in common…” I have not heard much talk about that in the press releases coming out the Heartland Institute’s conference. Locke’s view is that private property has to be justified given that starting point; and the justification requires, among other things, that those who appropriate resources leave “enough, and as good,” for others. But when people spoil the atmosphere for a century or more—the average time a CO2 molecule remains in the atmosphere—they are precisely not leaving enough and as good for others. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=489