Bruce Sterling recently declared that
Viridian greens are winning
. In a week where John Howard hails climate scientist Tim Flannery as
Australian of the Year
, he might have a point. In 2007, you're green or you're dead in the water. Which brings us to libertarians.
Greens and libertarians tend to see themselves as natural antagonists. Greens see libertarians as right wing extremists; selfish, corporate shills for the ugliest side of heartless capitalism. Libertarians see greens as nannies finding yet another reason to expand the state towards omni-competence and tyranny.
In the US, the green movement in the seventies emerged in parallel with libertarian reactions to wealth destroying command economy techniques used throughout state and federal governments. A representative clash of those worldviews might be Julian Simon's
1980 bet with Paul Ehrlich
on commodity prices. Simon won, but also kind of missed the point, and it showed a telling intellectual naivety on the part of Ehrlich and his colleagues. This instinct of mistrust continues to the present day: the otherwise excellent Reason magazine flogged the climate change denialist horse long after it was dead. (Even last month Ronald Bailey was unable to write an article
on the topic
without putting the word solution in quotes.)
Though the market is a
recognised
green tool
, in green philosophical terms, libertarians are
off the map (PDF)
.
This is a shame. There are a number of intersections between greens and libertarian philosophies, and plenty of opportunities for synthesis. Libertarians believe in individual responsibilty, agency and moral conscience, not just as a way of making oneself rich in a narrow sense, but as a better way of living, and this extends to choices about drugs or lifestyle. They believe that your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins, but that shadow boxing should not be stomped on by the police. They believe that using the state to distribute services or largesse ties citizens to a dead central hand, and impinges on both innovation and liberty. In addition, many libertarians tend to be materialists and empiricists who see their philosophies as hard headed responses to the physical universe and human nature.
Environmental values are not usually cast in these terms, but once you accept the existence of environmental externalities, they are not just comprehensible but useful from a green perspective. In a world where the climate has been changed by industrialisation, your right to swing your carbon ends where my coastline begins. Failing to control that is a failure of stewardship on an individual level. By contrast, relying on the state, or utility monopolies, to provide water and and energy, ties you to their command economy apron strings in a way a more decentralised solution would not. For example, using water tanks in combination with larger reservoirs provides a more robust decentralised solution than relying solely on dams and stormwater drains. The common aesthetic is one of enlightened self-reliance.
Dan Sullivan recognised common aspects of greens and libertarians in a
1994 essay
. He ties it back to the moral basis for private property and distinguishing property earned through one's labour from common community assets partitioned amongst individuals. One of the technical names for this position is
Geolibertarianism
. This is particularly relevant today to air and climate, but it relates to a much older debate about land and land taxation that harks back to Locke, Paine and Jefferson. The usual policy outcome is support for a Land Value Tax. Since we don't have a good way to partition air, or climate variation for that matter, you could recast it in terms of an air or climate services rental fee.
We live in a time of large governments, where legislation structures and directs many aspects of our economic and environmental lives. Now that the political and cultural ground on climate change has shifted, that means government will need to move too: it will be activist and dynamic reorganisation, or a failure. The ten tonne koala leviathan is on the move already, and when government moves, it usually moves power to itself. This week the Howard government proposed taking control of the Murray-Darling river system, without, of course, this being balanced by additional state autonomy in any other area. Soon the 500 tonne gorilla in the east Pacific will be on the move too. Without an environmental sensibility libertarians will be catapulted into further irrelevance. Without a libertarian sensibility green policies will be servants of a brittle, stifling, central state.
