The environment isn’t very popular with libertarians. My suspicion is that support for the environment is viewed as a vessel for regulation and taxes (specifically a carbon tax) – an anathema to liberation. There are, however, very libertarian considerations when it comes to environmental pollution.
The first and most serious is the violation of the non-aggression principle. Polluters emit poisonous gas into the air. Chemical runoff from fertilizers, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and nitrogen oxides all negatively impact society. Producers of goods that cause air, soil, and water pollution profit while other individuals suffer the consequences; this is hardly a non-aggression ideal.
To further establish fossil fuels’ anti-liberty credentials, they do this with government assistance.
The Overseas Development Institute, and Oil Change International, commissioned a study which concluded that global subsidies for fossil fuel producers stood at $775 billion, while green energy subsidies received a humbler $101 billion.
Fossil fuels receive an unfair competitive advantage. Libertarians desperately need to stop pretending this is a free market – it is big government.
Environmentalism ought not to be a platform for the left. There is no stronger empirical argument for liberty than the horrifying reality of governments actually stealing our money and giving it to people to poison the air we breathe and destroy the life-permitting chemical balance of our atmosphere. Big government interfering with the free market system is the height of corruption.
Ronald Reagan famously quipped that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” When it comes to the environment, truer words were never spoken.
Free market environmentalists advocate internalizing the costs of production. If there is a cost of producing a product then this should be factored into the cost of production rather than it being paid by a bystanding individual.
There is no shortage of arguments libertarians have ready to dispense (if the topic of environmentalism is brought up) regarding anthropogenic causes to our planet’s warming; some are more intelligent than others.
I would like to remind all true libertarians that none of these serve as sufficient justifications for overlooking the violation of the non-aggression principle with poisonous air or the big government-style subsidies that individuals have to pay.
On the opposite end of the political spectrum, we find leftists who urge me on to the conclusion that government is necessary for the protection of our environment. The empirical evidence suggests that governments are not only unlikely to be able to accomplish this but are even more likely to be an accomplice for the opposite.
Leftists urge me to support a system that’s statistically, and therefore empirically, likely to oppose environmentalism due to the enormous politicking power of the fossil fuel industry.
The only pragmatic solution to human-caused degradation of our environment is the idealism of liberty.
Only through the elimination of subsidies can we create a fair market for green energy. Only through the non-aggression principle can we reasonably argue for additional costs imposed on fossil fuel production – in the absence of that, it’s mere capriciousness.
At the heart of environmentalism is liberty; not a big government with all its corruption-potential, but liberty for the individual and justice for society.
Brandon Kirby
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I have been a libertarian environmentalist animal-rights activist for a long long time, and to me they do not conflict at all. In fact, all of them are based upon my opposition to what I call Control-Freak-ism, that very human need to dominate and be in control of things — or destroy them if one cannot be. Political oppression is Control-Freak-ism applied to other human beings. Animal abuse is Control-Freak-ism applied to other species. Environmental destruction is Control-Freak-ism applied to the planet overall. This is the adversary we are trying to defeat.
[…] Freedom Philosophy: Free Market Environmentalism – Being Libertarian […]
I agree with the author that the government almost always makes things worse with regards to the environment, and that respecting private property generally is much more beneficial. However, I do not have the hostility that some seem to have towards government-managed wilderness lands, as a I view them as a public good and as such, one of the few things government can be tasked with (sure as hell a lot less a violation of liberty than throwing people in jail for non-crimes or taxing half our income or droning people halfway across the globe). Once these lands are gone, they are gone. Put in some nice hiking and biking trails, use competitive bidding to operate concessions and keep them as they are.
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