What Would You Do With CFCs?

[Mordan]

I have been attacked on the global warming issue.

Bill Maher interviewed him on the subject, but Ron Paul's answer was pretty weak.

How libertarians answer the challenge of global pollution:

be it

CFCs

Carbon Emissions,

How do world citizens get together to ban toxic substances from being released in the air, destroying ozone or other layers of the atmosphere?

[acptulsa]

The libertarian position is that laws are to protect people from each other, not themselves. It really isn't diametrically opposed to regulation. That said, I suspect that Dr. Paul would personally prefer to see fear of lawsuits cause self-regulation, but I sincerely doubt he'd scrap all emissions regulation--especially with so much more pressing work needing to be done.

[jmdrake]

How do you stop carbon emissions? Stop breathing. :rolleyes: Seriously man made global warming is total BS. As for the ozone layer depletion that's due mainly to supersonic jets and the space shuttle. So cut NASA to save the environment. ;)

Regards,

John M. Drake

[Mordan]

How do you stop carbon emissions? Stop breathing. :rolleyes: Seriously man made global warming is total BS. As for the ozone layer depletion that's due mainly to supersonic jets and the space shuttle. So cut NASA to save the environment. ;)

Regards,

John M. Drake

this kind of argument isn't going to win us voters trust me.

CFCs are what make the ozone hole. This has been proven times and times again. I'm an engineer and the chemistry is clearly explained in scientific papers. The US signed a treaty phasing out the use of CFCs.
Carbon emissions are more ambiguous. Anyways the theorical challenge to libertarianism still stands.

Do we accept private use of a substance giving short term benefits but having bad long term consequences on earth/human health ?

Can't we just accept the government should regulate in some cases to protect citizens?
Can't we support a world market-based approach to pollution? (which Kyoto is trying to do)

My brother tells me, this is the single biggest flaw of Ron Paul's ideology and the single reason Ron Paul cannot have his vote. I'm left on the ground without arguments.

[Dr.3D]

Just how do those CFCs, which are heaver than air get up in to the ozone layer?
The ozone layer is up in the stratosphere.

[hypnagogue]

I am of the opinion that the only way to use the market to correct practices which are damaging to our mutual environment is to introduce a cost. In other words, a pollution tax. It's no different then littering fines. I find nothing unlibertarian about such an approach.

[angelatc]

I am of the opinion that the only way to use the market to correct practices which are damaging to our mutual environment is to introduce a cost. In other words, a pollution tax. It's no different then littering fines. I find nothing unlibertarian about such an approach.

Just curious about how old you are. IMHO, littering was far more affected by social pressure than it was by fines.

When I was a kid, it was not uncommon to see people fling garbage from their cars. Then came the crying indian commercial. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QKvEy0AIk

(Yes I know - he wasn't a real Indian. He was an actor.)

[amy31416]

How do you stop carbon emissions? Stop breathing. :rolleyes: Seriously man made global warming is total BS. As for the ozone layer depletion that's due mainly to supersonic jets and the space shuttle. So cut NASA to save the environment. ;)

Regards,

John M. Drake

Your sources, sir?

[ChickenHawk]

I'm not going to argue that CFCs don't damage ozone, but how do we know that CFCs are causing a problem with the ozone layer? Doesn't the hole go away in the winter? Hasn't the hole always been there as far as anyone knows? It's my understanding that the hole was discovered very soon after the ozone layer itself was discovered.

[Mini-Me]

Let's stop splitting hairs over, "do CFC's really damage the ozone layer?" For the sake of argument, let's assume they do, because regardless of whether or not this particular example is valid, the general issue must be coherently addressed.

Therefore, here's the solution:
I imagine that if the entire citizenship of the Australian continent filed a few class-action lawsuits that absolutely bankrupted corporations stupid enough to use CFC's, others would think twice about doing the same...(it would also help if we got rid of the "corporate personhood" sham that allows shareholders to limit their liability beyond what they could with private contracts - after all, corporations as they exist today are government constructs, not mere joint-stock companies born in the free market).
CFC's and global pollution can be handled on the basis of property rights, just like more local water/ground pollution. The only requirement is that our laws allow citizens of other countries to sue for damages, which I don't find unreasonable at all - after all, if the US protected its companies from such lawsuits, that would be the same thing in principle as another country harboring terrorists. If a country allows its citizens to commit aggression against citizens of other countries without punishment, the situation could escalate into full-out war. Therefore, it's reasonable to allow citizens of other countries to sue our companies in our courts (and if the judgment is not to their liking, international relations may suffer).

The main problem with this is that when you base environmental upkeep on property rights, you need to find some way to keep the judges from becoming corrupt...(but of course, that's the case no matter what avenue we take). Huge infringements on the property rights of others should not be punished with a slap on the wrist, but a crippling lawsuit that serves as an effective deterrent for the rest of eternity.

[IPSecure]

Have everyone pay a fee to the planet, dig a hole and through it in.

Or

We could sell 'Pollution Tax Credits', and trade them on the stock market!


Regarding the ozone layer - Anyone think that all of the satellites and rockets we send into space has anything to do with the 'hole'?

[Mordan]

Let's stop splitting hairs over, "do CFC's really damage the ozone layer?" For the sake of argument, let's assume they do, because regardless of whether or not this particular example is valid, the general issue must be coherently addressed.

Therefore, here's the solution:
I imagine that if the entire citizenship of the Australian continent filed a few class-action lawsuits that absolutely bankrupted corporations stupid enough to use CFC's, others would think twice about doing the same...(it would also help if we got rid of the "corporate personhood" sham that allows shareholders to limit their liability beyond what they could with private contracts - after all, corporations as they exist today are government constructs, not mere joint-stock companies born in the free market).
CFC's and global pollution can be handled on the basis of property rights, just like more local water/ground pollution. The only requirement is that our laws allow citizens of other countries to sue for damages, which I don't find unreasonable at all - after all, if the US protected its companies from such lawsuits, that would be the same thing in principle as another country harboring terrorists. If a country allows its citizens to commit aggression against citizens of other countries without punishment, the situation could escalate into full-out war. Therefore, it's reasonable to allow citizens of other countries to sue our companies in our courts (and if the judgment is not to their liking, international relations may suffer).

The main problem with this is that when you base environmental upkeep on property rights, you need to find some way to keep the judges from becoming corrupt...(but of course, that's the case no matter what avenue we take). Huge infringements on the property rights of others should not be punished with a slap on the wrist, but a crippling lawsuit that serves as an effective deterrent for the rest of eternity.

thank you for addressing the issue. For the record, I'm a libertarian but I came to realize the ideology has some shortcomings that need to be addressed.

I will play devil's advocate as my bro will never come here.

Your solution is "allow foreign citizens to sue in other countries"

Do you find this solution practical?. Who do you sue? Which companies? All that use CFCs? And in which country? America? Europe? China? All countries in the world are currently using CFCs.
Would we accept a crippling lawsuit when the very core of our economy is at stake? (case of carbon emissions). We would never accept Australians or anyone to wield so much power. Corporate Interests would corrupt the process I'm afraid.

What about the poor people in the Seychelles island? They will lose their islands if the level of the sea rises. How do you pay them back?

Wouldn't the cost of setting a world market aiming at lowering pollution far offset the cost of pollution itself, as it has done irrepparable damage? Can't we citizens of the world, acknowledge this issue and give an international body the power to set up and run this market?

any thought?

[acptulsa]

As I say, laws that protect one person from harm at the hands of another is absolutely not contrary to the ideals of libertarianism. If it were, there would be no difference between this and anarchy. So, neither regulations nor treaties would be specifically an anathema to the concept.

[Mini-Me]

thank you for addressing the issue. For the record, I'm a libertarian but I came to realize the ideology has some shortcomings that need to be addressed.

I will play devil's advocate as my bro will never come here.

Your solution is "allow foreign citizens to sue in other countries"

Do you find this solution practical?. Who do you sue? Which companies? All that use CFCs? And in which country? America? Europe? China? All countries in the world are currently using CFCs.
Would we accept a crippling lawsuit when the very core of our economy is at stake? (case of carbon emissions). We would never accept Australians or anyone to wield so much power. Corporate Interests would corrupt the process I'm afraid.

What about the poor people in the Seychelles island? They will lose their islands if the level of the sea rises. How do you pay them back?

Wouldn't the cost of setting a world market aiming at lowering pollution far offset the cost of pollution itself, as it has done irrepparable damage? Can't we citizens of the world, acknowledge this issue and give an international body the power to set up and run this market?

any thought?

I think the only real "problem" with libertarianism isn't the philosophy of limited government in and of itself, but that we might be defining "aggression" too narrowly as a single individual overtly committing obvious and quickly-materializing harm to a single person or [relatively] small group living locally. However, "aggression" is a little more fuzzy when a whole bunch of companies might be committing a great deal of harm, yet it's distributed among billions of people that can live thousands of miles away, and we may not see its effects for a significant period of time. This distributed kind of aggression is a little harder to define and account for. However, I don't think it's a "glaring flaw" - just, as you said, something that needs to be addressed.

One key point to remember is that under a real free market, our economy would not be so fragile as it is today, and it could not be hurt by a single large company going out of business (which in today's economy would put tons of people out of a job for a significant amount of time). Instead, the greatly increased competitive pressures would make it more like cutting a head off a hydra, where two more spring up in its place. Therefore, we wouldn't have to worry as much about courts "not allowing" people to sue a company out of business for economic reasons. We'd still have to address corruption and bias concerns, but if it's doable under any system, it's doable under this one...after all, no structure is more prone to corruption and bias than an "independent" unelected body of elites deciding policy.

Now, as far as allowing foreigners to sue - the fact is, if we didn't allow foreigners to sue companies in the US that are doing harm to them, we'd be doing the same thing as harboring terrorists. Just like any other similar situation, this would result in tense international relations. That, of course, can lead to war (and in many ways, the other country would be justified). At the very least, it could hurt our trade prospects and therefore our economy - so we'd really have no choice but to allow redress for foreigners wronged by our citizens.

When you regulate industries, you might end up over-regulating on something that they aren't really harming the environment with. On the other hand, any time regulation is involved, the biggest violating industries will always lobby and bribe politicians in order to have first dibs at writing those regulations. Although such regulations do end up limiting big corporations, the tradeoff is that they benefit them relative to smaller companies, further cementing their market share. Because of the corruption inherent in centralized government, centralized regulations are almost always written to look like "positive change," when they really hurt small companies even worse by erecting hoops only the large ones can jump through or circumvent. In other words, regulations simultaneously put a harness on big corporations but appease them by giving them an anticompetitive spiked club to whack competition with. This tendency toward overregulation (along with overtaxing, inflationary credit-based fiat money, and corporate welfare) is one of the major reasons why we're currently experiencing an unholy and unnatural trend of business mergers and consolidations. Under such a system, only the big boys can compete (unlike in a real free market). The funny thing is...what happens under our current system is people think, "Yeah, those damn corporations can't pollute the environment! We sure stuck them with some tough regulations now!" The reality is quite different...instead, those regulations protect companies because, even if they're still doing harm to the environment, they can point to the fact that they're working inside of industry regulations (which they largely decided the terms of, since any centralized power can and will be corrupted) - which makes them untouchable from a legal standpoint!

That's why it's usually best to wait until harm has clearly been committed, and then sue for damages - and the system needs to allow people to destroy a company to the point where it makes a difference and acts as a huge deterrent. Under a situation where tons of companies are doing the same thing, the first thing for class action plaintiffs to do is identify the most egregious offender and make an example. After two or three examples have been made, the risk of continuing the same practices will not be lost on other big offenders. It would also be much more effective if corporate personhood was revoked so the big shareholders couldn't hide behind the corporate veil of unaccountability.


...
Although this is beside the point, we can't overlook the possibility that global warming and environmental dangers are being overhyped and exaggerated for political reasons. After all, what better way is there to convince people that international government or even one-world government is "necessary?" ;)

[Mini-Me]

All of that said, my biggest problem with federal environmental regulations is simply that they're currently unconstitutional. When it comes down to it, libertarianism is about a government that's restricted to protecting the rights of the people. If pollution is causing harm to people (i.e. infringing on rights) and it can only be adequately handled on the federal level (because unlike states, the feds can make treaties based on international consensus, for example), I see no problem with amending the Constitution to allow for the government to impose environmental regulations. Such authorities we may consider granting (if they don't already exist - I'm a bit rusty on some of the Constitution) include:

The specific, enumerated authority to create caps for the emission of pollutants. This can be enforced either directly through heavy fines, etc. or by or by punishing infringers with an excise tax or higher corporate income tax - after all, if you make it more expensive to pollute than not to pollute, nobody will do it anymore. Tax credits also fall under this category (because giving everybody but polluters tax credits is essentially the same thing as giving polluters harsher taxes).
The specific, enumerated authority to ban and prosecute the use of industrial substances that have been shown by strong supporting evidence to harm the environment (e.g. CFC's)


It is very plain that, if regulations are necessary, they can easily be handled by the federal government without additional bureaucracy. International consensus can be negotiated through diplomacy and enforced through treaties. An independent international regulating body would not only be completely unnecessary, but it would in fact be a dangerous threat to our sovereignty. Why give the power to regulate to an unelected group of international elites giving edicts from above, when you can instead give the power to regulate to our duly elected leaders (and the ambassadors and foreign policy deal-brokers held accountable to them)? The only possible answer is if you think that countries cannot be trusted to come to a reasonable agreement without being coerced by an unelected body of elites - by extension, that would imply that you not only trust such an unelected body to know what's best for the whole world, but you believe it's so infallible that it deserves coercive power over otherwise sovereign states...setting up an international board with the power to coerce sovereign nations is pure folly, but it's perfectly reasonable to amend the Constitution to allow the federal government to address environmental concerns (and by extension, to make treaties addressing them).

These powers would have to be executed wisely, but that's why we have representative government. The most important thing is simply that the government does not go rampant (as it has today) and break free of its Constitutional limitations, suspending the rule of law and becoming completely unaccountable to the people. After all, an unjust government can construe these powers to institute a tax on breathing...the wording of such an Amendment would probably have to be precise and narrow to provide another layer of protection beyond representative government.
I mentioned in my previous post that a more passive approach allowing lawsuits might be more effective if we have a true free market, but hey - as a moderate libertarian, I won't deal in absolutes and say that there's no possible reason why we might want to grant the federal government the authority to regulate polluters...we just have to do it properly by amending, not violating, the Constitution.

So, in other words, while Ron Paul's platform and the current platform of the Libertarian Party are against environmental regulation, that does not mean that such powers are incompatible with libertarian thought. Even if it was, considering what else is at stake, is it really important enough to turn your brother into a single-issue voter at the expense of all other issues? After all, we're facing some pretty dark times, and far more pressing issues exist:

The emerging police state
The unaccountability of government to the people
The economy - because of our horrible policies of outrageous government spending, a high income tax, excessive unconstitutional regulations, corporate welfare, and credit-based inflationary fiat money, we have some major problems: The dollar is collapsing (not yet in free fall), we're losing our economic relevance, and we may end up facing another Great Depression (and it could be even worse). In the second-to-worst case scenario, a depression combined with a police state could lead to martial law and food rationing.
Our foreign policy, which draws us into wars and results in us funding both sides of most wars we're not fighting - and of course, war causes IMMENSE pollution. Fixing our foreign policy should be first on the agenda for anyone who cares about the environment.
Loss of sovereignty. I mentioned earlier that martial law with food rationing is just the second-to-worst case scenario, and I meant it with the utmost of sincerity. In the absolute worst case scenario, which will inevitably occur within our lifetimes if we continue on our present course without drastic change, we will become a province of a one-world government...the growing trend of regionalization and international government is not going to run out of steam by itself anytime soon, and we are not exempt from it. The NAU is not some "silly conspiracy theory," although its proponents are doing a good job at using the media to give people this impression. If you think our federal government is unaccountable to the people now, just wait until we're ruled, not represented, by an international, one-world unelected body of elites. Seriously, such a system will quickly, not slowly, degenerate into the worst tyranny the world has ever seen - and there will be no easy escape from it.


At the risk of sounding rude and insensitive, I think your brother is giving the issue of environmental regulations way too much weight and ignoring the big picture, to the detriment of us all. If that's his only problem with Ron Paul, it stands to reason that it's really the only thing he considers superior about, say, Obama. This is the way most Americans are, though...single-issue voters on tertiary issues (abortion, etc.)...and this is a huge reason why our government has been permitted to become the monster it is today. Let your brother know that environmental regulations are not at all incompatible with libertarianism as long as the Constitution is amended to allow for them (even if Ron Paul personally believes they're unwise), and that even more importantly, he needs to start looking at the big picture instead of falling into single-issue traps.

[hypnagogue]

Just curious about how old you are. IMHO, littering was far more affected by social pressure than it was by fines.

When I was a kid, it was not uncommon to see people fling garbage from their cars. Then came the crying indian commercial. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QKvEy0AIk 23 if you think it matters. I believe corporations are far less susceptible to shame than your average person. Besides, the feasibility of creating a new social trend, which definitely included much more than a commercial, in contrast to simple fines, is perhaps unsurmountable.

It is true that in order to adhere to Libertarian principles we would need a Constitutional amendment to invest the power to regulate environmental damage in the Federal Government, but I can think of hardly any amendment that would be easier to pass.