Libertarianism is naturally green, George

A couple of weeks ago George Monbiot argued that libertarians must deny climate change at guardian.co.uk If he gets anything at all right in this article, it is merely implied: that libertarian types do not appear to articulate often enough our thoughts about how a stateless world might deal with environmental issues.

But the main argument of his article betrays a failure of logic that, in his determination to have a pop at what he thinks of as libertarianism again, leads him to reject one of the simplest and most just mechanisms for preventing, or ultimately punishing, environmental damage.  And in thus blindly attacking libertarianism on false premises, he dismisses an entire ideology that offers more hope than the statist quo of creating a sustainable economy with better and more adaptable stewardship of apparently finite natural resources.

His logically challenged argument goes thus:

1. Libertarians (as if we all are of one opinion - a generalisation he'd probably denounce shrilly if it were levelled at any "right on" heterogenous group he happens to approve of) hold property rights as near sacred.
2. Libertarians would not presume to circumscribe the uses to which any individual or organisation puts its property.
3. Consequently libertarians can have nothing to say about people using their property to pollute their neighbours' property, the planet as a whole or to cause any other environmental degradation.

And on the back of this deduction he complains that libertarians can have no coherent response to any sort of environmental concerns such as climate change because we cannot both hold property as sacred and reserve the right to tell people what they can or cannot do with it.

Logically challenged?  Surely not, someone as clever and erudite as George?  Well yes, you see the very thing he attacks, the sanctity of property rights, is the simplest bastion against environmental destruction you could find.  Because the inescapable (and quite obvious with a minute's thought) corollary to me not being able to curtail your "enjoyment" of your property is that you cannot use that property to harm my enjoyment of mine, or my property in myself.

Private property and equity

The ancient legal (Justinian I believe) doctrine of "sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas" meaning something like "one should use his own property in such a manner as not to injure that of another" had established the principle that one could sue another for damage done to yourself or your property or nuisance caused by another's property for centuries.  And it appears to have worked pretty well at least until around the middle of the nineteenth century.  There are lots of cases on record of firms being shut down or forcibly moved because of the pollution they caused, for example to people living nearby.

What appears to have broken the system a little is that the polluting effects of traditional "nuisance" industries such as slaughterhouses, renderers, tanners and the like was well known, whereas the Industrial Revolution brought challenges people, including courts did not understand.  You could tell the horrible smell of a tallow plant was a nuisance, but the science wasn't up to deciding whether that cloud of odourless vapour coming out of your plant was actually responsible for damage to others and their property.  In the US at least, it appears that the courts started to take a view on the economic benefits of a new industry and not having the evidence to prove it was dangerous sided with the businesses more than they had previously with the "|traditional" polluting industries.

But it's what happened next that shows that government mechanisms are less up to the job than the courts could be.  Once science caught up with the idea that some of these new industries did in fact have damaging effects, government stepped in and imposed limits.  But those limits tended to be roughly what the contemporary pollution problems were - i.e. that you could carry on doing what you had been doing but not pollute any more than that.  Courts of equity would likely have taken a different view.  Even though most propertarian libertarian types would say that if you owned the property before anyone moved into your area new arrivals would be "late comers" and caveat emptor would apply - you could continue running your polluting business as you had done - if something was later discovered to be damaging that wasn't known about before, there could still be a case to answer.  Or if the business intensified its pollution or changed its pollution there would be a case to answer.

Perhaps just as important is to look at the environmental degradation in countries where personal property rights are not well defended.  In Kenya, for example, source of many of our more frivolous horticultural products like mange tout peas, cut flowers and salad, which gets a lot of criticism for wasting badly needed water, most indigenous farmers can only rent either from the state or large land owners protected by the state.  They all too often find that when someone appears with some kind of export revenue generating idea such as growing roses the government are quick to revoke tenancies and force people off their land to make way for these environmentally destructive uses.  Same goes for gold and diamond mining in west Africa - tenuous property rights allow states to kick people off the land to make way for massively polluting extractive industries.  At the very least if they had strong property rights these farmers could hold out for a decent price for their land.

The state promotes environmental profligacy

But libertarian environmentalism is not restricted to private actions for specific damage to the property of another.  Apart from the problem mentioned above that when the state set limits they tended to become "targets" within which companies could operate more or less as they had previously, many state programmes actually promote or reward a certain level of environmental carelessness.  The BP Deepwater Horizon disaster is a case in point - as is the entire oil industry.  Governments have aggressively promoted exploration, have gone to war to acquire and protect oil supplies, and indemnified firms against losses or limited their liability.  In the BP case they also insisted that BP only drill at the edge of their technological ability rather than in shallower waters that might have prevented such an accident becoming a disaster.

State run monetary systems too promote unsustainable production, built in obsolescence and so on, so that firms stand a chance, not only of making enough money to pay their taxes, but to keep up with the monetary devaluation caused by the state run inflation mechanism.  They have to run faster, sell more, to stand still.  Inflation erodes savings, so people will tend to consume more and invest less.

Private law makes change easier

But probably just as important as any of these, for hard core stateless society types like myself, is that with a private law society, people at large, the "demos" if you will, or its equivalent, could bring about more change, more quickly, than the tortuous process of international treaties and policing them.  We've had Kyoto, Copenhagen, Durban and all the rest and still have no binding international agreement, let alone ways of policing them.

Under a private law society, where so much would be handled on behalf of owners by competing insurance and litigation organisations those who wanted could demand and probably pay for their insurer not to do business with proven polluters.  Steadily a market consensus would grow, polluters would find their insurance against environmental claims became too expensive.  Add this to the idea above that there would be no state to be in thrall to polluting businesses and there's nothing stopping the private, competitive insurance and litigation system putting a pretty swift halt to identifiably environmentally damaging business processes.

So, all in all George (not that you'll ever find this, but my International Relations lecturer might and pass it on to you I guess), I think you'll find that without the power of the state to promote and protect polluters and to prevent private property owners taking action against them by issuing them rights to pollute and so on, we'd have a much more sustainable economy and better stewardship of the planet.  If that's what people want.  And people like you keep telling us that that is what people want.