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What Do Young Libertarians Have to Say about Climate Change?

Freedom lovers grapple with the great challenge of our time at a recent student-led conference.

Katie Hyslop 13 Nov 2015TheTyee.ca

Katie Hyslop reports on education and youth for The Tyee.

In less than three weeks delegates from 195 countries will gather for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, France.

The stakes could not be higher. The planet is on track to be one degree hotter in 2015 than it was in the last half of the 19th century -- half way to the two-degree tipping point climate scientists say will trigger dangerous levels of warming.

Yet climate change wasn't on the agenda at a recent libertarian student confab held at UBC Robson Square in Vancouver. Instead, roughly 90 attendees heard lectures on whether feminism is a friend to liberty; why pot should be decriminalized; if libertarians should care about electoral reform; and how our courts are curbing our constitutionally declared personal liberty.

An unscientific Tyee survey found young libertarians aren't deniers. In fact, all five Students for Liberty conference-goers interviewed happily offered up liberty-preserving solutions to the greatest challenge of our time.

Since the upcoming Paris talks are pretty much the opposite of a libertarian ideal -- so many governments! spending taxpayer money! telling corporations what to do! -- I asked a few freedom-loving student leaders how they think libertarianism can address a collective problem like climate change.

'Government might have a role'

When I put this question to Rodrigo Proenca, president of the Libertarian Club at UBC, he said, "I think most libertarians would say we don't know yet. There would [need to] be some sort of voluntary agreement between countries to solve this problem," he said.

The Brazilian international student said it's something he's grappling with: "I think it's one of the cases where free markets might go too far," he added. "If you only try to maximize your profits, it can reach a point where we don't have natural resources anymore."

According to Proenca, government or private markets could hold the keys to climate stability. "We see a lot of people working on sustainability, on renewable energy sources -- I think that's a solution. But I think the government might have a role. It's something I concede to the other side."

Katrina Haffner, a Students For Liberty campus co-ordinator at the Western Washington University in Bellingham, agrees with Proenca: "Personally I do believe in climate change and I think intervention is necessary. But we still have to be skeptical about how we intervene in that kind of stuff," she said.

Cap-and-trade salvation?

Not everyone shared Haffner and Proenca's point of view. Lucas Da Cunha, a Brazilian international student attending Fairleigh Dickinson University, said government control over our environment actually leads us to value it less.

He says markets will play a much more important role on climate than any government. "My belief is that the market finds a way of fixing itself -- even if it creates a problem, it will find a way of fixing that problem," he said.

As an example he cites the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, which is public land that he says the government doesn't have the resources to protect from unscrupulous actors. If the land was privately owned, he argued, and "there was a way of doing sustainable exploration... then the private companies would take private ownership, they would not allow the deforestation to happen because they would be losing with that.

"It's the tragedy* of the commons where no one takes ownership and then everyone is worse off."

Theryn Meyer, a South African international student at Simon Fraser University, agrees. The president of the SFU Advocacy for Men & Boys group doesn't have a definitive answer for solving climate change, although privatization for better environmental stewardship makes sense to her. As does cap-and-trade, where companies can make money off of emitting less.

"If they're below that amount of emission, they can sell what they have left of their cap to a different corporation who needs it more," she said. "The only way things like that come into being are if you have a free economy where things like that can be tried."

An impossible contract

Like Proenca, Garrett Petersen is conflicted about climate change. The PhD candidate in economics at SFU acknowledges climate change is a failure of the market or a "market externality" imposed on future generations.

"Obviously we can't write a contract with them because they are not born," he said, referring to instances where the polluter signs a contract with those impacted by pollution, like cap-and-trade systems where industries are allowed a certain amount of emissions.

"For climate change I would argue there is no perfect solution. It would be great if we could all come together in a perfectly utopian and altruistic way and decide how much carbon to emit," he said.

But he believes neither governments nor private companies are better suited to making that decision: markets can't bargain with future generations, and politicians only care about the time they're in office -- not how their actions will impact the next generation.

Whereas past generations of libertarian thinkers may have shirked climate responsibility, the next generation raises wide-ranging worries, ideas and solutions.  [Tyee]

*Updated Nov. 13, 11 a.m.

Read more: Environment

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