A Private Climate Policy?

Governments should abandon their climate-change-related taxes and regulations, turning instead to the courts for answers regarding anthropogenic global warming’s (AGW) affect on property rights, argues University of Buckingham fellow Graham Dawson in the January issue of The Free Market, a newsletter issued by The Ludwig von Mises Institute. “There is no secure foundation in climate science for the current policy rhetoric; governments simply lack the knowledge to operate climate-change policy effectively,” he writes, later adding, that “…it is not markets that have failed but governments in failing to protect property rights.”

Protecting property rights, according to Dawson, involves demonstrating to the “courts” that climate “changes” have negatively affected a citizen’s property or business. Dawson characterizes AGW as “a possible example of interpersonal conflict over the use of resources” where some individuals treat the atmosphere as a “carbon sink;” the resulting changes thereby “mak[e] it impossible for other individuals to rely upon an unchanged climate as a resource for growing crops in” and might even cause these areas to become uninhabitable.

Given that the environment is ever-changing, regardless of the validity of the AGW theory, it’s not clear how property owners could depend “upon an unchanged climate” as a resource for agriculture or habitation in the first place. “That climate change is part of our planet’s normal, dynamic behaviour is not in doubt,” writes James Cook University (Australia) professor Bob Carter in a 2007 column for the UK Telegraph. “Nor should there be any doubt about the need for governments to prepare sensible response plans for future climate change, both warmings and coolings,” he writes. “But reflection on recent climatic episodes like the ‘little Ice Ages’ makes it plain that future climatic coolings will cause much greater damage to our societies than will mild warmings similar to that of the 20th century.

Carter and two other scholars, Chris de Freitas at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and John McClean at the Australian University of Melbourne, published a peer-reviewed study last summer which shows that “natural forces are the dominant influence on climate,” states a July 2009 press release on ClimateDepot.com. Marc Morano, executive director of Climate Depot, will receive Accuracy in Media’s Reed Irvine Award for Grassroots Journalism this evening for his reporting on the ClimateGate scandal.

Dawson’s theory, as outlined in the Free Market newsletter, assumes that the property potentially harmed by AGW is owned by private citizens, but governments have a considerable stake (in terms of property rights) in the land which they govern. For example, the U.S. federal government owned 40.9 million acres of land, according to the FY 2008 Federal Real Property report (pdf), released in August 2009. “[Executive Order] 13327 does not require the reporting of data for public domain lands and certain other asset types,” states the report. “Therefore, the FY 2007 and FY 2008 land data represents a subset of the Federal Government’s total land acreage.” On top of that, state and local governments can also own land.

In other words, if climate change were to be redefined as a property rights issue in the U.S., this would not necessarily preclude federal or state government involvement.

“Litigation would improve the public understanding of the science of climate change,” Dawson argues. “Reports of the testimony of a range of expert witnesses would disseminate a more balanced account of climate science than the biased and artificially constructed dogma of the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] IPCC.”

“The courts would call expert witnesses,” writes Dawson, continuing, “So firms would have an incentive to fund research into the many uncertainties of climate change. This would give a boost to the growing number of climate skeptics and challenge the monopoly position of the IPCC.”

But would disputing climate change science in the British courts really lead to a more unbiased outlook which acknowledges the uncertainly of the science? Such did not happen in the U.S., as can by seen by Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Massachusetts et al. v. EPA (pdf). “A well-documented rise in global temperatures has coincided with a significant increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” begins the 2007 majority opinion, delivered by Justice John Paul Stevens. “Respected scientists believe the two trends are related.”

The 5-4 majority opinion concluded that the “EPA’s refusal to regulate CO2 has led to ‘actual’ and ‘imminent’ harm to the state of Massachusetts, mainly in the form of rising sea-levels along the state’s coast,” states the Pew Center on Global Climate Change website.

As Accuracy in Academia has documented in a recent special report, there are currently significant financial incentives for climate change researchers to exaggerate the dangers of increased global temperatures, such as in Pennsylvania State University professor Michael Mann’s case. While currently under investigation by his own university, Prof. Mann is currently under formal investigation by Penn State, but his employment poses a significant financial conflict of interest: he can be connected to over $4 million in climate-change-related grants since he was hired by Penn State, according to his own curriculum vitae; more than $2 million of these monies are in ongoing grants.

In his essay Dawson maintains that “Tort litigation on the basis of strict liability would protect the right to a climate free from human intervention if the climate does need protecting, and, in case it does not, would save economic activity across the world from the imposition of unnecessary costs.”

That is unless the courts use their authority to direct governments to regulate CO2 levels on behalf of its citizens, citing the tragedy of the commons.

Bethany Stotts is staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.