Save us from ideologues.
This is an excellent article, and correctly identifies one of the greatest weaknesses of the global system; excessive transport and it's deleterious effect on the atmosphere that every human, indeed every living thing shares.
To suggest that any market philosophy has a dog in this fight is inane. A market by definition must have at least two participants. Clearly, in any situation -any threat- involving the entire human race there is no market, as there is no one or thing with which humanity trades.
We are one.
The Biosphere which every living thing on the planet depends on cannot be divided, allocated or privately owned.
Even Mises was not an anarchist. He held that governments had (some, limited) legitimate reasons for existence, including defence, maintenance of Law and order and protection of private property.
Humanity is undeniably the most dominant, most belligerent and affecting species on the planet; by these characteristics alone humanity can be said to “own” the biosphere (“we only truly own that which we can destroy”).
If the Biosphere owned by Humanity is undeniably being affected by Humanity, it becomes a legitimate government -or intragovernment- concern.
Any problem, any threat, which concerns the entire Human Race deserves to be considered objectively and pragmatically, without being bogged down by petty ideologies, left, right or any of the myriad alternates.

"Save us from ideologues."

Save us from you, Grim? Good idea!

The fact that nature imposes limitations on human action is not caused by "ideology", and it's not even a proposition that you disagree with.

"We" (undefined term apparently meaning all the human beings in the world including everyone who disagrees with Grim apparently) are not "one", and it is this bad habit of lumping billions of people into a monolithic lump in the disposition of government that is the basis of all the enormous crimes of the collectivists over the last century.

If the biosphere "cannot be divided, allocated or privately owned" then what did you eat for breakfast Grim? Not even you agree with the nonsense you are talking.

All you're doing, with your talk of "us" and "the biosphere", is pretending to talk down to everyone else from a Gods-eye point of view, alleging that, because the world exists, government power is justified: to control any and every aspect of human life, because it might affect "the biosphere". Unlimited power. This is just the same old communist sh!t sandwich in a different wrapping.

If you want to get rid of ideologies, you can start with your own dreary, totally failed ideology of unlimited government power based on mystic concepts of a Grand Spirit.

Besides, lets suppose that John's thought experiment were granted, okay. There's a revolution in Australia. Well according to John's and the Green's logic, this "revolution" means we should have *more* government, more taxes, more officials, more bureaucracy, more regulations which, according to you guys, are necessary for government to decide what ordinary people should be permitted to do. But that’s not a revolution: that’s more of the same!

You see the problem for you guys, is that whenever you squark "ideology!" what you're really contending is that everything is just a matter of opinion. But in reality, the scarcity of resources cannot be made to go away by forcibly re-arranging property titles. You are flatly incorrect. And we can see this is true because your collectivist arguments are self-contradictory EVERY TIME.

In response to jardine. As the author of the article I prefer to stay out of the discussion but the following comment seems to have missed the point of the piece entirely:

Well according to John's and the Green's logic, this "revolution" means we should have *more* government, more taxes, more officials, more bureaucracy, more regulations ....

For the record - the title of the piece is taken from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke is a conservative - who wrote before the idea of right and left was invented (also a legacy of the French revolution) For those of you who remember your history you will know that what provided the initial impetus behind the French revolution was the writings of the the enlightenment: Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau et al. They provided people with an alternative vision. The distinction I was attempting to make (and clearly did not succeed in doing) is that we do not have competing alternative visions of the future; it is not about the right or the left it is about the reality that it does not matter who we vote for as we will end up with much the same outcome.

What we end up talking about is more taxes or fewer taxes, more government regulations or fewer government regulations, big versus small government.

These questions tend to miss the point - I have no problems with taxes provided the money is spent wisely and the tax burden is shared equitably, regulations provided those regulations help us achieve a better quality of life. The size of the government does not worry me provided it is no bigger then it needs to be.

Until governments accept the responsibility of looking after the needs of this generation without compromising the capacity of future governments to look after the needs of future generations we will see the slow unravelling of the quality of life for all Australians.

If our conservative politicians were just a little more familiar with radical conservatives like Edmund Burke we just might be able to build a better future.

That's where the difference is BAYGON. You want government to hold everyones hand from cradle to the grave. That means surrendering all power & decision making to government.

Those with a bit of sense want government to create a situation that gives people opportunity to look after themselves, then get the hell out of the way, & let them get on with it.

Perhaps we are already too far down the murky corruption paved road to socialism to claw our way back. If so my grand kids will inherit a collapsing society, with nothing but turmoil to live with. As usual, socialism will collapse under the weight of expectation without obligation or responsibility.

I heard another fool planner waffling on today, about how we have to "PLAN" our future communities. What a great vehicle for corruption.

Just how much corruption can bureaucrats & politicians syphon off when they can gazette one citizens land for development, & another's for private open space.

Nothing could have caused the land in my out of the way back blocks area to go from $70,000 for half a hector, to $210,000 in just a couple of years, but for the previous government banning all future subdivision in the whole district.

Socialism breeds payola like rabbits breed kittens.

I was aware of the Burkean reference, but knowledge of that history doesn’t put you on any better footing.

Interestingly enough:
“The first leftist would not be popular in America today. That is true because the original leftists [so named because they sat on the left side of the new revolutionary Assembly] wanted to abolish government controls over industry, trade, and the professions. They wanted wages, prices, and profits to be determined by competition in a free market, and not by government decree. They were pledged to free their economy from government planning, and to remove the government-guaranteed special privileges of guilds, unions, and associations whose members were banded together to use the law to set the price of their labor or capital or product above what it would be in a free market [in other words, the Greens of modern days].
“The First Leftist”, by Dean Russell
http://mises.org/daily/3425

Baygon, you are saying, correct me if I’m wrong, that you have no problem with taxes, regulation or the size of government, provided government is wise, fair, and helps us achieve a better quality of life, and therefore *other people* are missing the point to object to it.

That is so dumb, that I’m surprised you’re not ashamed to have betrayed such complete confusion.

There are two fatal flaws in that line of thinking. Firstly, let’s suppose that you had some rational criterion by which you were able to identify when government actions are wise, fair or pragmatic, as opposed to foolish, unjust or wasteful. And let’s suppose that everyone else in the world agrees with you. Then it still wouldn’t be “missing the point” for anyone to object to governmental actions for deviating from that standard, would it? It would be right on point, wouldn’t it?

Secondly, the entire issue is precisely that the apologists for big government have shown themselves completely incapable of answering the radical critique of the libertarians, which shows categorically that apologists for government do not have, and are not capable of having, a rational criterion for deciding whether or not the actions of government are wise, fair and pragmatic. This is not, as the leftists mistakenly think, a question of mere differing opinions. It is just empty-headed sloganeering to think that this is a problem of “ideology”.

The issue is whether government action is capable of satisfying the intended values of its intended consumers EVEN IN ITS OWN TERMS.

For example, when we ask you to provide a rational criterion for whether taxes are spent wisely or not - not in terms of your arbitrary opinion mind, but *in terms of the evaluations of the intended consumers of government’s services, versus the values that were sacrificed to satisfy them* - you are in a world of conceptual difficulty. If you are honest, you will admit straight up that you can’t do it. But if you can … what is it?

You have no problems “if the tax burden is shared equitably”. But supply the rational criterion by which you decide whether it is or not, and again you find yourself in a world of conceptual difficulty. Again the problem is not just differing opinions. Nor is it the inability to square any theory of a just tax with the fact that tax is, in fact and law, a coerced confiscation. The problem is that the formulation of a just criterion is never able to escape the fatal flaw of self-contradiction. Go ahead: try floating one and I'll show you.