Even if we assume AGW is real, it still doesn’t follow that political action is warranted as a solution, even if we are faced with a ‘tragedy of the commons’ situation.

The original intent of the author of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was to show how bad it was that private property had degraded the common resource. It was soon realized however that the same general problem inhered in holding resources in common. As Aristotle said “The property of all is the property of none.” People look after their own property better than they look after public property.

A classic example was the near extinction of the American buffalo on common property in the nineteenth century, at the same time as the same lands were filled up with privately-owned cattle, which are, biologically, virtually the same animal. As stark as these examples are, people are still making the same environmentally destructive mistakes today. The worst offenders are the environmentalists with their rampant romantic Rousseauian sentiments, their dreams of wilderness owned by no-one.

Before we rush to the conclusion that management of resources by way of private property has failed, we need to remember that there was a time when even land was not subject to private property. If we followed the line of reasoning of the statists, therefore land should have been put under public ownership, and the scarcity of resources should have been regulated by central government bureaucracies developing a plan for the management of the entire resource viewed as a whole. Advised by technical experts, they would then assign arbitrary values to particular resources. People could fit in with this grand plan by making an application for permission to use a particular piece of land for a particular purpose, and the whole scheme would be backed up by a mountain of rules and procedures, and fines, police, magistrates and prisons. The more ‘free market’ systems would graciously permit trading in the permits, but only on the basis of the arbitrary values that the state had originally assigned to the factors of production.

If we had done that, we would have starved to death by the millions. The reason we know this, is because the socialists have just tried it! In the last hundred years, they killed over a hundred million people, and they’re still starving them to death right now in North Korea.

Yet the interventionists just never seem to get it. Socialism doesn’t work! It’s not a good idea in theory, with a few technical problems in the implementation, as the socialists seem to think. It doesn’t have presumptive moral superiority. The reason it doesn’t work in practice is because it’s wrong in theory, and we need to recognize that, not continually repeat the same mistaken assumptions of governmental omnipotence every time we meet a resource-use problem.

In proceeding to common ownership, we must hasten slowly, and firstly eliminate the theoretical possibility that government is not itself already doing something to contribute to or cause the problem in the first place, and then eliminate that. (As it turns out, AGW is itself entirely an artefact of the government funding of science, media, industry, schooling and politics. There is no evidence for AGW, and the entire claim is riddled with vested interests, corruption, and fraud. We’re ignoring that fact, but we must not forget the idea of freedom, on which our lives and civilization depend.)

But, you might say, how could private property be established in air? Land stays still (mostly).

However even assuming AGW, we still have not arrived at the valid conclusion that the solution is political action to control the air. The private property solution doesn’t need to control the air, it needs to satisfy human wants, and remove human dissatisfactions, arising from climate change.

We already satisfy human wants because of climate now, by making walls, and roofs, and dykes, and clothes, and hats, and air-con, and so on.

The warmists still haven’t got to first base in showing that they even understand what they would need to prove in order to have a rational discussion about the advantages of their proposals exceeding the disadvantages.

Peter Hume: "The warmists still haven’t got to first base in showing that they even understand what they would need to prove in order to have a rational discussion about the advantages of their proposals exceeding the disadvantages."

If your last two posts are an illustration of what you think "understanding" or "rational discussion" are, then you are probably right. I could not pick up a single thread of logic from your post. Even facts you quote seem unrelated (eg the ETS and North Korea), wrong (the government doesn't set the price in an ETS, they set the number of permits available), or just utterly warped (the tragedy of the commons was really about the evils of private ownership - really?).

Peter Hume: "We already satisfy human wants because of climate now, by making walls, and roofs, and dykes, and clothes, and hats, and air-con, and so on."

Even the simplest things seem to escape you. The things you list are our wants now. But AGW is not about now. The claim is if the climate does what is predicted we won't be able to satisfy our wants in the future. In effect all solutions to AGW put an artificial price on CO2 now to reflect the damage it will do to our ability to satisfy our wants in the future. It is not like our kids in 50 years time can time travel back to us, and say "hey, the bottom 1/2 of Australia is now desert, and food prices have gone through the roof - here is the bill for the price difference", and we say in response, "jezzz, we don't want to pay that, it is cheaper to stop emitting CO2".

Common sense tells us the world doesn't work that way Peter. And most people aren't as happy as you seem to be at sacrificing common sense on the altar of some warped ideology. As I said, your words have the ring of an ideological text such as the Bible, the Koran and Mao's little red book. Whatever they are, they aren't reasoned argument.

All your arguments resolve into:
a) assuming what is in issue;
b) personal argument;
and are thus only different species of the genus fallacy.

Having assumed AGW, you then proceed straight to assuming that the solution to this supposed problem is governmental action. But you don’t establish why – you just assume it. When it’s questioned, your reply is to the effect that it’s “common sense”; and that it is a “totally warped ideology” to point out that you haven’t justified jumping to the conclusion that the remedy for this assumed problem is governmental control of the climate by way of governmental control of carbon dioxide. Even if we assume AGW, the fact that human wants would, ex hypothesi, remain unsatisfied, is no more a self-sufficient or self-evidence justification of governmental action than is the fact of human wants in any other case.

QED

Peter Hume: "Having assumed AGW, you then proceed straight to assuming that the solution to this supposed problem is governmental action. But you don’t establish why – you just assume it."

Oh for god's sake, I didn't assume it. Try reading my initial post that started this thread.

I said the two sides of politics say they have polices for addressing AGW / climate change. That is a fact, not an assumption. Those two policies are very different. Another fact. Relatively speaking, the Labour solution is more of a free market one and Liberal solution is decidedly less so. This is my evaluation, but it seems uncontentious. Apart from you, no one here disagrees. Given the fact that Liberals market themselves as the champions of the free market and Labour doesn't this means there has been an idealogical inversion.

There are no assumptions in that logic, Peter.

Peter Hume: "Even if we assume AGW, the fact that human wants would, ex hypothesi, remain unsatisfied, is no more a self-sufficient or self-evidence justification of governmental action than is the fact of human wants in any other case."

Absolute rubbish. We all have wants that are unsatisfied. Often they conflict: should we spend that money on an ice cream now, or save it for a holiday later. The two wants that conflict with AGW is wanting cheap energy now, versus having a liveable planet in 100 years time. You are deliberately ignoring the latter.

I guess it is because you can't think of a way to fix it without government intervention, so to admit it would undermine your vision of Utopia. The communists had the same problem with their predictions of the fall of capitalism while the west went from strength to strength. Like you, their solution was to deny or ignore it. That seems to be the way all ideologues handle inconvenient truths.

What rstuart says ... hear, hear!