Global Warming is Real but Who Needs Kyoto

The following thoughts came to me while reading Mike's excellent article on global warming written from the viewpoint of a market libertarian and mutualist. The point is that many people who oppose government thuggery in other areas ie. Iraq, Afghanistan,etc. refuse to accept the growing body of scientific evidence in support of global warming hypothesis because of a fear that "liberal" solutions are an unavoidable part of the package. He states the case,

" it seems to me they are confusing the problem of global warming with the mainstream idea of the solution. They don’t want to believe the science, because, I suspect, they think this means they must accept the so-called solution - state enforced austerity measures, regulations and ‘carbon taxes’. What self-respecting libertarian could accept that?

The Kyoto Protocol sounds like one of those scams which have the "feeling" of being reasonable. Individual countries or groups like the European Union will set limits based on their situation in 1990. But major polluters can then sell their "carbon credits" to those that can't or won't reduce emissions as handily. The trouble is the choice of 1990 as a base year appears to reward countries whose economies have declined since that time. Russia and eastern Europe have supported Kyoto but their economies have stagnated and this means that major western industries would send billions of dollars to buy carbon credits from these nations, especially Russia, because it would have the most to sell. Transferring large sums to this bastion of democracy sounds a bit like the modern equivalent of "lend-lease" or the days when the Canadian state was basically giving huge sums to the old Soviet Union to prop up a "market" for western Canadian wheat. Likewise Germany and Britain endorse Kyoto but both nations have found it relatively easy to met their targets. In Britain's case this is partly due to the privatization of the coal industry which has essentially disappeared to be replaced by natural gas from the North sea. And does anyone think that China can be influenced by moral suasion? There is too much money in selling cheap goods made by slave labour to worry about niceties like clean air and water. Shag feels that as the influence of neoconservatism declines, for all sorts of good reasons, public opinion will, once again, be moved towards "liberal" and social democratic solutions. In turn these will place us more firmly within the managerial orbit. Look at the decline of civil liberties within the UK as a most obvious and unpleasant example. Such people seem determined to exploit ecological and climatological problems as yet another "law and order" issue.