Why do libertarians deny climate change?

Okay, not all libertarians deny the reality of partially human-caused climate change (I know personally at least one who doesn’t), but the trend is hard to miss. The libertarian think tank CATO Institute has been waging a media war against the very notion for years, and even prominent skeptics with libertarian leanings have pronounced themselves negatively on the matter (most famously Penn & Teller, and initially even Michael Shermer, though both — I count P&T as one — lately have taken a few steps back from their initial positions).

The question that I want to address is not whether climate change is real or not. It is, according to the best science available. Yes, even the best science can be wrong, but frankly the only people who can tell with any degree of reasonability are those belonging to the relevant community of experts, in this case climate scientists — certainly not magicians. (And please don’t get started with the recent hoopla about “climate gate”. That episode simply shows that individual scientists can be just as human as anyone else, meaning a bit petty and self-centered; it doesn’t in the least invalidate the overwhelming evidence for climate change.)

The question is particularly pertinent to libertarians and the ideologically close allied group of “objectivists,” i.e. followers of Ayn Rand (though there are significant differences between the two groups, as I mentioned before). These people often claim to be friends of science (as opposed to many radical conservatives like Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla), who called global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” (perpetrated by whom? And to what end?)), and in the case of objectivists, whose whole approach to politics is allegedly based on rational considerations of the facts.

Well, then, since by far the best interpretation of said facts is that human beings have contributed significantly to climate change, and that such change is already substantially and negatively affecting the world’s ecosystem as well as human welfare, why are so many libertarians/objectivists dead set against the notion of global warming?

I mean, one would think that libertarians could make a distinction between evidence-based interpretation of reality (global warming is happening), and whatever policies we might want to enact to avoid catastrophe. Qua libertarians, they would obviously resist any government-led effort at clean up, especially if internationally coordinated, preferring instead a coalition of the willing within the private sector because — they claim — “the markets” will take care of pretty much everything, if we just leave them alone.

I think the latter contention is nonsense on stilts, something that ought to be painfully obvious given the recent BP-caused oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and particularly given the inane remarks of BP’s CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg. But whatever, there certainly is plenty of room for reasonable discussions and disagreements about how best to proceed in confronting the problem. On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be much room for reasonable disagreement about the very existence of the problem itself. So, what gives, my dear libertarians?

I suspect the answer lies along two parallel lines. In the case of major libertarian outlets, like the CATO Institute think tank, the rather unglamorous answer may simply be that they are in the pockets of the oil industry. A large amount of the funding for CATO comes from private corporations with obvious political agendas including, you guessed it, Exxon-Mobil (remember the Valdez?). No wonder CATO people trump the party line on this one.

The second reason, however, is more personal and widespread: libertarianism is committed to the high moral value of private enterprise, just read pretty much anything that Ayn Rand wrote if you have any doubt. Given that, it follows naturally (if irrationally) that libertarians cannot admit to themselves, and even less to the world at large, that the much vaunted private sector may be responsible — out of both greed and downright incompetence — for a major environmental catastrophe of planetary proportions. The industry is the good guy in their movie, how then could they possibly have done something so horrible?

That’s the problem with ideology in general (be it left, right, or libertarian), it provides us with thick blinders that very effectively shield us from reality. Of course, no one is actually free of bias, yours truly included. But a core principle of skepticism and critical thinking is that we do our best to be aware (and minimize) our own biases, and that we ought to open ourselves to honest criticism from different parties, in pursuit of the best approximation to the truth that we can muster. How about it, my libertarian friends?