What to do about Climate Change - A Libertarian Proposal

What to do about Climate Change - A Libertarian Proposal
Author: Gene Balfour
Publisher: Eugene C Balfour
Total Pages: 164
Release:
Genre: Science
ISBN:

Should governments have a role in managing Climate Change? Is there a better way? This book answers those questions. Climate Alarmists argue that greenhouse gas emissions pose such a serious threat to humanity that governments must aggressively tax and regulate to curtail every human activity they allege to increase that threat. Skeptics disagree. Scientific evidence doesn’t support the Alarmists’ theory with conclusive data. The man-made global warming concern began in 1992 in the sphere of politics. It's been sustained by politicians and tax-funded institutions globally and domestically. Ongoing fearmongering campaigns has kept the public anxious for a generation. Citizens tacitly submit to the ‘tax and spend’ policies that keep the Climate Change Government Complex (CCGC) growing and profitable. With the unlikely name The Bigfoot Show (’Bigfoot’ is the abbreviated term for the proposal), the author proposes a superior alternative to the CCGC that will reduce industrial CO2 emissions. It will also entertain and educate the public while satisfying Alarmists and Skeptics alike. No government participation will be allowed. Bigfoot is an innovation that, when adopted, will be the first step towards replacing government responsibility for Climate Change and, potentially, for other areas where public sector monopolies exist. Chapter One describes the core failures of the government's approach to Climate Change. Chapter Two lays out the proposal. Chapter Three provides a SWOT+ analysis to explain how the proposal is an evolutionary improvement over the CCGC. The next seven chapters offer a 360-degree look at the entire Climate Change topic -- a highly complex subject with many dimensions and stakeholders. Bigfoot is a practical solution that will get the desired results and do it in a cost-effective, transparent and accountable manner. Modern digital technology will play an important part. In recent years, the pandemic and other crises have pushed public anxiety to historic levels. While we enjoy unprecedented access to information, uncertainty about the future had never been worse especially with our youth. Conspiracy theories arise whenever people are confused by complex issues that affect their lives. The impulse to find satisfying answers drives many to the ‘authorities’. Twenty years ago, we outsourced manufacturing to nations like China, Mexico and India. Today we outsource our critical thinking to designated ‘gurus’ and ‘experts’. If you are interested in people and the choices they make, you will like this book. It raises questions regarding morality, mutual respect, personal responsibility and the freedom to act accordingly, fairness, the dynamics of human communities of both religious and secular natures, creativity, philosophy, leadership and the consequences when it’s lacking, the nature of fiat and digital money as mediums of exchange and stores of wealth. Political leaders can embrace Bigfoot for the public benefits that are achievable with or without their endorsement. Public trust and respect can be restored for political and government leaders. Threats to Canadian sovereignty by globalist entities can be thwarted. A new age of democracy renewal can begin with Bigfoot. Read about some of the most important characters in the Climate Change saga, its authoritarian nature, and its most influential Skeptics. Bigfoot offers hope to all Canadians. It signifies that a viable, democratic and peaceful path out of perhaps the darkest period in our history is finally here!

Why People Believe Weird Things

Why People Believe Weird Things
Author: Michael Shermer
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2002-09-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1429996765

"This sparkling book romps over the range of science and anti-science." --Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel Revised and Expanded Edition. In this age of supposed scientific enlightenment, many people still believe in mind reading, past-life regression theory, New Age hokum, and alien abduction. A no-holds-barred assault on popular superstitions and prejudices, with more than 80,000 copies in print, Why People Believe Weird Things debunks these nonsensical claims and explores the very human reasons people find otherworldly phenomena, conspiracy theories, and cults so appealing. In an entirely new chapter, "Why Smart People Believe in Weird Things," Michael Shermer takes on science luminaries like physicist Frank Tippler and others, who hide their spiritual beliefs behind the trappings of science. Shermer, science historian and true crusader, also reveals the more dangerous side of such illogical thinking, including Holocaust denial, the recovered-memory movement, the satanic ritual abuse scare, and other modern crazes. Why People Believe Strange Things is an eye-opening resource for the most gullible among us and those who want to protect them.

Free Market Environmentalism

Free Market Environmentalism
Author: T. Anderson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2001-02-02
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0312299737

The original edition of this seminal book, published in 1991, introduced the concept of using markets and property rights to protect and improve environmental quality. Since publication, the ideas in this book have been adopted not only by conservative circles but by a wide range of environmental groups. To mention a few examples, Defenders of Wildlife applies the tenets of free market environmentalism to its wolf compensation program; World Wildlife Federation has successfully launched the CAMPFIRE program in southern Africa to reward native villagers who conserve elephants; and the Oregon Water Trust uses water markets to purchase or lease water for salmon and steelhead habitats. This revised edition updates the successful applications of free market environmentalism and adds two new chapters.

Adapt and Be Adept

Adapt and Be Adept
Author: Terry L. Anderson
Publisher: Hoover Press
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2021-04-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0817924566

How can markets help us adapt to the challenges of climate change? Editor Terry L. Anderson brings together this collection of essays featuring the work of nine leading policy analysts, who argue that market forces are just as important as government regulation in shaping climate policy—and should be at the heart of our response to helping societies adapt to climate change. Anderson notes in his introduction that most current climate policies such as the Paris Agreement require hard-to-enforce collective action and focus on reducing or mitigating greenhouse gases rather than adapting to their negative effects. Adaptive actions can typically deliver much more, faster and more cheaply than any realistic climate policy. The authors tackle a range of issues: the hidden costs of renewable energy sources, the political obstacles surrounding climate change policy, insurance and financial instruments for pricing risk of exposure to the effects of climate change, and more. Reliance on emerging renewable energies and a carbon tax are not enough to prevent the effects of global warming, they argue. We must encourage more private action and market incentives to adapt to a rapidly changing climate.

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear
Author: Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1541788486

A tiny American town's plans for radical self-government overlooked one hairy detail: no one told the bears. Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government. In 2004, they set their sights on Grafton, NH, a barely populated settlement with one paved road. When they descended on Grafton, public funding for pretty much everything shrank: the fire department, the library, the schoolhouse. State and federal laws became meek suggestions, scarcely heard in the town's thick wilderness. The anything-goes atmosphere soon caught the attention of Grafton's neighbors: the bears. Freedom-loving citizens ignored hunting laws and regulations on food disposal. They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is the sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying tale of what happens when a government disappears into the woods. Complete with gunplay, adventure, and backstabbing politicians, this is the ultimate story of a quintessential American experiment -- to live free or die, perhaps from a bear.

Burning Down the House

Burning Down the House
Author: Andrew Koppelman
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2022-10-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1250280141

A lively history of American libertarianism and its decay into dangerous fantasy. In 2010 in South Fulton, Tennessee, each household paid the local fire department a yearly fee of $75.00. That year, Gene Cranick's house accidentally caught fire. But the fire department refused to come because Cranick had forgotten to pay his yearly fee, leaving his home in ashes. Observers across the political spectrum agreed—some with horror and some with enthusiasm—that this revealed the true face of libertarianism. But libertarianism did not always require callous indifference to the misfortunes of others. Modern libertarianism began with Friedrich Hayek’s admirable corrective to the Depression-era vogue for central economic planning. It resisted oppressive state power. It showed how capitalism could improve life for everyone. Yet today, it's a toxic blend of anarchism, disdain for the weak, and rationalization for environmental catastrophe. Libertarians today accept new, radical arguments—which crumble under scrutiny—that justify dishonest business practices and Covid deniers who refuse to wear masks in the name of “freedom.” Andrew Koppelman’s book traces libertarianism's evolution from Hayek’s moderate pro-market ideas to the romantic fabulism of Murray Rothbard, Robert Nozick, and Ayn Rand, and Charles Koch’s promotion of climate change denial. Burning Down the House is the definitive history of an ideological movement that has reshaped American politics.

This Changes Everything

This Changes Everything
Author: Naomi Klein
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 576
Release: 2014-09-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1451697384

With strong first-hand reporting and an original, provocative thesis, Naomi Klein returns with this book on how the climate crisis must spur transformational political change

How to Think Seriously about the Planet

How to Think Seriously about the Planet
Author: Roger Scruton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2014-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199371245

Roger Scruton here makes a plea to rescue environmental politics from the activist movements and to return them to the people. The book defends the legacy of home-building and practical reasoning with which ordinary human beings solve their environmental problems, and attacks the alarmism and hysteria that are being used to uproot these resources, while putting nothing coherent in their place.

The Republican Reversal

The Republican Reversal
Author: James Morton Turner
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2018-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674979974

Not long ago, Republicans could take pride in their party’s tradition of environmental leadership. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the GOP helped to create the Environmental Protection Agency, extend the Clean Air Act, and protect endangered species. Today, as Republicans denounce climate change as a “hoax” and seek to dismantle the environmental regulatory state they worked to build, we are left to wonder: What happened? In The Republican Reversal, James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg show that the party’s transformation began in the late 1970s, with the emergence of a new alliance of pro-business, libertarian, and anti-federalist voters. This coalition came about through a concerted effort by politicians and business leaders, abetted by intellectuals and policy experts, to link the commercial interests of big corporate donors with states’-rights activism and Main Street regulatory distrust. Fiscal conservatives embraced cost-benefit analysis to counter earlier models of environmental policy making, and business tycoons funded think tanks to denounce federal environmental regulation as economically harmful, constitutionally suspect, and unchristian, thereby appealing to evangelical views of man’s God-given dominion of the Earth. As Turner and Isenberg make clear, the conservative abdication of environmental concern stands out as one of the most profound turnabouts in modern American political history, critical to our understanding of the GOP’s modern success. The Republican reversal on the environment is emblematic of an unwavering faith in the market, skepticism of scientific and technocratic elites, and belief in American exceptionalism that have become the party’s distinguishing characteristics.