“Speculative incremental harm from a multi-decade global phenomenon has a classical liberal option: civil society charity. Uber-wealthy climate-related foundations can evaluate the harms to poor island villagers from sea level rise (as an example). But keep politicized science, global judicial activism, and backdoor Big Brother out of it.”

By 2004, after Jonathan Adler reversed positions to endorse climate policy activism, the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) published a dialogue where Professor Adler defended his tort approach to address anthropogenic climate change with several classical liberals. Excerpts from “Global Warming: A Dialogue” follow.

This discussion is an edited version of comments made in December 2004 on the Free Market Environmentalism (FME) Roundtable list-serve. Jonathan Adler prodded his colleagues to forget, for just a minute, the debate over the impacts of warmer temperatures or whether humans are contributing or not.…

“A serious rebuttal to my review would require Adler et al. to get into climate science rather than assuming CO2 as a ‘pollutant’. It would also require a much deeper look into climate economics….”

Previous posts this week have presented the case by Jonathan Adler (et al.) against climate policy activism based on the precautionary principle (here) and Alder’s turn in academia toward activism (here). Today’s post answers some very brief arguments made by Adler in response to my critical review of his new book, Climate Liberalism: Perspectives on Liberty, Property, and Pollution.

Adler’s criticisms involve either erroneous statements or non-sequiturs.

“Robert L. Bradley, Jr. of the Institute for Energy Research offers less favorable commentary on the book at Law & Liberty (which previously ran a favorable review).”…

The ability and beneficience of free minds and markets to handle the unknowns of future weather and ‘climate change’ has a strong intellectual case. Such is more true today than when the global warming debate began in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Four decades on, the case of classical liberalism against climate alarmism and forced energy transformation remains intact and strong–probably stronger than ever given the “saturation effect” of greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing. [1] In fact, the debate should be not about the weather or climate but about Statism, that gargoyle of government intervention that makes rich people poorer and keeps poor people poor. Regarding climate, statism is what sets up the problems that are too often simplistically and erroneously blamed on ‘weather’ or ‘climate’.

I bring this up in relation to a new book that ignores and dumbs down the free-market, classical-liberal viewpoint on energy/climate in the name of … “classical liberalism.”…