Adler on Climate Policy: More Vague, Weak Argumentation

My least favorite think tank is Shikha Dalmia’s Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist. Left-funded and a pretend classical-liberal group, it promotes a vague ‘liberalism’. ISMA is a Trump-hate group of disaffected, politically homeless folk who have forgotten that statism is the enemy, not Donald Trump. Thus, they do not apply their metrics to the Progressive Left–just Trump. And their TDS has put them at odds with normal folk. [1]

This fringe group is a home to Left Libertarians who, among other things, play up climate alarmism and thus the Climate Industrial Complex’s forced energy transformation. Jonathan Adler, who I have taken to task (without his promised rebuttal), fits right in with Shikha’s group. Employing judicial activism, Adler assumes CO2 is a deleterious pollutant to argue for tort law for the ‘victims’ (fill in the blank) to sue the ‘guilty’ (everyone, really).

Sound crazy? It is!

Last summer, ISMA/The UnPopulist held its inaugural Liberalism for the 21st Century conference in Washington, DC. One session on climate featured Adler himself, with nary a person on the other side of the quite unsettled debate. The fix was in with the participants:

Climate Change: Liberal Solutions
Jonathan Adler, Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve, University School of Law
Nils Gilman, EVP & COO, Berggruen Institute
Joseph Majkut, Director, Energy Security and Climate, CSIS
Moderated by Matt Yglesias

The discussion was published as Climate Catastrophism Leads to Illiberalism but Doesn’t Solve the Problem with the subtitle (ahem), “There are liberal solutions available, but the right’s denialism and the left’s alarmism are getting in the way.” Denialism? As in those who think that carbon dioxide enrichment is not catastrophic but just the opposite? “Denialism” as in what is now U.S. climate policy with the world moving in our direction?

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Here are the transcript highlights with my comments interceded.

“Jonathan, you’re the expert in this. There is a ‘liberal’ way to think about climate change, right?”

Jonathan H. Adler: There certainly is, and a lot of folks who take at least the libertarian manifestations of liberal policy positions in a lot of other contexts abandon it in the context of climate change, which is a problem.

Comment: Incorrect. Classical liberalism 101 concludes that government (global government in this case) should not price or otherwise regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) or other man-made greenhouse gas emissions to “save” or “stabilize” the planet. This was true in the 1980s and is truer today, with the forcing effect of CO2 encountering diminishing returns (saturation effect) and natural adaptation in free societies internalizing the alleged negative externality. Time is on the side of classical liberalism’s “first, do no harm” and “naturally adapt” conclusion.

Alder: [When] we step back and think about environmental protection generally as something that we ask government to do, or what the liberal case for environmental protection is, it begins with the government protecting people and their property from harms caused by the misuse of other people’s property. One of my favorite old cases is William Aldred’s case from [1610]. A guy has a pig farm, and his neighbor’s like, “The pig stink, and I can’t sit at my table and have dinner because of the odors.” And this opinion sounds like something that some law and economics person would have written in the 1970s, because the farm owner is like, “Well, I’m producing valuable stuff for society. I am helping people be fed. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have pork on your dinner plate. From a welfare-maximizing standpoint, I have to be allowed to do this, and your nose shouldn’t be so sensitive.” The court says, “No, that’s not how it works. You have the right to do things on your property. He has the right to do things on his. But when you start to intrude” … it’s the pollution version of the aphorism about my right to swing my hand ends at the tip of your nose. It’s the same principle.

Comment: What does this have to do with CO2, which was never thought to be a pollutant until politics made it so? CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is not pig stink but odorless. It is a trace gas with numerous benefits for plants and other forms of human life.

Adler: Historically, that was the beginnings of environmental policy, before we had big federal regulatory agencies. Over time, we realized that it’s often not this bilateral problem. It’s not one farmer and one homeowner; it’s lots of people, lots of activities—the accumulation of many activities in a particular area, so that the concentration of effects reaches a point where it actually becomes a problem. Again, the same principles would underlie the early zoning laws that were designed to deal with this. How do we prevent these sorts of conflicts ex ante rather than ex post? The Progressive Era smoke control movement [was] very much designed to make sure you can burn coal, but you can’t burn it in a place that’s going to make people nearby sick, and that resulted in moving a lot of these facilities outside of the cities.

Comment: Again, this is not applicable to CO2 but to real air and water pollution. CO2 does not produce smoke (it is colorless) , ruining the above analogy.

Adler: At a certain point, the politics of environmental issues, as the problems become more complicated, as the stakes become larger, make these coordination problems look more difficult, and they’ve produced this illiberal response of not merely saying, not just in terms of the policy measures, but the reaction of being involved, “the problem can’t be real.” The need to deny the problem so as to deny the rationale for government intervention. It’s this binary choice: if it’s a catastrophe, yes, we have to do terrible things. But if it’s not, we can ignore it. But of course, that’s not the traditional liberal way of thinking about these sorts of problems.

Comment: “The need to deny the problem so as to deny the rationale for government intervention” is a slight toward decades of classical liberal attention to this subject, from physical science to climate economics to public policy. “illiberal response of … ‘the problem can’t be real’” is a non sequitur. And certainly not a classical liberal position where the burden of proof is on those who declare a global emergency calling for global government intervention. ‘Liberal’ is Statism, as Adler uses it. Throw this vague term away.

Adler: I worked at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which I guess is still today the leading don’t take action on climate change organization here in D.C.

Comment: Another vague, incorrect statement. The government should not take action. Free people and civil society should take action based on their opinion of the trustworthiness of physical climate science based on global climate models.

Adler: A few years after I left and went to academia, I wrote a paper saying, “Look, if we take these ideas about protecting property rights—not merely from the government but from others—seriously, you don’t have to be [a catastrophist] to think that climate change is a problem within this traditional, classical liberal framework.” You can take very modest, non-apocalyptic scenarios about things like sea level rise. And you can point out that just as there are old cases about pig farmers, there are old cases about land modifications that cause the flooding of a neighbor’s property, and it was recognized [that if] you do something on your property that causes standing water on your neighbor’s property, that’s a trespass, that’s a property rights violation.

We can have a discussion about when it’s not one landowner versus another landowner, it’s millions of people emitting stuff, and millions of people’s land being affected very far away, about what sort of institutional mechanisms we want to have to deal with that … but you don’t actually need to prove very much. You don’t need to prove we only have six years to show that that’s a problem.

Comment: Climate change as a tort? How problematic can this be from proving causality and assigning blame in a global, multi-billion-person world. A negative pig externality is one thing; indirect, unsettled causality involving countless business and consumers is quite another. And if the “problem” has been bandied about for several decades (it has), why should a speculative damage be entertained?

Adler: Similarly, if we just think about it as a risk problem, is it all that different from national defense? We don’t invest in national defense because we know with certainty that Russia, China, pick the country you want, is going to do x by a particular date. We know that the risk of them doing something sufficiently bad is such that prudent investments that can reduce the likelihood or the consequences of those actions are worthwhile.

You think of it kind of like an insurance problem. In terms of thinking about the problem, it is very useful to not think about climate change as this kind of separate category—apocalypse—that means all the rules are thrown out the window, but rather just a more complicated, more difficult version of the problem that we’ve been thinking about dealing with liberal institutions and liberal ideas about the role of government for a very long time. Part of the problem is that we’ve forgotten a lot of that, and we don’t talk about climate change in those kinds of terms.

Comment: Another bad analogy from lawyerlike make-your-best-case-for-one-side-of-the-debate. Is this scholarship or just advocacy?

Adler: When I worked at CEI, and I began there in 1991, there was this great quote from former Senator Tim Wirth that was always kind of fun to deploy about climate change. This is in the ’90s, and I’m paraphrasing, but it was basically, “We’ve got to ride this issue, because even if it’s not really a problem, we’ll still be doing the right things.”

So there’s this idea that’s very pervasive, that’s not wholly unfounded, that climate change creates an excuse to give government control over lots of things, energy in particular, and that if your view of government is that that’s threatening, that’s scary, something that’s ultimately very illiberal, in the sense that it’s hostile to innovation, hostile to market dynamism … that’s a really scary thing. It’s okay to be defending property rights, if you’re talking about defending the property owner from the farm next door—that’s just a little localized problem. But if you’re talking about energy use throughout the global economy, oh my gosh, that’s really scary.

Comment: It is scary–and an argument to separate government from climate/energy.

Adler: I think part of what feeds that is the only way we want to talk about climate policy is: How do we hit that target that Joe [Majkut] mentioned? How do we know that the policy we’ve adopted will hit that target? So even on the left and with the environmental community, there is a preference for regulation over pricing, because regulation at least gives you the illusion that you have a target that will be met by a particular day. I say “illusion” because it turns out environmental law does not work that way. It has never worked that way. We don’t meet targets.

Comment: Okay, so pricing CO2 is out….

Adler: I did a paper for Joe [Majkut] at Niskanen [Center] that actually points out that we pretend as if you say, “We should have regulations,” and you snap your fingers, and suddenly they’re in place and they’re complied with, and their targets are met. And that’s just not the world we live in. The throughput capacity for right environmental regulations is kind of like the throughput capacity for environmental impact statements—the government can’t do the volume that we need if that’s the way we’re going to decarbonize….

Comment: Why decarbonize? No intellectual case has been made, just vague assertions that CO2 is bad.

Adler: But the big point is that there’s this fear: Which am I afraid more of, climate change or climate change policy? And if climate change policy means the government is going to decide how much, and what sort of, energy each industry gets to use, and in what time frame, and what car you drive, and what kind of stove you have, what kind of house you live in, and so on … well, then, climate change has got to be really, really bad to justify that. And I would argue that not only is that not the choice we face—that in fact, going down the road is actually not even the best way to deal with climate change—but that’s what feeds the right side of the political spectrum’s fear of climate policy.

Comment: Correct: there is a competing fear of climate change vs. climate change policy. And a grand reason to get off The Road to Climate Serfdom.

Adler: There are ways of thinking about the collective action problem where we think about reciprocity of advantage, and where we’re all allowed to engage in equivalent types of conduct, and we engage in some sort of collective enterprise to make sure it’s not too excessive.

Comment: “Collective” as in global? “Collective action problem” as in guilty until proven innocent with the global greening gas of life? Adler is out on a limb with no tree.

Adler: On this issue of adaptation that was just brought up, though, I’ve been pointing this out to people for close to 20 years that the UN IPCC on issues like water rights is more liberal and more market oriented than pretty much any major environmental NGO in this town, and certainly than the U.S. government’s policy. Because for 20 years, the UN IPCC has noted that on the issue of water availability and access to water—which is a huge issue, and something that climate change is going to affect in a lot of unpredictable but significant ways—you’re not going to be able to build your way out of that with infrastructure, especially in the Global South, but not only in the Global South. You’re going to have to have ways of pricing and reallocating water in response to demands. And we know how to do that. We’ve shown how to do that.

Water markets are very robust where they’re allowed to operate. And … crickets. Policy-makers don’t want to talk about that. It feeds into the idea that it’s a watermelon thing, because here’s an example where we have clear empirical evidence, we know how to deal with dramatic changes in the availability and supply and timing of water, and we know what sorts of institutions can handle that sort of thing—and yet, we don’t want to talk about that. We want to tell you what shower-head you use.

Comment: A free market in water, yes. Adaptation, yes. Nothing here on the problem or solution to “climate change.”

Adler: There’s a lot of pressure to maintain what is ultimately a similar narrative. There’s a belief, and it’s a well-intentioned belief, that the nuts and bolts on climate change are complicated: It’s not immediate, so it’s a long-term problem, but it’s still very important. And the way you get—in a democratic society—people to act is simplifying it and scaring people.

Comment: This is a reason for the climate lobby to cease-and-desist, not for global government or a misapplication of tort law where it cannot possibly succeed except for judicial activism/statism. Complexity calls for markets and not government, and markets include Civil Society, not only profit/loss business.

Adler: So the folks [who] want to attribute every hurricane or whatever to climate change aren’t trying to … this isn’t a stalking horse for some broad liberal agenda. It’s, well, “We’re oversimplifying some, but this is the sort of thing we are worried about over the long term, and we don’t think the democratic process will be able to handle the complexity that what’s really going on is we’re increasing the upward potential of hurricane damage and hurricane storms and the likelihood over a longer period of time. But we can’t say it about a particular storm.”

And if you try to say that on the evening news, people are going to change the channel, or they’re going to fall asleep. Whereas, if you say, “Oh, my God. [Hurricane] Beryl or whatever is the result of climate change,” maybe that gets politics in action. The problem, of course, is that when someone goes and looks at the science, and they pull out the IPCC, and they talk about, “Okay, what are the different levels of attribution we can engage in with regard to different types of changes in weather?,” and they see the IPCC is saying, “Hurricanes? Yeah, we can’t really tie the knot yet,” well, it’s like we saw with Covid: “Well, now they’ve exaggerated. Climate change is still a problem, but the specific thing they led with wasn’t true, so maybe that’s an excuse that gives me permission now to say they’re lying about everything.”

Comment: Has Jonathan Adler contradicted the deep ecology belief that nature is optimal and fragile and that the human perturbation cannot be good but bad?

Adler: In a democratic polity, it’s undermined the ability of science to inform the policy process, because the way the science of climate is presented oversimplifies and glosses over a lot of complexity, and, in some cases, just says stuff that isn’t quite true.

Comment: Global climate models are science? Reliable and settled? And attribution models based on them (for tort claims) are not less so? Remember Climategate?

Adler: Yes, it’s true that we are not good at building some Grand Cathedral that takes 150 years to build, but we do a lot of other things much, much better. China’s gonna be able to build lots of stuff if they wanna do it. The evidence that we have so far … and there’s some research coming out soon that, actually, when you look at it qualitatively as opposed to quantitatively, they obtain far more patents for clean energy products, but the patents they’re obtaining are very low value patents. All the high value patents are still here. They’re not in China, they’re not in Europe. The problem we have here is that we make it too difficult to do stuff. The discussion we’ve been having about permitting for transmission lines is a very salient example of a problem that is endemic of that we’ve made it too hard to do stuff, and part of what we’ve made it too hard to do are the natural things that make problems like climate easier to solve.

Comment: This excursion into energy policy is a reason for a separation of government and climate/energy. Nothing more,

Adler: So the least talked about and yet most important environmental trend of the 21st century in countries like the United States is net dematerialization—using less stuff that’s physical material year over year. The United States will use fewer molecules of physical stuff next year than this year. That’s mind blowing. That wasn’t planned. That wasn’t designed. That wasn’t programmed. That wasn’t scheduled. It was because stuff costs. We pay for stuff. We pay to get it, we pay to manipulate it. We pay to deploy it. We pay, unless we can figure out a way to turn it into smoke, to dispose of it. In a world in which you can innovate, that over time leads to these trends. We don’t do that with energy because we don’t fully integrate it into those market processes, those very liberal processes that encourage all of us, collectively, to try to make more with less tomorrow than we did today.

Comment: Yes, and a reason, again, to separate government from climate/energy policy.

Adler: So if we want these bigger, longer term trends, we know what the institutional framework needs to look like to decarbonize. And we don’t do that. China’s not doing it either. Now, if we figure stuff out, China will build a ton of it, and I’m not sure that’s bad if they build a ton of it, and it’s less expensive for us, so then it’s even easier for us to deploy it. The real challenge for an issue like climate change that’s global is: Are we able to be the engine of figuring out how to how to decarbonize? And we’re kind of failing at that.

Comment: Alder’s premise “to decarbonize” is a fatal one both in the “problem” and the “solution.”

Adler: And it’s not clear it’s democratic, right? Because the people who show up at the planning meeting to complain about the wind turbine that’s going to go on the other side of the hill that they heard about, and they’re afraid they’re going to see when they drive to work, are not necessarily representative of the people as a whole. And I should just note: the more you dig into it, [when] we talk about NEPA and environmental impact statements, especially for energy infrastructure, state and local barriers are probably greater than federal barriers for everything but large transmission projects that have to go across federal land, and perhaps across tribal lands. Otherwise, the state and local barriers are greater. We have things in federal law that magnify those state and local impacts. And I’ll say, as someone who loves decentralizing political authority, that’s a hard fact to wrestle with. Because I like letting different communities make different choices. But letting different communities make different choices means it’s really hard to build linear infrastructure. And you can’t electrify and decarbonize through electrification if you can’t build linear infrastructure.

Comment: Again, Adler poses an issue that he has not defended as a problem. CO2 enrichment is positive from the most settled science of all: CO2 science under laboratory conditions. He arbitrarily puts his faith climate models that cannot be tested and have no way of knowing that their physics are right. No convincing case here!

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[1] Here is my exchange with Tom Palmer (and Shikha Dalmia) who refuses to do a deep dive into Progressive Left authoritarianism. (Note how I was ‘indefinitely suspended for my comment. How authoritarian, ISMA.)

To get an idea of ISMA head Shikha Dalmia, a “left liberal” and Kamala Harris supporter, consider this rant:

So, these low information voters, voting based on what their media ecosystem is telling them rather than what the truth is, it bothers me that all of us, including the Kamala Harris operatives, just kind of gave up on informing those voters and trying to at least win some of them over, or at least take the edge off their cynicism of the establishment. If we keep giving up on those voters, that’s just going to deepen. Elections are a great moment to educate voters—at least the informative function that it serves is highly important to keep both sides somewhat in line. (The UnPopulist, November 10, 2024)

The November election results for the TDS bunch were expressed as follow:

Shikha Dalmia: To me, it was a gut punch. Obviously we all knew going in that it was 50-50. But I was hoping it wouldn’t be Trump. And it was. So I spent the first day completely in shock. And if I could have my way I would curl into a fetal position and wake up in four years. But there’s work to be done, a country to be saved, our republic’s fate is on the line—so here I am.

Andy Craig: Yeah, I share a lot of that. Not necessarily shock as in surprise, but shock as in, “Wow, this is really happening.” We’d still had the hope that it wouldn’t. I think a lot of people are still, understandably, taking the time to emotionally process it. I think it’s not wrong that people are feeling it as a gut punch. I mean, it is. I did.

Belvedere: The gut punch, for me, is that there was no shortage of coverage about Trump’s manifold barbarisms. And yet Americans saw all of that, processed it, and in the end said, “This is the guy we want.”

In denial and out of touch. The real world must be a strange place for this cult.

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