For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And this is, I guess it's a foreign policy subject, right?
Yeah, it's a foreign policy subject.
Global warming.
The guest is Clifford F. Thies.
He's the Eldon R. Lindsey chair of the free of free Enterprise at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia.
Welcome to show sir.
How are you doing?
Hey doing great.
I appreciate you joining us on the show, especially on short notice like this.
Oh, no problem.
All right.
So I guess I'd like to ask you a little bit.
Well, mostly if possible about the politics of the whole Copenhagen Global Warming Convention and all this stuff going on.
But I guess first I wanted to ask you a bit about the, you know, so-called scientific debate on it and whatever.
Personally, I don't know anything about it.
Really.
I know that, you know, I don't want government to do anything to anybody all the time, but that's sort of the second question.
The first question is whether there's actually sound science what people believe and whether it's right about global warming climate change or whatever they call it nowadays.
It sounds plausible enough, sir, that human beings dumping carbon dioxide in the air for 150 years in a row would have some effect, right?
It's plausible.
I'm not going to comment on the natural science aspect of it.
I'm an economist.
I can read I have some familiarity with statistics, but in terms of a scientific assessment, I'm going to leave that for my colleagues over in those departments.
Well, you do write in your articles at Mises.
You point out that there's really no testable science.
We're really talking about kind of computer models and guesses correlations and assumed causations and it seems like you're basically calling out bogus science.
No.
Well, that's what I can do.
I can see if the correlations prove causation.
I can comment on the illusion of a correlation for causation.
We've had our problems in economics with those matters, but it required us in our field to review the matter more sharply.
So we see these correlations in the current era where we have direct measurement of warmth and carbon dioxide in the environment.
We see this by proxies of these things in the past.
These things have fluctuated for a long time and fluctuated more or less together.
Now, does that prove one is the cause of the other the effect?
Actually not.
It doesn't prove that.
It does prove there's a lot of natural variation.
Now, do humans contribute to global warming?
I don't think there's a consensus in the natural science world.
Well, you know, they say the people who are the proponents of global warming policy changes and even the science itself, I guess their refrain is that the case is settled.
Come on.
The only people who disagree with this are people who are on the take of Exxon or some coal company or something like that.
All the real scientists in the world agree about this.
We see now that's not a scientific attitude.
It would surprise me as a student of science for a new discipline to get it right soon.
In my field economics, we required a lot of rethinking of our premises.
We had what we called a revolution in our field in the 1890s as we moved from classical economics to what we call neoclassical economics.
Over in psychology, Freud is a great father of that field and yet to current people in psychology, they don't look at what he said as the gospel truth.
They have revisited all the issues he has addressed and expanded their thinking.
So how is it that climatologists would get these things right?
Right off the bat and then close off debate.
That's not a scientific attitude and I noticed it's not scientists that are saying that primarily.
It's politicians who are saying that people like Al Gore who got a D in math and was excused from taking science when he was in college.
So real scientists keep their mind open.
That's what a liberally educated person does.
On the other hand, there are issues of prudence.
If we are talking about the possibility of a catastrophic error, well, it should get our attention and we should at least monitor what is going on.
So keeping our eye out open to the possibilities is very important for us to do.
Now, on the other hand, spending 30% of global GDP on abatement of carbon dioxide.
Does that make sense?
Is that what prudence calls for?
30%?
Is that what's going on here?
That is what I have seen for achieving the level of emissions that some of the alarmists call for.
Reducing carbon output, tremendously reducing carbon dioxide output would require us moving dramatically to another base for energy.
And I'm not sure what that would be.
Currently, nuclear looks like the best efficient way of replacing the use of coal in our electricity grid, but we don't have any licenses for nuclear plants in this country.
France came the closest to achieving the Kyoto targets of 5% reduction.
They achieved 4% reduction by turning their electrical generation over to nuclear power.
But where is that in the U.S. environment?
So we have not only a jihad against carbon dioxide emitting sources of fuel, but also against nuclear energy as well.
What does that leave us with?
Well, some people have this vision of, it's almost a quixotic vision of windmills.
Windmills cost about four times what coal-fired electricity costs.
And then you have the problem of transmitting the energy you develop from the windmill farm to where the urban populations are.
Well, we're talking about transmission wires and getting licenses for new transmission wires is another problem.
So practically every venue of opposing a possible solution is cut down.
Then we get the following arguments, which are just contradictory.
We're told to recycle paper and plastic and we're told to sequestrate carbon-based, sequestrate carbon.
Well, putting paper and plastic into landfills is a form of sequestration.
We're told we're running out of fossil fuels.
And if we keep using it, we'll poison the planet.
Well, it's obviously only going to be one thing or the other.
Which one is it?
So as an economist, here's what I say.
Expanding the definition of property rights to include the commons, the great commons of the world currently viewed as commons, the ocean, the atmosphere, the underwater aquifers, there could be others, migratory animals, migratory birds.
Okay, these pose challenges to the definition of property.
How do we do this?
I'm not saying I have the solution, but expanding the definition of property so as to bring about a market-based solution to these problems or potential problems would bring about dramatic reductions in the cost of achieving a set goal.
We'll have exploration for alternatives not currently available to us.
What we call progress is a continuous attack on what is viewed as impossible.
Things are possible today that were impossible in the past.
And if we get incentives to work as the private sector is able to do, we would be able to achieve currently envisioned goals at dramatically less cost than we have currently before us.
Well, you know, I'd really like to get back actually to the privatizing of the oceans because I'm in complete agreement with you.
In fact, I think it's an emergency that we hurry up and privatize them as soon as possible.
I also know that people in the audience are saying, what?
But I'll just ask them actually to hold on to that or I guess go ahead.
Yeah, and so am I.
I don't know what all that means.
Okay.
How do you quote privatize an ocean?
Do we just simply draw lines out to the ocean like expanding the current international jurisdiction from, you know, 200 miles out to as far out as you then abut against some other national jurisdiction?
That might not make sense.
You have to look at flows of water.
You have to look at flows of the species and things like that.
So I'm not sure what these things mean, but development of a property rights to cover what currently is viewed as Commons of the world will become to be more and more important as the human population grows.
And so I'm not, I'm actually not against the concept of cap and trade.
If by cap, we mean recognizing property rights and by trade, we mean making both tradable copy of property rights.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, there's as long as we're on the oceans for this one example.
Anyway, I was actually I talked with Walter Block about this not too long ago.
I guess I read something about how here's the analogy they made professor.
They said if you took two Humvees with a giant net and you sent them from the tip of South Africa to up to, you know, the south of the Sahara Desert with a giant net between them up, you know, the east and the west coast of Africa and you just caught every bit of wildlife in Africa and then you picked out the giraffes and threw everything else away.
Then that's basically the analogy for how they're doing the oceans.
Now, the technology of the nets is so good.
Now, they can just do these huge sweeps through the ocean and they're just wiping out masses of species and it is exactly the tragedy of the commons because there's only so many fish left.
So what are you going to do?
Let everybody else get them.
You got to go in there and get them and it's, you know, I don't know exactly what they're going to do to the food chain here, but it seems like the hysterical people might actually have a point that this is the kind of thing that can really screw up the food chain for our future existence and seems to me like only if you figure out a way to put some GPS buoys out there and have contracts and have people, you know, figure out a way to give people the incentive to conserve for their own business later and that kind of thing.
And I know it is difficult with the species swimming all over the place and everything else, but it's got to be work outable somehow.
We can't go on like this.
I don't think.
Yes.
And I think the unfortunate politicalization of these issues where it becomes a matter of are we going to go socialist and command and control versus a market and freedom oriented approach this just makes these tragedies more and worse and worse it delays our action.
So the efforts by some people to use the current crisis to extend state control or international control over resources is really puts the goal of socialism ahead of the goal of the flourishing of life on the planet.
I don't know.
I was curious to me because Marx was an atheist and a materialist, right?
I mean ultimately even if his mechanism was all messed up and based on the labor theory of value and all this nonsense what he wanted though was for the average schmuck to be able to live a decent life and have access to goods and services and things This is the strange twist of history is that when capitalism won out against socialism because capitalism showed that it was the cornucopia that brought at least middle-class decency to the masses of the world then those people who wanted to control over others switch from the goal of material advancement to the goal of control.
Then it was socialism not to expand flourishing a better life for everyone but rather socialism to restrict our enjoyment of life.
Now we got you know environmentalism means we have to do with less rather than dealing with more.
Well, you know the thing is to that, you know, people are glad I'm pretty sure right that cars don't still belch out all the lead that they used to in the air and things like this.
I mean, there's you know, certainly people can enjoy their lives by ruining other people's lives and so we do need to figure out ways to enjoy our lives without violating the rights of others, but it seems like what's happened sort of is people quit parsing these things right where it's simply, you know, if you're driving a car, you know that runs on foot power like Fred Flintstone, you're still polluting because it's a car and it's still a sin ultimately for you to have technology to advance yourself exactly the traditional concept of pollution is where a byproduct of your exercise of what you think is freedom is interfering with other people's continued peaceful enjoyment of their rights.
So when we have in that case, the government is protecting each of us from each of us and you know that we accept that we live in community with others and to some extent we have well understood property rights, but being a progressive society.
We're always changing things and having to read have to having to come back and reconsider our assumptions about what is property and that's what I'm saying with regard to the atmosphere and the oceans and other other matters is that if we approach these things from the standpoint of free market environmentalism, if we recognize things that formerly were viewed as held in common meaning that anyone could take however much they wanted out of it with no consequence to other people, but now there's so many of us or the ways of pulling value out are so efficient that there are consequences to others.
And now we have to sit down and figure this out.
How do we privatize these resources?
Well, now here's what they're trying to figure out now is how to privatize the right to use energy and you know, maybe this is a bit more political than your expertise here, sir, but it seems to me like, you know, the biggest multinational corporations by definition are conservatives in the sense that they want to keep things more or less the way they are their access to the state more or less the way it is and they know that more than half the people are born hating their guts for being the richest most powerful people who control the state and use it against the rest of us all the time and so they try hard.
I think they work hard at using judo on us and to make the people who oppose them actually help them, you know mistakenly and for example, I'm looking here at this Bloomberg article and get this this is about a well, I'll just read this little bit to you about a Range Rover selling in England for 90,000 pounds a hundred and fifty one thousand dollars a blue windshield sticker proclaims that the gasoline-powered trucks first 45,000 miles will be carbon-neutral that's because Land Rover the official purveyor of 4x4's to Queen Elizabeth the second is helping Ugandans cut their greenhouse gas emissions with new stoves.
These two worlds came together in the offices of Blythe Masters at JP Morgan Chase and Company Masters 40 oversees the New York Bank's environmental businesses as the firm's global head of commodities.
JP Morgan brokered a deal in 2007 for Land Rover to buy carbon credits from climate care and Oxford England based group that develops energy efficiency projects around the world Land Rover now owned by Mumbai based Tata Motors Limited is using the credits to offset some of the co2 emissions produced by its vehicles for Wall Street.
These kind of voluntary carbon deals are just a dress rehearsal for the day when the u.s.
Develops a mandatory trading program for greenhouse gas emissions JP Morgan Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
And Morgan Stanley will be watching closely as a hundred ninety two nations gather in Copenhagen this week to try to forge a new climate change treaty for the world that would for the first time include the US and China.
So I guess what's your reaction to that is is this whole thing just a big scam of a bunch of Wall Street bankers the same guys that that ruin the economy and then got the big bailout.
Well, I'm not opposed to cap and trade.
I might be opposed to setting very tight caps that cause us to make severe cuts in our GDP right away.
I'm not an alarmist.
What I am opposed to is this the government deciding to first auction the carbon rights and then use the proceeds to then pick alternative energies to fund.
This is how the government in the United States is getting mobile Exxon Mobil and GE and some of the other big corporations to buy into the program because these companies have vision that they'll be over there generating the alternative energies and taking a tax on one of the science as you were saying at the beginning.
I wonder why you'd be for it at all.
Well, I'm not for severe caps.
I am for continued monitoring.
I do think that sulfur dioxide methane these things are and traditionally have been viewed as pollutants and we are addressing those very successfully in the highly developed economies of the world, but in the emerging economies like China and India of these traditional pollutions are really terrible.
It's more of a local problem than a global one.
Even though methane has very high greenhouse gas quotient according to those who believe in the theory.
So we would hope that those countries address this issue mostly for internal reasons.
We should monitor the atmosphere.
We should take initial steps to set up a trading regime that is to recognize a kind of property right and allow it to be traded.
My real fear is that they're going to use carbon dioxide as a as calling it a pollution in order to take direct control over the US economy.
Yeah.
Well, that's what it seems like we're talking about here.
They keep using the phrase global governance like the commission on global governance back in the 90s.
Don't call it world government.
They hate that call it global governance and the other thing is in terms of pulling out carbon dioxide.
It might be very cheap to do that.
For example, let's say I build a nuclear power plant generate steam and then I use the condensed water from that steam to pipe it inland to irrigate what was formerly a desert and grow trees there.
Now, I get a lot of sources of revenue from this whole project including I get carbon offsets.
So it might be that generating carbon offsets is the cheaper way of reducing net human emissions.
Also draining swamps swamps put out a lot of methane bacteria as it eats decaying vegetable and animal matter puts out methane which is 30 times the greenhouse effect.
So draining swamps would actually give you big carbon credit.
Yeah, that's kind of messing with the very first steps in the food chain there, right?
Draining all the swamps all the wetlands and stuff.
Well, you would want to maybe siphon the methane out garbage dumps.
You want to address the issue of decaying matter.
You don't want vegetable biomatter to decay because that puts off the methane.
So prior to man's becoming into dominance of the world.
There were all kinds of swamps all over the place all kinds of bacteria putting out methane.
We have a chance to ameliorate that natural source, but you should get carbon credits for that.
The point is that if you just look at conservation, that might be a real tough row to hoe.
If you open up offsets you might be able you might under current technologies have really better options and then you might develop terrific options.
You might be able to develop a way like with a vacuum cleaner of just sucking out however much carbon dioxide you want and we could come into regulating climate on the planet making the planet very conducive to the flourishing of life.
Well, I don't know about I mean, there's a problem a knowledge problem with the influencing the weather the way you want it to write right where we're very early in the sequence of these are baby steps.
We should be taking we don't want to be terraforming the earth there.
It's pretty good.
Yeah, okay.
Well now I understand what you're saying about technologies getting better and better and there's there's a better and better ways to you know, fix pollution at the smokestack before it gets out in the air and all these kinds of things but just in terms of the economics of this thing these pollution credits.
I mean, we're talking about a new global currency to be traded by governments and multinational corporations, right?
I mean this seems to just be a blueprint for new taxes new regulation new corruption on a global scale.
What am I missing?
Well, it could be one or the other way.
In other words, if it's just a recognition of a property right with private trading and none of this going to the government, then it's it is just a currency that basically floats around the world and it's part of when we buy gasoline, maybe two cents per gallon of gasoline is being used to for the offset and you know, it's a little price.
We buy a refrigerator little price.
We buy a home someone plants a tree and so it's cost $80 more for the home.
So yeah, and we don't have to worry about accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
That could be the way we go on the other hand if it's a tax and every time you buy something this money goes to the government which the government then uses to subsidize wind farms or solar collection sites or you know, whatever they think of well, then that becomes a new, you know part of the bureaucracy.
Yeah.
Well, and that's what they're talking about over there in Copenhagen, right?
This isn't this isn't like they're having the global warming conference at Auburn, Alabama.
Exactly.
The UN is oriented to generate the scare their their so-called scientific panel.
It is commissioned directly to develop the argument that the humans are the reason for global warming there.
They're not directed to a balanced consideration of the evidence.
So they're assessing the risk you could view it as a precautionary approach.
They want to consider only the risk.
They don't want to consider the balance approach.
But when we're talking of hundreds of billions even trillions of dollars of economic consequences, well, you do want to consider the balance of the scientific evidence.
So well now what about these Republican scare stories that there's going to be well, I don't even know if they're scare stories.
What about these stories that there's going to be a new federal police agency that's in charge of monitoring everybody's energy use and are they really talking about stuff like that?
Well, we do have an EPA some of our states like Maryland are pretty aggressive about this and actually having environmental police uniformed and so forth like that.
I remember they put a lady in prison or at least arrested her for sending a dream catcher to Hillary Clinton with an endangered feather that she found on the ground.
Well, we want to have the presumption of innocence.
We want to have due process for any search and seizure.
We want to, you know, maintain our civil liberties and the argument that the environment Trump's civil liberties is very scary to me.
So as long as any new police come down with the same constitutional restrictions as any other police, I would be okay with it.
But I am concerned about the government to defining everything to be interstate commerce and therefore for amassing to the central government unlimited power.
I am concerned about that.
Yeah.
Well, you know, as long as I have you here, let me ask you when it comes to bears and salmon and say a certain kind of swan that maybe migrates from here to there and they stop at this one pond on this one guy's property on the way to here there.
How does how do you deal with that without state involvement?
If that guy wants to just poison his pond because he hates the damn geese, but I mean the geese don't really belong to him to kill do that.
But the principle is that people have the right to do the continued peaceful enjoyment of their rights and property.
So what you and other law-abiding people are doing you can project continuing to do.
Okay, so that if there are migratory birds and they stop at a place that hunters like that and so forth and they stop at a place for refreshing themselves, the owner of that place does not have preempt of the right to go and poison them all that would be a a tort which other people could take against him.
Now, it might require some collective effort on their part and the government may be their voice to protect their interest, but generally speaking, whatever peaceful whatever law-abiding people are doing they should have the right to continue to do that.
That's what that's an implication of the presumption of innocence and the government should exist to protect us in these things not for deciding.
Oh, these geese are good and they need to be preserved.
Those geese are bad.
They need to be taken out or we'll have an election and depending on the outcome of the election that matter will be decided.
Nobody should have to worry about the outcome of an election.
Elections should be conservative in the sense of that our rights are to be conserved.
Now, that is the principle.
Then you get somebody in the factory and it puts out a lot of smoke and that problem had never been thought of before.
I mean people maybe they burn some fire.
I talked with David Thoreau one time and he actually said that you know from the Independent Institute and he said that back in England it used to be that say if your neighbor was burning garbage and the smoke was coming and polluting the air on your private property that you could take him down to local magistrate for that.
I guess you had to be of a certain social class to be able to do so but you could take him to local magistrate and say hey your honor that's my air and he's making it stink make him stop and that it was tree as a matter of property rights and they actually nationalized it in the name of environmentalism back in the 1600s.
I think or 1700s maybe in England.
They nationalize the air in order to allow polluters to dump all their coal smoke into the air and that was the end of the private property rights over air in England and it was in the name of protecting the environment from the people they were allowing to pollute.
Of course.
Well, I don't think it was strictly that I think it was a they thought it was for national power.
They wanted to have factories in order to have more national power.
So the king had weighed the balance of the private interest in a continued peaceful enjoyment of their rights and property against the national interest in having industry and they decided what we want the industry you see that they should the principle of property would be whoever's a loser has to be compensated.
So in other words, they'd have to buy out the downstream breathers the downstream drinkers because of the taking away of something that they had a right to expect to continue to do so that that is always the problem when you set these up as matters of public policy rather than met matters of property rights property rights are conservative in the sense that everyone should be confident that they will be able to continue to do what they're currently doing and with regard to the potential problems like the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the world if we have an orientation that our purpose in doing that is to protect people rather than to decide that the internal combustion energy is bad per se or nuclear energy is bad.
Okay, if we have a value-free approach to property, then I'm for it.
Well, you know, it's kind of sad to me that so often property rights is sort of like states rights back in the day of the state's reserve powers that doctrine was beaten into the ground by the racist Jim Crow southern governments and and discredited it seems like you know, the big state entwined multinational corporations like to talk about private property rights to like to try to sound as much like a Mises Institute libertarian as they can and so I think as a result of that a lot of people on the left side of the political spectrum think of property rights as simply code for people who are already rich and powerful to have the right to violate their rights and you know the idea that the real solution is guaranteeing the property rights of all especially even the little guy as the balance to the big guy that that's really the end goal.
It's not property rights that are the problem.
It's that only people who are billionaires and and own congressman have property rights.
The rest of us are at their whim because of their access to the state, right?
Well that we want to have a principled approach now in the current environment.
We're talking about emerging economies like India and China of billions of people who currently live in emerging economies emerging from low-income becoming middle-income countries.
This is where the pollution is coming from the West has flatlined emissions for about 30 years now.
The increment in emissions is from the emerging countries of the world.
So what we have now are is another version of conservatism the version that you're referring to here where the wealthy are seeking to protect their wealth and imposing caps wanting these to be binding caps on the emerging economies that doesn't seem fair to me.
So in an allocation of well and even then they say well and then the American people will there at least some people are proposing that the American people taxpayers should have to pay reparations to these countries since they're taking the brunt of this as they're trying to develop.
I die.
Well, it's hard for me to to grapple with the United States having to pay reparations since we were only recently freed from being a colony ourselves and we we've done pretty well so that we overtook our formal Imperial ruler, but you know, okay, India was a colony until 60 years ago.
They're not much younger as a nation, you're free from colonial rule than we are.
So maybe the Europeans should pay us the reparations, right?
Yeah.
Well, maybe we should just abolish all governments and have private courts and adjudicate all of these things as matters of property rights and then we can be free, but here's the point of the biggest reparation anyone could get is to be free.
If you're free, you can pursue your own destiny as you choose.
And if you want to become wealthy, that option is available to you so that a country, once it is free for 60 to 80 hundred years, something like that, it no longer can argue that somebody else owes them something.
They've been free long enough to be master of their own destiny.
Now, the United States never had any colony in Africa.
We never had a colony in South America.
It's about the only country that you could say we might have colonial reparations that we owe.
I mean, this is a stretch, would be the Philippines as we inherited it from Spain.
Well, and Iraq and Afghanistan.
Well, for a while and now it's free.
Well, Iraq and Afghanistan too, huh?
Well, with regard to Korea, we occupied it for a time and it is a burgeoning free society.
Now, it took about 30 years for it to come to the point of democracy flourishing.
Democracy doesn't flourish in five or six years.
So Iraq has a way to go.
Afghanistan, boy, that is a bridge too far.
Iraq has a much greater potential to go this road to becoming a democracy given that it's been a civilization.
It's a cradle of civilization in the world.
Well, it's a very highly educated population.
Lots of professionals.
Well, used to be before they all fled to Jordan.
Right, and the challenge to nation building in Afghanistan is just tremendous, but that's not our fault.
It's been that way for centuries.
No, we're just making it harder and worse.
Well, I don't know about making something worse, which is impossible to begin with.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show.
This has been very interesting stuff.
Okay, a bit of a different flavor from what we usually do on anti-war radio.
I really appreciate it.
All right.
Okay, everybody.
That's Clifford F. Thies.
He is the Eldon Arch Lindsey Chair of Free Enterprise at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia.
