Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Libertarians warm up to environmental issues

I'm going to take a brief break from responding to George Phillies's delegate flier, and instead make time to applaud both George and Steve Kubby for being ahead of the gradient as Libertarian responders to environmental issues.

As recently as two years ago, it seemed that Libertarians didn't want to hear the words "global warming." It was easier just to plug our ears and scream "junk science" because that was seemingly the only alternative to accepting the statist Left's program for draconian government measures versus climate change.

Sure, most of the "libertarian" responses smacked of corporate welfare and crony "capitalism" rather than real free market solutions, but that was the flow it was easy to go with. I recall the particularly bellicose reaction at the Libertarian Party's 2004 national convention when nomination contender Aaron Russo had the gall and temerity to suggest that the answer to America's energy problems might not be another corporate welfare program in the form of handing half of Alaska over to Exxon.

The dam broke in August, 2005 when Ronald Bailey, Reason's science correspondent, proclaimed "We're all global warmers now." The science is becoming pretty damn clear ... and libertarians need to come up with real answers instead of continuing to pretend the old ones work.

Read George Phillies's position paper on energy and the environment here.

Steve Kubby's latest blog entry -- which I can confirm is also a position paper, or at least the backbone of one -- is on the same subject.

Congratulations to George and Steve for leading from the front on this one.

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