Not by the Free Market Alone

I do not know of a single man-made environmental problem that is not due to undefined or ill-defined property rights. When land belongs to everybody, it belongs to nobody and is over-grazed, as it was on the Indian reservations or on African tribal lands; it is the private owner with full rights over his property that will take exquisite care of it.

No wonder then that not only free marketeers take on the sham-environmentalists in a copious and excellent free-market literature, but that the free market is extolled even by liberal Democrats like Sen. Wirth, and more moderate Democrats like Sen. Lieberman write articles "To market, to market" (Issues in Sci. & Tech., Summer 1992, in which he makes the droll state-ment "Making carbon dioxide emissions a marketable com-modity may be the quickest way to slow global warming.")

But there are two strong reasons why the free-market ap-proach will not impress those who are in the thralls of the sham-ecological fanatics. First, the majority of people clearly prefers steady 9 to 5 employment to the risks and long hours of an entrepreneur. And contemporary welfare morality says: better sit on the wagon than pull it (and don't the "generous" politicians know it!).

Second, and far more important, the sham-environmentalist lies have succeeded in pre-emptying property rights. Where the Reds stole, killed to rob, confiscated and nationalized, the Greens have found a more sophisticated method of abolishing property rights, the Naderite slogan "the biosphere belongs to all of us." The allegedly thinning ozone layer belongs to all of us, as does the allegedly warming climate. (It belongs to none of us, as we have not the slightest control over them.) Stop burning fossil fuels, use less efficient, more expensive and more dangerous coolants than CFCs, for you have no rights over your property like your refrigerator. You wouldn't want monetary thoughts to affect the future of your children, would you? "We must tell our children . . . that they must begin to think of the sky as a threaten-ing part of their environment," says eco-lunatic Sen. Gore.

A somewhat better approach, therefore, is to point to the ecocrats' coerciveness and impairment of civil rights . As pointed out by the Washington Legal Foundation, the EPA's planned warning labels on all equipment containing CFCs, ". . . harms public health and environment by destroying the ozone in the upper atmosphere," is a precedent with unforeseeable conse-quences for Big Brother running your life. Similarly, I have often pointed out the coerciveness of the anti-food-irradiation crowd, though if irradiated food, well marked as such, were harmful, it would harm nobody but its consumers, who (like "the people" in Communism) are too stupid to know what's good for them.

Alas, a people who does not object to the virulent racism of Affirmative Action will not be terribly disturbed by such losses of civil liberties; but there is still one thing Americans won't stand for: being duped and played for suckers. And that is where science comes in. Slow global warming by market methods? What global warming? There may not be any; if there is, it can-not, by the historical record and other evidence, be man-made. The ozone layer, the ozone hole, acid rain, radiation, nuclear wastes, and the rest of it is based on bold-faced lies that in normal times would never pass as science. But the ex-scientists catering to the media and their own grantsmanship by panic-making has changed all that. Yet in spite of charlatans like Ehrlich, Rifkin and Schneider, people still have respect for scientists, and they seem to be able to tell the genuine ones from the media monkeys. When they realize how they have been had, they get mad. And so they should.

There was a time when I thought I was all alone in pursuing that strategy, and the feeling was reinforced with the terrible loss of Warren Brookes. Yet more and more articles with this strategy are appearing. To name just a few recent ones, R. Bailey tells "The Hole Story" about ozone (Reason, June 1992); J.H. Adler demolishes the myths that children are taught in school in "Little Green Lies" (Policy Review, Summer 1992); P. Samuel (Ntl. Rev. 8/31/92) points out how the Reagan administration failed to use the most potent weapon against the enviro-extremists, science. The German equivalent of Forbes, called Impulse, brought an en-lightening, scientifically based story on "Why the chemical com-panies need the ozone hole" (May 1992); and through the excellent work of the Science and Environmental Policy Project parts of the press have finally admitted that only a small part of climatologists believe in man-made global warming. Rep. Dan-nemeyer has introduced resolution HR 547 calling for an inves-tigation of ozone depletion.

Once you have laid the scientific foundation you also have the moral high ground. The sham-environmentalists have killed mil-lions by needlessly outlawing DDT; they have killed tens of thousands by refusing coal-fired plants to be replaced by nuclear ones; they have legislatively forced people to buy light and dangerous cars; they have killed thousand by scaring them out of radiation therapy, they brainwashed thousands of women into abortions of wanted babies in Greece and other West European countries where there was not the slightest danger from Cher-nobyl radiation levels.

Onward and forward! Nobody is irreplaceable, and nobody should stand aside in the defense of science against the new totalitarians.