https://news.yahoo.com/climate-activists-invest-property-beaches-110000244.html Climate activists invest in property on beaches they say are disappearing From Bill and Melinda Gates to climate envoy John Kerry, climate activists have sounded the alarm about how melting ice will soon raise the ocean to levels that swallow the world’s beaches. But some of the country's most vocal climate change activists have invested heavily in luxury oceanfront property along beaches they’ve claimed will be underwater one day due to rising sea levels. Climate activists have long faced charges of hypocrisy from critics who accuse them of lecturing others about making sacrifices for the environment while declining to live by that example themselves. For instance, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were pilloried in the media in 2019 after the two flew on a private jet just days after Prince Harry wrote on social media that “every choice, every footprint, every action makes a difference” in protecting the environment. More recently, Kerry faced criticism for flying on a private jet to Iceland to accept an environmental award. And Kerry is one of several activists who have put millions into homes on the water. Kerry has warned about rising sea levels in the past; he did so, for example, as secretary of state, painting sea level rise in Virginia as a sign of the larger threat posed by climate change. Speaking in Indonesia in 2014, he warned Asian nations that they could see their countries destroyed by rising sea levels that, he said, could put entire cities underwater. He has even mocked people whom he believed to be insufficiently concerned about rising sea levels, saying in 2015: “We have people who still deny this, members of a flat-Earth society that seem to believe that — who seem to believe that ocean rise won’t be a problem because the water will just spill over the edge.” But Kerry’s concerns did not prevent him from investing considerably in oceanfront property that, by his own accounts, could be underwater in a matter of decades. Kerry spent $11.75 million in 2017 for a sprawling estate on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard. The property includes more than 18 acres of land on which his seven-bedroom home sits, overlooking the Vineyard Sound. Bill and Melinda Gates, passionate climate activists, also shelled out a small fortune for a luxury waterfront home. Last year, the couple, who are presently in the midst of a divorce, paid $43 million for a massive house on the beach in Del Mar, California, near San Diego. But Bill Gates has issued dire warnings that beaches, like the one on which he has invested in property, will be wiped out by higher ocean levels in a matter of years. “There will be places near the ocean [that] the sea-level rise will completely wipe out,” Gates told the Miami Herald in February. “You know, like Miami won’t look anything like it does today. Those beaches will be all gone.” Former President Barack Obama has warned extensively about rising sea levels, arguing in the past that such trends pose a threat to national security. “Climate change, and especially rising seas, is a threat to our homeland security, our economic infrastructure, the safety and health of the American people,” Obama said in a 2015 speech. Marty Nesbitt, a close friend of the Obamas and chairman of the Obama Foundation, purchased a tract of land in Hawaii for $8.7 million in 2015, miles from where the two families would visit every Christmas during the president's time in office, and is building a trio of houses on the beachfront estate. The Obamas are believed to be planning to occupy at least one of the houses when construction is complete. The project has been controversial locally, in large part because the developers requested and received an exemption from Hawaii’s environmental laws to leave in place an old sea wall on the beach. Environmental experts say sea walls contribute significantly to beach erosion and should be removed, but plans were submitted to the state to expand the sea wall on the property. The Obamas own an $11.75 million mansion in Martha's Vineyard, near the water as well. Even Al Gore, whose warnings about the danger of climate change have been among the most dramatic from a politician, has invested in property overlooking the ocean he says will wipe out coastal towns. Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, warned that the sea could rise by as much as 20 feet “in the near future.” Gore has made a number of dire predictions about the speed at which Arctic ice will melt, causing the oceans to swell, that have not occurred on the aggressive timelines he’s suggested. But Gore invested nearly $9 million into an ocean view property in Montecito, California, in 2009. The lush property had a swimming pool, spa, wine cellar, and six fireplaces.
The article missed an obvious point. This isn't about investment for these affluent individuals, it's about enjoyment. These people are rich. The wealthy elite have multiple homes with beachfront properties just for their pleasure. The millionaires and billionaires would be financially fine if their beachfront homes disappeared tomorrow. Climate activists get to enjoy their wealth too, there's nothing hypocritical about that.
Climate Liberalism in Public Choice A nice review of Climate Liberalism by Jordan Lofthouse (and a less nice one by Robert Bradley). https://reason.com/volokh/2023/09/04/climate-liberalism-in-public-choice/
This article is just a tease for a book review that's behind a paywall, what a boner kill. The highlighted sounds interesting...
text: Across the globe, many significant environmental challenges exist, but man-made climate change may be the most widespread and potentially dangerous. For decades, many scholars, policymakers, and activists have discussed ways to address air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change. However, scholars in the classical-liberal tradition have understudied and underemphasized the issues surrounding climate change. Of course, many classical-liberal scholars have worked on this topic, but a conspicuous gap in the literature remains for such an enormous social issue (for just a few examples, see Adler, 2012; Anderson and Leal, 2015; Jenkins et al., 2020; Ostrom, 2012, 2014). The edited volume Climate Liberalism: Perspectives on Liberty, Property and Pollution helps to fill this gap. A variety of contributors discuss pollution- and climate-related issues from a classical-liberal perspective using multidisciplinary approaches, including philosophy, law, economics, and political science. The volume is a useful resource for understanding practical approaches for addressing climate change while also focusing on “preserving individual liberty and maintaining a free and dynamic economic marketplace” (p. 2). The editor, Jonathan Adler, opens the volume by laying out the classical-liberal perspective and tying that perspective to climate change. Adler outlines the most foundational classical-liberal principles as “property rights, decentralized authority, and dynamic markets” (p. 2). In general, the classical-liberal approach is skeptical of top-down administrative regulations that attempt to control the environmental consequences of productive activity. The skepticism of environmental control, from both positive and normative angles, reflects the classical-liberal skepticism of economic central planning. Government officials, whether elected or unelected, face both epistemic limitations and perverse incentives, which undermine the stated goals of public policies. Instead, the classical-liberal approach to environmental concerns, in the most general sense, focuses on the ability of private property, prices, and the feedback of profit and loss to coordinate social activities. From this perspective, a key cause of environmental problems is the absence of markets or their antecedent, private property. When transaction costs prohibit the defining or enforcement of property rights, environmental problems arise. In these cases, a classical-liberal approach might see some role for government, but the limitations of government are at the front and center of analysis. Knowledge problems and incentive problems abound in policymaking, and government failures might result in worse outcomes than the supposed market failure they are trying to fix. In cases where private property is well-defined and well-enforced, markets lead to socially beneficial outcomes, such as more efficient resource use, innovations, and greater preference satisfaction. However, property rights to water and air are generally not well defined, which limits the possibility of Coasean contractual solutions to pollution problems. Particularly in countries with a common law tradition, adjudicating property rights and damages can and does work (generally) well for relatively simple cases when harms are direct, the parties at fault are readily identifiable, and transaction costs are relatively low. However, when property rights are incomplete or ill-defined, it becomes much more difficult to use the common law to solve pollution issues. Greenhouse gas emissions and man-made climate change are a commons problem at the largest possible scale, making it especially difficult to address. Although classical-liberal principles work well when property rights are well defined and the rule of law exists, resolving such a global commons problem with these principles is not straightforward. Using the power of a Leviathan to address such a large-scale commons problem is a double-edged sword. A Leviathan can restrict harmful pollution, but in the process of those restrictions, it may cause unintended consequences and threaten the classical-liberal values of individual liberty and limited government. Thus, liberal institutions rooted in private property rights and the rule of law can solve many environmental problems better than centralized, top-down government policies, but only so far as these institutions exist. When property rights are too costly to establish, government may need to play a role. However, not all policies are created equal. Some are better than others at solving social dilemmas or preserving individual liberty. As Adler frames it, “The question then becomes what sorts of measures can be justified and whether some forms of government intervention are more consistent with classical liberal principles than others” (p. 12). Throughout the volume, many prominent thinkers in the classical-liberal tradition and their ideas are used to bolster the ideas of “climate liberalism.” It is worth noting some of these thinkers and their ideas: Philosophers like John Locke, Adam Smith, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Gerald Gaus provide the philosophical foundation for understanding the proper scale and scope of government, liberal morality, and liberal justice. Austrian economists, including F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Israel Kirzner, and Joseph Schumpeter, emphasize spontaneous order, entrepreneurship, and the market as a process. Public choice economists, including James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, articulate the importance of methodological individualism and the incentives facing policymakers. Ronald Coase, a foundational thinker in law and economics, is used extensively, particularly his seminal paper “The Problem of Social Cost” (1960). The work of institutional scholars, including Vincent Ostrom, Elinor Ostrom, Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, elucidate how different institutions influence human behavior in different ways. The work of Harold Demsetz and Yoram Barzel highlights the importance of property rights for social coordination. The insights of Chicago economists Gary Becker and George Stigler are used to bring a price-theoretic perspective to human behavior. Finally, foundational thinkers in the free market environmental movement, including Terry Anderson and Donald Leal, help to connect the ideas of property rights and markets to modern environmental concerns. The chapters in the volume can be divided into four broad categories. The first, which includes three chapters, is the philosophical underpinnings of a classical-liberal approach to climate change. This includes three chapters: “Pollution and Natural Rights” by Billy Christmas, “Do Libertarians Have Anything Useful to Contribute to Climate Change Policy?” by Daniel Cole, and “Climate Change Adaptation Through the Prism of Individual Rights” by David Dana. One of the most insightful quotes comes from Cole’s chapter. “Abstract, simplistic, and ideal political theories are not particularly helpful in diagnosing and resolving complex collective-action problems in the real world. If libertarians are serious about contributing to climate policy debates, they need to do more than offer broad policy advice based on presuppositions. They need to be more pragmatic and dig into the details of institutional design and application, with an understanding that no single policy instrument (or set of policy instruments) is universally preferable in all circumstances” (pp. 70–71). Thus, Cole highlights the difficulty of translating idealized classical-liberal principles into real-world policies. All policies will have trade-offs and unintended consequences, but it would be a shame to let the perfect be an enemy of the good. more
conclusion: The second category includes discussions of resolving climate change issues using property rights and the courts. This includes “Common Law Tort as a Transitional Regulatory Regime: A New Perspective on Climate Change Litigation” by Catherine Sharkey, “Libertarianism, Pollution, and the Limits of Court Adjudication” by Dan Shahar, “Complexities of Climate Governance in Multidimensional Property Regimes” by Karen Bradshaw and Monika Ehrman, and “Climate Change and Class Action” by Brian Fitzpatrick. While these chapters emphasize the importance of the courts to climate issues, Shahar makes an astute observation. “The most effective way for courts to fulfill the role libertarians envision is to work alongside legislators and regulators as complements instead of replacements” (p. 130). Using the courts to resolve issues is one important facet of a liberal approach to climate change, but it cannot be the only approach. In the traditional liberal framework, power and responsibility are divided among the three branches of government. Public policy works best when the legislative, executive, and judicial branches each perform their duties, constrained by the rule of law. One branch should not usurp another branch’s power by substituting for it. The third category includes discussions of the use of markets and firms to address climate issues. This includes “Nature and the Firm” by Jonathan Adler, “Permission, Prohibition, and Dynamism” by John Thrasher, and “Market Solutions to Large Number Environmental Problem-Induced Changes in Risk Distributions” by Andrew Morriss. Thrasher makes an especially insightful point about policy approaches that affect entrepreneurs, innovators, and firms. “Given the clear benefits of dynamism, we should favor PI [permissionless innovation] style permission rules over PP [precautionary principle] style prohibition rules all things being equal. Of course, all things are not equal, and there may be instances where a strong case can be made for PP style rules. Even so, in those instances, we are likely to have a better sense of the outcomes and their likelihoods, which means we should engage in traditional cost-benefit analysis rather than favor a PP” (pp. 245–246). Thrasher’s point is important because we live in a world of uncertainty. In an open, liberal society, we should tend to prefer permissionless innovation over the precautionary principle, unless there is some overwhelming reason to restrict action (Thierer, 2020). The fourth category includes discussions of institutional analysis and public policy, including carbon pricing. This includes “The Classical Liberal Case for a Target-Consistent Carbon Pricing” by Ed Dolan, “Climate Change, Political Economy, and the Problem of Comparative Institutional Analysis” by Mark Pennington, and “The Social Cost of Carbon, Humility, and Overlapping Consensus on Climate Policy” by Mark Budolfson. Pennington makes an important observation about polycentric arrangements in coping with climate change. “The point is precisely that in many decision-making contexts the way to manage radical uncertainty is to hedge one’s bets, to fracture or to divide decision-making authority in a manner that allows for comparative trial and error data production, that facilitates reflexive learning across decision making units, and that allows systemic risk—and this is what meta-level polycentricity allows for” (p. 330). The problems surrounding climate change are highly complex, and therefore, the responses to climate change must match that complexity. Meta-level polycentric governance involves the actions of governments, markets, and civil society at a variety of scales. Top-down, one-size-fits-all approaches to climate policy will not be well equipped to deal with the diversity and complexity of climate change (for a similar argument, see Lofthouse and Herzberg, 2023). Global problems like climate change do not have easy answers. Those answers are made more difficult when complicated with other considerations, including the classical-liberal values of limited government and decentralized authority. However, Climate Liberalism provides insightful and practical perspectives on how to understand and potentially tackle such a pressing social and ecological problem. References Adler, J. H. (2012). Is the Common Law a Free-Market Solution to Pollution? Critical Review, 24(1), 61–85. Anderson, T. L., & Leal, D. (2015). Free Market Environmentalism for the Next Generation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Coase, R. H. (1960). The Problem of Social Cost. The Journal of Law & Economics, 3, 1–44. Jenkins, M. E., Simmons, R., & Wardle, C. (Eds.). (2020). The Environmental Optimism of Elinor Ostrom. Logan, UT: Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University. Lofthouse, J. K., & Herzberg, R. Q. (2023). The Continuing Case for a Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change. Sustainability, 15(4), 3770. Ostrom, E. (2012). Nested Externalities and Polycentric Institutions: Must we wait for global solutions to climate change before taking actions at other scales? Economic Theory, 49(2), 353–369. Ostrom, E. (2014). A Polycentric Approach for coping with Climate Change. Annals of Economics and Finance, 15(1), 97–134. Thierer, A. (2020). Evasive entrepreneurs and the future of Governance: How Innovation improves economies and governments. Washington, DC: Cato Institute.
Seems like a book of someone trying to square their political ideology with climate/environmental solutions (or really trying to create a foundation or a mindset bracket for creating solutions) that they would personally find acceptable, I wish him luck.
Reason Foundation is one of the think tanks funded by the Kochs. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/opinion/sunday/david-koch-climate-change.html David Koch Was the Ultimate Climate Change Denier How a playboy billionaire built a political army to defend his fossil fuel empire. Aug. 23, 2019 By Christopher Leonard A few years ago, I was sitting in the book-lined study of an elegant condo with a view of downtown Washington, interviewing a former senior Koch Industries lobbyist about his job. I asked him what got him up in the morning when he worked for Koch. He gave me a one-word answer: “Carbon.” At the time, I had been reporting for years on Koch Industries, one of the largest and most confusingly complex private companies in the world. Its annual revenue is larger than that of Facebook, Goldman Sachs and U.S. Steel combined, and it makes everything from gasoline to nitrogen fertilizer to nylon, paper towels and windows. For all this complexity, one business inside Koch Industries remains more important than the rest — processing and selling fossil fuels. David Koch, who died Friday at the age of 79, is best known as a major funder of right-wing political causes, from tax cuts to deregulation, an enthusiastic patron of the arts and a man-about-town. But to his critics, his most lasting political legacy might very well be the rapidly warming world that he has left behind. Koch Industries realized early on that it would be a financial disaster for the firm if the American government regulated carbon emissions or made companies pay a price for releasing carbon into the atmosphere. The effects of such a policy would be measured over decades for Koch. The company has billions of dollars sunk into the complex and expensive infrastructure of crude-oil processing. If a limit on greenhouse gas emissions were imposed, it could dampen demand for oil and diminish the value of those assets and their future sales. The total dollar losses would likely be measured in trillions over a period of 30 years or more. David Koch and his brother Charles built a political influence machine that is arguably unrivaled by any in corporate America. Construction on the Koch political machine began in the 1970s, after Charles Koch took over the family company. He and David began funding and orchestrating a political project to restrain government power in the United States through lobbying, think tanks and political donations. The effort accelerated in the 1990s after a Senate committee, following a long investigation, accused Koch Industries of stealing oil from Native American reservations where the company was operating. That experience convinced David and Charles Koch that they needed to have a stronger presence in Washington to fend off their critics. More at the link
I have no problem calling people like Bill Gates hypocrites. I don’t form my views on Climate Change based upon Bill Gates. In general I think too many of our views and policies are formed based in individuals when an issue like Climate Change certainly isn’t based upon the action of an individual.
Fair criticism is all good, and hypocrites should be called out. Beach house vacation homes aren't an example.
Pielke Jr The Coming Revolution in Climate Research Get ready, everything is going to change https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-coming-revolution-in-climate excerpt: Long time readers here will be well aware of the problem of outdated scenarios that underpin climate research and the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The climate community is at long last coming to grips with this problem. The solutions, which are only just now emerging, will revolutionize climate research and policy. Back in July, I wrote about a workshop held in Reading, UK that discussed the preparation of new scenarios to guide the IPCC’s 7th assessment cycle. Among the recommendations of that workshop was that going forward, the focus should be on “plausible scenarios.” They also emphasized the importance of a “current policies” scenario that projects where the world is currently headed to better inform near-term policy decisions. At that workshop an influential group of more than 40 scenario experts from the community of integrated assessment modeling and adjacent expertise presented their views on the next generation of scenarios. Yesterday, that group published a pre-printsharing these views for comment. I encourage you to read the whole paper, and to feel free to offer comments as it moves towards publication — I’ll be offering comments by the 1 November 2023 deadline. Today, I wish to highlight an important implication of the emerging consensus around the importance of scenario plausibility. more at the link
