Summary
The U.S. government has subsidized many activities that burn carbon: it has seized land through eminent domain to build highways, funded rural electrification projects, and fought wars to ensure Americans' access to oil. (State intervention, of course, tends to stifle innovations that threaten the continued dominance of currently powerful special interests, such as oil companies-for example, the state of North Carolina recently fined Bob Teixeira for running his car on soybean oil.) Private insurers have a strong incentive to assess the potential effects of global warming without bias in order to price their policies optimally-if they overestimate the risk, they will lose business to lower-priced rivals; if they are too sanguine about the dangers, they will lose money once the claims start rolling in.
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How a Free Society Could Solve Global Warming
The phrase "global warming" has been around for quite some time, but in the past year it has captured the spotlight as never before. One can't turn on the radio or open a newspaper without facing ads from "green" corporations, or hearing the latest way to reduce one's "carbon footprint." With even prominent Republicans (such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and George W Bush) on board, it seems all but inevitable that major governments around the world will enact new policies to combat this ostensible threat-and to cripple economic growth in the process.
Thus far the typical libertarian response to the growing clamor has been to challenge the science behind it. Now it really is the scientific consensus that global warming occurred during the twentieth century. What is not so obvious is that (1) humans caused this warming and (2) this ...See the full content of this document
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