The Environment

Activists who genuinely believe the world faces catastrophe should give serious consideration to David Henderson’s reasons for thinking a carbon tax might be a false “solution."

Brazil — and its longtime disregard for property rights — has shown us how not to manage forest lands. Current calls for government solutions to forest fires do nothing to offer real solutions.

The whole episode shows the folly of top-down political solutions to social challenges.

Proposals to ban single-use plastics is yet another triumph of symbolism over substance. Unfortunately, while the benefits are largely illusory, the costs are quite real.

People use the marketplace to deliver what others need and want. Environmentalism, on the other hand, is built around denying human needs. 

Presented at Mises University 2019.

The most alarming of the projections of climate change damages rely on naïve assumptions about human adaptability.

Having failed to show that capitalism impoverishes people, socialists have invented a new victim of material prosperity: the environment. But this latest turn is the most disturbing of all in its knee-jerk hatred for human beings and human life.

Supply, demand, and prices affect human usage of natural resources in such a way that the most scarce and valued resources are economized and preserved. The practical effect is that valuable resources never really run out.

To borrow a line from Al Gore, this strikes me as a “risky scheme.”