Reason Roundtable
Climate Change and Property Rights

June 12, 2008

Shikha Dalmia, senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation, notes in the latest edition of the Reason Roundtable: Property Rights in an Age of Anthropogenic Global Warming that ultimately free market advocates cannot have an ideological predisposition regarding the scientific outcome of climate change. Their interest ought to be first and foremost in ensuring maximum protections for property rights.

There has been much discussion in free market circles about market-based solutions to global warming that minimize the threat that big government poses to property rights. But less attention has been paid to the threat that greenhouse gas emitters themselves might pose to private property. This is the issue that Jonathan Adler, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Business Law & Regulation at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law and Indur Goklany, author of The Improving State of the World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet discuss in this edition of Reason Roundtable in two radical and provocative essays.

Adler believes that a normative commitment to property rights requires that First World countries, the primary contributors to global warming, ought to consider ways to compensate property owners in affected countries. But Goklany challenges that conclusion noting that, when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, no country or person - whether in industrialized or developing countries - has "clean hands." Therefore, based on what is known right now, no one has any claim for redress.

You can find the Reason Roundtable columns here:

Global Warming: Keeping Property Rights at the Forefront
Looking for solutions that would least empower the government - and least threaten property rights
By Shikha Dalmia

Climate Change As If Property Rights Mattered
Individuals should be compensated by those whose actions create environmental problems that produce provable damages to their property
By Jonathan H. Adler

Climate Change: No Harm, No Claim
All countries have engaged in greenhouse-gas generating activities
By Indur Goklany

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