Climate-Denying Libertarianism

Exclusive: Libertarianism has gained new followers amid disclosures of excessive government surveillance. But this trendy ideology is filled with hypocrisy on principles and hostility to facts, having evolved from the Souths defense of slaveryand now resistant to the science of global warming, Robert Parry reports.

By Robert Parry

An inconvenient truth for libertarians is that their ideology of a minimalist U.S. government grew out of the Souths institution of human bondage, i.e. the contractual right of a white person to own a black person, and from the desire of slaveholders to keep the federal government small so it could never abolish slavery.

That is why many libertarian icons the likes of Patrick Henry, George Mason, Thomas Jefferson and the later incarnation of James Madison were slave owners who understood the link between the emergence of a strong national government and the threat toslavery.

The image of the Earth rising over the surface of the moon, a photograph taken by the first U.S. astronauts to orbit the moon.

More recently, libertarian political favorites, such as Ron and Rand Paul, have either opposed or criticized civil rights laws that, in their view, infringe on the rights of white businessmen to discriminate against blacks. Andlibertarian-oriented Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court and in legislatres across the country are gutting voting rights for black and brown Americans.

But an even bigger crisis facing libertarianism now and why the ideology is particularly dangerous is the existential threat from global warming and the urgent need for collective government action on a worldwide scale to reduce human output of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping chemicals.

The libertarian response to the overwhelming scientific consensus on this life-threatening reality has been either to deny the facts or to propose implausible free market solutions that would barely dent the crisis. Somedismiss the threatin mocking tones as some kind of statist conspiracy. Typical were sarcastic comments by the Independent Institutes Mary Theroux, writing: The climate crisis is real, its here, and its time for absolute power for Obama!

Theres also lots of sophistry and quibbling about the science. The preferred libertarian position adopts the pretense that the release of carbon dioxide by human activity contributeslittle or nothing to climate change.

Other libertarians accept the science but still cant bring themselves to recognize that a coordinated government response is needed. Anti-government ideology trumps even the possible destruction of life on the planet, a very real possibility given the likelihood of mass dislocations of populations and the availability of nuclear weapons.

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Climate-Denying Libertarianism