Justice and Climate Change: Toward a Libertarian Analysis

As most parts of the world scramble to find solutions to what they anticipate will be a serious problem for human civilization, libertarians have often brushed the issue aside by denying that climate change is real or, if it is real, that humans have caused it. This position is problematic in several ways. Perhaps the most obvious is that the move to dismiss the problem relies heavily on minority views among the climate science community that may turn out to be incorrect. In this article, the researcher take the first steps to identifying the kind of answer for which they should be looking. Mainstream discussions have typically portrayed global climate change as the product of the free market's systemic failure to bring about desirable environmental, economic, and social outcomes. Libertarians will need to consider the procedural justice and the legitimacy of public-policy measures before formulating any concrete recommendations.