I attended a Students for Liberty conference organized by my good friend Liz Jaluague and happened to speak to a reporter from The Tyee. We talked about many things, but she made climate change her focus when writing her article. Here’s my part:
Like Proenca, Garrett Petersen is conflicted about climate change. The PhD candidate in economics at SFU acknowledges climate change is a failure of the market or a “market externality” imposed on future generations.
“Obviously we can’t write a contract with them because they are not born,” he said, referring to instances where the polluter signs a contract with those impacted by pollution, like cap-and-trade systems where industries are allowed a certain amount of emissions.
“For climate change I would argue there is no perfect solution. It would be great if we could all come together in a perfectly utopian and altruistic way and decide how much carbon to emit,” he said.
But he believes neither governments nor private companies are better suited to making that decision: markets can’t bargain with future generations, and politicians only care about the time they’re in office — not how their actions will impact the next generation.