Question Earthority!

It’s hard to say when the new era began, but I personally date it from August 11th, 2005 — the day that Reason’s Ronald Bailey declared “we are all global warmers now.”

Over the last 18-24 months, the fact of global warming, and of mankind’s active, significant role in climate change, has gained increasing acceptance among those who might previously have been classified as “bitter dead-enders.”

And, in a curious “what comes around goes around” phenomenon, the remaining dead-enders — it would be impossible to identify them all, but if a tornado hit the water cooler at the Competitive Enterprise Institute the local ER would be flooded with them — have essentially donned the mantle they once tried to hang on the shoulders of environmentalists: The cloak of Luddism.

Environmentalists have become the forward-looking visionaries leading us into a new era. Part of that change of image can be ascribed to normal progress in technologies they’ve long advocated (solar, biodiesel, hybrid vehicles, etc.); part of it to a new willingness on the part of many “greens” to consider nuclear power and other previously taboo subjects.

Anti-environmentalists, on the other hand, have ceased to be the protectors of advancement (which they identified with the Industrial Revolution), and have become mere spokespersons for preserving outmoded and inefficient technologies against the advent of better ones. In a word, Luddites.

The transition seemed to happen in a relative eye-blink, but it’s really been a long-term thing. There was no sudden realization … just a slow accumulation of overwhelming evidence which was bound to eventually persuade honest skeptics.

The New Luddites haven’t been routed yet, but they are increasingly reduced to the position of crying “persecution!” when their rejection of science is brought up as an argument in favor of rejecting them as scientists.

Those cries, in turn, represent a crossroad for the freedom movement.

In the post-WWII era, libertarians have often identified with “big business” as the mainspring of innovation, even as “big business” often quashed innovation in preference to easily extracted profit, using government (via lobbyists, PR jihads, and pet “think tanks”) to hold innovative competitors back. The best example of that is probably the trillions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to Big Oil for the express purpose of keeping it competitive with emerging technologies.

While libertarians weren’t looking, real innovation and competition emerged … on the left. Now, we’re caught in the middle. The left has all too often relied on state power to get its way with regulation, just as the right has done so with subsidy. And breaking up is hard to do!

Should libertarians take their chance with a newly innovative, competitive, freedom-oriented left, or allow ourselves to be chained to the sinking ship of Big Business Luddism? I think you know my answer … but I’d like to hear yours.