Free Markets, Property Rights and Climate Change: How to Privatize Climate Policy

SHORTLY BEFORE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION the English philosopher John Locke put forward a theory of property that reflected the emerging capitalist system. This theory has often been interpreted as supposing that we, the human race, live on a frontier with the natural world, looking across to plentiful resources in an as yet un-tamed and un-owned wilderness. In the 1960s Kenneth Boulding, an economist born in Liverpool whose working life was spent mainly in the USA, caught the mood of environmental anxiety by labelling this approach ‘the cowboy economy’. He contrasted it with the idea of ‘Spaceship Earth’, its astronauts, the human race, depending for their lives upon the fragile atmosphere and depleted resources of a tiny planet spinning through an indifferent universe. Will Spaceship Earth land on a new frontier or disappear burning into deep space? Pessimists see the human race represented by Icarus, the young man in Classical Greek mythology whose ambition outstripped the technology available to him. He flew using wings made for him by his father, Daedalus, but the wax holding the wings melted when he flew too close to the sun. In Breugel’s famous painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, he is depicted splashing helplessly into the sea.