Global warming

Global warming is the claim that the average surface temperature of the earth is rising and that human activity is a substantial cause. Whether that claim is true is a question for the physical sciences. Objectivism is a philosophy, and no philosophy can settle a question of fact about the atmosphere; a philosophy that claimed to could not also hold that empirical knowledge is acquired by observation and inference.

What Objectivism does bear on is everything that surrounds the claim: what standard the situation should be judged by, what a person is entitled to conclude from evidence he cannot personally check, and what a government may do about a harm nobody can trace to a particular defendant.

“City smog and filthy rivers are not good for men (though they are not the kind of danger that the ecological panic-mongers proclaim them to be). This is a scientific, technological problem — not a political one — and it can be solved only by technology.”
~ Ayn Rand, "The Anti-Industrial Revolution", Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

For the movement and its philosophy, see Environmentalism. This article is about the specific issue and the questions it raises.

What Ayn Rand actually wrote

Rand died in 1982, before global warming became a political question, and she never wrote about it. Attributing a position on it to her is an error of the kind she was most consistent about objecting to.

What she wrote about was the ecology movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and her target there was its philosophy rather than any of its factual claims. Her charge was that the movement took nature untouched by man as its standard of value, and therefore counted human production as a cost with no corresponding benefit, a standard on which the more successfully men live, the worse the result.

“Ecology as a social principle ... condemns cities, culture, industry, technology, the intellect, and advocates man's return to "nature," to the state of grunting subanimals digging the soil with their bare hands.”
~ Ayn Rand, "The Anti-Industrial Revolution", Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

That is a claim about a movement's ideas, and it is not evidence about the climate. Reading it as though it were is the most common misuse of Rand on this subject.

The standard of value

The Objectivist question is not "is the earth warming?" but "warming is bad for whom, measured against what?", because on this philosophy nothing is good or bad in itself. Value is value to some entity, for the sake of something; the ultimate standard is life, and for a human being, man's life. See Value and Ethics.

This has two consequences that cut in different directions, and an article that reports only one of them is not reporting the philosophy.

First, it rules out the intrinsic valuation of nature: a stable climate, a species, or a wilderness is not valuable apart from any valuer, and "undisturbed" is not a standard. A change in the earth's temperature is a problem to the exact extent that it is a problem for human beings, and not one inch further.

Second, and by the same reasoning, it does not permit dismissing the question. If a change in the climate would in fact damage human life on a large scale, then by the standard of man's life it is a serious matter, and no amount of contempt for the movement making the claim changes that. The standard is what serves human life, not what annoys environmentalists.

The same test must then be applied to the remedy, which is where most of the argument actually lies. A policy is not justified by the existence of a problem; it has to be shown to leave people better off than the alternatives, including the alternative of doing nothing and the alternative of getting richer and adapting.

Judging a claim you cannot check yourself

Most of the argument on this forum is not about policy at all. It is about how a person who is not a climate scientist is entitled to hold any view. Objectivism has a developed answer, and it disappoints partisans of both sides.

Accepting expert testimony is not faith. The faith article on this wiki draws the distinction: accepting a claim from someone you have grounds to think competent and honest, where the claim could in principle be checked, rests on evidence. What is rejected is belief without evidence, not belief without personal replication. Independence is a virtue about the functioning of your own judgment, not a requirement to rederive physics from scratch.

The grounds are themselves open to examination. Because testimony is accepted on grounds, those grounds can be assessed: whether a field's methods are public, whether its errors get corrected, whether its practitioners face consequences for being wrong, whether funding or politics has captured its incentives. Raising those questions is ordinary objectivity and not an attack on science. It is also not a substitute for evidence about the climate: showing that an institution behaved badly establishes something about the institution.

"Arbitrary" is a specific charge, not a general dismissal. A claim advanced with no evidence is outside cognition and is dismissed rather than argued against. A claim supported by contested evidence is not arbitrary, whatever one thinks of the people making it, and cannot be disposed of that way. The concept does real work here, and using it as a synonym for "I am unconvinced" destroys it.

Certainty is contextual. Certainty means that the evidence available warrants the conclusion within a specified context of knowledge, not omniscience. So both "the science is settled" and "the models are worthless" are claims that require the same kind of support and are subject to the same kind of revision. Neither is made true by being asserted with confidence.

The source of an argument is not its refutation. That environmentalism rests on a bad standard of value is a reason to examine its policy proposals with care. It is not a reason to conclude that any factual claim its adherents make is false. See Fallacies and Ad hominem.

Rights, causation, and the liability question

Objectivism holds that pollution which invades another person's property is a violation of rights and properly actionable, and that this is a matter for objective law rather than for administrative discretion. See Initiation of force and Government.

The difficulty specific to this case is causation, and the forum states it precisely: a company emits, the emissions contribute to an accumulation, the accumulation contributes to weather, and the weather destroys a house. Every step is diffuse. No particular ton is traceable to any particular loss, the interval runs to decades, and every person on earth is both plaintiff and defendant.

On the requirement that a specific defendant be shown to have caused a specific injury, that is not a case a court can decide. The honest statement of the position is that a strict causation standard leaves a harm of this shape unremedied, not that it remedies it. Objectivists argue about what follows. What does not follow, on this philosophy, is that a regulatory agency should be empowered to act where a court could not, since that substitutes an official's judgment for proof and is the thing objective law exists to prevent. See Justice.

Energy, wealth, and adaptation

The positive line most Objectivist writers take is that industrial civilisation is what makes human beings safe from a climate that was never friendly to begin with. Shelter, refrigeration, flood control, irrigation, storm warning, and abundant energy are the reasons a bad season is now an inconvenience where it was once a famine, and wealth is the general-purpose means of adapting to whatever the climate does.

Alex Epstein has argued this case at book length from an explicitly Objectivist starting point, holding that energy policy must be judged by its effect on human flourishing, that the benefits of cheap energy have to be counted and not only its side effects, and that resilience deserves at least the weight given to emissions reduction. His conclusions are disputed, including among Objectivists, but the framework is the philosophy applied: judge by the standard of human life, and count both sides of the ledger.

This is also the reading of Rand's remark above that the forum most often reaches on its own: that the response to a technological problem is more technology and more wealth, and that a policy which slows their accumulation has a cost measured in human lives protected.

Common misunderstandings

That Objectivism entails rejecting the scientific claim. It contains no position on it. Treating a question of physics as settled by one's politics is precisely the subordination of cognition to wishes that the philosophy identifies as the root error.
That because environmentalism is a bad philosophy, warming is not happening. The premise may be granted and the conclusion still does not follow.
That because warming is happening, the proposed policies follow. A demonstrated problem does not validate a particular remedy; the remedy has to be judged on its own effects.
That relying on scientists is second-handed. It is not, when the reliance rests on assessable grounds. What is second-handed is holding a view because of who else holds it.
That the philosophy delivers a policy. It supplies a standard, human life, and rules out some approaches. What follows from that standard given a particular set of facts is a question about the facts, and Objectivists reach different answers.

Discussion

"Don't Look Up": is there a prevailing view among Objectivists about what should be done?
Justice and Global Warming (the causation problem)
Property Rights/Global Warming/Industry
Climate Change (reasoning about it without claiming to know)
I need help in discussion about Global Warming.
Views on Climate Engineering Technologies

References

Rand, Ayn. "The Anti-Industrial Revolution". Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, edited by Peter Schwartz. Meridian, 1999. Originally published in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 1971.
Epstein, Alex. The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. Portfolio, 2014.
Epstein, Alex. Fossil Future. Portfolio, 2022.

External links

Ecology/Environmental Movement at the Ayn Rand Lexicon