Food for thought in the climate change debate

As North Carolina moves forward with proposed policies to combat global climate change, North Carolinians could be forced to make major sacrifices.

“Seriously flawed” work attempts to justify policy proposals that would substitute government coercion for the natural processes of the free market.

Setting aside the flaws in the methodology used to justify the new policies, those asking for change might want to consider the following observations from Ludwig von Mises in his classic work, Human Action: 

[T]he degree
of convertibility of the supply of capital goods available affects all
decisions concerning production and consumption. The smaller the degree
of convertibility, the more realization of technological improvement is
delayed. Yet it would be absurd to refer to this retarding effect as
irrational and antiprogressive. To consider, in planning action, all
the advantages and disadvantages expected and to weigh them against one
another is a manifestation of rationality. Not the soberly calculating
businessman, but the romantic technocrat is to blame for a delusive
incomprehension of reality. What slows down technological improvement
is not the imperfect convertibility of capital goods, but their
scarcity. We are not rich enough to renounce the services which still
utilizable capital goods could provide. The fact that a supply of
capital goods is available does not check progress; it is, on the
contrary, the indispensable condition of any improvement and progress.
The heritage of the past
embodied in our supply of capital goods is our wealth and the foremost
means of further advancement in well-being. It is true we would be
still better off if our ancestors and we ourselves in our past actions
had succeeded in better anticipating the conditions under which we must
act today. The cognizance of this explains many phenomena of our time.
But it does not cast any blame upon the past nor does it show any
imperfection inherent in the market economy.

In other words, the “romantic technocrats” might want us to scrap all of our existing cars, power plants, and homes in favor of items that use less energy or produce fewer “greenhouse gas” emissions. But they ignore the fact that mandating such drastic changes would cause a huge waste of the existing capital that serves as the “foremost means of further advancement in well-being.”