Rob's Blog

Twice recently I have encountered arguments that libertarians don’t believe in global warming because if true, it would invalidate their world view. The first time was a comment on Eric Raymond’s blog, and the second a comment at Samizdata.

Presumably the idea is that since only government action could reduce emissions enough to avert global warming, you need big government to solve any such crisis. Libertarianism can’t solve this because the atmosphere is the ultimate commons.

But whatever the seriousness of global warming and whatever its causes, more freedom will always be a better solution than less freedom.

There is no conceivable problem that cannot better be solved by a free society than by a society ruled by a large state.

Free people are richer, more innovative and can respond more quickly. Governments are slow, and because they are centralised have a tendency to make the wrong choices. A government can only make one choice at a time, so it goes to its best experts and they decide what is to be done and it gets done, and then we find out what the unintended consequences are and start again. This is far inferior to a free market of competing ideas where lots of things get tried and winners emerge.

But what if the only way to prevent catastrophe is it dramatically reduce emissions immediately? Then there will be catastrophe! Governments are not able to co-ordinate the whole world into reducing emissions. They’ve been trying for long enough and not succeeding. Now, how do you want to face catastrophe? Free, or constrained?

I was forced to watch some of Hugh’s Fish Fight the other day. It was the episode about salmon. In it, wealthy, successful TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall lectured us about how we should eat a wider variety of fish and not so much salmon.

He mocked people who said they preferred salmon because it had fewer bones. But people can like whatever fish they like for whatever reasons they like. And fishing out tiny bones is annoying. And salmon tastes good.

He complained that farmed salmon is fed on herring and sardines. It takes three pounds of these to get one pound of farmed salmon. So what? Quite a lot of the herring and sardines would be thrown away anyway. And hasn’t Hugh heard of the law of conservation of mass? It’s not as if the organic matter disappears. It eventually rots or is eaten and the carbon dioxide ends up as plant and algae food and so around it goes. Nothing is ever really wasted.

Hugh would prefer us to eat the herring and sardines directly, but given that we have already expressed a preference for salmon, that would achieve nothing except to make us less happy. To make us decide to be less happy, Hugh is trying to make us feel guilty.

It’s time people stopped letting people like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall make them feel guilty.

Hugh spent much of his programme about salmon worrying about the scale of the operation. Oh no, they hoover up salmon with a big pipe! Oh no, they have a big machine to chop off all their heads! Oh no, there are so many! I had no idea we ate so much salmon!

Well Hugh, how do you think you feed a nation of 60 million people without them all spending their entire lives farming and fishing? It’s the economies of scale of things like fish farms that makes it possible for us all to eat salmon and still have leisure time. Hugh wants to make salmon more expensive so that only people like him can eat it, and we’re all stuck eating herring.

He’s not just talking about it on TV, he wants to influence policy. He has a campaign web site promoting an early day motion and wants us all writing to our MPs. Much of it talks about the “problem” of discards.

Fishermen are throwing away the fish they don’t want — the ones we don’t eat. He wants politicians to prevent this.

But it’s a non-problem, for the same reason that wasted salmon feed is a non-problem. The waste is an illusion: the dead fish don’t just disappear, they are recycled by the sea: eaten by other creatures and bacteria, and eventually turned into new tasty fish. The energy for all this comes from the sun, so there’s an endless supply. It’s all sustainable. Where does Hugh think fish come from?

But what if we eat too much of one kind of fish and run out? Market forces will keep this in check. If we fish to many of one kind of fish, they become harder to find and prices go up, and fewer will be sold, until a balance is reached. Prices will settle at a level people are prepared to pay for that kind of fish. Innovations such as farming can make an otherwise expensive fish cheaper, as in the case of salmon. This is all good.

But the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstalls don’t like innovation. They yearn for an imagined golden age when we all gamboled in meadows and were in tune with nature and ate fish caught with our bare hands. If such an age ever existed there were a lot more hungry people in it who didn’t live very long and they certainly didn’t get to eat salmon.

Nature isn’t something to be in-tune with. It’s something to conquer, before it conquers you. So sod off back to nature, Hugh, and let the rest of us enjoy our salmon.

Update: And another thing. If you still think there is something good about Hugh’s campaign, consider the outcomes. The only way he can get us to eat less cod and salmon is to make it more expensive. There are various ideas on his site, such as fish credit trading schemes for fishermen, but ultimately it’s about reducing the supply of our favourite fish, which will make them more expensive. Now what do you think people will do? Buy herring because they can’t afford salmon? Of course not. They’ll end up eating less fish overall, to the detriment of their health.