Here are some of the more obvious things that could help combat global environmental crises like global warming in a way that doesn’t crush individual economic liberties or doesn’t increase state control of the economy. This is all leading up to something. You’ll notice that for many of these, it’s simply a case of the cost of something not reflecting the environmental cost, due to marketing controls.

Of course, the ones of these that are both obvious and easy do get implemented – slowly. Green Scissors has their influence, but that only gets the really low-hanging fruits. I’d like to see leadership in the executive branch have the gonads to implement the obvious, but politically suicidal (particularly #2!).

I’m naturally more interested in the not-so-low-hanging fruits, but that’s the subject of past (and future!) blog posts.

1. End farm subsidies. They are the reason alfalfa is grown in the desert and meat is cheap. They only help the richest farmers, anyway.
2. Stop making gas cheap. End subsidies for gas, oil. The government fights the creeping “problem” of gas being expensive. There are many, many creative folks working on alternatives to hydrocarbons, yet here we are artificially reducing the demand for their work.
3. Make national parks, state recreation areas, etc. pay for themselves. Wild nature is a scarce resource. Charge for it. There is an opportunity cost in keeping these lands, and it costs money to clean up after the homo sapiens. For this matter, private corporations can do the same thing! It is unlikely a nature-enjoyment use of a land will win out against more exploitative uses in the free market often enough to preserve biodiversity, but stranger things happen (like churches being rich!) and rigging the game slightly in favor of such entities would be much less statist than so many other proposed measures…
4. Big business, trade unions are forces to be reckoned with. Though they may temporarily work to protect the environment, they are more often foes. The government needn’t (and shouldn’t) oppress these entities, but it can stop giving them unchecked political power that isn’t afforded any individual human. If asked to donate to a club the whales fund, I think you’re answer would be “pshaw!”, yet that corporation you own stock in, or that union you’re in, may lobby time and again against your wishes – without asking you once! Businesses and trade unions’ lobbying limbs exist to maintain status quo – but status quo is precisely the cause of our troubles, no?
5. Lower taxes. More money to donate to the Nature Conservancy. When people pay less in taxes, they donate to charitable causes, and some are bound to be environmental. Land-grabbing orgs large and small do much more using less, than the federal government.
6. Let the private sector feed the poor. Poorige is good for you and lower on the food chain. And, it’s cheaper (unless the government artificially makes foods higher in the food chain cheaper, which they do). Food stamps give you the power to buy the laziest foods, which also require the most industrial processing. Poor people have time on their hands, not money. Let them have potatoes, not potato chips. Oh, yes, and population growth is a doozy and when you must choose between feeding yourself or having a child who will stave, just maybe you might choose the former.
7. Enforce property rights. An industry doesn’t have any special rights to pollute my property.
8. and much more…