We support a clean environment as it relates to the flourishing of human life—not as an end in itself.

Human beings—not swamps, wastelands, caribou, rats, or mosquitoes—hold supreme moral value. We hold that what is morally right and proper is for human beings to develop and cultivate the earth’s resources in service of human life.

The human environment is kept clean and safe primarily by advances in science, technology, and industrialization.

For example: development of steel and concrete enables construction of reservoirs, water mains, indoor plumbing, and sewer mains that keep sewage out of the drinking water; advanced technology allows for the draining swamps that are breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitoes; heating and central air conditioning permit human beings to live comfortably in extreme climate conditions, without breathing smoke from indoor fires; and so forth.

Related, the protection of private property rights is essential to effectively resolving legitimate cases of pollution. If an individual chooses to pollute and limits the damage to his own property, that is his affair and none of the government’s.

But if he pollutes someone else’s property, a claim against him in civil court by one whose property he damaged must be upheld; a polluter must be held legally responsible for remediating any property damage he incurred. Additionally, the upholding of property rights enables environmentalist organizations, or others, to raise money and purchase large wilderness tracts, to be kept forever wild, unused for human economic development.

Regarding climate change, the earth is roughly 4.65 billion years old, possessing therefore a vast history in which climate change occurs naturally and ceaselessly. For example, millions of years ago, long before human beings existed, much less industrialized, huge naturally-driven temperature swings—significantly larger than the 1.5 degree Fahrenheit rise of the past 150 years—caused the onset and, in time, the cessation of ice ages.

We recognize that the best opportunity for human life to flourish during such periods of severe cooling or warming is provided by electric power, indoor heat, thermal clothing, advances in medical science, air conditioning, sunscreen, and the like—all products of applied science, technology, and industrialization.

Whether or not human industrial activity contributed to the slight warming of the past 150 years, two truths are certain: This mild warming, despite decades of alarmism, poses no immediate catastrophic threat to human life—and government’s restricting of the economic activity required to attain flourishing life across all climates, is the exact opposite of a proper course of action.

Only a free society and a free market, upholding individual rights and freedom of the mind, enables the advances in science, technology, and industrialization necessary to protect human life from all of nature’s dangers, including ice ages and other forms of extreme (or mild) climate change, germs and disease, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and the like.