I have longed argued that one of the primary problems with the thinking of our well-meaning liberal friends is that they tend to live in the world of "wouldn't it be nice" and then attempt to argue that people who dissent from this view are just plain bad. Nowhere is that tendency better exemplified than in the battle over Climate Change.
Most of us are familiar with the concept of the "prisoner's dilemma." It's an exercise in game theory where two men are arrested for a crime and interrogated separately by the police. If one man informs on the other and the other does not, the informer will walk and the other will get ten years. If neither cracks than both will go free. If each betrays the other then each will get two years. It increasingly occurs to me that this the best paradigm through which to view the struggle over Anthropomorphic Global Warming and what to do about it.
Too often conservatives and libertarians have allowed themselves to get bogged down in the debate over whether global warming is occurring and, further, if it is whether humans are responsible for it. The problem, as I see it, is that this takes us into a charged debate over science that has us fighting an inconclusive battle of attrition over technical questions that are barely understood by the overwhelming majority of debaters. I think that we would be much better off if we used the example of the prisoner's dilemma to explain why the "solutions" to global warming proposed by the statist element -- assuming for the moment that they are 100% correct on the scientific aspects of the question -- are not only unworkable but destructive.
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