Climate Change and Militarized Planning

About this event

Some academics and commentators argue that societies should engage in centralized planning to avoid climate change impacts, similar to war-time economic planning from the past. This talk critiques militarized climate planning in its comprehensive and noncomprehensive forms. The speaker, Nathan Goodman, argues that a “war footing” would severely exacerbate epistemic limitations, perverse incentives, and political power problems, reducing the capacities to discover effective means of climate mitigation in localized contexts. He alternatively argues that polycentric governance systems promote diverse and nuanced mitigation approaches. Polycentric institutional configurations tend to improve learning processes, provide stronger incentives for socially productive behavior, facilitate coproduction, and foster legitimacy for climate action. Societies do not need to engage in militarized planning—either comprehensively or noncomprehensively—to address climate change problems effectively. This presentation is adapted from a recently published paper titled “Militarized climate planning: what is left?”, you can read it in the link below. Dr. Nathan Goodman is a senior research fellow and senior fellow at the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.