A certain brand of libertarian ideology is about a principled dislike of government intervention into personal and economic affairs. Another brand, subscribed to by the Cato Institute’s David Boaz, is about sticking it to hippies. This in response to environmentalist suggests that people observe an “earth hour” and—voluntarily, I note—conserve energy by turning out the lights, he suggests that we deliberately waste energy in order to stick it to the hippies:

[The Competitive Enterprise Institute] rejects the rejection of technology. They have declared the hour between 8:30 and 9:30 tonight to be “Human Achievement Hour.” To join the celebration, just turn your lights on tonight and enjoy the human achievement of light when we want it. And watch CEI’s short video history of human achievement here.

Because remember, kids, whenever you help contribute to the death of a Bangladeshi in coastal flooding, an environmentalist cries. Every time drought malnourishes an African child, Al Gore sheds a tear. So waste, waste, waste away. It’s the human thing to do after all.

The Cato Institute usually doesn’t mess around with the way-outside-the-mainstream elements of the libertarian worldview (see Chris Hayes for some of this) and certainly not with the elements of hard-core anti-statism that the business community would find very distressing. But with the economy in crisis, a lot of people are feeling somewhat ideologically discombobulated (myself included, at times) so I suppose it’s not shocking to see some loopy ideas moving closer to the mainstream. At the same time, there’s another trend that Brad DeLong’s been calling attention to, namely the fact that the present crisis has reached a level where even Milton Friedman’s ideas suggest that we should be doing stimulus. Brad, with touching naiveté, seems to think that that means that people normally inclined to admire Friedman should start agreeing that stimulus is a good idea. What’s happening, in fact, is that people normally inclined to admire Friedman are embracing fringy “Austrian” ideas (or Ayn Rand books) since the point of admiring Friedman is to reach the conclusion that government intervention is always economically ruinous.

All of which is by way of introducing the fact that Cato Institute Executive Vice President David Boaz apparently thinks we should adopt the gold standard and abandon “fiat money.” Of course, contractionary monetary policy amidst a sharp worldwide recession would doom us to years and years of misery. And during the Great Depression, nations’ ability to recover was strongly linked to their willingness to abandon gold.

Paul Krugman’s old post on “The Goldbug Variations” is always worth re-reading.

I did a post last month on some of the differences between classical liberalism and modern libertarianism but I don’t think I was making myself very clear. A practical example, however, helps.

Nowhere in the works of Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, for example, is there anything about how if science indicates that certain form of human activity that was long thought to be harmless to others is, in fact, doing massive, hard-to-reverse damage to the long-term interests of billions of people that the correct response is to retreat into dogma and ignorance. And yet here’s Cato Institute Executive Vice President David Boaz teaming up with Washington Post columnist George Will to push the idea that there was a 1970s-era scientific consensus that we were facing dangerous “global cooling” and that, therefore, we shouldn’t take today’s warnings about global warming seriously.

The fact of the matter is that there was a bunch of media hype in the 1970s about a cooling trend. Now as probably know, the media sometimes hypes up bogus trend stories with no real basis in evidence. Neither Will nor Boaz are small children or lobotomy victims, so presumably they understand this, too. And that’s exactly what was happening in the 70s:

The supposed “global cooling” consensus among scientists in the 1970s — frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can’t make up their minds — is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era.

The ’70s was an unusually cold decade. Newsweek, Time, The New York Times and National Geographic published articles at the time speculating on the causes of the unusual cold and about the possibility of a new ice age.

But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.

Yes, that’s right, even in the 60s and 70s the bulk of scientific concern was about warming. The evidence was, at that time, tenuous. But it’s grown steadily in every passing decade. This is not media hype. It’s real science. It’s possible, of course, that the vast majority of competent scientists are all part of a vast conspiracy to defraud the public into believing that human activity is causing the planet to warm. But it’s hard to see why that would happen. It is, however, easy to see why polluting industries and their hirelings in the think tank world would want to pretend that this is what’s happening.