Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson and his Green counterpart Jill Stein | Photos: Gage Skidmore, some rights reserved
Commentary: If you're a concerned environmentalist voter that's unhappy with the Democrats' lackluster environmental platform, but even more so with the Republicans' expressly anti-environmentalist platform, you might be wondering whether a third party might offer you an alternative.
In one sense, the answer is no, at least in 2016. Even the best-crafted party platform doesn't mean much without legislators to enact its provisions. It's less likely that Libertarian or Green Party candidates will win enough seats in Congress, or for that matter any state legislature, to make their platforms reality, than it is that a Delta smelt will become chair of the California Republican Party. Or that it will rain every day for the next month.
But electability aside - and yes, thats a big aside - if you're considering a protest vote on behalf of the environment, just what environmental positions would you be voting for with a third party? We took a look at the environmental platforms of the two leading alternative parties on the ballot in 2016. Their approaches to environmental issues couldn't be more different, aside from their shared commitment to legalize cannabis.
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Libertarian Party
Let's discuss the Libertarian Party's 2016 environmental positions first. It won't take long. Within that party's 2016 Platform, there are a total of 126 words devoted to environmental policy. That's so little language that we can paste it all in right here. The platform's Environment language - actually and tellingly a subsection of the Economic Liberty section - reads thus:
Competitive free markets and property rights stimulate the technological innovations and behavioral changes required to protect our environment and ecosystems. Private landowners and conservation groups have a vested interest in maintaining natural resources. Governments are unaccountable for damage done to our environment and have a terrible track record when it comes to environmental protection. Protecting the environment requires a clear definition and enforcement of individual rights and responsibilities regarding resources like land, water, air, and wildlife. Where damages can be proven and quantified in a court of law, restitution to the injured parties must be required.
There's also an energy subsection, which reads, in its entirety,
While energy is needed to fuel a modern society, government should not be subsidizing any particular form of energy. We oppose all government control of energy pricing, allocation, and production.
The language is essentially the classic Libertarian Party line on the environment: privatize everything, then assume that property owners act in their long-term self-interest by protecting the ecological value of their resource. If a person owns a square mile of old-growth forest, by this logic, they have a vested interest in maintaining the value of that resource, and government should get out of the way and let them do it.
The argument suffers from a bit of a rhetorical downside, which is that the vast majority of human history refutes it. To claim that government environmental law only makes the environment worse, while an unfettered property rights doctrine is the best way to protect resources, is pretty much an admission that the person making the claim doesn't get out much.
That's not to say that private property owners can't be environmentally conscious and work hard to protect the biological values within their holdings. Many do, many of them heroically. But without government regulation to back them up, their hard work can be undone by a recalcitrant owner of nearby property who decides the best use of her land is to dump meth lab waste into the creek.
In other words, the Libertarian Party's environmental platform can pretty much be summed up by an aphorism you may have heard from your friendly local agent of government coercion: Nothing to see here; move along.
The Libertarian Partys argument suffers from a bit of a rhetorical downside, which is that the vast majority of human history refutes it.
Green Party
The Libertarian Party devotes just 126 words to the entire environment in its 2016 platform. That's less than a hundredth the verbiage on the environment offered up by the Libertarians' third party counterpart on the left, the Green Party of the United States (GPUS). The GPUS platform's environment section weighs in at more than 10,000 words, and other sections from foreign policy to banking to racial justice have environmental topics woven throughout.
The GPUS is a confusing beast. Founded in 2001, GPUS is the second or third contender (depending on how you count) for the role of a national Green Party in the United States since the notion of a Green Party was borrowed from West Germany in the 1980s. GPUS is fractious and prone to schisms, and its organizational views often conflict with those of state party organizations.
If, based on your conversations with rank-and-file Green Party voters over the years, you're imagining that the GPUS platform spends those ten-thousand-plus words advocating for bike lanes, locally sourced organic produce, and legalizing pot, you wouldn't be wrong. Those stereotypical topics are in there. But they're just bullet points in a surprisingly authoritative, wonkish policy paper on ways U.S. environmental policy could be improved.
If you follow social media, that may surprise you. The GPUS has taken some heat from its own potential constituency in recent weeks after its Presidential candidate, Dr. Jill Stein, staked out a series of positions on controversial topics that are not supported by the best science. T
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Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson and his Green counterpart Jill Stein | Photos: Gage Skidmore, some rights reserved 
