But let me back track a bit. There is a lot to say here about choosing an antagonistic way of presenting an idea, but one tiny nitpick affected me in particular. I was actually following fine and agreeing perfectly well up until his proposed solution of solving everything by simply making a law. Now, the problem isn't necessarily that I don't think this is the best solution, but the fact that he clearly does not actually understand the libertarian position, and thus completely fails to convince me by using the wrong counter arguments to hypothetical objections he imagines I have. His assumption is that libertarians value ridiculous personal freedoms more than the environment, and thus spends his time explaining how much the externalities of wood burning outweigh whatever silly freedom I may be concerned with this week. This is equivalent to patronizing someone who is for drug legalization by explaining to them that, actually, drugs are bad, and that's why they need to be illegal silly.
I think he can't fathom that I may actually be 100% in agreement with his goal (to reduce wood burning), and yet reach a completely different conclusion as to the method to achieve it. A big part of the libertarian argument is actually quite consequentialist: make this illegal and you may very well find the the amount of wood burning go up, or at least not decreasing at all. If its obvious to you that that's not the case, then it should be easy to prove. To convince me (and it is totally possible), I'd actually be curious to know things such as: is wood burning already decreasing on its own and thus not require a law and all sorts of strange enforcement practices? Are we sure that enforcing such a law wouldn't unexpectedly require another form of pollution (wouldn't be the first time an environmental law had that result). Have we really exhausted all other approaches including education on the subject? Etc. Etc.
I get the sense that what he wants us to walk away with is "look how hard the truth can be to accept if you don't know it", but I think the real takeaway is seeing how little we understand our audience sometimes. Whether the argument is political or religious, the favored method of argumentation seems to be "shock and awe". Showing people that as it turns out, they're actually assholes and didn't even know it! Then following up by belittling their values and explaining why your values are more important. This rarely works. I think people's goals are actually way more aligned than we think they are, but understandably we have reached different conclusions on how to reach those goals (again, the drug legalization issue is a great example). To finally bring it full circle, I think this is certainly true of religious arguments. I'm certain there is a much better path than trying to beat into people's heads how stupid they've actually been their whole lives and how they're partially responsible for so much suffering in the world by perpetuating this "terrible" thing.