As Hayek's Nobel Lecture pointed out to us, we simply cannot know enough about the economy, in enough detail, to be able to plan it in any detail. The only method we've got of even calculating it is the very markets which make it up.

It turns out that this applies to climate change as well:

Potent, climate warming gases are being emitted into the atmosphere but are not being recorded in official inventories, a BBC investigation has found.

Air monitors in Switzerland have detected large quantities of one gas coming from a location in Italy.

However, the Italian submission to the UN records just a tiny amount of the substance being emitted.

Levels of some emissions from India and China are so uncertain that experts say their records are plus or minus 100%.

The problem here being:

Among the key provisions of the Paris climate deal, signed by 195 countries in December 2015, is the requirement that every country, rich or poor, has to submit an inventory of its greenhouse-gas emissions every two years.

Under UN rules, most countries produce "bottom-up" records, based on how many car journeys are made or how much energy is used for heating homes and offices.

But as Hayek pointed out, we just cannot know the economy at that level of detail. Now, of course, we have our doubts about whether climate change really is the threat to civilisation that some claim. But why is it that those who do make the claim, who really do argue that this is an existential matter, why is it that these very same people have insisted upon using methods that we know can never work? Simply because we cannot, ever, know the economy in the level of detail their plans demand?