I am following another thread on another site and environmental issues have come up. I’ll assume its a reasonable objective that people living in a built up area should be entitled to clean air or at least should not have to suffer someone elses externalities. So form a Libertarian perspective how are these issues to be framed. Does someone have to get sick from local emissions before taking action? does a person have to sue every potential road owner or car owner?
or to put it another way how would a Libertarian solution improve on the current government based regulation which is deemed to have improved air quality over the decades.
We need a new system of property rights. Originally the air was homesteaded for breathing purposes, we have all inherited this so anything that interferes with our breathing is actionable. Take the burning of fossil fuels for example anyone who sees anyone else burning fossil fuels would be able to take them to court and get an order to cease said activity, they could even hire someone to enforce this, but in enforcing this, since it is an issue of property they could only use proportional force, enough to get them to cease burning them.
From there we can privatize the natural factors that clean up the air, for example trees and bodies of water clean CO2 so that if you could show that you owned enough of the natural factors to fully mitigate your burning of fossil fuels you would be allowed to burn. And of course you could give or sell others the right to burn fossil fuels in your place.
Now this would be very hard on the economy but if I recall correctly most of the CO2 is emitted from nature, but the problem with burning lots of fossil fuels is that it makes the CO2 surplus or the amount that doesn’t get cleaned up much much larger. So even under this system we could still have a global warming problem, but I believe the extra cost added onto the climbing price of scarce fossil fuels would do several things:
Lower the value of coal, oil and natural gas so that it wouldn’t be worth it to harvest from the marginally cost effective sources.
Increase the cost of burning to a point where it would make alternative energy sources much more attractive, probably shutting down coal powerplants. This is an idea workable in an anarcho-capitalist society.
Of course the people who are offended by burning would need to have lots of resources to enforce this, but if they could come up with them they could, under this framework take some kind of action to internalize the externalities.
AK , I hadnt come across the idea that air could have been homesteaded, do you have any articles that discusses this idea? I had read various articles on the site that in the case of water say, that rights pertaining to rivers was tied to owning the particular stretch ie only the particular molocules that happen to have crossed and are currently on your bounded property.
So essentially you see some form of privatised EPA with insurance attached where people pay a subscription for them to monitor and do research and to be kept informed and have them act as an advocate?
Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution is what you’re looking for. It just happens to be one of the most famous libertarian pieces on an environmental issue.
I’ve read the article Jesse is pointing to, I don’t believe there are any articles discussing my particular idea.
For a while I’ve thought this is perhaps the weakest part of my political economy and it seems to me as though the air, as a wastebin for airborne soot and particulate is a scarce good. I’ve seen some speeches where some scholars of the Mises institute just shrug off the whole global warming issue as if it were a joke(I’m a Rothbardian so I really respect these guys).
So I took an absolutist position and again I find myself even more radically environmentalist then most people on the left and even more laissez faire then people on the right. But there is a crucial difference between me and environmentalists, I don’t value the environment and animal life as an end in itself, so I don’t buy into that preserve nature primeval stuff, I really don’t care about that.
I don’t know about insurance, but yeah basically a private epa that goes out and gets injunctions against people who pollute, there would be organizations that measure your cleaning capacity and you would be able to pollute unmolested, basically this would give people an incentive to grow trees. But yes it would need to be funded by concerned citizens, maybe this organization would work out a deal with the road owner so that they could track peoples’ mileage. But they would still have to respect your privacy as anyone else does so they couldn’t, say stick a gps tracking device on your car.
And the idea is that it has been homesteaded by everyone for breathing purposes so that anyone could get an injunction against anyone else for polluting.
You can’t privatize air, unless you build a mythical biodome.
Air is technically a scarce good, even though people misleadingly attach the term “super-abundant”. The air I’ve just breathed in is private, then I release it “back into the wild”. I also have property rights in my home or the land surrounding a stream. When someone introduces pollutants to the air/water where they are, those pollutants are what interferes with the physical integrity of my property downwind or downstream.
The problem with going from life under states to a free society is how government has destroyed the common law tradition of people being able to transfer small tort claims, say to damage from a small amount of pollution, so that someone could pool them and have proper incentive to pursue the claim. The tragedy of hte commons comes about from “public” ownership and states renting land to industry, who then has no incentive as a short-term user not to pollute.
If science shows us that X amount of a certain toxin leads to certain amounts of future damage, the claim can be acted upon. It’s in the the best interest of everyone involved to sort out easement rights to pollute from roads, factories, etc.