The main reason that most researchers believe that government controls are the only way is the past record of business not curb itself when it comes to making a buck. Invasive species like the Nutria that was brought over for the beaver hat industry and then released after the price of hat dropped. This is just one example and I am not condeming all business because there are some good environmentallly friendly companies out there but they are the exception not the norm. Other than government regulation, how do you keep the companies from dumping tons of pollutants into the rivers, so that we have another Cuyahoga River catching fire like it did in June of 1969
By making them pay for it, which can only be done if people own their property totally. Right now it's economic externality for them. That's the problem with the way most profs approach the subject. They ignore the fact that most if not all pollution happens through either government neglect or collusion. It wasn't too long ago that judges decided that companies aren't polluting so long as they pollute as much as everyone else. Questions to ask would be: why do the worst pollution and other types of environmental damage (deforrestation is a great example) generally happen on government owned property? Why is it that in industries where companies are allowed complete ownership of the resources they use, pollution and environmental damage is less than in those with heavy government intervention (answer: because they have a long term interest in the value of the resource, be it land, trees, coal, fish, etc)? Why is it that when laws protect rather than destroy property rights, pollution goes down (a good example of this is private ownership of rivers or pieces of rivers, as happens in some European countries). The government is not the protector of our planet, it's complicit in its destruction more often than not. Their standards even do physical and economic harm. Some examples cited from an article by Patrick Weinert:
"In 1994, under threat of lawsuit, the EPA forced the Pennsylvania state legislature to spend $145 million of taxpayers' money on the construction of 86 automobile emissions test centers. Later that same year, EPA officials realized that the project was a mistake, but forced the legislature to buy the empty buildings nonetheless.
"In 1996 the EPA demanded that citizens in Salmon, Idaho close down the town's two sawdust-burning heaters and replace them with propane heaters at a price of $750,000. Seeing a rural population of only 3,100 in the town with most airborne pollutants consisting of road dust and pollen, the EPA was more successful at cleaning out the Salmonites' bank accounts than at cleaning their air.
"During the summer of 1995, due to new federal limits placed on power plant emissions, utility companies in Chicago were forced to raise their prices for electricity. Over 700 residents of the city perished in their apartments from dehydration and heat stroke, many of whom had air conditioners but could not afford to turn them on."
When the government sets arbitrary standards industries aim for them, regardless of whether or not there are better ways to achieve the ends people seem to want, or if those standards are even really necessary. When the government removes the
price of a clean environment from the actual process of getting it clean, they waste resources and create inefficiencies that make it harder to reach that end of a clean, well balanced environment.
They also ignore the tendency of pollution to follow an inverted U curve. That is, the richer a society gets the more it can afford to worry about and actually do something about its environment. What people don't want to accept is that some level of pollution will always be there, and is probably necessary even to make the transition from primitive third world economies to more advanced ones. Most people think populations and pollution both keep going up and up, and it just doesn't work that way. People
want to live in a clean world, but they need to be able to afford it before it can happen. That only happens with economic development, which government regulation stiffles.
A good lecture, relevant to this thread, can be found here:
http://www.mises.org/Media/?action=showname&ID=39. It's worth a listen.
LOL). Even then, my teachers have been pretty pushy with their leftist political beliefs. It's quite odd...but maybe that's just california, eh?
