We don’t need no stinkin’ environmental regulations to save the earth — all we need are well functioning property rights for environmental resources and common law courts to protect that property against trespass. Pollution is simply a neighbor’s garbage dumped in your backyard without permission. If we simply recognize and enforce property rights for nature, the need for most environmental regulation goes away.
That’s the libertarian pitch anyway, and it goes by the moniker “Free Market Environmentalism,” or “FME” to its acolytes. FME was given a firm theoretical foundation by Ronald Coase, embellished and blessed by libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, given academic life by the Political Economy Research Center and the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment, popularized in Washington by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and even pitched by yours truly to the Board of Trustees of the Natural Resources Defense Council about nine years ago.
Alas, there has never been much evidence to suggest that libertarians were making much headway with these arguments and I have come to believe that they have less promise than I had once imagined. But what do you know? FME is now all the rage amongst environmentalists who have discovered that suing polluters for tresspass is easier than passing satisfactory laws against the same.