Comments on: Libertarianism, the Environment, and Kyoto: Part 1

By: susanna

susanna — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 16:56:05 +0000

Although your science is very sloppy and your attitude deplorable, you’d get more points if you could spell. when you can’t even proofread your own blog, how are we supposed to take your sarcasm seriously?

By: Gregory

Gregory — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 10:06:23 +0000

"We have no regulations that people should keep their house looking nice and shouldn't trash it, but most people keep their house up anyway. Why? Because it is in their own obvious self-interest to do so."

In many urban and suburban areas, there are property maintenance codes that dictate how high your grass can grow, what types of plants are permitted, such as no weeds or poison ivy. The community in which I live even restricts where you can park a trailer, what material a driveway must be constructed with and there is even a ban on putting a "for sale" sign in the window of your car!

"I have had literally twenty different people give me the exact same response to this: "If you let people do whatever they want, they would all trash their own land and dump toxic waste all over it"."

Unfortunately, in business, this is often quite true. I worked for an electronics manufacturing facility that routinely buried hazardous waste in massive pits. When one pit neared full, it was covered over and a new one dug. This went on for many years until they were forced by environmental laws and enforcement to stop the dumping and clean up the site.

By: Max

Max — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 15:35:43 +0000

This is all nice and plain, as long as you are arguing about individual levels. But most environmentally concerned people (I know of) have a different problem, namely the destruction of nature by companies whose self-interest lies with making profit and where conservation (or at least securing) of the environment is not necessary in the process.

For example, we have the Oil Industry, that needs not take care of its environment, because it can get oil even in a desolate wasteland.

Another example would be a chemical factory that produces waste and just dumps it into the river.

By: Chris Beck

Chris Beck — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 22:08:26 +0000

"3. Use of One's Own Property. By the reasoning for environmental regulation above, the regulation is to limit the impact of one property owner on others. But the flip side is that property owners should be able to do whatever they damn well please with their own property if it does not affect others."

It certainly seems a fair enough point. I wonder about possible really long-term scenarios. Let us say that I have a process for manufacturing a "widget" that involves toxic by-product. Let us say that this toxic by-product remains toxic for a very long (1000+ years) time. Now if the profit I get from selling widgets is less than the cost of purchasing land it is certainly commercially viable for me to store this stuff and buy more and more land until a land shortage raises the cost of new storage facilities too high so I close down my widget factory and move on to something more profitable (blogging, perhaps). Now I own a large chunk of land that has no future value. Is it in society's best interest to allow owners to reduce the future value of land to zero? One of the major problems with environmental concerns is the large difficulty in measuring cost.

Let us say that I follow all reasonable current containment standards to store my toxic waste. An act of nature causes a toxic spill causing damage to my neighbours.Would they have the right to sue me or should they rely on any insurance that they may have purchased.

Just curious.