Free-market environmentalism
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Free-market environmentalism argues that the free market, property rights, and tort law provide the best means of preserving the environment, internalizing pollution costs, and conserving resources.
Free-market environmentalists therefore argue that the best way to protect the environment is to clarify and protect property rights. This allows parties to negotiate improvements in environmental quality. It also allows them to use torts to stop environmental harm. If affected parties can compel polluters to compensate them they will reduce or eliminate the externality. Market proponents advocate changes to the legal system that empower affected parties to obtain such compensation. They further claim that governments have limited affected parties' ability to do so by complicating the tort system to benefit producers over others.
Criticisms
Some critics argue that free-market environmentalists have no method of dealing with collective problems like environmental degradation and natural resource depletion because of their rejection of collective regulation and control. They see natural resources as too difficult to privatize (e.g. water), as well as legal responsibility for pollution and degrading biodiversity as too hard to trace.
See also
- Eco-capitalism
- Ecological economics
- Enviro-Capitalists: Doing Good While Doing Well
- Environmental economics
- Environmentalism
- Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment
- Geolibertarianism
- Georgism
- Green conservatism
- Green economy
- Green libertarianism
- Green tax shift
- Land (economics)
- Natural capitalism
- Natural resource economics
- Physiocracy
- Polluter pays principle
- Property and Environment Research Center
- Property rights (economics)
- Waterkeeper Alliance
- Wise use
