What's the Libertarian way to protect the environment?

 

by Mark Grannis

I’m an environmentalist. I spend several weeks each summer in New York’s Adirondack State Park, enjoying the mountains, lakes, and rivers in that beautiful place. But I’m against the “cap and trade” bill and most other ideas for new environmental laws and regulations, because they don’t work. Environmental protection has been dominated for decades by large government regulatory initiatives, but experience shows that government regulation can’t and doesn’t protect the environment as effectively as private ownership and a strong dose of civil liability for actual environmental damage.

In the short term, I favor waiving the government’s sovereign immunity in environmental litigation, so that government is fully accountable for the environmental harms it covers. In the longer term, I favor a transition away from government regulation, which doesn’t work, and toward strict enforcement of property rights so that people can sue for restitution from polluters who put things in our air, water, and soil that we don’t want there.

The first thing to understand about environmental protection is that government is the main culprit. Our federal government (particularly the military) is the nation’s largest polluter, and a great deal of pollution by commercial enterprises occurs on government lands that are being poorly managed. Why are government lands poorly managed? Because government managers do not take care of them as well as a private owner would. The Izaak Walton League, the Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club—any of these would manage our national parks better than the federal government does.