I will try to be as concise and accurate as possible while addressing this issue, though this might prove difficult, because libertarian positions on the environment, like so many other things, are not uniform. So with that said, there are multiple ways to address environmental concerns, and what you see below is merely one set of ideas on the matter.
First of all, I should lay a little groundwork. People can be placed in four categories regarding perception of environmental issues. Category #1 includes those who either do not care about the environment and/or have reached the conclusion, for whatever reason, that there is nothing to care about. Category #2 includes those who acknowledge that there is some scientific validity to certain environmental problems but remain unconvinced that these problems are unnatural or are even remotely as dire as portrayed in mainstream media. Category #3 includes those who view the environment as seriously threatened by mankind and believe environmental issues should be at or near the top of every socio-political agenda. Category #4 includes those who believe the Earth is doomed, that it’s destined to go up in flames like a solar-irradiated tinderbox, and mankind has only itself to blame. And as in politics, this comes full circle, as these people are functionally no different than those in Category #1.
There’s no formal reason behind my formation of the aforementioned categories; they simply reflect how I see things.
Many environmentalists succumb to the trap of applying rules to humanity in very inconsistent ways. The prevailing view is that only the state can save the environment, because free market proponents are only concerned about profit and self-interest, which purportedly can work against the so-called “public good” — in other words, the age-old “problem of the commons” or “crisis of the commons.”
However, both the free market and the state are comprised of people. If people in the free market are only concerned about profit and self-interest, by what logic do people in the state have other goals? A government that makes intervening on behalf of the environment a policy has much to gain by passing regulations that allow lip service to environmental causes while doing nothing to actually solve the problems. A state, comprised of people, will act in its self-interest, and this includes creating and/or prolonging problems in order to justify its own existence.
So if most people DO care about the environment, then no government is needed to protect it. If most people do NOT care about the environment, the last thing you want is an armed, violent monopoly in charge of it. So it seems to me that simple logic provides a rather compelling case for excluding the state as a reasonable approach to environmental concerns. This argument has even more weight when one considers that the biggest polluter of them all, at least in the United States, is the U.S. Government.
A libertarian approach to the problem, from the perspective of an anarchist, is that the ultimate means of protecting the environment is to place it in the hands of those who benefit from sustaining it, through voluntary association. Perhaps the single most efficient means of destroying a piece of property is to collectivize it, either through a state or some other means, wherein the only benefit is to take as much as one can before someone else does. In short, the libertarian solution to the “problem of the commons” is to eliminate the commons to the greatest extent possible.
This is not to say that collectivism cannot work, because we’ve seen that it can on small scales, but the incentive to preserve decreases as the number of metaphorical hands in the jar increases. Anarchists are regrettably divided on property, but it is my opinion that a philosophy which fails to account for simply facts of existence like the exploitation of natural resources is a philosophy that fails. Call is ownership or call it use, but the fundamental reality of land appropriation does not change.
Of course, incentive unto itself does not address inter-property issues such as air and water pollution. Again, on the premise that self-interest is the motivating factor in decision-making, the following can be derived. If most people DO care about the environment, then interactions between individuals and organizations will take this into account. Consumers, insurance companies, unions, Dispute Resolution Organizations (see Stefan Molyneux’s DRO Theory) and businesses at large will refuse to associate with individuals and organizations that do not heed the environmental demands of the market. In some cases, defensive action may be taken to prevent or clean up pollution.
If most people do NOT care about the environment, then it becomes necessary for a would-be authoritarian environmentalist to demonstrate exactly how destroying the environment is in the self-interest of that majority. Bob might benefit from pouring hazardous liquid waste into the drainage system along his road, but everyone else on that road and in the city at large stands to be harmed by it. Even if everyone thinks it’s okay to pollute, they are only mutually destroying one another’s environment, so it becomes logically indefensible to claim pollution in this manner as being in one’s self-interest. This concept can be extrapolated to encompass air pollution and the dumping of waste into lakes and rivers. Even if such pollution is in the self-interest of one individual or company or even a group of individuals or companies, the number of people who stand to be affected negatively by such behavior is always greater, barring complete isolation of the polluter from society at large. As such, insurance companies, DROs, unions, etc. (also acting in self-interest) are required to function in a manner not so different from the previous scenario, wherein most people cared for the environment.
Pollution in a free market leads to financial ruin. The only way a company can destroy the environment against the will of the populace and profit from it, adversely affecting millions if not billions of people, is with the sanction and protection of a state.
It seems your views and mine are in agreement on this, not that this is likely to surprise you
However, I would offer some caveats, or at least talking points.
There are cases where pollution is a byproduct of something that is nearly universally beneficial or desirable to people in general, such as the automobile.
The “environmentalist” solution seems to be (for the more fair minded of that lot) to eliminate the automobile. Practically speaking, this is not going to happen. But that still leaves the problem of cars being quite seriously polluting. I probably fit best in your number three category, except that I don’t see it as a matter of “public policy”. Yeah, I know you know that, but for the eyes of others…
What I would offer as a solution, or series therof, is to let the technology and public demand for less pollution continue to go the way it is. Modern cars are inherently more efficient than cars of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. marginally less than a lot of the nineties, but this has more to do with other preferences being met as well. Engineering is not uniform. People like me demand more power and more overall performance, and that involves compromises in fuel efficiency, for the nonce. This too is improving.
Eventually, I think that a number of emerging technologies will put this problem to rest anyway. ZEV technology is largely in it’s infancy, but it’s not going away either. There is a growing interest in eliminating fossil fuels as the source of energy for most things that need energy, and given the extremely broad appeal and demand for the automobile, that’s probably where it will happen first. (I personally have a number of ideas relating to this, but it’s beyond the scope of this comment).
The thing is that a lot of environmental pollution is or was either inadvertant, or unavoidable with the available technology. That’s just the nature of humans. We build shit, we figure out how to improve it and solve some problems, which creates others, and we continue the course. Environmentalists and Statists have a tendency to view technology and the market as static. They are not. Just about everything you can buy is already obsolete, but it takes time for the new stuff to make it to the market.
Environmental regulation, like most other regulation (in the sense of government mandated action), is an unmitigated disaster. Not just in the automotive industry, but across the board. In the automotive industry, there is a particularly grievous form of regulation that exists that mandates a particular system rather than mandating results. This is in fact the most common form of environmental “regulation”, and even when well intentioned it demonstrates exactly the type of “static” thinking I’m talking about. Not to mention filling the coffers of politicos with cash from the manufacturers of the mandated equipment…
Yet even on it’s face such regulation makes no sense. If the goal is to reduce certain specific emissions, and someone achieves those results via a different technology, then a law mandating specific equipment fails. This has happened a number of times. EGR systems are a “great” example. As originally mandated, they actually increased pollution across the board, except to reduce the PERCENTAGE of certain pollutants in emissions. Since they significantly reduced fuel efficiency (past tense, technology adapts, even in the face of stupid regulation), they actually INCREASED the overall level of pollution in their early years, not to mention making the automotive industry go through it’s worse period of unspeakable junk from 79 to about 91…
I’ve rambled on enough about this for now. My basic point is that it’s far better to set a standard and shoot for it than to mandate some solution based on what’s current or currently possible and make it law. Laws such as these stifle innovation, or focus it narrowly on one possible solutioh out of many.