pull down to refresh
Implementation is the big problem, but conceptually I think many environmental issues fit into standard ways of thinking about property rights. Users of unowned air and water establish easements on their use. If someone pollutes the air or water that you have such an easement on, then you can hold them liable or issue a cease and desist order.
As I mentioned in another recent comment, people use to use mechanisms like that against industry to prevent air and water pollution. The objection to that free market property rights approach was actually that it didn't allow enough pollution for the amount of industrialization that the government wanted.
There are some issues, like ocean pollution, that might not fit so cleanly into that framework. I worry about ocean pollution more than most of the other environmental stuff, because it's so out-of-sight out-of-mind for people and might hit some unobserved point of no return.
Yes, people do attach value to nature, as in, everyone would want to breathe clean air, drink clean water etc. But people also want the stuff they buy to be cheap. Those are opposing forces and every individual has a different heuristic to "solve" this.
In aggregate (billions of people), I believe we can treat people as stochastic functions. In this case, it becomes: "How much of my personal well-being am I willing to sacrifice to improve the environment?"
People will fall on a spectrum here. Most well-off people would probably be capable of sacrificing more. People living below the mean will have to make meaningful sacrifices. This opens up the following questions for consideration: