It's kind of based on the (unverifiable) assumption that the air and oceans and glaciers are effectively infinite resources - either because they replenish themselves through natural processes faster than we can use them up, or because they're just so damn big that by the time we're in any danger of depleting them modern science will have created an alternative.

These aren't my positions - but there they are.



There is a point at which holding something back for its own protection becomes more harm than it's worth. For example, a restriction that costs a company an extra five million dollars a year to comply with and still keep up the same production, which can only produce revenues of twenty million. The trick is finding out when regulations are protecting the business and when they're strangling it.

That kind of assumes that no business should be strangled. If this company can only make $20 million a year by inflicting $50 million worth of medical problems on the rest of society; why not let it die under a wave of regulations?

I could have sworn I said something about this already. Maybe that was somewhere else, though....

Anyway. I have no problem with it if the benefits ($50 million) outweigh the costs ($5 million). The problem is when the regulations have no perceptible benefit, or when the benefit is outweighed by the costs. Say the restrictions only prevented $1 million a year in medical costs. What would be the justification in forcing a company to spend $5 million a year to comply with them? The short-term costs outweigh the short-term benefits and the long-term benefits can't be proven to outweight the long-term costs.

Compensation comes to mind. How do we identify the sufferers of the company's actions, exactly calculate the damage inflicted on them, and recompense them for it? Just as importantly, what right does the company have to inflict a million dollars worth of damage on innocent bystanders; no matter how much money it can make by doing so? Your right to swing your arm ends at the tip of my nose; no matter how much you'll make by swinging your arm an inch farther.

It's not that the company is making money by doing that damage. It's saving money by doing the damage. Just wanting to nitpick a little.

The rest of that, though, is valid, and I have no real problem with it at this time.

It's also at least in part based on the assumption that these resources are pretty much impossible to control. Unless a nation spends absurd amount of money, they cannot keep track of every molecule of air, and safeguard it from the delterious effects of other nations. While a single country can take great pains to assist in attempting to preserve the quality of the air around their area, in reality this is not tantamount to ownership, merely tending to the quality of the commons.

The situation regarding the oceans is a somewhat more complicated one - there are resources within the oceans that are mostly fixed in position (these include underwater gas/oil reserves, fish/whale hunting grounds, etc). However, the actual water quality of the ocean is not in that category - damage to the quality of the water in one part of the ocean can spread quite quickly.

Nations typically keep as "territory" the 200 nautical miles of ocean around them, but it's only the geographical space (and any stationary resources within) they own - the water itself cannot be controlled.

Yeah, that too.