Libertarian Environmental Policy Notes
Daniel C. Burton (dburton@ocf.berkeley.edu)
22 Jan 1998 00:51:28 GMT
The Libertarian Solution to our Environmental Problems
by Daniel C. Burton
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The following is based on notes from a presentation I made before the
Cal Libertarians in the late Fall 1997 Semester. It is also available
on the World Wide Web at http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~callib/
past-activities/environment-notes.html.
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As the dawn of the Millennium approaches, we seem to be further than
ever from solving our environmental problems. Despite our attempts to
limit the damage done, the specter of large-scale environmental
destruction still looms over our heads. The massive extinction of
species still remains a possibility. Clear-cutting, overhunting, and
overfishing threaten our natural habitats. Pollutants released into
the air and water threaten our health and livelihood.
Environmental damage clearly poses a danger to us, but it would be
impossible to eliminate it completely, short of the extinction of the
human race. Nearly every activity of human society encroaches on the
natural environment somehow. From agriculture to industrial
production to electrical power, everything has its impact.
While some would like to see the end of all technological
civilization, most of us care somewhat about the human welfare, and we
care about environmental destruction because of the threat it poses to
humans. We have taken up a delicate balancing act, trying to better
our lives on the one hand, while trying to avoid harming ourselves on
the other. Ultimately, what we want is for environmental damage to
proceed only if it is of overall benefit to humanity, and the big
question is: What set of social institutions comes closest to making
this possible?
The traditional answer of the left has been that only government
bureaucracies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and National
Forest Service can protect the environment sufficiently. However,
libertarians offer an alternate solution based on the traditional
Anglo-American legal framework of private property rights.
Most liberals would cringe at the thought of private property rights
reigning supreme, but most of their fears are based on a few common
misconceptions. One is that only the EPA and similar government
agencies can protect us from pollution. Another is that only
government bureaucracies can manage wilderness areas in ways that
maintain their long term value. Finally, they seem to think that
private property owners do not have an interest in maintaining the
long-term value of their land. As we shall see, all of these
assumptions are incorrect.
Let us first consider pollution. To see how the traditional
Anglo-American legal system could protect us from pollution, we must
first consider what pollution is. Pollution is when someone releases
something harmful into the environment. However, "the environment" is
really nothing other than the sum of all the property owned by
everyone in the world, and the traditional legal system has always
provided a remedy for harm to property.
For example, consider what would happen if your neighbor dumped trash
on your front lawn. Clearly you would be entitled to some sort of
legal remedy for this. You could rightfully sue, and there are two
types of remedies you could receive. One would be an injunction to
stop your neighbor from dumping trash, and the other would be
restitutional payments for the damage already done.
The medium by which pollution harms you may be different, but there is
no reason why this damage should be treated any differently. However,
while private property rights remain intact for the dumping of trash,
the government has claimed centralized authority over other types of
pollution.
Imagine how ridiculous it would be if we regulated the dumping of
trash this way. If your neighbor went and dumped trash on your
property, you would not be able to sue. Instead you would have to
report a possible violation to the Federal Garbage Dumping
Administration. Then, using a complex set of criteria, they would
judge how "avoidable" the dumping was. They might allow the dumping
-- or they might impose thousands of dollars of fines -- but you most
certainly would not get any of the money. The government would keep
all of it.
Private property rights are in fact the mechanism for preventing water
pollution in Great Britain and Canada. There, rivers and other bodies
of water are owned just as land is. When someone upstream harms the
quality of the waters downstream, the owners downstream can sue for
damages. Property owners routinely drag offenders to court, and this
seems to be working to keep the waters clean. Dividing up the waters
in the United States could instantly give us these benefits without
the need for government bureaucracies.
Some things like air are a little bit more complicated, but
essentially the same thing can be accomplished. Clearly you should
not have to get the permission of everyone in the United States to
open a chemical plant, but you should not be able to release unlimited
amounts of pollutants in the atmosphere either. Here the standard
should not be whether a sensitive device can detect some miniscule
amount of chemicals but whether the pollution could actually harm
someone or their property.
You could think of many other sticky examples that are a lot less
clear than this, but it is always possible to sort things out. You
must simply remember that property is not merely a form of physical
possession, but a set of a legal rights. Then you must ask yourself
which sets of rights are most logically bundled together. In the
previous example, it was relatively useless for land ownership to
include protection against a few molecules of chemicals, but it was
quite useful for it to include the right to open chemical plants. On
the other hand, it was also more useful for it to include protection
against harmful levels of pollution than for it to include the right
to produce them.
Some people argue that if we handled pollution this way, the cost of
litigation would be too high, but what they forget is the great cost
our environmental bureaucracy already imposes on us. A host of
lawyers are already employed by both private companies and regulatory
agencies, and complying with an increasingly complex set of
regulations is already a significant cost of business. Most likely
litigation would be resolved much more quickly under an objective
system of property rights than under today's host of regulations.
You can see from all this that where property rights are well-defined,
pollution can be controlled without government bureaucracies. The
main reason that pollution is a problem at all is that certain things
are not a form of property -- anyone who wants to use them may. They
suffer from what Dr. Garrett Harding described in a 1968 paper as "the
tragedy of the commons." The problem is that things that belong to
"everyone" are the responsibility of no one. Since no one is
guaranteed continued access to a resource, no one has an incentive to
maintain it in the long term, and people will tend to exploit it as
much as possible in the short term.
Resources that are held privately tend with long term interests in
mind. One example of this is shrimp fishing in the Gulf of Mexico.
Before the turn of the century, shrimp fishermen used to claim parts
of the ocean under the traditional practice of homesteading. Through
voluntary association, they formed an organization to protect the
waters and help avoid overfishing. All this changed in the early
1900's when the United States Government took over the waters. Now
everyone just tries to catch as many shrimp as they can.
Under a system of private property rights, an efficient bargaining
mechanism exists to make sure that resource use is overall beneficial.
Before someone can pollute someone else's land, they must first
negotiate permission. Before they pollute their own land, they must
consider the loss in property value caused by doing so. No such
incentives exist for publicly-held resources, and not surprisingly the
outcome tends not to be as good.
The Federal Government owns roughly one third of the land in the
United States, but it does more damage to the environment on these
lands than all private land-holders do combined. This is because when
resource use decisions are made politically, special interest groups
tend to prevail. Small, concentrated interests who have much to gain
have much more of an incentive to become involved in the political
process than large, unconcentrated ones who have less at stake
individually. The small group can easily put effort into one
important issue, but for the large group, it is just one of many
issues. The result is that groups like logging companies tend to
prevail over ones like wilderness enthusiasts and the general public.
For example, the National Forest Service builds three times as many
logging roads as public access trails. It has even been known to
build these roads at a cost above the profit from logging. It gives
companies short-term contracts to log trees, which gives them little
incentive to worry about long-term conservation of resources. This
amounts to nothing more than a subsidy for clear-cutting that runs
contrary to the agency's mission of conserving our forests.
When paper and timber companies have to manage their own privately
held land, they suddenly look like staunch environmentalists. They
have a strong incentive to maintain the stock of trees because they
want to maintain the long-term value of their land. Timber companies
like Weyerhauser and Georgia Pacific have consistently done a better
job at forest conservation than the Federal Government. The uses of
their land also include game preserves and camping and hiking
facilities. In fact, International Paper in the South makes as much
as 30% of its profit from recreational use of its
forests.[Bergland][Ruwart]
Private property is even better at protecting endangered species than
government bureaucracies. For example, in Zimbabwe, the government
honors traditional claims to land, which also includes the right to
hunt and sell elephants. Land owners have a strong incentive to
protect the value of their elephants and do everything they can to
protect them from poachers. They try to raise as many elephants as
they can so they can profit from sponsoring safaris, and selling meat,
hide, and ivory. As a result, the elephant population in Zimbabwe has
increased from 30,000 to 43,000 over the last ten years. In contrast,
in Kenya, where the government claims ownership of all elephants, the
population has fallen by 67%.[Ruwart]
Even some government programs that could only seem to do good have had
their share of negative consequences. One such example is Superfund,
a Federal program designed to subsidize the cleanup of toxic spills.
On the surface this would seem like a good idea, but because chemical
producers know that part of the cost of a spill will be funded by the
government, they have less incentive to keep one from happening. In
effect this is a subsidy for irresponsibility.
Some government policies even run explicitly counter to protecting the
environment. In the 1950's insurance companies would not insure
nuclear power plants because of the enormous risk of accidents.
Consequently, power companies refused to consider nuclear power. At
least, that was until the government came along and fixed everything.
It limited the amount of money nuclear disaster victims could collect
in damages to $560 million, 80% of which would be payed by the
government. Not surprisingly after this, nuclear power plants, and
with them the risk of nuclear accidents, proliferated.[Ruwart]
Government has been also instrumental in the destruction of the
rainforests. Third World dictators routinely remove native peoples
from their rainforest homes so that special interests can clear out
the forests. Worse still, such activities have been subsidized by
U.S. foreign aid.
Such acts of government should be ended as well. However, this is
nothing compared to the damage done by our nation's worst polluter --
The United States Military.
In 1991, Pentagon Spokesperson Kevin Doxey stated, "We have found some
17,400 contaminated sites at 1,850 installations, not including
formerly used sites." In 1988, The Department of Energy estimated
that it would take 100 billion dollars and 50 years just to clean up
17 of these sites.[Ruwart]
If this were not enough, when the government damages the environment
there is no legal recourse -- even if it results in death. In 1984 a
Utah court ruled that 10 out of 24 cases of cancer brought to its
attention were due to the negligence of the U.S. Military in
association with nuclear weapons testing. Yet the government did not
have to pay any damages, because it claims "sovereign
immunity."[Ruwart]
Such sovereign immunity laws should be eliminated. The government,
like everyone else, should be held accountable for its actions.
Finally, we must consider the threat to our political freedom posed by
giving the government centralized control over our activities. The
more complex the regulations, and the greater the power of the
bureaucracies, the more leeway it has in arbitrarily controlling
people's lives. This can be especially dangerous for those at odds
with those in power.
For example, in San Rafael, California, an employee of a construction
company owned by Fred Grange accidentally spilled one barrel of oil on
a vacant lot As he was supposed to, Mr. Grange reported this to the
EPA and local environmental agencies. Soon there were a dozen
government agencies and hundreds of investigators on the scene.
Mr. Grange, justifiably got angry at this, so they decided to make an
example of him. Fines of over $20 million were imposed, forcing him
to close his business.[Wollstein]
You might object that private property rights are no guarantee that
the environment will be protected, but government regulations are no
guarantee either. You might be able to get the government to enact
only good regulations that protect the environment, though there is
good reason to believe that that is impossible. Even if you could do
that today, there is no guarantee that your policies would remain
intact tomorrow. That is not how democracy works.
In four years we might have a Republican-controlled government that
wants to cut down our forests and pave over Yosemite. If our lands
were publicly held, they could do just that. However, once private
property has been established, constitutional barriers stand in the
way of taking it back without compensation. Private property rights
could not guarantee the environment would be protected, but they are a
solution that would probably protect it quite well and would be
politically quite difficult to remove.
We must keep in mind that even good government policies inevitably
pave the way for bad ones, and the bad ones pave the way for even
worse. Expansion of the government into one area, such as
environmental protection, gives it more resources and sets precedents
that allow it to expand into other areas.
The libertarian solution to this is limiting government to the
absolute minimum possible. It should only provide things that the
free market most definitely cannot provide itself. Depending on who
you ask this may range from a moderate array of functions to
absolutely nothing at all, but what unites us all is a healthy
distrust of unlimited government.
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Sources:
[Bergland] Bergland, David _Libertarianism in One Lesson_. Costa
Mesa, CA: Orpheus Publications, 1993
[Friedman1] Friedman, David _The Machinery of Freedom_. LaSalle, IL:
Open Court, 1989
[Friedman2] Friedman, David "The Swedes Get It Right."
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Libertarian/The_Swedes.html (Reprinted from
Liberty Magazine).
[Ruwart] Ruwart, Mary "The Pollution Solution." International Society
for Individual Liberty Educational Pamphlet Series. Available online
at: http://www.creative.net/~star/pollutio.htm
[Wollstein] Wollstein, Jarret B. "The Green Gestapo." International
Society for Individual Liberty Educational Pamphlet Series. Available
online at: http://www.creative.net/~star/gestapo.htm