Re: Historical cases of internalizing costs of pollution?

Poptech — Wed, 27 May 2009 03:14:20 GMT

Free-market regulation is an oxymoron. I am not familiar with an exact case but at one time Gasoline was considered a waste by-product of Kerosene production and as they say the rest is history.

Historical cases of internalizing costs of pollution?

Telemachus — Wed, 27 May 2009 01:29:03 GMT

Ya'll,

Still a relative newbie to "Austrian" and libertarian ideas, I nevertheless engaged in a conversation with my socialist brother concerning all things capitalism, private property, etc. Needless to say, I don't like these conversations, because nothing ever seems to be understood and more heat than light is typically generated.

Now, I've been very interested in free-market environmental regulation for a while, and am quite sure that the costs of pollution in general could be internalized if there were not so much perversion of the market and legal system by government interference and over-bearing regulation. Nevertheless, does anybody know of any real cases whereby pollution has been internalized by industries without state-coercion, lawsuits, etc., i.e. where a company has been forced to reduce its pollution because of market-pressures, competition, voluntary industrial standards, etc.?

One of the things that always occurs to me in this is that pollution is wasteful. I think it was Du Pont that saw a ton of petroleum waste just being tossed away and ended up developing ~300 different products based on it. Is stuff like that common?

Best Regards,
Tele

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Re: Historical cases of internalizing costs of pollution?

Historical cases of internalizing costs of pollution?