Environmental debates are often framed as a conflict between government regulation and unrestricted corporate activity. They’re both wrong. Though companies have the right to do what they choose with their property, it does not mean violating someone else’s right to their property. If I throw a rock through your living room window, it’s vandalism and assault. What happens if a factory sends millions of microscopic chemical particles through your window and into your lungs? The problem isn’t that the factory is producing something. The problem is that its production is imposing a cost on someone who never consented to it.
To distinguish myself from traditional environmental approaches, I am opposed to bureaucracy and federal regulations being the primary way of fixing this problem. The EPA establishes national standards for pollutants, which can be useful for addressing certain broad risks, but a nationwide standard cannot perfectly account for every factory, property, pollutant, and individual harm. The EPA’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards show how much of environmental policy relies on regulators establishing general limits rather than determining liability between individual property owners.
My solution is to hold polluters civilly liable for demonstrable damages to private property and human health. If a company pollutes a river and can be shown to have damaged another person’s property, they should not simply have to pay a government fine; they should be sued by the people whose rights were violated. This is not a rejection of environmental protection, it is a different way of achieving it.
This position is grounded in the Austrian approach to environmental economics. Art Carden argues that, without the price mechanism, decision-makers lack the information necessary for rational economic calculation, while a system based on strict private property rights can reduce conflict and improve economic coordination. Economic Calculation in the Environmentalist Commonwealth puts the issue in terms of property rights and decentralized economic coordination rather than simply calculating an ideal amount of pollution.
The principle is simple: you can do what you want with your property, but you cannot use your property as an excuse to damage somebody else’s. Murray Rothbard made a similar argument about air pollution, treating harmful emissions that invade another person’s property as a potential property-rights violation. Rothbard’s “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution” provides one example of how this principle can be applied to pollution.
The Austrian case for this approach is not just moral; it is economic. Regulators face a massive knowledge problem. They have to create general rules for millions of different businesses, properties, pollutants, and circumstances. There is no single bureaucrat who can know the costs and benefits of every factory’s emissions to every person affected. A decentralized system of property rights and liability allows information to emerge through individual disputes, prices, lawyers, insurers, and entrepreneurs. Instead of asking a regulator to determine the “correct” amount of pollution for society as a whole, we can ask a much more concrete question: Did this company cause demonstrable harm to someone else’s property or person?
Now, many of you reading may be asking: How, then, does an average person sue a multi-billion-dollar oil company over invisible particles without spending millions of dollars?
It’s simple: the legal market can adapt. Class-action lawsuits and contingency-based lawyers already exist to help people with limited resources pursue claims against much larger defendants. If a company pollutes a river, affected property owners could sue as a unified bloc. Together, these legal avenues create a financial risk for polluters and give lawyers an incentive to discover cases where companies have caused real harm.
Insurance could make this even more powerful. Environmental liability insurance already exists, covering risks such as bodily injury, property damage, and cleanup costs from pollution. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ overview of environmental insurance explains how these policies are specifically designed around environmental risks.
More importantly, there is evidence that insurance incentives can actually change corporate behavior. A 2026 study in the Journal of Risk and Insurance examined pollution-liability insurance in Shenzhen and found a 72 percent reduction in annual environmental violations among the firms studied. The researchers found evidence that firms changed their behavior partly because they anticipated that their insurance premiums would depend on their previous violations. The study provides a real-world example of insurers creating incentives for companies to reduce pollution.
This is exactly the kind of incentive a market-based system should encourage. If a company knows that pollution can create large civil liabilities, insurers have a financial incentive to inspect that company’s operations and price its risk accordingly. A reckless polluter could face higher premiums or difficulty obtaining coverage. In that system, insurance companies (not regulators) have a reason to discover environmental risks because their own money is at stake.
Of course, this doesn’t mean every pollution problem is easy to solve. Invisible pollution can make causation difficult to establish, particularly when emissions come from thousands of different sources. If one factory dumps chemicals directly onto my land, the case is relatively simple. If thousands of factories each contribute a tiny amount to air pollution, identifying exactly who caused a particular person’s harm becomes much harder.
This is a serious challenge for a property-rights approach, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But difficulty in establishing liability does not mean regulators have perfect knowledge. It means we need better ways of determining causation and enforcing liability. Courts, lawyers, insurers, scientists, and property owners can all contribute information to that process.
History shows why these questions matter. At Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, more than 21,000 tons of hazardous chemicals were dumped at an industrial site between 1942 and 1953. The waste later contaminated soil and groundwater, and contaminated material migrated through sewers and into nearby areas. The EPA eventually evacuated hundreds of families and the disaster became a major catalyst for the federal Superfund program. EPA’s history of Love Canal documents the scale of the contamination and the government’s response.
The lesson I take from cases like Love Canal is not that corporations should be allowed to pollute without consequences. It is the opposite. If a company causes serious damage to other people’s property and health, there should be serious consequences. The question is whether those consequences should primarily come from bureaucrats deciding in advance how much pollution is acceptable, or from a system in which the people actually harmed have enforceable claims against the people who harmed them.
Unfortunately, much of this won’t work perfectly under the current legal system. We already have a complicated mixture of federal regulations, environmental standards, and private lawsuits. But if we want to strive toward a society built on the non-aggression principle, we should reduce reliance on agencies such as the EPA as the primary solution, strengthen individual rights against demonstrable pollution, and make it easier for individuals to pursue legitimate claims against corporations that harm them.
This market solution is not only about reducing pollution. It is about putting responsibility where it belongs. If a company causes damage, the company should bear the cost instead of automatically shifting it onto taxpayers or innocent property owners. If insurers, lawyers, and consumers can profit from identifying risks and enforcing rights, they have an incentive to do exactly that. The goal should not be to choose between government regulation and unrestricted corporate activity. It should be to protect the individual from both.
A company should be free to operate its factory. A homeowner should be free to enjoy his property. But the factory’s freedom should end where it begins causing demonstrable harm to someone else’s property or person. That is not anti-business. It is the same principle that applies everywhere else in a free society: your property is yours, and mine is mine.
So, the next time someone forces a choice between government regulation and unrestricted corporate activity on the environment, say you pick the individual and property rights.
