U.S. Politics Online: A Political Discussion Forum - View Single Post - What do you consider to be the most serious environmental problem facing the world?

partofme · #59 (**permalink**) 12-02-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by liberty1776

First, I think it is much more likely that a private ocean owner would sure another private ocean owner than for people to hold an officeholder accountable for anything. How do you account for two Bush terms?

Second, this might increase their disregard for the enviroment, and other things. If an officeholder knows that he is going to be able to hold office for a small ammount of time, he will grab as much as he can as quickly as he can.

Well, if they own that part of the ocean, then they can certainly pollute it. However, when their pollution escapes, they must compensate the owner of the property that they damaged. And, if there is private ownership, people will be able to raise species if fish and increase the populations. Plus, I think it is highly likely that there would be oceananic zoos which would serve to increase the populations even more. So, I am sure that there would be polluters, but I think the goods of private ownership would outweigh any bads.

Of course democracy doesn't always lead to wonderful outcomes but the same can be said of private relationships as well so cherry picking examples like Bush or greedy people that screw customers, employees, or share holders doesn't really give a good broad picture of everything overall. Sure some politicians will be bad as will some owners or managers. But from what I can tell pollution in the past came from industry and the cleaning up of the last few decades came through regulation and legislation.

You assume that the suit will be able to tell who is doing the dumping and where. If after a storm in the ocean some toxic waste shows up in your water then it may be hard to tell exactly where it comes from. Granted we can never know what systems could be in place so the argument is really valid anyway unless we could see an alternate reality where a private system exists but from my experience private owners (particularly business) are the ones that do the most polluting. Exxon is already paying out the ass for it's oil spill so I think this system really punished them as much as the one you propose. The problem is that in a suite the cost of it to pay for the damage to another owner would not be as much as oil companies make anyway dong what they do so it wouldn't stop a thing. They would just price it into the cost of doing business and these things would still happen and the environment would be no more protected.