(1) The Harvard-Yale game sucks. Harvard sucks. Yale sucks. Freezing your balls off trying to find the Law School’s tailgate party sucks. People who like college football suck.
(2) Property Rights and Pollution:
I don’t think the framework of traditional property rights works very well for regulating emissions.
Property rights have often been used to regulate pollution in the micro level. Generally, something is either a nuisance or it isn’t, and the courts will either allow it or enjoin it. This, it turns out, is efficient because one party can always buy the right to either be polluted or not be polluted from the other. This doesn’t always make so much sense, since it may not be possible for one party to effectively bargain with the other. In the case of Boomer v. Atlantic Cement, 257 N.E.2d 870 (N.Y. 1970), a court ordered a cement factory spraying soot to pay damages to its neighbors. In theory if the court had just shut down the factory, the factory owners could have paid the neighbors enough to convince them to allow the factory to reopen, but in practice, this would probably have been difficult.
Anyway, the property rights framework seems to make sense when you’re talking about harms that have definite targets, but it breaks down, I feel, when you’re talking about global harm: a factory that emits sulfur dioxide is causing, through acid rain, harm to millions; and every mile I drive is, in some sense, harming everyone on the Earth. I suppose you could say that, by fining carbon emissions, what’s actually happening is that the offending party is paying for violating the rights of everyone in the United States, who are compensated, perhaps, by increased government services because of the increased revenue from the fine. But this seems like a silly way to think about the issue; you’re shoehorning the traditional framework of property rights into an in-apt situation. I do think that getting used to the idea that traditional property rights neither require you be hyper-conscious of every neighbor nor allow you to do completely as you please is a good way to reconcile yourself with the value of government environmental regulation. But, and I suppose I don’t know if anyone other than this blogger is actually doing it, I think government regulation to prevent a harm as nebulous and remote as global warming is completely sui generis, which is not to say that I don’t support it.
So, uh, what do you think?
