Do the philosophical roots of the New Left hamper the enactment of environmental policy?

[jimM47]

Impressive conversation. A pity that the time limit cut short the solutions part of the diavlog.

During the "shallow economy" portion of the conversation, when the topics of climate change's disproportionate effect on poorer regions and of institutions came up, I couldn't help but think of this (slightly tangential) analogy drawn from the common law tort system: In American courts, where a nontrivial amount of environmental policy is still made, many tragedy-of-the-commons-type environmental questions sound in nuisance law, which asks courts to balance the social utility of a harmful activity with the damage it causes to others. One of the first questions for the court, and one that implicates nearly every aspect of the case, is the remedy to be granted: injunction (ordering the polluter to stop) or damages (ordering the polluter to pay for the harm they cause). Under the influence of law-and-economics scholars such as Ronald Coase, courts have been reluctant in many circumstances to grant injunctive relief, and where they do grant it, the grant is specifically aimed at getting the parties to negotiate a price for lifting the injunction. The theory behind this is that there may be many cases in which it is more "efficient" to produce something of value, pollute in the process, and then compensate for the damage that pollutant causes, than to simply refrain from the harmful activity entirely. This has the secondary effect of helping to balance social utilities, because the requirement of paying compensation will cause less useful polluting activities to become economically unfeasible.

It seems to me that much of current environmental thinking, especially in the international realm, has focused on finding an injunctive-like solution, which seeks to limit emissions in terms of raw number, rather than a compensatory-like solution, which would seek to limit wasteful emissions and redress the inequitable effect of fossil fuel externalities, and that this has disproportionately hurt nations like those in the Indian Ocean and other poorer nations which will necessarily feel significant economic effects of the greenhouse emissions that remain inevitable for many years to come under any system.