анонимный вопрос
What needs to be done to achieve clean air with the help of the state? You need to launch a public campaign, convince politicians that ecological regulations can generate both political capital and a decent amount of embezzled money—and eventually, the state will squeeze those who pollute, reducing their income, and bestow favors upon those who want clean air. This is, of course, if you live in New York, and not in the city of Sibay in the Republic of Bashkortostan.
What happens to the environment in a free market? Where existing technologies mean that you either pollute and make money, or you don’t pollute and make jack shit, you will pollute. And around you will live those who also pollute and make money, or are otherwise tied to your business. Those for whom the smoke is harmful simply leave for wherever it is cleaner and start their own business there, linked to the sale of beautiful views and clean air. For example, in the USA in the 20th century, New York and other Detroits and Los Angeleses were polluting, while connoisseurs of healthy recreation mass-developed Florida, which rapidly transformed from a land of swamps into a land of beaches.
The market very reliably compels people toward peaceful coexistence when everyone minds their own business and does not try to suppress competitors by force. When the state began to actively fight for clean air in cities, businesses found places to pollute and began moving to third-world countries; the country paid for this with the emergence of the Rust Belt—cities where it was impossible to find any other more or less profitable activities besides polluting. Of course, I am simplifying greatly, and it wasn’t just about ecology—the state was advancing on many fronts.
Of course, business can be criticized for often starting to solve problems as they arise, meaning that for some time a problem remains unsolved. But the state, with its manic-depressive style of reacting, either forces you to swim in an empty pool or demands that you march along the bottom of one that has already filled up. If ecological regulations are introduced before the emergence of sufficiently cheap emission cleaning technologies, you will either get corruption or destroy businesses, and a vast number of people will suffer needlessly from poverty. Conversely, if you try to centrally suppress ecological protests, a vast number of people will also suffer needlessly from poor ecology.
At the same time, business in a free market, even without any state regulations, will look for ways to pollute less, produce less waste, spend less energy, and so on. A dirty enterprise is located on the outskirts; skilled workers must be lured there with good money, the produced goods must be transported to consumers in far-off lands, waste must also be hauled away, and so on. If it were possible to produce the same thing with comparable costs right next to the mass consumer, it would provide a significant competitive advantage, which means investing in technologies that reduce ecological damage.
The main means of improving the environment is the prosperity of the people. As long as people are poor, they will turn a blind eye to everything that hinders the satisfaction of their most urgent needs. Only after becoming wealthy do they begin to think about how to organize a comfortable life. Trying to organize their life for them immediately, at their own expense, while preventing them from becoming wealthy, is a crime.