Free-market environmentalism is the political position that argues that the free market, property rights, and tort law provide the best means of preserving the environment.
While environmental problems may be viewed as market failures, free market environmentalists argue that environmental problems arise because:
- Laws override or obscure property rights and thus fail to protect or define those rights adequately.
- Laws governing class or individual tort claims provide polluters with immunity from tort claims, or interfere with those claims in such a way as to make it difficult to legally sustain them.
Free-market environmentalists therefore argue that the best way to protect the environment is to use tort and contract laws governing and protecting property rights and tort claims to protect the environment. They believe that if affected parties can compel producers to compensate them, producers will reduce or eliminate the externality. Market proponents advocate changes to the legal system that empower affected parties to obtain such compensation. They further claim that governments have limited affected parties' ability to do so by complicating the tort system to benefit producers over others.
Read more about Free-market Environmentalism: Issues, Notable Free-market Environmentalists, Notable Free-market Environmentalist Groups, Criticisms