A popular argument in the “environmentalist” community is that pollution is a moral wrong. By extension this belief holds that using market instruments such as taxes and tradable permits to control pollution are no different than allowing burglars to pay for the privilege of burgling houses. What is wrong with this analogy?

Pollution is a COST, not a moral wrong. What does it mean to be a cost? It means that pollution is a by-product of a socially beneficial activity. And to reduce pollution therefore requires that we get less of the things that we like (remember intro econ: there is no such thing as a free lunch). A tax or a marketable permit is simply an instrument that induces “polluters” to internalize the full costs of their actions, rather than have those costs borne by unwilling participants. A “fee” paid by a burglar is not simply a cost of doing something we want – that is because burgling a house is an economically harmful activity. Ignoring the moral aspect for a moment, even if you view the burgling as a pure transfer from homeowner to burglar, the burglar expends valuable resources on these actions when they could have devoted their time to actions that were socially beneficial.

It might seem odd that environmentalists do not also criticize the direct regulation of the environment, since efficient regulation (in theory) should get us the same amount of pollution reduction, clean air, clean water, etc. as a well designed tax or permit system. In other words, efficient regulation does not bring us down to a zero pollution level as well. For example, regulating an industry so that it must reduce emissions by 80% is the SAME THING as arguing that it is “allowed” to continue polluting with the other 20%. It seems odd to criticize some methods for doing this and not others. Perhaps much of environmentalism is actually not about the environment.