Environmental damage is one place free market thinking has completely failed, repeatedly. It surely is not the right solution. First off, there’s a massive delay between environmental changes and outcomes. We’d have had to foresee this problem and set the right prices 100 years ago when water rights were being handed out and priced. Secondly, prices are never “appropriate”, we simply cannot forecast the outcome of environmental changes. Cost benefit analyses in the past when it comes to the environment have been wrong by orders of magnitude [1] Third is that viewing things through an economic lens distorts the value and gives automatic preference to the party that is profiteering off the environment. Saying that people in Salt Lake should cough up enough cash to outbid the people who want to grow alfalfa to sell it to China is kinda gross, that’s not how we should handle public safety or our environment. Think about all these issue with respect to air pollution & CO2. What would it have taken to solve it with free markets? We haven’t solved it yet, and it would have needed to be priced and debated starting 100 years ago. And there is no appropriate price for clean air and the earth to stay habitable.

[1] https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...