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Comment by dpatru | Hacker News Reader

It should be possible to sue air polluters for putting toxins on your property (your land or your body.) Pollution is usually a problem of trespass and enforcement of property rights could solve it.

Regulations are kind of a roundabout way to solve the problem. You want the polluter to be concerned about affecting its neighbors, not just to meet (or help set) some arbitrary government standard.

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    It should be possible to sue air polluters for putting
    toxins on your property

Not possible. For example, diesel exhaust and wood smoke both contain carcinogenic submicron particulate matter pollution. It's not possible to sue every truck driver and person with a campfire who is within several miles of one's home. This is why we need regulations like burn bans and diesel engine emission regulations.

In practice, you'd focus on factories, powerplants, the road owners, auto-makers, etc. This is similar to how regulations already work. The regulators tend to ignore the rogue backyard barbecuer and instead focus on the big polluters.

Also, aggregation techniques could be used for both defendants (polluters) and plaintiffs (landowners and other people being poisoned.)

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