But you have to admit there is a line where it does make sense. Approaching this from a property rights point of view, no one has the right to encroach on your

But you have to admit there is a line where it does make sense. Approaching this from a property rights point of view, no one has the right to encroach on your property. If a plant next door to you is reducing the air quality on your property, that is a violation of your rights. Imagine that’s the case. There’s a plant next door to you which pumps very dangerous emissions into the air. The air you breath is now poisonous, and you die. The plant is (or should be) directly at fault for killing you. (Indeed, there are plenty of examples of factories that have done just this. Today, maybe killing less people, but definitely killing the surrounding ecosystem.) Fossil fuels do this, just at a much larger scale with impacts that are less local and more global. In other words, it is harder for you to specifically identify how your rights were infringed because the impact is global instead of local, and it’s gradual. That’s why it’s hard to get people on board with these proposals. But your rights are being violated nonetheless. What environmentally-conscious people want is for industry to stop polluting. Since slapping a law on everything saying “don’t pollute” is probably impossible, carbon pricing is an interesting alternative. It takes a free-market approach to making the externalities of a certain process matter to the company. Since companies are focused only on profit, they won’t care if they’re polluting because it’s the cheapest option. But if it costs money to harm the environment, that should make the company “care” about the externalities. Along with that, it should incentivize the market towards less-harmful solutions in a dynamic way. So the “externalities cost” is built into things like producing a solar panel. That way, everything competes on a level playing field instead of a politically charged one, or even one where companies aren’t accountable to their externalities.