Funny thing is, pollution is often characterized as a "free market failure" but the reality is, in a truly free market there is no tragedy of the commons. In a free market, someone's private property rights were violated by pollution of someone else, and there would be market pressure to address it.

I think we could make great strides in protecting the planet if there was some moral method of enforcing private property rights. If my neighbor is burning his trash and it messes up the air quality for me, it's understandable for me to complain. I'd probably win in some kind of adjudicational venue.

I don't even think I'd need too much science to win. "What my neighbor is doing smells really bad." Enter that as evidence. Case closed.

But this notion isn't very scalable under the current system. Meaning, if my neighborhood attempts to complain about a nearby factory, just doing the same thing as the previous example, there's a lot more of a process that protects the factory.

Then try to scale that up even further to regions and continents, it's just impossible, even with all the scientific evidence in the world.

In attempting to address this, government institutions call this process "tort reform" and "privatization". I'm not convinced they actually want to reform or privatize anything. That's why I'd be keen on a decentralized analogs to tort reform and privatization. But looking at the current state of crypto, that's still 200 years away.

Therefore, the moral way to fix the environment is centuries away, regardless of any scientific assertions.