And that’s why environmental regulation – and other regulations dealing with external factors – are so important, and why treaties that try to prevent that are dangerous.

But the EPA can only exist in the context of a country that's relatively wealthy. In countries where hunger is a problem, you can't ask people to accept a lower standard of living in exchange for a better environment, because a lower standard of living means starvation.

They're useful trailblazers, but I'd love to see more free-market solutions tried and developed.

The free market solution to environmental issues has always been "dump it right here", because it completely ignores externalities.

You'd have to be insane to even consider that it could be otherwise.

What does that even mean? Do you have any examples where the so-called free market has successfully solved this problem?

Why don't you start with a simple demonstration or example of the free-market working for any public good.

there's absolutely no incentive in the free market to care about pollution.

There technically is an incentive, though it might not be recognized as being enough to move the needle (mentioned later): if pollution is not taken care of in some way, the costs associated with supplying (producing) some thing (good or service) or things is likely increased as a result of the pollution.

The incentive to care about pollution, then, is the potential to save money when producing some thing or things by reducing the levels of pollution. That is, if it would cost less money to reduce pollution than the pollution causes the costs of production to increase, then you have an opportunity to save money by reducing pollution and possibly an opportunity to produce more (incentive to reduce pollution).

Problem is, the incentive might not be recognized as being enough to move the needle because the increase in costs of producing is likely distributed across many producers and its effect might be too minimal on a per-producer basis for them to either recognize that it exists or too costly to do anything at the level that they experience its effects.

Really? What about removing BPA from plastic water bottles? I know it's not pollution in the strict sense. Companies did that before the gov't ever stepped in and forced it. Why? Consumer demand.

The market cares about whatever customers care about.

Was BPA removed from all plastic water bottles? I remember when BPA-free was trending. All the expensive designer water bottles slapped stickers all over saying they were BPA free. The cheaper bottles made no such assurances.

The Clean Water Act applies to everyone equally. The market cares only about customers with money.

That's not quite a valid analogy in my books, because either you have BPA in a water bottle or you don't. In contrast, "customers don't want pollution" isn't quite accurate - it's better described as "customers don't want pollution near them". To this end, you just dump the pollution elsewhere, where your customers aren't.

Pollution is a global problem though, so this isn't a solution that works yet it's absolutely what the free market would decide.