Howard Pearce wrote on LPplatform-discuss:

BH) requiring toll collectors to also check for a valid and locally-acceptable emissions certification (BH

HP) This might be done electronically. Anyone passing thru with an invalid certificate would be subject to a higher fee by contract, perhaps. (HP

So on your trip to the grocery store, you have to plan your route to minimize not only your tolls but also the fees and fines assessed by any road you might use that requires more stringent emissions certification than what you have.  Merely to describe the never-before-solved challenge facing you is to discredit this idea for almost the entirety of the relevant audience.

Your hand-waving toward a deus ex machina technological solution also seems to constitute an admission that for much of the previous century, the LP dogma of road-owner-mediated pollution enforcement would have been woefully impractical.  Environmental aggression via automobile emissions was a serious problem in America for decades before it would have been remotely feasible to do electronic certification-checking at the borders of private roads.

Also, automobile emissions are just one of myriad kinds of pollution, none of which have EVER been successfully addressed by liability rules, despite there being no apparent obstacle to the kind of torts that zero-aggression absolutists claim would ALWAYS handle these problems.  A partial list of these kinds of pollution would include:

• air pollution via
  • automobile emissions,
  • smoke and soot from wood-burning appliances,
  • chlorofluorocarbons used in refrigerants;
• water pollution (in groundwater, streams, lakes, and oceans) via
  • herbicides and pesticides,
  • fecal contamination,
  • silting,
  • litter,
  • leakage from pleasure craft, and
  • improper disposal of hazardous substances.

This partial list only covers literal pollution.  Other forms of negative externalities caused by non-excludability include

• depletion of shared freshwater sources;
• depletion of fish and game stocks;
• increased microbial resistance due to overuse of antibiotics;
• electromagnetic noise pollution; and
• heat pollution.

I've never heard of liability rules being able to address ANY of the above kinds of negative externalities in ANY jurisdiction at ANY time in human history.  There is zero prospect of technological advances that will magically make all currently non-excludable resources suddenly excludable.

HP) Maybe such checks might even be random . (HP

There is a smarter way to use such selective enforcement to address these issues.  If anarcholibertarians claim that micro-torts could efficiently police micro-pollution, then it should be possible to allow a micro-protest system to let people challenge how the default rules (e.g. pollution taxes) treat their behavior.  If you plan to burn your gallon of gasoline in an extremely clean way, it should be just as efficient for you to file for an exemption as it would be for you to be sued for burning it in a dirty way.  In fact, it would be orders of magnitude more efficient, because the default pollution tax would be calibrated to the average polluting behavior, and there would be no need for a magical mechanism to aggregate into a class-action suit the complaints of all the people that your pollution would harm.

HP) On the other hand, maybe any pollution fines would be handled by the freeway owner and passed on to all via toll costs. (HP

Ah, a third-party payer.  File this bad idea under M for moral hazard.  You can't use one textbook market failure to correct another.

Susan Hogarth wrote:

SH) This is the sort of talk I expect from a government apologist. Oh, right. Nevermind.  Perhaps it is a tragic lack of imagination which envisions that the only way the market would have of conducting business is the current way the government does it. (SH

It is a tragic lack of comprehension if you think that green pricing is anywhere close to how the government currently regulates pollution.  The government does NOT currently internalize into transactions the price of their negative externalities and then stand back and let markets decide the most efficient ways and places to decrease pollution.  Instead, the government engages in command-and-control bureaucratic regulation of technology, products, and practices, with all the usual unintended consequences.  CAFE fleet mileage standards cause auto manufacturers to disproportionately switch to SUV and minivan production.  Differing regulations for new versus existing power plants cause power companies to over-invest in eking more power out of their dirty older plants instead of investing in cleaner new plants that would be subject to tighter rules.  Such examples can be multiplied indefinitely by anyone vaguely familiar with environmental regulation.  So it's simply ignorant for you to suggest I'm an apologist for the way the government currently regulates pollution.

SH) But just because -you- can only envision a million toll booths as a consequence of market roads does not mean that's the only way private roads could operate. Off the top of my head, I see a possible model whereby road-owners allow free access to cars but charge -businesses- to locate along the road. That's just one possibility. (SH

Thanks for trying to copy the geolibertarian idea of collecting part of a site's land rent in order to provide public goods that serve the site.  However, your idea would do nothing to address automobile emissions. Once businesses have paid their site fee, it's in their interest to maximize the amount of auto traffic on the adjacent road, and they would have no incentive to minimize emissions there.  (If you tried to create such an incentive, you would make the problem even worse than if road owners tried to minimize emissions, as there would be many more storefronts than there would be toll booths.)

It's laughable to suggest that the problem here is my personal lack of imagination.  The basic idea -- discussed in every macroeconomics textbook -- is that negative externalities are inevitable for ANY resource that is non-excludable -- i.e. that you can't efficiently stop people from using or fouling.  All this blatant hand-waving about technology or lack of imagination cannot reverse the verdict of history and the consensus of economic science.  Economics textbooks already endorse the obvious libertarian solution to this sort of market failure, by harnessing the power of markets to find the optimal solution once the pricing system accurately reports all the relevant information.  It's tragic for a party that calls itself "Libertarian" to not endorse and champion the textbook libertarian solution to environmental aggression.

It's appropriate here to repeat the words of 2004 LP presidential contender Aaron Russo, who died yesterday.  Although he was a conspiracy theorist who claimed the Rothschild family controls the Federal Reserve and the government wired the World Trade Center for demolition, he recognized the kookiness of the LP dogma on pollution: "I think the Libertarian Party has never had a good policy on the environment. I've never heard a good one, and I've been looking for one for months, and I'm hoping to find new ideas on how we can handle the environment. On this issue, to tell you the truth, there's a bit of confusion in my mind. But the stock answer that I've been hearing about the environment is not good in my view. Sue your neighbor, sue this one, sue that one, those aren't good answers for me."  See my July 2004 article in California Freedom for a similar quote from another major LP candidate.