But it isn’t..it is because of consumption and population growth(which leads to more consumption)

So that's precisely why blaming pollution might be sensible. Can you actually force all parents to move away from a polluted area? Or can you punish a diesel truck driver for driving in a legally designated area? Taken to the extreme, can you change the laws of the universe, or its initial boundary conditions?

Probably not, but you can certainly change pollution limits and enforce them.

Sometimes I wonder if future generations will be sickened by the idea that individuals thought it was ok to drive cars that simply released poisonous gasses and particulates into the air rather than trapping and storing them for safe disposal. After all, we know it has already led to society wide increases in violence due to retarded brain development.

A libertarian/hardcore capitalist approach might be to try to actually codify ownership rights over these things and give them to persons who could exert them against polluters.

I and I suspect many others would find that pretty disturbing. I think the idea of being forced to pay rent for breathing someones air is shocking, but if nobody stands to benefit from providing good quality air, there is no clear capitalist incentive to spend effort creating and ensuring it. Without that we need some other mechanism to force polluters to pay for the costs of their behaviour instead of forcing them onto everyone else.

One idea would be that if there were enough detailed, trustworthy information that consumers might hold companies accountable for their abuse of community resources, and vote with their wallets but empirically speaking this kind of safeguard seems to work very patchily when it works at all.

Once those two possibilities are eliminated I'm struggling to think of anything that doesn't end up looking like regulation.

I couldn't tell you if we're able to STOP it before we suffer even more catastropic consequences, but with time, such a way of living (if lived by a high enough percentage of the population), will eventually reverse the damage done. It's one hell of a step in the right direction.

Cleaner conscience, cleaner environment.

It's very acceptable for proven causes of proven societal ills to be handled by a consensus of that society. It's not acceptable to stampede, bully, exaggerate, and mislead to cause something to happen, just because in your opinion, it would be best.

Remove the contaminated material from nature first then return it. Cleaned.

I'm not saying we should dump more chemicals because of chemicals. This is a depressingly stupid conversation.

And you see the absolutist Utilitarian argument he is making used in economics. For example, Larry Summers (yes, that Larry Summers) memo (when he was at the World Bank) justifying dumping toxic waste in developing countries since the life expectancy of people in developing countries was already lower. The argument being that it was better for someone who would only projected to make it to 50 years to die early than it would be if someone who was projected to make it to 75 years died early.

The memo

'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:*

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.

Note: The memo was written by Lant Pritchett and signed off by Lawrence Summers (who was the Chief economist at the World Bank at the time). They have both argued it was meant to be sarcastic but nothing at the time indicated that.

It would have been easier to believe in a better future if people could stomach tiny inconveniences.

I think our children will experience both scenarios anyway (they already do in poorer countries).

By abstract labour you mean like overly specific high rate tasks instead of craftmanship ?

The first and foremost "pollutant" source of environmental damage and degradation are humans. Simply speaking, the only way that humanity has any real chance at fighting global climate impacts is by limiting and reducing reproduction. But it's a really difficult topic to talk about, let alone even just bring up. It's the 1 million pound gorilla that cannot be seen for all the gorilla blocking the view.