link to original reddit post by /u/Chaos2718
TL;DR: How do you assign property rights to the atmosphere and oceans?
Just as a some background, I'm fairly young and still forming my opinions. A year ago I probably would have called myself a "centrist" or "moderate" or something like that but recently (because of lockdowns) I've been learning about libertarian thought.
So my understanding is that the libertarian view on externalities is based on the Coase theorem meaning that strong property rights would eliminate externalities. If everything has an owner, then everything would be protected by its owner.
Then there is the conventional "statist" Pigouvian view that externalities are market failures that must remedied by either taxes or subsidies.
The common big externality that people talk about these days is climate change (note: this is meant to be focused on externalities and such so lets just assume for the sake of discussion that this is a real and significant negative externality). The widely agreed upon "solution" (by economists and politicians and probably a significant number of people) is a carbon tax i.e. a Pigouvian solution.
So my question is, what is the libertarian, Coase based, response to climate change (or more broadly, pollution of the atmosphere and oceans)? I can understand on a small scale that if you own, say, a lake, then you won't let it get polluted. But how do assign property rights to the oceans and atmosphere? The first thing that comes to mind is come sort of publicly traded corporation that represents the atmosphere and just goes around suing polluters to protect the property of its shareholders (i.e. the atmosphere is now collectively owned by everybody who owns shares). But I don't know how practical that is.