Systems of "pollution" reduction, and "environmental" protection or conservation, by adjunct processes, never claim as part of their purposes NET benefit for the environment. The system insiders are quite more astute than their followers who cannot appreciate assumptions that have been made, but not stated, about NET system (any system) effect upon environment.



Since a system has a local model of knowing and controlling itself and cannot comprehend the environment outside as a consequence of its model, its self interest dictates that it convince outsiders that overall improvement is possible. However, that ploy is equivalent to maximal discount of the environment of the model: as if supposed beneficial changes to the model, working against the environment as source and sink, represent net changes to the model and its environment.



Polluter pays principle creates new forms and orders of "pollution": the costs of "pollution" discovery, definition (pricing), advocacy, education or lobbying; mitigation with its standards, commands and controls, law suits, taxes and subsidies, international agreements, and adjusted property rights. Institutional aggrandizement is the main value of polluter pays; as a result, the environment is degraded to a greater extent by real world processes of various systems. That degradation leads to the emergence of new forms of physical and other orders of "pollution" and more powerful institutions (the environment willing).



Get a coherent model of "pollution": state your assumptions of ontology and epistemology. Admit all of the arbitrary costs (pollutions do not have standard units or methods of measurement). Grant that a system telos implies a shadow telos of NET environmental degradation.



People should be less concerned about a falling sky than an institutional framework that wants more "pollution".