A Question I got via PM

[Borodog]

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Private lawsuits cannot effectively prevent air pollution. It is as simple as that. Let's say I step out on my porch and test for hazardous substances and find some cancer causing agent in the air. How the hell am I supposed to know who to sue?

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Call a lawyer. They will investigate. They would probably use an environmental forensics company to discover the source of the pollution. Perhaps they would employ computational fluid dynamics modelling. You know, like the EPA does.

Why does everyone assume that private individuals are too incompetent to figure anything out yet assume that bureaucrats are infallible?

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But if there are several companies which release that pollutant it is essentially impossible to prove which one released the particles that are in your yard.

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Sorry, but this is just wrong. Pollutants are not indistinguishable things; they have chemical fingerprints, and it is really quite easy to tell where they come from. Plus, if there are several companies polluting your property, you would just sue them all.

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Moreover, there is the problem of proving damages. Lets say you notice the pollutant really quickly and somehow are able to prove how released the particles that ended up in yard. How much money are you going to be able to collect for being exposed to a cancer causing agent for 1 week? Probably not much. And probably not enough to incentivize you to take up the costs of hiring a lawyer and filing a lawsuit. So the polluters will keep on polluting because of people catching them is so prohibitively high.

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You're totally ignoring class action suits, which bring transaction costs for individual claimants down to extremely low levels.