Pollution is a very broad category of problems and include innumerable causes and effects.  Though anthropogenic pollution is an unavoidable effect of all human activities in any environment, the idea here is to create policies that would naturally minimize all detrimental interactions with the environment, while designing substantially more targeted policies against the more obvious externalities imposed on the environment.

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1. Business Relationship to the Environment

The greatest sources of pollution usually result from the unintended consequences of the production of goods and services by organizations.  All these organizations (usually businesses) should be required to operate in ways that prevent the environment from absorbing any significant negative impact due to these activities.  Only once all these costs are incorporated into the cost of a product or service, is the free market working properly.

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2. Environmental Damage Penalty

All businesses should naturally be required to pay for any environmental damage they cause.

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3. Genetic Engineering Regulations

Because of the reproductive qualities of genetic pollution and because genetic manipulations of ecosystems are so complex and any negative ramifications are virtually impossible to correct, the introduction of new genetic information into any organism or ecosystem should be heavily regulated.

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4. Waste Poundage Fee

Making the end user feel the pain directly for each pound of garbage they generate will be the most effective way to encourage the end-user to strive to recycle and sort their garbage, think of ways to reduce waste, encourage broad-based grassroots efforts to lobby all businesses to reduce packaging materials, increase product quality, design more repairable products rather than replaceable products and countless other environmental benefits.

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5. Littering Penalties & Collection Strategies

Everyone needs to be taught from the youngest of ages to never litter and this message needs to be repeated often.  So many people seemingly aware of the wrongfulness of littering still often do it casually and feel no remorse. To help solve the homeless problem of beggars on the street, the government should fund a program that would pay these people to pick up litter and be paid based on the weight of litter they collect and turn in.

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6. Landfills

50 years from now, the fact that we buried our trash on land would be viewed as being as ludicrous as the practice of dumping trash from barges into the ocean that was finally banned.  Many metals are present in municipal wastes at concentrations higher than those found in the respective metal’s mines.  Many other useful materials, including energy, could also be obtained from the waste stream.

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7. Sewage, Wastewater & Runoff Treatment and Recovery Regulations

All water returning to the natural environment after any human use or passage through  any significant human infrastructures (like normal runoff from streets) needs to be treated to return it an environmentally inert state.

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8. Only Permit Nuclear Reactors Capable of Sustaining Destruction of Nuclear Facilities

One major nuclear power accident could eliminate up to a decade of permissive social capital built up during the time of uneventful operations.  Because the terrorist threat is real and ever expanding due to the progressive ease with which destructive technologies are coming within reach of the average person’s ability to fully harness them, and because of the ever-present threats of nature and human error, it is imperative that the only acceptable large scale nuclear reactor vessels be designed in such a way to make the necessary environmental clean-up after a catastrophic event easy enough to be completed within 5 years, at reasonable costs and using existing technologies.

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9. Raise the Price of a Resource to Conserve It

Government micromanagement of resource usage is not the best way to conserve a resource.  Requiring toilets to use 1.6 gallons per flush, or cars to get certain MPG ratings are all examples of inefficient fiat government interventions into the free market system.  The more direct approach would be to merely increase the price of such resources (mainly through increased taxes) to discourage their use.

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10. Minimizing Negative Effects of Dams on Environment

Emptying reservoirs, reservoirs built on tributaries located off of the main streams, and simply not building and dismantling dams, would dramatically reduce the negative impact of dams on the environment.

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11. Nuclear Fuel and Radionuclide Recycling and Disposal

Minimizing the amount of high-level, long-lived radioactive isotopes is the first step in dealing with this waste problem.  Long-term storage on this planet could not be provided with the security necessary over the few hundred years before it decays to relatively safe levels.  Instead, only the highest level nuclear waste should be disposed of in space, preferably into the Sun.

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12. Light Pollution

A combination of redesigned lighting fixtures, a tax on light ‘leaking’ into the sky, real-time pricing of electricity and government regulations regarding major outdoor lighting policies during time of significant astronomical events, would all work together to reduce the amount of light pollution in the skies.

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13. Real Time Pricing of Utilities

This kind of pricing would provide a clear incentive to reduce demand during the peak hours.

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14. Space Junk

Operators in space need to remove their junk once they are through with it.  Quarterly fines for every piece of junk left should be applied.

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15. Honking the Horn

Fines equivalent to littering ($1,000 per offense) should be charged to anyone who honks the horn without a valid reasons.

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16. Car Alarm Regulations

Car alarms should only sound when actual damage is being done.  Furthermore, the owner’s key chain should sound or otherwise notify the owner.

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17. Antarctica

The entire continent and sea around it should be reserved for scientific exploration and left in as pristine a condition as possible.

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18. Environmental Preservation and Development Grading Scale

Such a grading scale as this would enable the creation of a clearer map illustrating the degree of human impact on lands.  A variety of tax schedules or fees could then be based on such a scale.

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19. Pollution Definition Levels

Pollution defined as based upon a multiple of natural background levels would result in  regulations that don’t automatically put nature in violation of environmental regulations.

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20. Large Pests

Large pests could cause rapid imbalances and permanent damage in ecosystems.  It is important to find new recipes or new ways to cull these large animals.

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21. Shipwreck Owners Responsibility

Shipwrecks (and their sources of pollutants) are easy to forget about after they occur because of the ‘out-of-sight-and-out-of-mind’ effect to which humans are so susceptible.  In order to counter this effect, clear quantitative penalties need to be imposed that are based on the actual negative environmental impact of the materials carried aboard the wrecked ship at the time of its wrecking.  This should provide a significant incentive to the ships owners to take measures to more quickly remove such pollutants from the environment.

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22. Subterranean Gasoline Tanks

Once pollutants get into the ground and migrate through the water table, they become virtually impossible to remove.  Massive efforts need to be made (and penalties imposed) to ensure that prevention of such pollution is assured.

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23. Oil Spill Dispersant Application Policy

Because oil spills in bodies of water are fast-paced events with major ecological ramifications, the pressure is often applied on clean-up crew to just do anything to quickly control the visible damage.  Unfortunately, the long-term environmental health becomes a victim of these short-term pollution clean-up tactics.  Applying dispersants to oil spills merely distributes the oil (and environmental damage) throughout the water column.  A better solution would be to allow the oil to concentrate on the water’s surface and affecting virtually only the shorelines, so that cleanup could be more localized, and environmental damage to the entire ecosystem would be lessened. Keep in mind that all dispersants themselves are very significant pollutants themselves.

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24. Water Craft Pollution

Requiring that a far higher percentage of pollutants be injected into the air (a sink that is better able to distribute and dilute such pollutants than water) would result in far less pollution to rivers and streams and lakes.

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25. Military Pollution and Cleanup Guidelines

Militaries should not be able to operate under more lenient environmental standards during peacetime.  Being one of the largest polluting industries on the globe, it is necessary they they cleanup after themselves.

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26. Permanent Garage/Yard Sale Lots

Creating common social standards to enable the creation of a larger market where more buyers and sellers could naturally find each other is essential in optimizing the efficiency of the second-hand market

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27. Individually Metered Utilities

Shared utility billing tends to slightly increase the consumption of utilities.  Individual metering would tend to reduce such consumption.

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28. Underground Power Lines

One of the largest urban and suburban aesthetic pollutants are power lines.  Getting these underground would help solve this visual irritant, make them more expensive, thus encouraging more distributed generation and local storage of electricity.

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29. External Electrical Outlets

These would help encourage the use of electrical gardening equipment instead of gasoline-powered equipment resulting in less noise and air pollution.

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