It is actually not the government's job to decide this - it is the voters. People vote with their mouths and dollars, and right now everyone just does not care enough to boycott coal power or stop driving SUVs. I'd like solar panels to become cheaper and electric vehicles to become more common, but the government cannot realistically control free markets like energy generation.

That said our perception of air pollution may be a bit exaggerated. Atmospheric aeroforming is a very difficult task -- even if we tried actively for 500 years, I think we might have difficulty changing the composition of the earth's atmosphere significantly. Before air pollution is even a real threat, our technology will have probably progressed far enough naturally (i.e. sans government investment) to handle any problems. Keep in mind there are over 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 (5 Dectillion!) kilograms of atmosphere. Humans produce 2,500,000,000,000 kilograms of CO2 year roughly (2.5 trillion). However, each tree (on average consumes 33 kilos of CO2, and (by NASA estimate) there are roughly 400,000,000,000 trees on earth -- thus trees could consume up to 13,200,000,000,000 (13.2 trillion kilos of CO2), and CO2 is heavier than air so probably a fair amount of it reaches the ground. Even if only 1/5 of the trees processed CO2, we would still be not generating any significant amount of it. Anthropogenic global warming is mostly alarmist theory until we prove humans have a significant effect on the atmosphere (as one scientist pointed out, the earth has warmed and cooled dramatically before human existence, and it will continue to during it, despite our actions).

It is the governments job to protect you from other people physically injuring you. That's the whole point--you don't get a choice. I can protect my daughter from inhaling particulate matter from coal energy just by not using coal power. It's literally the economic definition of negative externality--where the costs of activity are borne by people not parties to any transaction.

Also your analysis of air pollution is shockingly bad and you should feel bad. What on earth makes you think pollution mixes perfectly with the whole atmosphere before anyone breathes it in? It's like saying 2+2=cat.

I do feel bad ;) - yes, I am aware that the thermodynamics of our atmosphere are extremely complex, so complex that we can barely model them. This is exactly why I advocate people to be wary of when any scientist claims "x is going to happen in y years" -- we simply do not know how our atmosphere will behave, no more than we know what the exact weather will be like in two months. Right now, everything is basically a theory - we know that CO2 warms the atmosphere, but we do not know how much CO2 will be in the atmosphere in 2 years (we do not even presently have an exact amount).

We don't need to know exactly how much CO2 will warm the atmosphere. We have a probability distribution. We can't quantify the economic damage of climate change precisely, but we know enough to know it won't be $0, which is what the "wait and see" point of view prices the cost as.

Also, climate change isn't even the big issue here. I'm talking about much more mundane and also much more damaging air and water pollution from factories, cars, etc. We have very solid empirical evidence about that. Did you know that after the EPA's ban on leaded gasoline, blood lead levels in children dropped by a factor of 3-5x in just one decade? See: http://www.epa.gov/ace/body_burdens/b1-graph.html. This corresponds to a multiple IQ-point impact from lead. What's the dollar value of a multiple IQ-point impact on the nation's children (and future workforce)? It's a huge number.

Did you know that a recent Harvard Medical School study concluded that the true price of coal power factoring in the externalized environmental costs is 2-3x as much as the market price? http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/green/greenblog/2011/02/new_.... The same study found the total externalized costs of coal power to be $200-$500 billion/year: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010..... Here in Chicago we recently shut down two coal-fired power plants that were causing $100 million in health damage per year and only creating 50-60 jobs each.

The total cost of environmental damage being down every year, in terms of quantifiable impact to people is probably into the trillion dollar per year range. People tend to think of environmentalism as being about "soft values" but that couldn't be further from the truth. Even if we assign zero value to the environment itself, we can't avoid putting a dollar figure on the value of the services the environment provides us. When New York manages to avoid building a $6-$8 billion filtration facility by properly managing the Catskills watershed, we can't avoid the inescapable economic conclusion that damage to the Catskills and similar watersheds needs to be valued in the billions of dollars range. We can't avoid the conclusion that when a company dumps waste into those watersheds, it's an economic injury no different than if tore up city streets or caused a bridge to collapse.

It's the government's job to protect us from all this, the same as it's the government's job to protect us from people who steal your car or break into our houses. It goes to the heart of why government exists.

Basically, my argument is that we are going to continue to pollute the air for some time to come (the automobile will not disappear overnight). Natural gas is much cleaner, but even if it were crude oil under our soil, wouldn't it be better to use our own rather than another country's? The actual process of extracting any kind of oil/gas is not that environmentally hazardous, unless of course there is a spill.

Your argument was for reducing environmental regulation.