[nickik]

Well, first of all, with the exception of anarchist libertarians still support policy. This seems to be a case of illegal dumping. If the person that is harmed needs to go to the policy and they need to investigate. Once you find out who it was, they need to pay.

Also in cases such a pipelines and rivers, everybody can sue the person higher up and you will eventually arrive at the source.

For rivers this system has actually worked quite well. River property rights system were quite common in Britain and in the US. There is also direct comparison of rivers without such system and rivers with such system, and the property rights based once were much cleaner.

This of course changes when we are talking about dumping in the ocean. That another problem.

[nommm-nommm]

You seem to believe everyone has infinite time to spend in court.

[nickik]

The hole point of a legal system is to prevent people from doing something because they fear being sued. So by definition you only sue in special cases.

Also if somebody dumps huge amounts of waste on your property, or waste flows threw your river, then you have a intensive to go to court.

Also, in a well designed legal system you can do much better. Take the river example. If I don't like the waste flowing threw the river but I don't care all that much since I just use it as a cooling source, I might never bother to actually sue.

However if somebody wants to make a water sports related thing, he has a huge incentive to sue. So he sues the guy who uses the water for cooling. The cooling guy will say, he 'its not my waste, how about I give you my legal claim'. In some cases you might sell the legal claim for money.

The cooling guy improves his situation and makes a small amount of money for little effort and then does not have to be involved anymore. The water sports guy now has double the incentive to win the lawsuit, because if he wins he has two claims.

This is actually historically quite common. Most of the time you don't do much yourself, you just hand of your claims for a specialist.

[nommm-nommm]

I'd rather have the government use its power to proactively prevent rivers from being turned into toxic waste dumps rather than let it be a free for all and end up with a toxic waste dump and maybe a few dollars if I'm lucky. You're assuming that you'd actually be able to collect on that judgement. You can't if the plaintiff doesn't have the funds. For a real life example, a civilian shipyard worker named Casey Fury intentionally set a fire onboard the USS Miami that destroyed it. Part of his sentence was paying back $400 million to the Navy. Do you think the Navy is going to ever get anywhere near $400 million from some dude who will spend 17 of his life in jail and is stupid enough to set a fire onboard a submarine? The only chance of collecting even part of that is if he wins the lottery.

You're basically giving a company who is tanking permission to do whatever the fuck they want. Companies bankrupt and go out of business all the time.

There's going to be enforcement no matter what. I'd rather be proactive than reactive.

[riskable]

...and the shell company that has no assets doesn't even show up in court. That's the problem I wanted to know how to fix.

Courts can't solve everything and they certainly can't prevent a great many things. Especially when there's such a simple way to avoid responsibility (shell corporations).

[nommm-nommm]

Pollution to a river usually can't just be undone like that. "Water sports guy" still cant do water sports even if he wins a lawsuit. Look at the Hudson River for a real life example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_of_the_Hudson_River