The residents can simply stop doing business with that particular freight company. Now that they know they operate unsafely from suffering permanent damage from chemical poisoning, they can make an informed decision on the free market.
Right. After the fact and poisoning the swathes of land and tons of water nobody will clean up. And cost of the lost health of people being offloaded onto taxpayers.
The company or its shareholders is not bearing the cost of wrongdoing.
As such, the market is incentivized to do more of this garbage.
Environmental pollution is a classic example of a market failure. Market failures are the rule not some exception - they're a way to maximize profit. Efficient markets have zero profit.
Not that this brightens your day, but it's not just the evil and/or short-sighted capitalists:
"Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks."
Fauci's argument was that pandemics happen naturally, so it would be better to get ahead of them in the lab. Was he wrong? Maybe. Or maybe Covid was totally natural and we needed GoF research to help with vaccines.
Fauci also acknowledged the validity of concerns, in that same paper.
Is it bad to run a biolab next to a naturally virus -heavy environment? Probably.
Is it bad to trust the Chinese Communiat Party with a biolab,given their decades long record of oppression the Chinese epoeple and suppression of the press? Probably.
Vinyl Chloride gas clouds, by contrast, never appear naturally.