[isityouyesitsme]

He misses the point. If air was like coal, it would require extraction effort to both us and deliver it, and significant capital to do it at scale. If air was like water, it would require significant effort just to keep it clean enough to use without a near-immediate, acute, negative reaction. Imagine every person staking claim of water as part of the "public." It wouldn't last very long. Nearby where I live, they had to drain an entire reservoir for a municipality because they caught someone sneaking in past a fence to urinate and defecate into it.

Now, since pollution spreads so far and so quickly in air, he may have a different point, whereby the corps freely ruin the air, and then could charge for purified, usable air. The root problem there is the pollution, not the purification---which takes effort and capital to perform at scale.

Tressell is just another person who takes real problems, the depression of the poor, and suggests that a simple fix is to just "don't let them do this," as if anything in the world is this simple.