I’m rather fond of this pair of axioms regarding the rule of law:
For a law to bind anyone, it must protect everyone. For a law to protect anyone, it must bind everyone.
I see many of our modern problems as being rooted in laws and systems which neither protect nor bind everyone equally.
I can understand your desire for markets to handle things, but I don’t think the global climate can be handled that way. Cap and trade means businesses get to shift their fossil emissions around while pretending they’re helping. We already see this with companies which buy land that’s already lush with old growth, then pretend like not clear-cutting it represents a reduction in carbon emissions equivalent to having planted all those trees. Giving corporate bad actors any opportunity to scam their way out of responsibility is the wrong approach.
To be fair, this wouldn’t be nearly as true if we had persisted with our original plan which was to reprocess the spent fuel, more than 90% of which is still usable material. Once we found a couple huge deposits of Uranium, it became much cheaper to simply mine more of it and dispose of the spent fuel, so the recycling plans were scrapped. Sure, we can technically still pull the spent fuel back out again and recycle it, but we spent many years building reactors without building an equal capacity of reprocessing facilities (which are almost as hard to build safely as reactors), so that ship has more or less sailed.