Pollution as Public Bad

 Mitigation of Air and Water Pollution is the Responsibility of Governments

A public good refers to a commodity or service that is made available to all members of society. The two main criteria that distinguish a public good are that it must be non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Non-rivalrous means that the goods do not dwindle in supply as more people consume them; non-excludability means that the good is available to all citizens. Typically, these are services administered by governments and paid for collectively through taxation because private providers will not be able to provide these because of their non-rivalrous and non-excludable character.
Examples of public goods include law enforcement, national defense, and the rule of law. In the case of the environment these are basic goods such as access to clean air and water. Air and water are polluted differentially by people and so the polluter pays principle has been arrived at for garnering the resources to clean them. Thus, the Government has to either charge those who pollute through taxes or create an artificial market where the cleaning costs are bought by the polluters to offset their pollution.
However, the problem is that these cleaning costs are very high and are increasing with time as the newer technologies are more polluting in nature. Thus, unless all Governments globally, strictly implement the polluter pays principle either by taxation or by creating artificial markets for cleaning costs, the companies operating in countries that do this will become uncompetitive compared to those operating in countries that do not do this. This is the main reason that not much progress is being made in pollution abatement, especially in the mitigation of climate change where the costs involved are huge as the main solution is to transition from fossil fuels to renewable non Green House Gas emitting energy. The Governments of developed countries which have historically been the biggest polluters of both air and water and continue to be so are reluctant to enforce the polluter pays principle and are trying to obfuscate the issue by saying falsely that markets will take care of this problem.