If I walked over to David Koch’s lawn and tore up all the grass, he’d probably feel that the basic principles of a free market society require me to be punished. After all, that’s his property. And then there’s what happens when the Kochs want to pollute someone else’s river:

The complaint alleges that a Georgia-Pacific paper mill on the Coffee Creek in Arkansas – owned by the billionaire Koch Brothers -emits 45 million gallons of paper mill waste including hazardous materials like ammonia, chloride, and mercury each day.

Coffee Creek then flows into Louisiana’s Ouachita River where the pollutants have left the formerly pristine water speckled with odorous foam, slime and black pockets of water, said Jerry Johnson, who has been visiting the Ouachita River for 35 years.

“People used to swim in it,” said Johnson, who now lives along the river. “In the summertime, it was the place to go.”

But Johnson said the number of visitors has dwindled as the river conditions continued to grow worse, preventing the area from reaching its full economic potential as a vacation destination. The pollution is so bad it has kept Johnson from fishing in the river.

And yet somehow the coalition merchants of the contemporary right, financed by the Kochs and other industrialists, have constructed a conception of free markets and property rights such that trying to stop them from wrecking Ouachita River constitutes a defense of those things.

Kevin Drum tries to drive home exactly how counterintuitive it is that big cities are environmentally friendly:

Here’s the thing: my guess is that virtually nobody in the country thinks that cities are greener places than towns or suburbs. And by “virtually nobody,” I mean maybe a few percent tops. For most people, it’s wildly counterintuitive on all sorts of levels to think of big, dirty, crowded, urban areas as “green.” It just doesn’t compute.

I’d been familiar with this result for a long time so it no longer feels counterintuitive to me. But I found myself reshocked by the flipside of this recently while reading up on nuclear catastrophes. It turns out that the portion of countryside most affected by radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl disaster is something of a thriving wildlife refuge. It’s not the best wildlife refuge in the world—there’s all the radiation to deal with—but compared to the average spot on the land area of Europe it’s extremely friendly to wildlife. And that’s not despite the radiation, it’s because of it. All the radiation keeps the people away, and people are terrible for wildlife.

The point isn’t that we should welcome radioactive fallout. The point is just that there are major ecological benefits of true wilderness—of places that aren’t sliced up by roads and terraformed for human convenience. And the flipside of crowded urban areas is that leaves more genuinely vacant land. Something like a lawn or a golf course looks quite lush and green, but people don’t want wolves on their lawn. By contrast, “species not seen for decades, such as the lynx and eagle owl, began to return” to the Chernobyl area once the people left.

As I said before, I don’t want to be the pro-nuclear guy in the energy debate, but this kind of thing makes me nervous:

In the most dramatic move, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced Tuesday that all seven of the country’s nuclear power plants built before 1980 would be shut down, at least for now, as safety checks are conducted. The decision came one day after the government, facing strong public opposition to nuclear energy ahead of upcoming regional elections, suspended plans to extend the life of its aging plants.

Switzerland, with five reactors, announced Monday that it would freeze plans to build or replace nuclear power plants, and Austria called for new stress tests on plants across Europe.

Some people responded to my earlier posts by saying “sure, fossil fuels are terrible, but that doesn’t mean nuclear is good—we need real clean energy.” And I agree, we do need real clean energy. And if what was happening here is that the German government was announcing a visionary plan to transform Europe to a renewable energy utopia, I’d be clapping. But if what actually happens is just that people say “yikes!” and clamp down on nuclear then that really just further entrenches the status quo. As Kevin Drum said the other day what needs to happen is for us to start pricing the externalities of fossil fuel use. With that done, I have no particular inclination to engage in further nuclear cheerleading. But reacting to Japan by burning more coal and pumping more oil isn’t any kind of progress.