text: There are all kinds of particles in the air which someone might consider pollution.  Oxygen, for example.  Anaerobic bacteria consider our clean, breathable air to be horribly polluted with oxygen.\n\nI presume you don't want to remove the oxygen from the air.  We want the air to be hospitable to our own life forms and those which we depend on for our survival.  In that case, we need to continue to advance technologically.\n\nFor most of the earth's 4.6 billion year history, the air has been filled with all kinds of bad chemicals that are toxic to humans.  Only recently (in terms of the earth's existence) has our air been "clean" for humans to breathe.  We have no reason to believe that nature will preserve this balance indefinitely, so it makes sense that we have to proactively work to clean our air.\n\nIn order to develop this kind of technology, resources must be available to devote toward such research.  This means we need to stop our governments from siphoning the resources from the most productive (richest) members of society and putting them toward unprofitable uses.\n\nIn areas where pollution is the biggest concern, the quality of air (or water, etc.) becomes more and more valuable to the residents.  They become willing to put more and more resources toward developing technologies to clean the air, which in turn makes it profitable to do.  This is impossible to do when the resources have been stripped from the producers of wealth and put toward failed socialist experiments.\n\nIn short, we need to keep the government out of the economy, because the markets with the most freedom tend to become the wealthiest.  The wealthiest economies are the only ones who can devote resources toward cleaning up the environment.  When people are worried about their next meal, they're not too worried about some abstract theory about the environment 100 years from now.