I found this essay by Ryan Anderson both instructive and helpful.
Here’s the opening paragraph:
The Gulf oil spill is a terrible ecological disaster. But its legacy will be even worse if it results in the enactment of misguided policies that hurt the environment while trying to help it. It seems that almost everyone’s knee-jerk reaction to the spill is to forget (assuming they ever knew in the first place) the environmental lessons learned over the past several decades, and thus to bash cheap energy, market economies, and private property. But successful environmental protection results from harnessing, not subverting, the benefits of each of these.
After citing Paul Krugman, E.J. Dionne, Mark Galli, and Russell Moore, Anderson writes:
What we’re seeing is an animus directed toward modern technology and industry, an unmodulated suspicion of the private sector’s motives, an unexamined belief that markets have failed, all coupled with an uncritical (and nearly unthinking) faith that, in the final analysis, only government and extensive regulation will save us from ourselves and protect Mother Nature.
Here’s the conclusion:
Not relying on the good intentions of business or the wisdom and benevolence of government, but instead relying on economic incentives is the key. It’s not that market economies failed us in the Gulf, but that they were never put to work in the first place.
Read the whole thing to consider his arguments for his position.