Yeah, a civilized society tries to find cases of dangerous pollution and regulate them out of existence. Well-run companies with anything other than short time mindsets want to survive, and are active participants in consumer safety, but sadly, most industries can't be trusted to watchdog themselves. Its an esential govt function.
Regarding subsidies, I'll give props to the right.
By providing a check on the left, only the most worthy and justifiable subsidies get funded in the US. The wind, PV and EV subsidies are very lean compared to the European model, and are pay as you go (rather than creating huge costs in future budgets) and usually have 'caps' that limit them in case they are too successful. And yet they are successful, creating whole new service companies, small businesses and manufacturing industries across the US. They improve US balance of trade and energy security and engage our most innovative and ambitious young people doing something useful other than selling each other more complicated financial instruments.
Speaking for myself, I have seen the studies that make it clear that PV and on-shore wind make decent returns, when sited properly, without subsidies. If analysis shows that a small subsidy helps to grow that organic potential a lot faster than would happen otherwise, great. Let's grow the opportunity before another country seizes it. In contrast, a large subsidy will often lead to mal-investment...siting RE resources where they work less well, or their profitability (w/o subsidy) is unlikely.
In this lens, the federal onshore wind, residential PV and EV purchase subsidies are all small, and are helping to stimulate what will become gigantic, profitable industries (w/o subsidies) 10-20 years from now.
Conversely, it seems that a lot of PV investments overseas, and solar thermal in the US in the 70s were heavily subsidized, and became expensive boondoggles and crashed when the money ran out, leaving a lot of mal-investments....solar thermal systems that never worked well, shaded PV systems in Spain, etc. A lot of subsidies have performance checks....my house retrofit would not be eligible for cheap financing if the blower-door did not improve by 15%, my EV has to have a minimum electric range to qualify, PA solar rebates require <30% shading to be eligible, etc.
All seems pretty common sense to me.
And I've said before, Cape Wind is a fiasco.