Also if somebody dumps huge amounts of waste on your property, or waste flows threw your river, then you have a intensive to go to court.
Also, in a well designed legal system you can do much better. Take the river example. If I don't like the waste flowing threw the river but I don't care all that much since I just use it as a cooling source, I might never bother to actually sue.
However if somebody wants to make a water sports related thing, he has a huge incentive to sue. So he sues the guy who uses the water for cooling. The cooling guy will say, he 'its not my waste, how about I give you my legal claim'. In some cases you might sell the legal claim for money.
The cooling guy improves his situation and makes a small amount of money for little effort and then does not have to be involved anymore. The water sports guy now has double the incentive to win the lawsuit, because if he wins he has two claims.
This is actually historically quite common. Most of the time you don't do much yourself, you just hand of your claims for a specialist.
You're basically giving a company who is tanking permission to do whatever the fuck they want. Companies bankrupt and go out of business all the time.
There's going to be enforcement no matter what. I'd rather be proactive than reactive.
Courts can't solve everything and they certainly can't prevent a great many things. Especially when there's such a simple way to avoid responsibility (shell corporations).
Also in cases such a pipelines and rivers, everybody can sue the person higher up and you will eventually arrive at the source.
For rivers this system has actually worked quite well. River property rights system were quite common in Britain and in the US. There is also direct comparison of rivers without such system and rivers with such system, and the property rights based once were much cleaner.
This of course changes when we are talking about dumping in the ocean. That another problem.