Can money buy environmental and social harm?

Rich Californians don't think they should have to cut back on water (their golf courses, lawns, and pools need it): http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/rich-californians-youll-have-to-pry-the-hoses-from-our-cold-dead-hands/2015/06/13/fac6f998-0e39-11e5-9726-49d6fa26a8c6_story.html

And of course everyone's favorite dentist to hate allegedly paid locals $55K to get him special access to kill Cecil the lion: http://heavy.com/news/2015/07/walter-palmer-federal-international-zimbabwe-charges-charged-crimes-federal-corrupt-practices-act-laws-zimbabwe-united-states-extradition-treaty-info/

Power is corrupting, and money is a major form of power, so stuff like this has been going on for millennia. But do you think new laws are in order, or we just have to accept money as speech and tolerate that some wealthy folks can afford to commit socially harmful actions? Surely it isn't absolute, as some laws prevent people from buying other human beings, or WMDs, or using their money for coercion (the dentist may have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, even if the actual act of killing the lion off the preserve was "legal").

Some laws are already in place, as CA households that don't cut back on water sufficiently may need to pay fines/higher rates on a sliding scale (ostensibly to offset the social harm of their resource usage). But is that enough of a deterrent? Probably not considering some people's net worth - do they need to be cut off instead? They can water their lawns with Evian. That is why market pricing for water won't fully "solve" the issue for price insensitive people (it might affect businesses and farms though, which is the lion's share - no pun intended - of usage). But since water shouldn't be a luxury good like a Vuitton bag, affordability can't solely determine access.

But in the end, stricter punishments for "bad rich people behavior" are unlikely because the politicians who write the laws are rich and disproportionately represent the interests of the rich. America has ~150MM eligible voters, yet so far 400 families have accounted for 50% of the 2016 presidential campaign funding (according to Bill Maher today).

PS - environmental rant: I don't buy the BS from hunting proponents to justify killing animals - it's actually pro-environment as population control (and some species can withstand "culling" more than others). Maybe it's even pro-conservation because the $ that some hunters spend to kill a few big game are used to protect the other specimens (for future kills?). First of all, nature doesn't need us egotistical humans to control a species' population. There are natural limiting factors like food, habitat, etc. Humanity's only impacts on nature are negative, and in a huge way. Yeah we do a good thing now and then by relocating or repopulating a species under stress, but those well-intended moves can backfire too. The best we can do is have as little impact as possible, like some untouched areas of Siberia probably have the healthiest ecosystems because we don't have a footprint (apart from climate change and air pollution diffusing over). And re: the $ argument, I bet for every dollar spent on big game hunting/fishing, maybe at best 20% actually benefits the animals and the rest are just paid to various parties in the supply chain, so that claim is specious. If we love nature then we should leave it alone.

Another heartbreaking example: birds in the extreme north. Because of climate change (and humans' acceleration of it), arctic ice has receded drastically since 1980, and snows have turned to rains. Excessive rain causes fatal hypothermia for some birds, and the weather trends are too rapid/drastic for them to evolve and adapt in time. Ice gives access for birds to fish for food, and chicks are starving to death with less available ice per family (it's as if all our farms permanently lost 80% of their acreage in a generation - could we sustain our population under such conditions?). Species will naturally wax and wane (or disappear) over time, we don't have to "fix" that, but highly successful and evolved creatures like these birds and polar bears, who used to be flourishing, are now rapidly dying out because of us. If our species makes it to the 22nd-23rd Centuries, I am sure they will look back at our (in)actions and think that we were really a bunch of assholes.

All those birds wanted to do is live, and they never did us any harm (they don't even compete for resources with us, as that land is uninhabited and the fish they eat are not commercial). Yet because people want comforts and money (enabled by fossil fuel burning), benign living things have to die. And for those who don't value other species as much as humans, the same can be said of the ~3B folks who by chance were born into poverty and/or environmentally sensitive areas of the planet.