> they can pretty much do whatever they want in their EEZ

This reminds me of an old Simpsons episode, where Bart and Lisa both close their eyes and declare that they're going to punch and kick the air in their personal space, and it's the other person's fault if they get hit. Inevitably, they're hitting each other a moment later.

This 18th-century notion of "I can do whatever I want on my land" doesn't work, because we now understand that the impacts actually go outside of whatever boundary we've drawn. Pollution, water flow, noise, animals, insects, pollen, dust, etc don't magically stop and reset at arbitrary borders.

If what someone is doing on their patch of the Earth is harming their neighbors, of course their neighbors have a right to prevent (or mitigate, be compensated for, etc) that harm.