Nope, I understand negative externalities quite well. I’ve been studiying this stuff for over a decade.
You need ot show harm to show a negative externality. Africa shoots thousands of tons of microparticles over the the north america continent. Volcanoes shoot microparticles into the atmosphere by an even larger amount. Forest Fires is another. These collectively are known as aerosols.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Aerosols
The human contribution to these aerosols is tiny compared to those contributed by nature. So you have to show actual harm. If the harm is infinitessimal, then any cost to avert any specific action is outrageous.
There are cities where the human contribution is worse, and do in fact cause quantifiable harm. Guess who owns the roads, regulates the gas, and makes all the rules? So if you are claiming that we should go after governments to reduce their responsiblity for pollution, I am all for it.
As for cyclist deaths, please compare your effect for a life shortened or ended by pollution by any car owner, and factory owner, to the specific car owner who crashes into them.
https://fullfact.org/health/cyclist-deaths/
Worse, you have to reason out why, in the face of some infinitessimal damage, people in cities live longer than people in rural settings where the pollution is less.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24439358
Until you can quantify the amount of harm, you can’t simply claim that pollution from sources you choose are reducing lives by some unquanifitable amount and thus there is a negative externailty. As for the times when a car crashes into a bike, we have a quantifiable harm, we have a specific cause, and we have a system by which to punish the harm.
If there are people who have damage in 100 years…they THEY are the ones who can claim damage, not anyone else. So while the rest of the planet is busy preparing for or ignoring this possibility, that harm hasn’t happened. Let’s flip that around for a second. Lets say we put in an economic policy now, say free healthcare, free education, let’s add a basic income on that one. Now we are all happy in the present. But our grandchildren are living under martial law in a totally broke government (I am quite sure I dont have to point at a long history of this effect that begins during the roman empire). Shall we imprison all the universal healthcare voters that are left? Does it make sense to do this? Why would it make sense for someone whose house got flooded?
Look at the people who keep moving back to flood zones. Why did tax payer money get spent rebuilding new orleans when any sane person without artificial incentive would never have moved back to the low lands there? Who shall we blame for providing that? It’s the same people who own the roads and waterways right now.
My point is that negative externalities are most often (I can’t think of an example of when it is not, but I am open minded to hear one) caused by having a government. The very idea of a public space (as opposed to an unowned space) causes negative externalities to happen and when they happen there is no recourse.
“Should there be an open market where all those effected negatively by my purchases and actions can ‘bid’ to stop me doing them, in a sense determining a free market price for ‘not polluting in their neighbourhood’”
Absolutely.
We just had an example of that right here where I live, in puerto rico. Our building allowed a billboard company to put up an LED billboard. The contract is about 1.5 million over 30 years. This will pay for a generator which we do not currently have, it will keep the maintenance costs down for the old ladies who live in the building, and it might provide a solar system to help power the building if we cant get diesel. But the entire neighborhood has to look at the light. We offered the neighborhood to help us pay for these things (it would have been less than 1.5 milion), but we wouldn’t guarantee that the billboard wouldnt just appear on another building (because we don’t have any control over that). So, there is a billboard on our building now, because the value of the perceived harm was less than anyone was willing to pay to stop the billboard. The amount people were willing to pay to stop it was 0. Thus the cost of the harm from the light is 0, the benefit is immense.
