I'm aware of two sorts of evidence. First, there's the rhetoric used by the President, for example, "bitter clingers" speech and his statements about the Trayvon Martin shooting indicate he is at least in support of some sort of federal level gun control.
Second, there's the ATF Fast and Furious scandal. On the surface, it's supposedly a sting operation meant to uproot gun smuggling networks in the US in order to assist with the taming of the Cartel war in next door Mexico. In actuality, this sting delivered considerable material support to the Sinaloa Cartel, 2,000 guns guaranteed not to be intercepted plus whatever else the Cartel was able to smuggle out with those weapons (such as laundered money or more guns), a pretext (which turned out to be too flimsy when the scheme was revealed) for introducing additional regulations on gun purchases, and these guns turning up at over 200 murders in Mexico and the US and which are still turning up at crime scenes.
You are confusing expert opinion with argument from authority.
Not at all. Expert opinion is the most common basis for an argument from authority. Let's look at the three examples you gave, the Stern Review, the Garnaut Climate Change Reviews, and the IPCC's series of assessment reports. The first thing to observe is that the first two reports were funded by politicians with a particular agenda and who happened to need a particular outcome of those reports and for which the reports just happen to deliver on that agenda and need.
Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair needed a pretext for supporting near future greenhouse gases emission controls. He sets aside public funds for the Stern Review, and (what a coincidence!) the Stern Review just so happens to support his needs of the moment. Same goes for the Garnaut Reviews which happen to fill the same role for former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
IPCC has long been notorious for providing what pro-climate change propaganda is needed as it is needed. For example, we have the "hockey stick" estimate promulgated in the 2001 Third ASsessment Report, extreme weather in the next assessment, and heating of the oceans in the latest one. I wouldn't be surprised to see a sudden confidence by considerable narrowing of the temperature forcing of a doubling of carbon dioxide in the next assessment report.
Each of these reporting sources has consistently exaggerated its conclusions in favor of current carbon dioxide emission reduction. Earlier in this thread, I mentioned the consistent biases of the Stern Review. The Garnaut Reviews are even worse with a claim of only 0.1 to 0.2% of Australia's fossil fuel-dependent GDP lost each year to mitigation policies for AGW. That's ridiculous.
Meanwhile, the IPCC has long been notorious for exaggerating the impact of AGW while simultaneously downplaying the costs of greenhouse gases emissions reduction. For example, I was told by slashdotter Layzej that the IPCC's Third Assessment Report (TAR) predicted a 0.1 to 0.2 C increase in global mean temperature over the few decades after 2001 (using scenario "IS92a").
But when I actually looked at the "Summary for Policy Makers" I see claims of larger near future heating for the scenario in question (of 0.1 C to 0.3 C) with the high end of the initial range of increases presented instead as a median value of this new, unjustified range. I also saw that in this Summary the TAR had obsoleted the scenario in question and was using scenarios that presented more aggressive heating.
In other words, the fine print, which Layzej unearthed was buried deep in the report somewhere, while other, significantly worse and unjustified scenarios were presented for public consumption. Now, that those overly alarmist scenarios are failing, supporters are digging up the hidden, but somewhat more accurate predictions and claiming that the IPCC was right all along.
This sort of dishonesty and misuse of expert opinion is why I term the whole effort an argument from authority. But don't get me wrong I think there's a lot more fallacies at play here than just argument from authority.
My view on this is that "expert opinion" and "peer reviewed and published" doesn't outweigh being deliberately wrong.
No it isn't. It's required by law to pay taxes just as it is required to pay your employees and not kill them at the end of the day.
So you're saying it's not strictly a negative externality. The moral content or intent of a policy is completely irrelevant to whether it creates an externality or not.
Just because it would be cheaper if this law didn't exist doesn't make it an externality.
Of course not. It's incurred without choice by the employer, that's what makes it an externality.
I don't think you will ever understand what an externality is. There isn't much more I can do here. I understand that you will never want to lower CO2 emissions if you don't get what an externality is.
Funny, doesn't look like that from my end. While I grant someone seems to have a problem understanding what an externality is, I find it more interesting that merely characterizing this massive synergy of fossil fuels, energy, and transportation with the entirety of an economy, as not an externality is sufficient to dismiss it.
This strikes me as comparable to the argument from authority fallacy you presented earlier, created by presenting "credible, peer-reviewed", but highly biased predictions as if they were the best possible guesses out there.
Sure, if we ignore contrary evidence, like what I've remarked on (such as ignoring the positive externalities of fossil fuel use, proper time value of money, or the oter systematic biases contributing to portraying radical carbon dioxide emission reduction as something with low costs and large benefits) then sure, we can reach agreement on this. It's just not worth my effort to do so. Nor would it be moral.
As an aside, the more (or less) something costs, the less (or more) incentive there is to produce it. Higher supply results in a price swing in the opposite direction due to supply and demand. That right there creates a positive correlation between externalities incurred by something and the price offered for that thing.
The cost of all goods include the cost of transportation. When you pay for an apple, you pay for pesticide, oil, transport, the retailer's accountant and a whole bunch of stuff whether you like it or not and these are not externalities, these are part of the voluntary trade, no matter if you are aware of the details or not.
No, it doesn't work that way. You already included a number of externalities. The retailer's accountant, for example, often is employed to insure compliance with tax codes and employment regulation. The marginal cost of the labor required to deal with that is an externality.
For oil, similarly, the various goods and services that the apple grower uses which are not directly tied to the purchase of your apple, also make the apple a little bit cheaper. That's an externality of oil which directly changes the price of the apple. Similar, because the apple is cheaper or more expensive, you may be able to offer your goods and services (eg, your labor) at a cheaper price or forced to offer at a more expensive price . And you can purchase more or less of other goods and services that you consume.
Externalities are not related to price. Cheap oil has the same externalities as expensive oil. Externalities are related to its production and burning in your car. Not to the price you pay at the pump.
This is deeply flawed reasoning. The price of oil due to its prevalent use throughout human society creates substantial externalities just on that basis alone.
It's not nebulous. Just because you are ignorant doesn't make it an externality. So whether you agree or not to the pollution of your own car, it is par of the deal, or the trade (between you and the gas company) if you prefer. What is not part of the deal is the pollution that you force to others while driving your car.
I prefer "trade" not "deal" because "trade" has an established meaning ("mutually voluntary exchange of goods or services") while "deal" apparently means "Whatever danbob999 decides it means". I note that you have yet to objectively define "deal" or explain its relevance to anything we've been discussing.
Yes. And when you buy gas, or buy service from a delivery company, you make the choice to add more CO2 to the atmosphere. A small part of that cost will be assumed by you. But a much larger amount will be assumed by the rest of the world, and this is what we call an externality.
It's an externality because the rest of the world didn't participate in my transaction. Similarly, cheaper or more expensive oil can result in near universally cheaper or more expensive goods and services even when the agent doesn't do anything with oil or its derivative products directly. That's an externality as well by definition since the beneficiaries didn't participate in the trading or use of fuel and thus did not voluntarily incur the cost or benefit of the pricing of oil-derived fuels.
It's the impact on those not part of the deal which is an externality.
No, that's not what externality means. Externality means you didn't make a choice to incur the cost or benefit. Making a trade doesn't imply that I'm part of some larger, nebulous "deal" and hence have agreed to whatever externalities I'm exposed to.
So Zuckerberg is a bit of a hypocrite. This isn't exactly a new or rare thing. At least a hypocrite concedes that there is a moral system they should be following and can be pressured into following that moral code. The people who aren't hypocrites tend to be because such because there's no longer reason to bother hiding their vicious natures.
You don't choose the price in a competitive market.
An irrelevant detail, but it's worth noting that you do choose whether to engage in a trade or not.
That's not part of the deal. Amish farmers not using oil will suffer equally from AGW.
So externalities count only if they're incurred by people who are perceived by a single internet poster as not being participants in a market? The benefits or costs of an externality are not magically different from any other benefits or costs when it comes to trade. It's all part of the deal whether you can choose it or not.
When you buy service from a delivery company, the oil is part of the deal, even if the delivery company act as a middle man and do not extract, refine and transport the oil itself.
So are any negative externalities from fossil fuel use that drive up the price of the service. For example, if I buy an agricultural product which is made cheaper due to the use of cheap oil, then sure, that's part of the deal, a part which I didn't choose.
But if the farms which produce that agricultural product also are suffering from a drought directly caused by AGW and which drives up the cost of the product in question? Well, that's part of the deal too. And again, a part which I didn't choose.
You're throwing away the synergy argument as a result. Namely, that cheap, abundant oil makes everything else cheaper and everyone wealthier. That's the argument for using and even subsidizing oil in a nutshell. Lose that and you're stuck haggling over the amount of the carbon tax or size of the cap-and-trade markets.
Never mention != pretend it doesn't exist
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
Actually it is evidence especially since the positive externalities of transportation and energy have been a big argument both for using oil and for making that oil cheap for decades. It's too prevalent and important to just not mention. For example, the price of oil is the second most important factor for inflation in the developed world after supply of money.
I see the other poster you've been arguing with has not pretend the externalties don't exist, but merely say "the negative ones far outweight the positives."
Which is a good sign since that means someone can modify their rhetorical arguments to take into account an opponent's position. It doesn't mean I'll agree with them though especially since they are now ignoring the positive externalities explicitly (as being "far outweighed" without justification) rather than implicitly.
"In economics, an externality is the cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit."
Look at what I claimed externality meant:
An externality is a cost or benefit to any party which is not part of a trade.
Since the other parties are not part of the trade, then they did not choose to incur the costs or benefits of the trade and hence, my definition matches the Wikipedia definition of externality for trading.
Nor does adding a middleman not make it an externality. If I make a deal with the US government so that every transaction in the US now has to pay me a 1% sales tax in order to occur, then I've become a middle man in a zillion trades, but as a negative externality of the one trade with the US government.
And you are part of the trade when you get a service from company A which in turns gets another service from company B.
How? I benefit from the results of the trade, just as an asthmatic might suffer, but neither I or the asthmatic had a say in whether the trade happened or not. That makes me just another third party like everyone else who is not involved in the trade.
Googling around, I see that you appear to be devout Christian. Since economic and moral arguments don't seem to work, how about let's try two questions:
1) Has God given all of us free will?
2) Is it God's design that we should take away some degree of free will from others in order to help them become better people?
Agreed. That's the nasty thing about proscription lists, you tend to find out who's on them the hard way. I think it'd be educational to see how such a process would have worked in the 1950s.
I'm sure I've heard dumber things. But this is well past the point where I excise it from memory. So dumbest thing I haven't yet successfully wiped from my mind.
Ok, if we're going to argue some sort of prohibition on the basis of economics, what is your economics argument for it? I'll point out that the discrepancy between California and Texas is far, far greater than merely whether they allow people to smoke marijuana (something which California actually theoretically doesn't allow either BTW with a "medical marijuana" exception). For example, there's this notable law:
AB 32 requires California to reduce its GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 â" a reduction of approximately 15 percent below emissions expected under a âoebusiness as usualâ scenario.
Pursuant to AB 32, ARB must adopt regulations to achieve the maximum technologically feasible and cost-effective GHG emission reductions. The full implementation of AB 32 will help mitigate risks associated with climate change, while improving energy efficiency, expanding the use of renewable energy resources, cleaner transportation, and reducing waste.
It's not hippies smoking weed which makes California gasoline a third more expensive than Texas gasoline. Similarly, there are plenty of gotchas and liabilities for employers in California that just don't happen to employers in Texas.
l approve that Texas doesn't do the brutal economy-killing approach of California. I just don't think that marijuana consumption has anything to do with California's economic problems or growing inability to compete with Texas.
There's no "think" about it, the fact is that the economy in Colorado, California, and other liberal states has been getting worse and worse compared to Texas
Colorado's economy did a touch better than Texas's economy did in 2013 (though both states did much better than California did). That just doesn't seem to fit your narrative
These are not externalities. That's the benefit to the user/customer.
Externality is a benefit or cost to someone other than the user/customer. For example, a package delivery business can deliver packages cheaper with cheap oil. All of the customers of that business are third parties which can benefit from the cheaper costs of delivering packages. The customers of the customers in turn get cheaper services. In other words, cheap oil results in cheaper costs of doing anything in society even for parties which aren't directly directly consuming oil products for transportation.
That is the positive externality to oil.
That's your opinion. Thankfully no one will consider it. If you think your opinion/method is valuable, have the guts to publish it and get it peer reviewed.
A typical dishonest challenge. So it takes "guts" to publish something on your own dime contrary to the climate change group think? Sure. But what does it take to publish what your sugar daddy paying all your expenses wants you to publish? It's inevitable and easy like water flowing downhill.
The ones who pretend oil has no positive externalities are ones with political agendas. Namely, an agenda favoring oil. They'll pretend to be libertarians or fiscal conservatives, saying "nobody" should get subsidies. But they don't want the oil subsidies to be cut. So they pretend oil has no positive externalities thus aren't getting subsidies and thus there's nothing to cut from oil - only cut everybody else's subsidies!
That wouldn't make sense, since by granting such an argument, they would destroy the strongest argument for relatively unconstrained use of oil, namely, it's incredible usefulness for transportation. I could see the foolish or naive thinking that if they allow some point of debate, then their opponents will reciprocate by allowing some other point of debate of similar magnitude in the reverse direction, but that doesn't work in practice. An experienced debater wouldn't make such a mistake.
Further, my experience has been that everyone who insists that oil has huge negative externalities never mention the possibility that oil has positive externalities. And they don't favor oil.
They might exist but the negative ones far outweight the positives.
Show it then. Where is this evidence? I'll show as evidence of considerable positive externalities, the synergistic effects of cheaper energy and transportation on everything we do and make.
We were talking about credible, peer-reviewed reports.
And I was talking about a way to make those reports more accurate in fact than merely in appearance.
It is applicable. There's no "perhaps" to it. In a mostly free world people will act in ways that we won't approve of.
What we're discussing here is jobs and the economy in Texas.
And I get you think that legalized marijuana smoking is somehow worse economically than the current state of affairs with its destruction of people and the rule of law.
Similarly, maybe you think that "regulating" your employer to bankruptcy is more "fair".
OR MAYBE YOU DO. You're the one glossing over the destruction of a person's life just because they smoke or possess weed. Putting people out of business merely because they smoke something you don't approve of is pretty damned similar to the straw man you accuse me of above.
How is it more "liberal" to regulate a business to death rather than a person? Instead, I believe both are equally illiberal.
I request that you please do not run away from it's effects and bring it here. If you don't like the effects of your policies in California, change them, or come to Texas and become a Texan.
I in turn ask that instead of glibly saying that we'll never agree due to some mysterious quirk of philosophy or geography, look at the actual harm caused by the War on Drugs and then repudiate it. This is not a California thing. This is a moral thing.
As I noted earlier, the civil forfeiture of assets is the most unconstitutional thing the US and state governments do. There's also the militarization of law enforcement and the hijinks of unaccountable law enforcement, such as the Fast and Furious case where the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) ran some alleged stings that had the sole outcome of providing considerable material support for the Sinaloa Cartel to kill people (and perhaps do other things like money laundering) in a nasty and bloody war across the border in Mexico.
My honest assessment is as I hinted above - business is coming to Texas FROM the states that are making pot legal, increasing regulations, etc - liberal states. That suggests to me that while smoking pot might be fun, and these liberal policies may have some benefits, they are bad for an economy - bad for jobs. I get it - I used to be a member of NORML. So I understand that point of view - I wrote some of the literature they read. It just hasn't worked well for the jobs and cost of living situation.
Hasn't worked well compared to what? People are far less productive jobwise, when they're rotting in jail for committing a victimless crime like possession of marijuana than if they were casual marijuana users working some job within their abilities. And it costs a lot more to store those people in jail than it does to ignore their activities except in cases where they're doing something negligent, like operating heavy machinery while impaired.
And this War on Drugs (like marijuana), has resulted in the single largest current violation of the US Constitution, civil forfeiture of assets - the ability to seize assets of people without actually convicting anyone of a crime.
I voted for the Colorado marijuana legalization initiative in question because it was the right thing to do. I believe in time, Texas will follow the lead of Colorado.
As to your economic rationalizations, you can't study a problem like this by only considering one cost. Putting people in jail is a cost as well. So is creating a police state or spurring real shooting wars like the current cartel fighting in Mexico.
Impinging on other peoples' freedoms, even if you are of the opinion that the intervention is for their own good, has costs as well. My view is that we live in a free society. As a result, we have to expect and accept that people will on occasion act in ways that we don't like and perhaps even contrary to their own well-being.
Slashdot Mirror
But you haven't made the demonstration that these reports are wrong.
So what? If there's money for these sorts of games, then there's money for independent examination.
I'm aware of two sorts of evidence. First, there's the rhetoric used by the President, for example, "bitter clingers" speech and his statements about the Trayvon Martin shooting indicate he is at least in support of some sort of federal level gun control.
Second, there's the ATF Fast and Furious scandal. On the surface, it's supposedly a sting operation meant to uproot gun smuggling networks in the US in order to assist with the taming of the Cartel war in next door Mexico. In actuality, this sting delivered considerable material support to the Sinaloa Cartel, 2,000 guns guaranteed not to be intercepted plus whatever else the Cartel was able to smuggle out with those weapons (such as laundered money or more guns), a pretext (which turned out to be too flimsy when the scheme was revealed) for introducing additional regulations on gun purchases, and these guns turning up at over 200 murders in Mexico and the US and which are still turning up at crime scenes.
You are confusing expert opinion with argument from authority.
Not at all. Expert opinion is the most common basis for an argument from authority. Let's look at the three examples you gave, the Stern Review, the Garnaut Climate Change Reviews, and the IPCC's series of assessment reports. The first thing to observe is that the first two reports were funded by politicians with a particular agenda and who happened to need a particular outcome of those reports and for which the reports just happen to deliver on that agenda and need.
Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair needed a pretext for supporting near future greenhouse gases emission controls. He sets aside public funds for the Stern Review, and (what a coincidence!) the Stern Review just so happens to support his needs of the moment. Same goes for the Garnaut Reviews which happen to fill the same role for former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
IPCC has long been notorious for providing what pro-climate change propaganda is needed as it is needed. For example, we have the "hockey stick" estimate promulgated in the 2001 Third ASsessment Report, extreme weather in the next assessment, and heating of the oceans in the latest one. I wouldn't be surprised to see a sudden confidence by considerable narrowing of the temperature forcing of a doubling of carbon dioxide in the next assessment report.
Each of these reporting sources has consistently exaggerated its conclusions in favor of current carbon dioxide emission reduction. Earlier in this thread, I mentioned the consistent biases of the Stern Review. The Garnaut Reviews are even worse with a claim of only 0.1 to 0.2% of Australia's fossil fuel-dependent GDP lost each year to mitigation policies for AGW. That's ridiculous.
Meanwhile, the IPCC has long been notorious for exaggerating the impact of AGW while simultaneously downplaying the costs of greenhouse gases emissions reduction. For example, I was told by slashdotter Layzej that the IPCC's Third Assessment Report (TAR) predicted a 0.1 to 0.2 C increase in global mean temperature over the few decades after 2001 (using scenario "IS92a").
But when I actually looked at the "Summary for Policy Makers" I see claims of larger near future heating for the scenario in question (of 0.1 C to 0.3 C) with the high end of the initial range of increases presented instead as a median value of this new, unjustified range. I also saw that in this Summary the TAR had obsoleted the scenario in question and was using scenarios that presented more aggressive heating.
In other words, the fine print, which Layzej unearthed was buried deep in the report somewhere, while other, significantly worse and unjustified scenarios were presented for public consumption. Now, that those overly alarmist scenarios are failing, supporters are digging up the hidden, but somewhat more accurate predictions and claiming that the IPCC was right all along.
This sort of dishonesty and misuse of expert opinion is why I term the whole effort an argument from authority. But don't get me wrong I think there's a lot more fallacies at play here than just argument from authority.
My view on this is that "expert opinion" and "peer reviewed and published" doesn't outweigh being deliberately wrong.
No it isn't. It's required by law to pay taxes just as it is required to pay your employees and not kill them at the end of the day.
So you're saying it's not strictly a negative externality. The moral content or intent of a policy is completely irrelevant to whether it creates an externality or not.
Just because it would be cheaper if this law didn't exist doesn't make it an externality.
Of course not. It's incurred without choice by the employer, that's what makes it an externality.
I don't think you will ever understand what an externality is. There isn't much more I can do here. I understand that you will never want to lower CO2 emissions if you don't get what an externality is.
Funny, doesn't look like that from my end. While I grant someone seems to have a problem understanding what an externality is, I find it more interesting that merely characterizing this massive synergy of fossil fuels, energy, and transportation with the entirety of an economy, as not an externality is sufficient to dismiss it.
This strikes me as comparable to the argument from authority fallacy you presented earlier, created by presenting "credible, peer-reviewed", but highly biased predictions as if they were the best possible guesses out there.
Sure, if we ignore contrary evidence, like what I've remarked on (such as ignoring the positive externalities of fossil fuel use, proper time value of money, or the oter systematic biases contributing to portraying radical carbon dioxide emission reduction as something with low costs and large benefits) then sure, we can reach agreement on this. It's just not worth my effort to do so. Nor would it be moral.
Externalities are not related to price.
As an aside, the more (or less) something costs, the less (or more) incentive there is to produce it. Higher supply results in a price swing in the opposite direction due to supply and demand. That right there creates a positive correlation between externalities incurred by something and the price offered for that thing.
The cost of all goods include the cost of transportation. When you pay for an apple, you pay for pesticide, oil, transport, the retailer's accountant and a whole bunch of stuff whether you like it or not and these are not externalities, these are part of the voluntary trade, no matter if you are aware of the details or not.
No, it doesn't work that way. You already included a number of externalities. The retailer's accountant, for example, often is employed to insure compliance with tax codes and employment regulation. The marginal cost of the labor required to deal with that is an externality.
For oil, similarly, the various goods and services that the apple grower uses which are not directly tied to the purchase of your apple, also make the apple a little bit cheaper. That's an externality of oil which directly changes the price of the apple. Similar, because the apple is cheaper or more expensive, you may be able to offer your goods and services (eg, your labor) at a cheaper price or forced to offer at a more expensive price . And you can purchase more or less of other goods and services that you consume.
Externalities are not related to price. Cheap oil has the same externalities as expensive oil. Externalities are related to its production and burning in your car. Not to the price you pay at the pump.
This is deeply flawed reasoning. The price of oil due to its prevalent use throughout human society creates substantial externalities just on that basis alone.
It's not nebulous. Just because you are ignorant doesn't make it an externality. So whether you agree or not to the pollution of your own car, it is par of the deal, or the trade (between you and the gas company) if you prefer. What is not part of the deal is the pollution that you force to others while driving your car.
I prefer "trade" not "deal" because "trade" has an established meaning ("mutually voluntary exchange of goods or services") while "deal" apparently means "Whatever danbob999 decides it means". I note that you have yet to objectively define "deal" or explain its relevance to anything we've been discussing.
Yes. And when you buy gas, or buy service from a delivery company, you make the choice to add more CO2 to the atmosphere. A small part of that cost will be assumed by you. But a much larger amount will be assumed by the rest of the world, and this is what we call an externality.
It's an externality because the rest of the world didn't participate in my transaction. Similarly, cheaper or more expensive oil can result in near universally cheaper or more expensive goods and services even when the agent doesn't do anything with oil or its derivative products directly. That's an externality as well by definition since the beneficiaries didn't participate in the trading or use of fuel and thus did not voluntarily incur the cost or benefit of the pricing of oil-derived fuels.
It's the impact on those not part of the deal which is an externality.
No, that's not what externality means. Externality means you didn't make a choice to incur the cost or benefit. Making a trade doesn't imply that I'm part of some larger, nebulous "deal" and hence have agreed to whatever externalities I'm exposed to.
So Zuckerberg is a bit of a hypocrite. This isn't exactly a new or rare thing. At least a hypocrite concedes that there is a moral system they should be following and can be pressured into following that moral code. The people who aren't hypocrites tend to be because such because there's no longer reason to bother hiding their vicious natures.
You don't choose the price in a competitive market.
An irrelevant detail, but it's worth noting that you do choose whether to engage in a trade or not.
That's not part of the deal. Amish farmers not using oil will suffer equally from AGW.
So externalities count only if they're incurred by people who are perceived by a single internet poster as not being participants in a market? The benefits or costs of an externality are not magically different from any other benefits or costs when it comes to trade. It's all part of the deal whether you can choose it or not.
When you buy service from a delivery company, the oil is part of the deal, even if the delivery company act as a middle man and do not extract, refine and transport the oil itself.
So are any negative externalities from fossil fuel use that drive up the price of the service. For example, if I buy an agricultural product which is made cheaper due to the use of cheap oil, then sure, that's part of the deal, a part which I didn't choose.
But if the farms which produce that agricultural product also are suffering from a drought directly caused by AGW and which drives up the cost of the product in question? Well, that's part of the deal too. And again, a part which I didn't choose.
Unless it doesn't.
You're throwing away the synergy argument as a result. Namely, that cheap, abundant oil makes everything else cheaper and everyone wealthier. That's the argument for using and even subsidizing oil in a nutshell. Lose that and you're stuck haggling over the amount of the carbon tax or size of the cap-and-trade markets.
Never mention != pretend it doesn't exist
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
Actually it is evidence especially since the positive externalities of transportation and energy have been a big argument both for using oil and for making that oil cheap for decades. It's too prevalent and important to just not mention. For example, the price of oil is the second most important factor for inflation in the developed world after supply of money.
I see the other poster you've been arguing with has not pretend the externalties don't exist, but merely say "the negative ones far outweight the positives."
Which is a good sign since that means someone can modify their rhetorical arguments to take into account an opponent's position. It doesn't mean I'll agree with them though especially since they are now ignoring the positive externalities explicitly (as being "far outweighed" without justification) rather than implicitly.
"In economics, an externality is the cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit."
Look at what I claimed externality meant:
An externality is a cost or benefit to any party which is not part of a trade.
Since the other parties are not part of the trade, then they did not choose to incur the costs or benefits of the trade and hence, my definition matches the Wikipedia definition of externality for trading.
Nor does adding a middleman not make it an externality. If I make a deal with the US government so that every transaction in the US now has to pay me a 1% sales tax in order to occur, then I've become a middle man in a zillion trades, but as a negative externality of the one trade with the US government.
And you are part of the trade when you get a service from company A which in turns gets another service from company B.
How? I benefit from the results of the trade, just as an asthmatic might suffer, but neither I or the asthmatic had a say in whether the trade happened or not. That makes me just another third party like everyone else who is not involved in the trade.
Googling around, I see that you appear to be devout Christian. Since economic and moral arguments don't seem to work, how about let's try two questions:
1) Has God given all of us free will?
2) Is it God's design that we should take away some degree of free will from others in order to help them become better people?
Agreed. That's the nasty thing about proscription lists, you tend to find out who's on them the hard way. I think it'd be educational to see how such a process would have worked in the 1950s.
I'm sure I've heard dumber things. But this is well past the point where I excise it from memory. So dumbest thing I haven't yet successfully wiped from my mind.
You don't get what an externality is.
An externality is a cost or benefit to any party which is not part of a trade. That's it.
AB 32 requires California to reduce its GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 â" a reduction of approximately 15 percent below emissions expected under a âoebusiness as usualâ scenario.
Pursuant to AB 32, ARB must adopt regulations to achieve the maximum technologically feasible and cost-effective GHG emission reductions. The full implementation of AB 32 will help mitigate risks associated with climate change, while improving energy efficiency, expanding the use of renewable energy resources, cleaner transportation, and reducing waste.
It's not hippies smoking weed which makes California gasoline a third more expensive than Texas gasoline. Similarly, there are plenty of gotchas and liabilities for employers in California that just don't happen to employers in Texas.
l approve that Texas doesn't do the brutal economy-killing approach of California. I just don't think that marijuana consumption has anything to do with California's economic problems or growing inability to compete with Texas.
There's no "think" about it, the fact is that the economy in Colorado, California, and other liberal states has been getting worse and worse compared to Texas
Colorado's economy did a touch better than Texas's economy did in 2013 (though both states did much better than California did). That just doesn't seem to fit your narrative
These are not externalities. That's the benefit to the user/customer.
Externality is a benefit or cost to someone other than the user/customer. For example, a package delivery business can deliver packages cheaper with cheap oil. All of the customers of that business are third parties which can benefit from the cheaper costs of delivering packages. The customers of the customers in turn get cheaper services. In other words, cheap oil results in cheaper costs of doing anything in society even for parties which aren't directly directly consuming oil products for transportation.
That is the positive externality to oil.
That's your opinion. Thankfully no one will consider it. If you think your opinion/method is valuable, have the guts to publish it and get it peer reviewed.
A typical dishonest challenge. So it takes "guts" to publish something on your own dime contrary to the climate change group think? Sure. But what does it take to publish what your sugar daddy paying all your expenses wants you to publish? It's inevitable and easy like water flowing downhill.
The ones who pretend oil has no positive externalities are ones with political agendas. Namely, an agenda favoring oil. They'll pretend to be libertarians or fiscal conservatives, saying "nobody" should get subsidies. But they don't want the oil subsidies to be cut. So they pretend oil has no positive externalities thus aren't getting subsidies and thus there's nothing to cut from oil - only cut everybody else's subsidies!
That wouldn't make sense, since by granting such an argument, they would destroy the strongest argument for relatively unconstrained use of oil, namely, it's incredible usefulness for transportation. I could see the foolish or naive thinking that if they allow some point of debate, then their opponents will reciprocate by allowing some other point of debate of similar magnitude in the reverse direction, but that doesn't work in practice. An experienced debater wouldn't make such a mistake.
Further, my experience has been that everyone who insists that oil has huge negative externalities never mention the possibility that oil has positive externalities. And they don't favor oil.
They might exist but the negative ones far outweight the positives.
Show it then. Where is this evidence? I'll show as evidence of considerable positive externalities, the synergistic effects of cheaper energy and transportation on everything we do and make.
We were talking about credible, peer-reviewed reports.
And I was talking about a way to make those reports more accurate in fact than merely in appearance.
Perhaps that's applicable.
It is applicable. There's no "perhaps" to it. In a mostly free world people will act in ways that we won't approve of.
What we're discussing here is jobs and the economy in Texas.
And I get you think that legalized marijuana smoking is somehow worse economically than the current state of affairs with its destruction of people and the rule of law.
Similarly, maybe you think that "regulating" your employer to bankruptcy is more "fair".
OR MAYBE YOU DO. You're the one glossing over the destruction of a person's life just because they smoke or possess weed. Putting people out of business merely because they smoke something you don't approve of is pretty damned similar to the straw man you accuse me of above.
How is it more "liberal" to regulate a business to death rather than a person? Instead, I believe both are equally illiberal.
I request that you please do not run away from it's effects and bring it here. If you don't like the effects of your policies in California, change them, or come to Texas and become a Texan.
I in turn ask that instead of glibly saying that we'll never agree due to some mysterious quirk of philosophy or geography, look at the actual harm caused by the War on Drugs and then repudiate it. This is not a California thing. This is a moral thing.
As I noted earlier, the civil forfeiture of assets is the most unconstitutional thing the US and state governments do. There's also the militarization of law enforcement and the hijinks of unaccountable law enforcement, such as the Fast and Furious case where the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) ran some alleged stings that had the sole outcome of providing considerable material support for the Sinaloa Cartel to kill people (and perhaps do other things like money laundering) in a nasty and bloody war across the border in Mexico.
My honest assessment is as I hinted above - business is coming to Texas FROM the states that are making pot legal, increasing regulations, etc - liberal states. That suggests to me that while smoking pot might be fun, and these liberal policies may have some benefits, they are bad for an economy - bad for jobs. I get it - I used to be a member of NORML. So I understand that point of view - I wrote some of the literature they read. It just hasn't worked well for the jobs and cost of living situation.
Hasn't worked well compared to what? People are far less productive jobwise, when they're rotting in jail for committing a victimless crime like possession of marijuana than if they were casual marijuana users working some job within their abilities. And it costs a lot more to store those people in jail than it does to ignore their activities except in cases where they're doing something negligent, like operating heavy machinery while impaired.
And this War on Drugs (like marijuana), has resulted in the single largest current violation of the US Constitution, civil forfeiture of assets - the ability to seize assets of people without actually convicting anyone of a crime.
I voted for the Colorado marijuana legalization initiative in question because it was the right thing to do. I believe in time, Texas will follow the lead of Colorado.
As to your economic rationalizations, you can't study a problem like this by only considering one cost. Putting people in jail is a cost as well. So is creating a police state or spurring real shooting wars like the current cartel fighting in Mexico.
Impinging on other peoples' freedoms, even if you are of the opinion that the intervention is for their own good, has costs as well. My view is that we live in a free society. As a result, we have to expect and accept that people will on occasion act in ways that we don't like and perhaps even contrary to their own well-being.