WORTH THE READ:

“…The human race makes big decisions based on an economic model that ignores many negative externalities.

A ‘negative externality’ is, very roughly, a way in which my actions impose a cost on you, for which I don’t pay any price.

For example: suppose I live in a high-rise apartment and my toilet breaks. Instead of fixing it, I realize that I can just use a bucket — and throw its contents out the window! Whee! If society has no mechanism for dealing with people like me, I pay no price for doing this. But you, down there, will be very unhappy.

This isn’t just theoretical. Once upon a time in Europe there were few private toilets, and people would shout “gardyloo!” before throwing their waste down to the streets below. In retrospect that seems disgusting, but many of the big problems that afflict us now can be seen as the result of equally disgusting externalities. For example:

• Carbon dioxide pollution caused by burning fossil fuels. If the expected costs of global warming and ocean acidification were included in the price of fossil fuels, other sources of energy would more quickly become competitive. This is the idea behind a carbon tax or a ‘cap-and-trade program’ where companies pay for permits to put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
• Dead zones. Put too much nitrogen and phosophorus in the river, and lots of algae will grow in the ocean near the river’s mouth. When the algae dies and rots, the water runs out of dissolved oxygen, and fish cannot live there. Then we have a ‘dead zone’. Dead zones are expanding and increasing in number. For example, there’s one about 20,000 square kilometers in size near the mouth of the Mississippi River. Hog farming, chicken farming and runoff from fertilized crop lands are largely to blame.
• Overfishing. Since there is no ownership of fish, everyone tries to catch as many fish as possible, even though this is depleting fish stocks to the point of near-extinction. There’s evidence that populations of all big predatory ocean fish have dropped 90% since 1950. Populations of cod, bluefish tuna and many other popular fish have plummeted, despite feeble attempts at regulation.
• Species extinction due to habitat loss. Since the economic value of intact ecosystems has not been fully reckoned, in many parts of the world there’s little price to pay for destroying them.
• Overpopulation. Rising population is a major cause of the stresses on our biosphere, yet it costs less to have your own child than to adopt one. (However, a pilot project in India is offering cash payments to couples who put off having children for two years after marriage.)

One could go on.

Externalities often arise when we treat some resource as essentially infinite — for example fish, or clean water, or clean air. We thus impose no cost for using it. This is fine at first. But because this resource is free, we use more and more — until it no longer makes sense to act as if we have an infinite amount. As a physicist would say, the approximation breaks down, and we enter a new regime.

This is happening all over the place now. We have reached the point where we need to treat most resources as finite and take this into account in our economic decisions. We can’t afford so many externalities. It is irrational to let them go on.

But what can you do about this? Or what can I do?

We can do the things anyone can do. Educate ourselves. Educate our friends. Vote. Conserve energy. Don’t throw buckets of crap out of apartment windows.”

- By John Baez

[Picture: ‘The Blue Marble’ - most famous photograph of Earth taken December 7, 1972, by Apollo 17 spacecraft crew]