Mitt Romney Calls Tesla a 'Loser'

Also, climate change isn't even the big issue here. I'm talking about much more mundane and also much more damaging air and water pollution from factories, cars, etc. We have very solid empirical evidence about that. Did you know that after the EPA's ban on leaded gasoline, blood lead levels in children dropped by a factor of 3-5x in just one decade? See: http://www.epa.gov/ace/body_burdens/b1-graph.html. This corresponds to a multiple IQ-point impact from lead. What's the dollar value of a multiple IQ-point impact on the nation's children (and future workforce)? It's a huge number.

Did you know that a recent Harvard Medical School study concluded that the true price of coal power factoring in the externalized environmental costs is 2-3x as much as the market price? http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/green/greenblog/2011/02/new_.... The same study found the total externalized costs of coal power to be $200-$500 billion/year: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010..... Here in Chicago we recently shut down two coal-fired power plants that were causing $100 million in health damage per year and only creating 50-60 jobs each.

The total cost of environmental damage being down every year, in terms of quantifiable impact to people is probably into the trillion dollar per year range. People tend to think of environmentalism as being about "soft values" but that couldn't be further from the truth. Even if we assign zero value to the environment itself, we can't avoid putting a dollar figure on the value of the services the environment provides us. When New York manages to avoid building a $6-$8 billion filtration facility by properly managing the Catskills watershed, we can't avoid the inescapable economic conclusion that damage to the Catskills and similar watersheds needs to be valued in the billions of dollars range. We can't avoid the conclusion that when a company dumps waste into those watersheds, it's an economic injury no different than if tore up city streets or caused a bridge to collapse.

It's the government's job to protect us from all this, the same as it's the government's job to protect us from people who steal your car or break into our houses. It goes to the heart of why government exists.

And then there's the whole "regulatory capture" thing.

Govts fail all the time.

"Politician's logic: We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do it."

Direct government subsidies create deadweight loss, and by hurting the competitive position of companies and technologies that don't get the subsidy, they can actually make the negative externality worse. You can't justify a bad intervention just by pointing to the magnitude of the externality.

Bodily harm is not the only form of harm for which one may be liable. Repeated dispersal of unwanted waste upon other's property could be considered property damage, even if the waste cannot or has not yet caused exposure related medical conditions upon their person.

In an alternate legal context, a society might decide that proving an ash residue repeatedly collected on your property matches ash repeatedly emitted by a factory is sufficient grounds for property damage litigation without requiring you to also prove bodily harm. However, this would raise costs on industry by requiring them to be located further from residential areas.

Different societies will arrive at different tradeoffs and balances on these issues through the use of non-market forces, which will influence the incidence of negative externalities as much as market forces.

I disagree. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agree..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesothelioma#Legal_issues

Why do you assume that the supply chain would have broken down?

> it's very hard to argue that they were a net loss on U.S. GDP unless you assume a "controlled bankrupcy" for GM and Chrysler would not have destroyed the U.S. (or global) auto industry. That's a big leap.

It's easy to assume that standard bankruptcy would not have destroyed the US auto industry because there's no reason why it would have destroyed the US auto industry.

Bankruptcy is basically about separating assets from liabilities.

If GM's assets are well-suited to profitably making cars, that's what they'd have been used for post-bankruptcy. Why do you assume otherwise?

US airlines go bankrupt every so often. Their creditors take a loss but the effect on the rest of us is that a few flights get cancelled and that's about it.