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How do you propose to convince people to get those externalities accounted without emotions? How do you convince people of the value of externalities that are far away in place or time (but not less real)?
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The idea that you would be worried about how many electrons you use and it's relationship to climate change is on its face kind of ridiculous.

It's like worrying about how many times you personally ordered Chinese food affects the price of Diesel fuel in India. It's an absurd leap of logic, and the parent is right to call out these arguments which are almost always emotional.

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Sure, by your own argument, you should somehow increase the price of people telling other people what to avoid spending money on
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How am I as an individual supposed to get externalities priced in?

And given that right now they are clearly not, what’s your plan until then?

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Which specific externalities are you concerned about? Do they affect you directly?
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Climate change and pollution, and yes they do.
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Your dismissal of moral concerns is not convincing.

Imagine a world where the only energy you do is use was generated by a stationary bike you had to ride yourself. You would, generally speaking, use that energy differently than energy you would pay for--you would generally reserve your effort for worthwhile things, and would be averse to farming energy yourself just to power frivolity or vice. How you determine what to put your energy into would explicitly be a moral question.

Instead in our world we an abstractions conceals the source of the energy. But if the moral concerns from the first world had any weight, they haven't lost it now; if energy is anything short of completely free we should by the same logic be averse to expending energy on worthless work or vice. The human being is not a utility monster, but something very different, and moral questions of this sort are central to how it navigates the world, they should not be dismissed.

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Doesn't this argument hinge on equivocating between two different definitions of aversion, though? I'm averse to bananas, but that doesn't mean I think it's immoral to eat them. The moral dimension kicks in if somebody else had to ride that stationary bike for you, because then you'd be wasting their time on frivolities.
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Of course I'd use energy differently if it cost more. If I had to generate energy by pedaling a bike, I'd consider it costly indeed. So what? Energy doesn't cost as much as it would if I had to manually generate it, and who are you to say allocation decisions made under that regiment are good and ones made under ours are bad?

Wouldn't your argument also compel us to use steel as if it were gold? Salt as if it were saffron?

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> As for getting externalities internalized: as a society, we call the procedure for updating rules "politics", and it's as open to you as to anyone else.

Ok so I do need to worry about energy so that I can identify these unaddressed externalities and work towards updating the rules. You can to care before you can get involved in this stuff. You can't tell me not to worry about it and then also say that it's basically my fault for not getting involved if the price is wrong.

> any such rebuttal must involve numbers, not emotional appeals

Who are you arguing with? You're commenting about a website that has strictly numbers and nothing else.

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