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.

An irrelevant detail, but it's worth noting that you do choose whether to engage in a trade or not.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Look at what I claimed externality meant:

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.

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.

An externality is a cost or benefit to any party which is not part of a trade. That's it.

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:

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.

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

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.

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.

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.