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.

Of course not. It's incurred without choice by the employer, that's what makes it an externality.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.