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Your language here is contorted. An externality is an economic concept, not a person. It does not play on someone's emotions, it cannot know anyone's preferences. What exactly are you talking about?
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The person using the "externality" as part of his argument is playing on emotions and assuming to know someone else's preferences. Better?
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This makes no sense whatsoever. You are arguing that the cost to the infringed, to organize a lawsuit, should provide a powerful discouragement to polluters.
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That cost will be incorporated into damages judgements, if the case is decided for the plaintiff, so yes, that has to be factored into the decision process by the polluter.
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Essential in your schemata (sp) i believe that energy companies are stealing, insomuch, as they are using a resource (a non-polluted enviornment) that does not belong to them without paying for it. The typical arguement here is that if people value a clean enviornment they should organize and delinetate the rights to clean air, however i would argue that this organization is incredibly costly to the point of being nearly impossible.
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Why, then, would it be possible in a state system?
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There is this innovative idea in a state system called a 'tax' which goes about implementing this very thing. You can find more information about it
here.
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How do taxes make the organizational costs lower??? By them selves, they should make costs higher, because in addition to the organization costs we're already talking about, you're now adding a layer of bureaucracy to develop tax codes, administer taxation, and enforce the system.
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Why is this not possible? What trade is not allowed?
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Please quote me the market price for one liter of unpolluted air, or a hike in a pristine forest, or forty years of someone's life that occured when they didn't catch cancer. Sources please.
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Saying that you can't name a price for something is different than saying trade in it is not allowed. A lot different.
But anyway, sources:
http://www.praxair.com/oxygen
http://www.nature.org/pressroom/press/press180.html
http://www.anti-cancerdrugs.com/
Note in particular the second one. A government was unwilling to preserve a particular environmental feature so a private group went and bought the land.
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Anticipating your response: Yes, the value of each of these is different to every single person. The same is true of every single concrete good that is actually traded on every single market. So what?
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So nothing. You brought it up, you tell me so what.
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Also note that if producers of "cheap" but dirty energy are actually held accountable for their pollution and forced to pay for damages they cause, the price they are able to offer their energy at will have to reflect those costs - the supposed externality has been internalized.
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Sounds great to me. Now let's think, who will be in charge of getting the producers to internalize their costs... I'm sure there's someone who does these kind of thing all the time...
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Currently it's nobody. The whole concept of externalities was cooked up because the government allows offenders to dump on others. The EPA explicitly *allows* pollution, and provides protection to polluters - of course, they only allow politically desirable types and amounts of pollution, but some bureaucrat is deciding how much pollution you can put up with, not YOU. This is basically a case of the government legislating externalities into existence by fiat. So maybe I will amend my previous statement a bit.
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Let's allow that government does enable organization costs to drop. What about the costs it imposes elsewhere?
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So in other words, government is the wrong answer, even if it is the right answer.
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If (and that's a big if) government did actually allow organizational costs to be lower in this one narrow case, that alone would justify the oppression and bureaucratic bungling? Would you shoot the patient to kill his cancer?
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You mentioned before that someone needs to handle collating, evaluating and enforcing these costs on public goods by these goods' 'consumers'. In analogy to law firms, and class-action lawsuits. This way, the cost of prosecuting each individual's rights could be spread out amongst the class of the infringed.
Of course, in the case of clean air, the infringed would be everyone. To different extents. So for this lawsuit, everyone in the world would have go about choosing or electing representatives to handle their case. And those representatives would have to have occasional public meetings to decide a fair value for the infringed rights. I mean, they can just read off the numbers from the clean air markets which apparently exist. These representatives could then serve as executors of this market, by extracting payments from the infringers, and then returning it to the people, perhaps in the form of mitigation efforts to remove damage that has already occured. If they had sufficient legal power, they could skip the middle step altogether, by merely artificially raising prices at the consumer level and then applying the revenue directly.
I'm sure it's obvious how this would be completely unlike and totally superior to our current system.
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Your line of thinking here is exactly the problem. Instead of allowing the market to find the best answer, you assume you already know and assume that your vision will be imposed upon everyone. For some reason, I'm not surprised that the best you could think up looked pretty much like the current system.