Externalities

Externalities

Both DDT and CFCs produced negative externalities
These are the costs or benefits that use of a technology creates for a third party
Consider, for example, the 2008 Glastonbury Festival. Tickets cost £155, the proceeds being used to pay for the bands, the portaloos, rent for the land and all the other costs. However if you do not want to pay £155 you might be able to hear the bands for free by standing nearby (positive externality). If you live close by, you might hear the bands even though you do not want to (negative externality). Local residents are not compensated for noise pollution, and therefore not all the 'costs' are paid for.
Pollution sink
1. Many technologies which we use on an everyday basis produce these externalities which are unaccounted for
2. The largest of these is the carbon dioxide we produce when burning fossil fuels to heat our homes, drive our cars and make our consumber goods.
3. This is released into the atmosphere, which we treat as large pollution sinks
4. For decades it was assumed that this sink was large enough to cope
5. Only recently have people begun to realise that there may be significant costs to the pollution they produce
6. The WWF living planet index (LPI) has tracked the health of 1,313 terrestrial, marine and freshwater vertebrate species since 1970. It shows a significant decline in planet health
7. The LPI suggests that using the environment as a sink for pollution has serious consequences which humanity needs to address
Polluter pays
1. One way of accounting for the pollution which is a negative externality of the use of technology is to implement the polluter pays principle
2. This approach quantifies the cost of pollution and passes it back to the producer, or user, of a technology
3. In Europe, PPP has gradually been applied to cars, perhaps our most pervasive technology and one of the biggest polluters
4. However, while PPP might reduce pollution, it does not prevent it
5. There is evidence in the UK that variable vehicle excise duty 'road tax' and higher fuel prices have encouraged people to buy less polluting cars
6. Nevertheless, carbon dioxide levels have remained high
7. Transport's contribution to EU carbon emissions rose from 21% to 28% between 1990 and 2004
8. The EU is proposing that car manufactures be force the average emissions of new cars to 130 g km -1 by 2012
  1. This would be relatively easy for producers who make many small cars, but much harder for manufacturers of large, luxury vehicles such as BMW and Mercedes
Capturing pollutants
1. Road transport produces highly diffuse pollutants
2. Reducing emissions is more realistic approach than trying to prevent them
3. For large. single-point polluters, such as power stations fuelled by coal and gas, it may be realistic to capture and store pollutants before they enter the atmosphere
4. Flue gas desulphurisation (FGD) and selective catalytic reduction have been used to remove the sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides - a cause of acid rain - from power station emissions
5. Attention has recently turned to removing carbon dioxide emissions by using carbon capture and storage technology
6. CCS is a current technology
7. Norway's Statoil has geosequestered around 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year into the sleipner gas field
8. In Weyburn, Canada, carbon dioxide from coal gasification plants in the USA will be used for enhanced oil recovery

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	Created by Jodie Goodacre over 10 years ago