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Principles of Finance: Unit 9, Pollution vs. Price 3 Views
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Description:
How do we charge for negative externalities? Poor companies in poor countries pollute - polluting lets them offer their product cheaper. What are the economics and ethics behind this conflict?
Transcript
- 00:00
Principles of finance ah la shmoop pollution versus price Alright
- 00:06
well super dirty industries like the one that makes fertilizer
- 00:09
or the one that processes pigs for human consumption which
- 00:13
is the big game or the one that etches semi
- 00:16
conductors with arsenic all pollute massively But we humans like
Full Transcript
- 00:22
our plants big and green and our corn cheap And
- 00:25
we love our pork And we like our computers for
- 00:28
everything from bank payments and amazon ing to downloading you
- 00:32
know art films They also all happen to be super
- 00:35
compay hedda tive industries So the difference of a dime
- 00:38
a bag of that crap derived fertilizer massively affects the
- 00:42
success or failure of that company in the real world
- 00:45
Many times it's literally the difference between being a beam
- 00:48
off huge and going bankrupt that diamond bag difference Big
- 00:52
deal So then what happens in a world where notionally
- 00:55
evolved first world western countries which don't have people on
- 01:00
mass living just on the edge of starvation regulate pollution
- 01:04
in these dirty industries What happens What happens when we
- 01:07
do that That is a western chemical manufacturer might have
- 01:10
to actually dispose of the toxins in an organized way
- 01:15
Bringing in trucks that hold five thousand gallons of sludge
- 01:18
or whatever you call that stuff one truck at a
- 01:20
time to dump those toxins carefully in a manufactured giant
- 01:25
plastic swimming pool container buried somewhere in the middle of
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the desert All that collecting and hauling in the building
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of that million gallon swimming pool holding anything and then
- 01:35
overseeing that it doesn't leak or you'll get stolen by
- 01:39
terrorists or whatever might happen with all that effort All
- 01:42
that maintenance costs a fortune and that cost has to
- 01:46
be passed on to the end customer So a truckload
- 01:48
of this costs a grand to make and five hundred
- 01:51
bucks and cost to deal with the disposal of the
- 01:54
making of it So this total truckload costs fifteen hundred
- 01:57
bucks What about the stuff made by the competitor in
- 02:00
the third world country Half of whose citizens are three
- 02:03
days work away from starving to death Well they're simply
- 02:06
not worried about the storage of the pollutants so they
- 02:09
dumped in the river with cheaper basically free And yeah
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they just don't worry about the effects but they can
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sell their bag Oh crap for your lawn competitive product
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For five hundred bucks a truckload less than the first
- 02:22
world makers of the same thing So what happens while
- 02:25
the world acts short term rationally that is the world
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vise the cheaper version of the same commodity It's expensive
- 02:32
to not pollute that's a given being green cost green
- 02:36
So where do governments then draw the line Well in
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the case of fertilizer many western countries banned the import
- 02:42
of things that are bad for the environment and the
- 02:44
people around it and or were made in a bad
- 02:47
environment disrespecting kind of way But the banning is well
- 02:51
light Like you know you probably see a whole lot
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of fireworks throughout the year Fourth of july christmas weddings
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nfl games Well guess where they're made And guess who
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makes him Yeah these guys in india they bathe in
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the poison basically all day making roman candles and sparklers
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and single shot shooters None of them need walking canes
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ever dentures or artificial hips Why while they all die
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by their forty fifth birthday or sooner so individual countries
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can simply raise the price of a given product such
- 03:19
that bad polluters pay a big tax putting them equal
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To the environmentally sensitive manufacturers at least equal financially And
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how do we think about that The people polluting their
- 03:30
own rivers and they're all close to starvation anyway so
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if we harm their business and they can't export to
- 03:37
america well then they'll starve right So how do we
- 03:40
think about that So um not an easy answer here
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What about things that harm everyone like over fishing the
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oceans or nuclear power grid leaks or carbon emissions that
- 03:51
will come out of turkey but float down to australia
- 03:54
and the rest of the world Well how does the
- 03:56
u s tell poor starving countries tio not burn the
- 03:59
very cheap coal and shiver through their winters Well we're
- 04:04
not exactly shivering through our winters Yeah cole driven power
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cost about five bucks a kilowatt to produce wind power
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costs like eighty The math just doesn't work nowhere to
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go Solar nuclear politician Hot air Well they all have
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issues and none of us chief is the most polluting
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coal And oh by the way the u s is
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the saudi arabia of coal We have tons we burn
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tons We export tons we supply the arms to the
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biggest polluters and global arms and global warmers on the
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planet So what do we do about all this Tell
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all these minor guys they're out of work and just
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shut him down Or do we continue to pollute with
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cole what's our price Well if we go with solar
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nuclear wind while your monthly electric bills are going to
- 04:44
go from fifty bucks to three hundred probably not something
- 04:47
you really want to spend most of your annual savings
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on Well how high should we let prices get to
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then be able to migrate off of coal Lots of
- 04:56
polar bears have to die off first Probably all right
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we'll do We save the planet or save our money
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Can we just do nothing and hope Superman saves everything
- 05:04
for us What are we paying that guy for me 00:05:06.739 --> [endTime] No way
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