> Because there are no cheap sources of gasoline. Or any other petroleum product. Gee, IIRC a fracking driller in TX recently said that he could get the crude

> Because there are no cheap sources of gasoline. Or any other petroleum product. Gee, IIRC a fracking driller in TX recently said that he could get the crude oil out for ballpark $3 a barrel. Sounds "cheap" to me! Maybe we could get the retail price of gasoline down to $1 a gallon! For the "externalities", I'm not seeing anything very significant there. I'll make a wild guess: The externality being considered is global warming caused by human sources of CO2, e.g., burning gasoline. Well, three points: (1) There are claims that the concentration of CO2 over the past two decades or so is relatively high. However, from the more credible measurements, the global temperature has not gone up significantly in those two decades. Or, is temperature relatively high now? Well, apparently in 2006 the temperature was essentially the same as in year 1000, and the increases in the 100 years before 2006 and the 100 years before 1000 were essentially the same. So, the current temperature and the rate of increase over the previous 100 years happened before back near year 1000 and are not unique now. Details are in Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, National Research Council, Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, ISBN 0-309-66264-8, 196 pages, National Academies Press, 2006. available at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11676.html http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11676.html (2) There were some dozens of computer model calculations that took CO2 concentrations and predicted significant global warming by now. The predicted temperatures and the carefully measured real values are summarized in http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg The measured values showed essentially no change. Nearly all the predicted values showed significantly higher temperatures and were significantly wrong. (3) We can go back ballpark 800,000 in the history of global temperatures and CO2 concentration and find some really significant changes in temperature but fail to find even one significant example when CO2 concentration went up and then temperature went up or when CO2 concentration went down and temperature went down. The main examples of CO2 concentration changes are when temperature went up (from some cause, not a change in CO2 concentration) and CO2 concentration went up 800 years later where the guess is that the higher temperatures caused more biological activity that caused higher concentrations of CO2. Is CO2 a greenhouse gas? Sure it is: CO2 absorbs in three narrow bands out in the infrared, one band for each of bending, twisting, and stretching of the molecule. So, more CO2 will warm the planet. So will lighting a match. The issue is how much warming. So far, from both the models (2) and the historical record (1) and (3), it appears that the warming effect of realistic concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere is from trivial down to too small to measure. What about clean air? I live 70 miles north of Wall Street, and the air seems fine to me. As I outlined, NYC quite broadly was hating cars decades ago, well before there was much talk about externalities. Again, once again, over again, yet again, one more time, the NYT hates cars and, thus, is liked by a lot of people in NYC who hate cars. Again, ..., one more time, when I see an article from the NYT that is against cars, I have to conclude (my version of artificial intelligence!) that the reason is just that the NYT hates cars, even if the cars are in LA. No reason to make the OP complicated: Instead the NYT hates cars; has for decades; likely will as long as the NYT continues to exist. That the NYT hates cars is something "a blind man could see in a minute". If add enough other stuff to the argument, then can have a difficult time seeing the obvious -- the NYT hates cars.