For sure, energy has a cost which you want to optimize for - no question about it. The crux is when that cost is artificially low: you can dump your radioactive

For sure, energy has a cost which you want to optimize for - no question about it. The crux is when that cost is artificially low: you can dump your radioactive waste in the river for as much as it costs to transport it, but the cost is then payed by the people downstream. Now as you say if this is tightly causally linked, the people downstream will fight back against you and then it's not so cheap. But the problem comes when the causality gets foggy; it takes decades before there's enough data gathered to connect the high cancer rates with the waste dumping miles upstream. By that time the people who made that decision made bank and exited and are beyond accountability Where this causal disconnect occurs is where regulation is most effective I think we agree, you want to price in your externalities, but pricing externalities _is_ regulation, so we're saying the same thing. Perhaps we're crossing wires somewhere