PART OF FOSSIL FUELS' EXTERNALITY

"Externality" is a term economists use in much the same way that the military uses the term "collateral damage" except we rarely find the former in major news outlets.  Here's one exception from 2009:

Fossil Fuels’ Hidden Cost Is in Billions, Study Says
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: October 19, 2009
NY Times

WASHINGTON — Burning fossil fuels costs the United States about $120 billion a year in health costs, mostly because of thousands of premature deaths from air pollution, the National Academy of Sciences reported in a study issued Monday.

The damages are caused almost equally by coal and oil, according to the study, which was ordered by Congress. The study set out to measure the costs not incorporated into the price of a kilowatt-hour or a gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel. [This is the externality - Steve J.]

Nearly 20,000 people die prematurely each year from such causes, according to the study’s authors, who valued each life at $6 million based on the dollar in 2000. Those pollutants include small soot particles, which cause lung damage; nitrogen oxides, which contribute to smog; and sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain.

This isn't the entire story because the study left some things out:

The estimates by the academy do not include damages from global warming, which has been linked to the gases produced by burning fossil fuels. ... Nor did the study measure damage from burning oil for trains, ships and planes. And it did not include the environmental damage from coal mining or the pollution of rivers with chemicals that were filtered from coal plant smokestacks to keep the air clean.