[VBprogrammer]

There was an interesting TV show on British TV (apologies, my Google foo is not able to find the name at this moment in time) where they invited a number of people to eat dishes at a hypothetical restaurant, after each course the tallied the carbon emissions released in creating the dish.

Now obviously being a TV show they had to show some extreme examples but it was definitely interesting when things like imported asparagus dishes released more than the British beef dish. However, things like the wine were even more challenging, wine imported from Australia in bulk tanks was relatively ok, but wines imported after bottling (from Europe for example) where horrible because of the extra transportation.

[ip26]

Too bad there isn't some sort of free market based mechanism that would inherently account for all of these factors without you needing to think about it.

[MsMowz]

I'm not sure if this is sarcastic, but there quite literally is not a "free market based mechanism" to do this. If there were, there would not be the market failure that we can observe today.

There are plenty of market-based methods for accounting for these externalities though, such as Pigovian taxes.