Sure they do. You won't be accurate to the penny, but quantifying this stuff can be done. Even getting to within an order of magnitude would be useful.
Yeah, pretty much. If you're gonna do something like that you should first make sure you're not going to make life worse for people than the current system.
Why is that the default rather than, say, banning all coal burning until the danger can be quantified? If your position is that it's impossible to know the size of the impact, how do you choose one versus the other?
Personally, I think we should ban the burning of coal (unless the peak oil doomsday guys turn out to be right and we need it to keep society from collapsing). But it needs to be done over a relatively long time period so people have time to adjust.
I'm a libertarian-leaning guy, but charging for externalities has proven to be a mostly unworkable concept. How much is a human life worth? How much is a few years of a human life worth? How much should someone be compensated for a sickness with which they would not have otherwise been afflicted? Let's say we know coal burning doubles the risk of non-smoking-related lung cancer by 10%. When someone gets lung cancer, especially a smoker, how could you possibly determine the sum he's owed by a coal company? There's no way to prove they were even at fault. Should people be compensated for the risk of developing a problem they never actually develop?
And once you start down that road it doesn't end. Coal companies will (rightly) point out nearly every business generates uncompensated negative externalities. This morning I was awoken early by a trash collector. Shouldn't he be compensating me for the noise he's producing? Lack of sleep has a quantifiable negative impact on health. Shouldn't UPS be compensating me for the time I've spent waiting in traffic because one of their vans was double-parked?