True cost accounting

The social and environmental costs of many products, from the fossil fuel industry to food, is not reflected in its price. Thus businesses can get away with producing climate changing fumes from buring fossil fuels; society as a whole, all of us pay the cost, which makes oil businesses extremely profitable a our expense.

True cost accounting includes those costs to the environment, people’s health and other costs, that businesses are allowed to push off their balance sheets, and not pay for. Those are called extenalities; true cost accounting counts those externalities. Three views of true cost accounting: https://www.salon.com/2021/01/14/can-true-cost-accounting-tell-us-more-than-a-price-tag_partner/ and from Investopedia: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/truecosteconomics.asp And Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_full-cost_accounting.

I have not seen true cost accounting applied to the cost of manufacturing an electric car, say. So Tesla, which is helping to eliminate fossil fuels and that really reinvented the electric car industry, also has hidden social and environmental costs. For instance, in mining cobalt, which it needs for its batteries, miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo work in near slavery conditions. The company and the industry as a whole is trying to replace those costs. But right now, every Tesla has the blood of people working in slave like conditions in its batteries.