Wow.
Irrational, like the assessment of it as a universal.
A mild over statement? As long as a very small subset is exclusively applied to something that has to the best of our awareness only been a “practice” by one species ,for say 12,000 years, that accounts for less then a really really small percentage of all the life that has lived on this planet? That’s got to have even less of an impact on what is considered a universal, then 1 billion dollars has on what we consider the value of GWP.
Essentially the wold can be divided into two classes. What exists as natural resources before we were even around, and what resources we have moved around with our efforts. That would distinguish the value of the resources from what is a human added “value”. Let’s consider, just for the sake of the argument, that what existed as natural resources couldn’t have had a value that could be priced as the practice of economics hadn’t even come into existence yet. The “resources” had an existence without an assessed price and that did not affect their existence. No value that could be compared to a monetary unit of exchange.
No one is providing anything in exchange for the resources. It’s pretty much a flat out take without exchange. To whom would the exchange be made? So our current economic system does not place a value on the resources and can only place a value on what we consider we’ve added. When I buy a can of green beans I am not actually buying the green beans. I am buying a human process of cultivation, harvest, canning, distribution, and all the human time that involves. The beans are free. They are a product of the natural resource that were here way before we were. If all the beans in the world went extinct, our human species in general would feel no loss of value. We would just shift our attention to squash.
I see no indication that our species values the existence of green beans, If green beans were to go extinct it doesn’t affect the GWP. No species that was here before us and goes extinct because of us, factors into the GWP. No I don’t think the cost of natural resources is factored into GWP. “Buildings and the like”, well those are just natural resources no longer in their natural state.
So when I asked how much is a breadth of air worth? You seem to have missed the obvious.
Water was fresh and clean where it was available. It was free. It was a natural resource that didn’t require processing. It isn’t any longer. Now it’s something that is collected processed and sold. There aren’t any wells that tap into ground water anymore in metropolitan areas. Even in rural areas it has become unfit to consume. So now we have to have it processed, piped and delivered to our faucets, funneled into plastic bottles and placed on shelves for purchase. There is no end to what water will cost us. All the while it remains free, but the processing, now that’s going to have a continually rising cost as we foul it more and more. And sure we pay for oxygen to be pumped into pressure tanks now for our amusement. And some people have to pay to have it pumped into tanks just so they can breath at all, as their lungs have been damaged due to long term exposure to asbestos. Another of those natural resources that we have been moving into unnatural places, and I’m pretty sure someone realized it would end up in peoples lungs too. That is a fairly unnatural place for it to be found.
Ask any owner of a company that has had work related fatalities what those deaths of their random employees was worth. Not what it cost the company, but what they were worth? Would they be able to tell you they profited “X” number of dollars for every shortcut in safety they took that cost a life?
At the rate we are headed with our human contrived value system I don’t imagine it will be long before we are all flat our working for the money just to pay for our next breath. No the air still won’t cost you a thing but the air filter you will require, is going to set you back a bit. Tell me those face masks worn by all those people in polluted cities grows on trees. They are already paying for each breath now. It is possible everyone will need to soon.
Our human added values.
Money isn’t a universal, it doesn’t have a stable worth and it’s value is tied to human greed. Talk about more human pollution.