WIRED dissects the asinine logic of “green” capitalist thinking, and the reasons to find hope for the future. EarthDay
You titled the book after an especially striking example of how absurd green capitalism can be. The International Monetary Fund decided to place a price on whales: about $1 trillion for the whole species, or $2 million per individual whale. They arrived at this figure by calculating how much carbon whales sequestered and saw it as advocating for whale conservation as a way to fight climate change.
For me, it captures everything about green capitalism that is both seductive in an intuitive sense and then also deeply problematic in a practical sense. On the one hand, there’s this intuitive appeal to the idea that the reason that we destroy nature is because we don’t value it within our economic system, so we need to find a way to do that.
Speaking of other absurd value assignments, later in the book you discuss a measurement called the “value of a statistical life” which I did not know existed. It was developed during the Cold War to compare costs of military operations. You write that the VSL generally ranges from $8 to $11 million per life nowadays, and that the lives of those in lower income nations or lower income regions within a country are assigned lower VSL.
Yes, I think so. There are a lot of people working in the heterodox economic space, trying to overcome a barrier that the economics discipline has created for itself artificially. The barrier is the idea that economics is somehow not a social science, that it is not inherently political. Some economists like to pretend that it’s closer to a natural science, which is just obviously not the case.
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