Learning to "value" the earth- $$$ not :) :) :)

It was said by Oscar Wilde that, "nowadays people know the price of everything but the value of nothing." Sadly, that's probably more true now than when it was written. In our culture, we even know the price of a person's soul. Some have taken note of this and thought, 'hey, to fix the ecological problems, we need to learn to value things that are around us in a non-price-tag way'. I think that may be giving us to much credit. What I think we need to do is put more price tags on things we've taken for granted, like forests. Sure, we can say how much the wood is worth, but that doesn't really capture the whole picture - we need to find out everything that the forest does for us. This includes some things that are pretty easy to put a price tag on like filtering our water, preventing flood damage, harboring plants that may be used in medicines or cosmetics....but also things that are difficult to quantify, like the price of a peaceful walk through the woods on a fall day.

There has been a lot of research and general thought recently about exactly this, the overall $$$ of ecosystems. For a primer, go here, or for a good study about it, try here. It would be difficult to underestimate the importance of this type of research because it will underpin much of our plan of attack on climate change. Here's my logic: if people actually thought about the dollar value of things we may lose as a result of global warming, they would be less reluctant about a potential economic cost of preventative action. The biggest question to me is how much will it take.

Take the analogy of health care. People are willing to pay a decent amount of money every month to an insurance provider on the chance that they will get sick. In this situation, the big decision - whether you decide to pay for insurance or not - depends on:

a.) the your perception of the likelihood of something bad happening, so that you get your money's worth

and

b.) how much you can afford to pay if said 'bad event' happens.

When you consider that some sadly common events, like have a heart attack, or cancer, or a life threatening illness, could get you a hospital bill in excess of $20,000, you typically decide to get insurance (obviously this is not the case for everyone, for a variety of reasons). What I postulate is that if the public perceived the danger of climate change to be a cost which they could NOT afford to pay when the day comes, they would be willing to pay for climate insurance. Here's where it becomes complicated; what is the cost?

If you looked at the link above, you would see that the value of world ecosystem services has been estimated at 33 trillion dollars, or nearly double world GDP. This doesn't get to the value of what we could lose though. Yes, it's true that nearly every ecosystem has the potential to be impacted by climate change, but we're not going to lose the value of all of them. At the same time, we could lose a lot more than the ecosystem value calculation contains, including, for a starter, the homes of 100 million of people from sea level rise (for more impacts, check out this article). My point is, someone needs to spell out clearly for the general public that paying for carbon reduction through clean energy, efficient cars, better lightbulbs, more efficient heating, and so on, is akin to purchasing climate insurance, and that the cost of inaction WILL BE HUGE. Advising otherwise would be like telling people with medical problems not to get health insurance because they'd be better off without it (oh wait, that's exactly what Rush Limbaugh is advocating ...damn)