The Value of Air

I was writing a blog on a different subject and I came across this little tidbit about the value of the atmosphere and so I parked that post for next week and decided I would rant about the idiocy of the world we live in instead. A writer, (I believe he calls himself a scientist, although given his claim clearly that word is used rather loosely), claims that the value of the atmosphere is 100 times the world economy. We now know the value of air and it seems pretty damn expensive. 

Have we become so morally bankrupt that we are now putting monetary value on air. Surely someone could come up with a monetary value for water too, pretty soon we will have a price tag for the whole planet! This whole notion is absolutely ludicrous, Let me hold your head under water for sixty seconds and then ask you how much you value air. In fact, I think that this 100 times statistic might need some validation so I am going to write a research proposal to the United Nations for several billion dollars so that I can travel the world and hold people’s head under water, when they come up for air, I will ask them if it is worth 100X, 1000X or 1,000,000X the value of the world economy, based on this sample we should have a pretty good idea what the value of air is, and I will be extremely well travelled. 

The other part of my experiment will be to lead a manned mission to Mars where we can see what a world without air looks like and by comparing it to the earth we might be able to demonstrate the value of air. Perhaps when we are there we will meet some Martians who are interested in buying our air, we could probably sell 10% for 10X the value of the world economy, pay off all the US and European debt, buy Greece so everyone could go on a holiday there, and still have enough air left over to breathe. 

Not to be overly critical of said Scientist, he based on the carbon trading system and based on blocks of carbon dioxide that can be sold and the amount of air in the world he  came up with a value. So there was some math there. But my problem is that this type of thinking does a great disservice to the environmental movement. This notion that in order for things to have value we need to put a statistical number behind a price. The idea that without a price something can not have value does not help the environmental cause, because anyone with a brain cell, understands that such a number is pure and utter nonsense. You can not put a price on the planet because without it we are fucked. It’s not a house where we can just downsize to a new planet when we spoil this one. 

Rather than having a dialogue about how we ensure that everyone has clean air to breathe and that we don’t alter our climate so significantly as to make our planet unlivable, we are having a dialogue about the value of air. I don’t know what the real value of air is, but every time I take a deep breath I’m pretty happy it’s there and I’d like things to stay that way. As long as we are having ridiculous conversations like this we are unlikely to get around to the real business of saving the planet.