What Christos proposes is the approach of ecological economists. Prof. Costanza has invented ecological economics borrowing the idea from insurance companies. If you kill a carpenter with your car, his value is let's say 100. If you kill a young dentist, the value is 10.000. The life of people has differential values. What is the value of YOUR life? If we spoil our athmosphere, how many people have to die before we consider it of having an economic impact? Of course you have to take the gain (the money we obtain with pollution) and the losses (the money you lose with every death). Countries from the "first world" tend to settle their most polluting enterprises in "emerging" countries, since the price they should pay for environmental accidents (including the death of people) is much lower. In the era of political correctedness, the life of a person should have the same value throughout the world. In some cases, destroying the environment might be rewarding from an economic point of view. And it is. That's why we export our pollution, or we buy shares of clean air from the countries that do not pollute enough(!!!!).
I do not have a clear cut answer, but ecological economics is not satisfactory to me. When we trust lawyers and accountants for environment related issues, we end up being in trouble. And we are! |
