What do you think creates value? What is the difference between short term and long term value? Is value what makes us thrive or does thriving define what value represents? What our economy does in the present way of measuring output and product as value, is that it takes natural resources, labour, and capital to combine them and create value – mostly to people, sometimes to animals, plants and on rare occasions, to the environment.
At the end of the day, the system incentivises us to somewhat sacrifice the planet to feed and satisfy ourselves. The climate change as an impending catastrophe is just a type of warning sign for how we have structured our economy and to get us to think about how to rewire it. Pricing carbon is just a means of incorporating some kind of costs into our consideration. And there are many other taxes and tools we need to consider.
Our goal at the end of the day is to really cut back on harmful practices and ways of satisfying ourselves that is systematically taking out more than what we put back into the environment (including the rate by which nature is able to recover itself). Are we getting there yet? Probably it’ll be some kind of harmonic cycle, as with nature and systems that works along thresholds. But what I know is that our definition of what exactly is value, and what gives value, will be a key to getting there.