[coding123]

Without pricing the externalities, we're basically taking on debt, a debt against the future number of years the planet is habitable. I imagine it probably started at 1M years of supporting human life. I wonder if that number is now down to 50000 left. And I feel like it went from 1M to 50K in the last 50 years.

[FooHentai]

Indeed, it seems the longer we run under the status quo the greater the cost in externalities, to the point we’re beginning to understand represents an existential threat globally.

However we also risk a self-fulfilling prophecy if we commodify those externalities and reduce them to lines on a balance sheet. I know that this is not quite what’s being argued for, but I am equally certain that is how it would land in practice.

I’m not convinced re-framing/codifying our social, environmental, and human capitals as financial instruments is any kind of progress towards salvation, rather it’s a doomed attempt to take everything that never fit inside the tidy box of capitalism and cram it inside of the box anyway. A try at making the world comprehensible to a mind accustomed to that manner of framing.

This problem needs novel thinking, more novel than finding a direct way to account for it within the existing framework. I regrettably don’t have a better idea.