Peter Smith

It is impossible to value nature, it is too complex. Therefore the only practical way to value nature is to charge those who use it, and abuse it, an annual rent. This rent is to paid to the government in lieu of other taxes and will make natural resource destruction expensive and people will naturally seek to reduce their use of land and natural resources, so they can avoid the rental charge. It must be stressed that this tax is instead of other taxes, and total tax take would remain the same. It would be also much more progressive in that the poor would pay less and tax dodgers could not avoid it! Nature’s value to man is endless and should belong to every human in equal measure. The best way to express this is to charge a  tax equal to the rent a landowner would charge for the use of their land or the fee to extract minerals etc. There are other natural rents that could be charged such as water extraction and use of electromagnetic spectrum. This income would then form the bas...

There has been a lot of debate this week stimulated by the publication of the   National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA)  http://uknea.unep-wcmc.org/ This is an interesting publication and something ‘green’ economist have been wrestling with for years. The value of something is very complicated and in our ‘neo classical economic’ consensus, the standard economic argument of today is something is worth what  someone else will pay for it. Why the NEA is wrong and will never be practical It is virtually impossible when it comes to nature and ecological processes to put a value on something. So many people have vastly different values they associate with it and the modern system of regulation and taxation finds it very hard to deal with complex economic externalities from the loss of natural processes of any form. The mechanisms to construct a system of valuation and payment for those valuation would be doomed to failure, except as a dry exercise for purely academic purposes. ...