Philosophy of green economics: promoting a new oxygen tax.

I think many people operate on the assumption that our technology makes us somehow ‘superior’ to all other species; thus we feel like we are more independent and separate from nature, we have become more detached. And therein lies the problem…

If you do think along those lines, perhaps you should ask yourself: Where does your oxygen supply come from? Where does all of our fresh water come from? And who, or what, actually cleans and maintains the health of rivers, lakes and oceans which have provided us with food for hundreds and thousands of years?

Who actually gets rid of nature’s organic waste? No, it’s not your local sewerage treatment plant. It’s bacteria. It’s algae. It’s molluscs. It’s crustaceans. That’s who.

And who renews the nutrients in the soil? And I don’t mean who fertilises the soil, I mean, who breaks down the fertiliser? It’s not the farmer. All farmers do is plant crops, remove ‘weeds’ and ‘pests’ and then harvest those same crops. In that sense, farmers don’t ‘grow’ crops — crops grow themselves! Farmers maintain crops. They guide crops so that they are more productive. The farmer doesn’t pay his legion of plant employees, does he? He doesn’t pay the organims that do all of the really hard back-breaking work right down in soil, does he?

So let’s get this straight. The multitude of organisms that live and work in the soil are the ones responsible for helping to make our food. That’s what enables plants to grow bigger. And all the farm animals that graze on farms all around the world mostly feed on plant-based products, don’t they?

But do bacteria, plants and funghi send us a bill for extracting nutrients from soil? We don’t pay earthworms and beetles to recycle all of this organic ‘waste’, do we? Do bees come to us with a montly fee for all their pollination work? Do animals charge us for their considerable grazing time or for the meat on their bodies? No. They do it for free. You may think that you already pay for your food. But you’re really only paying someone to harvest, package and distribute that food. For what its worth, most of our food still grows by itself.

So too with fish. All fisherman do is collect fish. Even fish farmers don’t ‘grow’ fish. Fish grow and reproduce by themselves. Fish farmers don’t manipulate the cells of fish, or the molecules within those cells, do they? Am I right? (and I don’t mean genetically modified fish; but even GMO fish essentially grow and reproduce all by themselves)

Likewise, you might argue that you already pay for your water. But when it rains, do you have to pay for that rain? The answer is ‘no’. To my knowledge, no one has ever been charged to collect natural rain water. No one ‘owns’ rain because for now no one has the moral right to control where it falls or the ethical right to charge us for it ¹.

We get our precious drinking water [indirectly] from the oceans. Water evaporates from the surface of the oceans and forms clouds. On this Earth, today, water evaporates from the ocean all by itself. Eventually the clouds dump all of that accumulated water over things like mountains. It falls again as rain. We don’t control how that happens. We don’t control where it happens. And we don’t control when it happens. We merely go and collect that rain. We dam rivers and lakes and collect it from there. That’s all we do. We don’t produce all of our own water. Far from it! If we had to extract our own fresh drinking water from the ocean, it would cost A LOT more than it does now.

We don’t pay to extract all of our water from the ocean ourselves, mainly because it costs too much. We could distill it or desalinise it, but we don’t². I can tell you right now that if it ever does stop raining, or if you live in a place like the Moon or Mars with absolutely no rain, then wages being equal, you can expect that your water bill is going to be a lot higher than it is now. So although you may think you’re paying for water, you’re really only paying someone to bottle the water or to channel it through a series of pipes to your home. Right?

I’d also like to reiterate that we’re lucky enough to have an ocean. Most planets and moons don’t have liquid oceans. And when they do have an ocean, it’s usually a frozen methane ocean. If we had to transport fresh water to another planet or else formulate it chemically from elemental hydrogen and oxygen, we’d soon realise how precious fresh drinking water really is to us.

So we’re lucky enough to live in a place where the resources that are most essential for our own survival also happen to be free of charge. Things like oxygen, water, food and gravity (in that order).

The truth is that animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and other organisms, along with some natural processes like evaporation and gravity —in other words nature— does the majority of the work for us. And nature does it at no cost.

When was the last time you received a bill from nature? When was the last time a dirty big rain cloud charged you for its evaporation and precipitation services? Well the answer is that to this very day, no one has ever received a bill from mother nature herself. No lawyer has ever represented another species and started a class action lawsuit against humanity. Now there’s an a trillion-dollar idea for you bright spark young lawyers!

Right. So far, I hope that I’ve convinced you that the real force at work behind all of these [natural] processes is nature. The reason we are even here at all is because of nature. Got it?

And since I have taken it upon myself to “speak for Earth”, I’m here to inform you, the reader, that nature is massively getting fucked over. Because if we had to pay bees, earthworms and bacteria for all the hard work that they do for us, not to mention the work of eight million seven hundred thousand other species that you never hear about, well, I’m sure that at the very least we’d want to keep them happy. Because they are not our slaves. All great bosses and employers know that “greater worker satisfaction leads to better productivity”.  I’m sure their union representative would say: “you better stop using pesticides, insecticides and herbicides, because you’re making their job that much more difficult, they’ve threatened to all go on strike”.

I probably shouldn’t even mention that we still aren’t charged for the air we breathe! But trees and phytoplankton generate the 21% oxygen content in our atmosphere that we all need to survive! We certainly don’t electrolyse our own oxygen; that would be very inefficient (not to mention very costly). Nobody has to synthesise their own oxygen yet. If we had to do that, you’d have to add breathing to the cost of living.

At this point, I’d like to reiterate something else: most planets and moons don’t have atmospheres. And when they do have an atmosphere, they’re usually nasty sulfruric acid affairs like on our sister planet Venus.

To this day, even with our most ‘advanced’ technology, nothing is more efficient at generating oxygen and removing carbon dioxide from the air than a tropical rainforest.

Once again, do trees charge us for the work that they do? No, they do not. If they did, they’d surely be able to buy their very own tracts of land from a local real estate agent. And knowing that trees had legally bought and now effectively owned their own spaces —that forests held the deeds to their own property— I bet nobody would dare cut a forest down to the ground. I wonder whether one day in the future, forests will own their own real estate? I certainly hope that they do.

I wonder whether one day in the future, forests will own their own real estate? I certainly hope that they do.

I’ve come to think that every citizen on Earth should be forced to pay an “oxygen tax” (at the very least). That’s my idea for the future prosperity of our planet. Notice I didn’t say ‘humanity’, because remember, here I speak for Earth, not humanity.

If we had to pay for our own oxygen, we wouldn’t take our biosphere for granted. It’s well known that people take better care of the things they have had to pay for. Things like top-fuel drag racing would no longer be economically viable because competitors and spectators alike would quickly realise that it just wastes too much oxygen… it wouldn’t be worth it.

We should introduce an oxygen tax. We should do it for our own good. We should do it for our own long-term survival. We should do it because we can. We should do it because we can’t afford not to.

We should do it not so much for the sake of appreciating quattuordecillions of little oxygen molecules. There’s more to it than that. Because not only is nature releasing all of this wonderful life-giving oxygen [that we all need and use] completely for free… but the very people that go into wilderness areas to cut down trees and completely destroy all of life’s precious biodiversity, well, they are the ones that breathe a forests’ oxygen most directly. It’s worse than biting the hand that feeds you. It’s like… it’s like… it’s like chopping down the tree that supplies you with oxygen. There is just no other way to describe it.

it’s like chopping down the tree that supplies you with oxygen

It’s not really fair is it? So my wishful thinking is that if forests, rivers, lakes and oceans could all be economically sustainable, and I am absolutely 100% convinced that they would be because nature is already ecologically sustainable, then the really poor conservationists like myself wouldn’t have to fight quite so damn hard to protect the very environment that helps to sustain the rest of humanity.

If people were forced to pay an oxygen tax and governments then used that same money to pay for the direct and immediate protection of the world’s most biodiverse wilderness areas, then perhaps the continual destructive war-like attack humanity is waging on nature could be averted or avoided altogether³.

I think conservationists and environmentalist activists really need to teach economists the true monetary value of nature. Because right now, the politicians in charge don’t seem to have a fucking clue. In the world of green economics, cutting down a forest, for whatever reason, would be like “killing the goose that lays the golden egg”, so to speak. Cutting down a forest would be a bit like burning money, except far, far worse; rather, cutting down a forest would be more akin to deliberately setting fire to the machine that actually prints all of a countries’ money! It would be like setting the central bank ablaze in order to generate some heat! In a biological, ecological and material sense, I already know this to be true. As Edward O Wilson once said:

Destroying rain forest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal

(as a materials scientist, I happen to know first hand that we cannot even dream of artificially synthesising all of the lifeforms that make this planet habitable, but I’ll save that for another post)

I recently calculated that if we had to generate our own oxygen by the electrolysis of water, we would each need to generate a consistent 80W supply of electricity per person just to keep us alive and breathing*. Over a human lifetime this adds up to about twenty or thirty thousand dollars! It’s actually a lot cheaper than I thought. Unfortunately though, I don’t see many people giving that much money back to Mother Earth.

In fact, if we had to reimburse nature for all the past work that was done in creating and maintaining our prestent atmosphere, we as a human species would be TOTALLY BANKRUPT. It is said that 107 billion people have lived on planet Earth at one time or another. 107 billion people x 20 thousand dollars each = 2.14 quadrillion dollars. And that is just the oxygen consumed by humanity since humanity began (at most I’d say the last hundred thousand years or so)! Yet our atmosphere has been billions of years in the making. How do you quantify that? What do all-wise, all-knowing economists think of that?! Eh?!!

If we had to reimburse nature for all the past work that was done in creating and maintaining our prestent atmosphere, we as a human species would be TOTALLY BANKRUPT.

And the fact is, the rich people who seem to think that the economy somehow trumps nature, well, they’re the ones that should have to pay the highest rate of oxygen tax. They’re the people like Gina Rinehart, whose iron ore will eventually consume some 1.5 billion tonnes of oxygen and spew out 4.1 billion tonnes of CO2 when it is converted into metallic iron somewhere in a Chinese blast furnace. If everyone behaved like Gina, not only would that totally not work, but mines and steel would be everywhere and trees oxygen would be nowhere. What would you all do then, try to make a steely tree?

Sure, some of you smart-arses may argue, that even the things like oxygen, water, food and gravity we could potentially make ourselves without nature’s aid. Given enough money, yes I’m sure we could produce enough. For about a thousand people. Because if we had to do all of this work that nature does for us completely ourselves, I am convinced that we wouldn’t be able to live the way we do now for very long at all. Our “standard of living” would be more like a “standard of survival”.

In my humble scientific opinion, there is absolutely no freakin’ way that we could generate all of the resources required to survive on some off-world spaceship bubble designed for 7 billion people. It just isn’t going to happen… it’s far easier for us to accept that nature helps us a great deal more than we have generally have come to realise, accept or expect.

All we really have to do is leave nature alone. All we really need to do is stop poisoning it and destroying it. But since some people can’t seem to do that, I think it’s time for an oxygen tax. Because nature has been doing us all these favours for billions of years already and I think the time has come to repay our debt. Yes. I think the sooner we all move to a “circular economy”, the better.

* Assuming we breath on average 550L of pure oxygen per day. To convert 1 mole of water to oxygen/hydrogen gas via electrolysis requires 237.1kJ of energy. Cost of electricity 20c per kW.hr

1. Some people have even tried to control where and when rain falls by seeding rain clouds with silver iodide crystals.
2. Okay, I thought I would juts double-check that and it looks like 15% of Sydney’s fresh water supply is obtained by a process of reverse osmisis, which requires 3kWhr per m³. They must have built that while I was living in Spain.
3. How do you get people to pay for an oxygen tax you might ask? Simple. You make them undergo “two hours of WOO”.