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Aya Welcome to Current Affairs.

My name is Nathan Robinson.

I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

My guest today is Adrian Buller of Commonwealth,

a progressive big tech based in the UK.

She's the author of The Value of a Whale on the Illusions of Green Capitalism,

coming out from Manchester University Press.

Adrian, thank you so much for joining us on Current Affairs today.

It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Okay, thank you so much for joining us on Current Affairs today.

It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Okay, so I'm going to ask you. I'm going to start off by asking what is a whale worth?

Well, a very good question, very open-ended. If you are the International Monetary Fund, which is the example that I start with in the book, then a whale to you is worth about two million US dollars per species, or about a trillion for the entire global stock.

And that's only great whales, mind you, orcas, porpoises, sadly excluded from that calculus.

But they sort of base that evaluation off of combination of factors like ecotourism,

so people going on whale watching trips and their ability to sequester carbon over their lifetime,

ultimately trying to make the argument that instead of investing in sort of very

expensive technologies like CCS, we should all just invest in saving whales instead based on this

kind of valuation.

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