It seems like one could pretty easily point out the logical fallacy there. Another thing is that most governments and corporations don't necessarily look at th

It seems like one could pretty easily point out the logical fallacy there. Another thing is that most governments and corporations don't necessarily look at the positive benefits so much as the negatives. That's one reason why I like this dollar amount idea. You shouldn't say "each child's life is worth 40,000 pounds," but rather "the potential cost of a lawsuit brought by relatives of a deceased child is in the millions of pounds." The same method could be applied to valuing nature. You can simply say something like "the value of fisheries from the coast of Japan is $20 billion per year. Any release of radioactivity into the ocean could put TEPCO at risk of this amount in lawsuits." Corporations and governments don't want to put a price tag on people (even though there are well established pricing models, based on historical disasters). By putting a price tag on the environment they can hopefully do better risk management. Maybe they can make smarter decisions like: "Increasing the size of the Tsunami protection wall will cost an additional $200,000, but will prevent the potential $20 billion in cleanup costs from a radioactivity release incident."