A pilot Earth Index commissioned by BBC Earth using data from the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) sets a new standard for estimating pretend money. It values coral at $10 trillion for the global economy. Trees are worth even more, at $16 trillion, which means the pretend value of trees are almost as much as all of the real value of the people in the United States (GDP $17.42 trillion.) Heck, the Grand Canyon is worth $700 million and it just sits there looking stoic.

Obviously "virtual" has to be taken with a grain of salt. "Virtual water", for example, tries to claim that it takes 140 liters of water to create a cup of coffee, which means that the wheat grown just in Egypt uses more water than the entire Nile River - something anyone actually in agriculture there knows is wildly untrue. Every government program also claims some cosmic figure like that it gives back 130 percent in virtual money of whatever it got from taxpayers for paying bureaucrats to sit in committee meetings.

That's not to say coral isn't important, it certainly is, but the UN has a bad habit of making stuff up, as anyone who has read 899 of the 900 IARC monographs can attest. So having an environmentalist estimate from estimates by other environmentalists is not helping the public understand the value of nature much.

Yet if re-Tweeting stories about climate change is not assuaging your liberal guilt enough, you can play Costing the Earth here, and feel better knowing that the corporations behind neonicotinoid pesticides have saved bees even though they are worth nowhere near as much as Apple stock.