@Tyler9000, Ego, Chad - Well, I'd have to disagree with that one. Not on general principle but in certain cases, such as this.
Basically, you're saying that my value = my weight * importance of health + my weight * potential to help people environment + my weight * legal issues + my weight * unforeseen consequences ... and your value = your weight * ... and so on for everybody else will all be tallied up ending up in some kind of debate and consensus.
And this works fine if the issues are local, reversible, linear, and tradeable. In such a case mistakes can be reversed. Costs can be traded for benefits at any level. Our democratic or market based approach can converge on some kind of "best solution".
However, in cases where the issues are global, irreversible, bifurcated, and nontradeable, there are areas of the "map" where the costs are infinite and from which we can not return. This is where standard democratic market-based consensus methodology breaks down. If we hit the zone of ruin/death/extinction, it doesn't matter that there have might be a solution because we can not re-enter the game. We're permanently out.
This is why we calculate SWR because if you run out, it doesn't matter what the subsequent market returns are. It doesn't matter because your principal remains at zero. Similarly, if the human species goes extinct or is sent back to a population of 20000 people, it doesn't matter what the legal issues are or whether it's healthy to eat GMO. Systemic risks become irrelevant after systemic catastrophe has occurred. The situation can not be reversed or scaled/traded back to where it was. That world is gone.
The standard conventions/methods are broken for these issues. Mathematically speaking it happens whenever one of the variables in your style of math is infinite. That breaks it. Another way of grokking the breaking is that like good economists(*) you're presuming that all your variables can substitute for each other. However, things like ruin, death, or extinction have no substitution. Permanent death can't be traded for more favourable legal treatment because legality no longer matters when you're dead. Permanent ruin can't be traded better future returns.
(*) This is why I am very afraid of the kind of thinking Lomborg promotes.
Basically, you can't treat them using a risk perception applicable to a paintball game with flags and points and tactics that reflects that the only cost of getting hit is a 30 second break before you "respawn".
You have to treat them like a war with real bullets and a likelihood of personal death that permanently ends the game.
http://paintball.about.com/od/howtoplay ... oldier.htm
Paintball has objectives such as eliminating the opposing team, collecting flags, holding outposts, finding hidden treasures and other, ultimately meaningless objectives on a finite playing field in a limited amount of time. Wars cover huge areas with countless objectives and often last for years. In paintball the goal is to engage the opposing side, while in war you generally seek to minimize conflict.
Things like climate change, GMO agriculture, and antibiotics are infinite games on a global scale where the objective is to keep playing.
Whereas things like legal issues, democracy and politics, individuals getting cancer, local hunger crises, nuclear reactor accidents, ... is a series of finite independent and local games.
Also see,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games