The human cost of warming
This one can't wait ....
I know we’re all busy, so I usually try to restrict my posts to no more than one per week. But this one can’t wait. On the upside, it’s not too long ...
My colleague Trevor Chanter, who’s been helping with the set-up of a new Climate-change Resilience Entity, passed on this link to an alarming study. In it, authors Joshua Pearce and Richard Parncutt attempt to quantify the crimes of the fossil fuel industry in terms of how many people they’re killing - and how many more they’ll kill in the future if left unchecked.
They estimate that about one million are currently dying prematurely per year from global warming caused by fossil fuel burning. Mostly the innocent young and the elderly.
And of the geographical distribution of premature deaths among the young is so unfair. Look at the map below prepared by UNICEF. It shows a strong anti-correlation between those who causes the problem (rich white people) and those who suffer its consequences (poor darker-skinned people).
Unlike the more recent but already largely-solved ozone problem. It’s caused by the same people, but the difference is that victims -from skin cancer - are whites.
That premature death rate is projected to increase dramatically in the years ahead. Even in the unlikely event that we restrict future warming to 2C, it’s projected to rise to one billion per year. In reality the rate could be much higher because the real temperature increase could far exceed 2C. Even if these projections are wildly off the mark, there’s an obvious ethical problem with fossil fuels.
Don’t presume you’re safe just because you’re in a ‘white’ part of the above map. In a future world where people can’t survive in their own country because the air temperature exceeds blood temperature, do you think they’ll just sit down there and wait to die?
That message needs to go out to all the aiders and abettors of the oil companies: notably the climate-denying, gun-toting drivers of gas guzzlers.
Quoting from the paper’s conclusion:
… as a rough rule of thumb, burning roughly 1000 tons of fossil carbon (creating 3700 tons of CO2) causes one future premature death. Measuring carbon emissions in human lives not only makes the numbers easier to understand for non-experts but also clarifies energy policy priorities: clearly, allowing a policy to cause manslaughter is intuitively unacceptable.
As Al Gore reminded us, in his recent excellent TED talk, oil companies are currently subsidised by the governments of the world to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per year. When will they they instead be called to account for their crimes against humanity?
You can watch Gore’s talk here. Spread it round. It’s well worth the 25 minutes.
About the messages you got advertising Threads, Notes and Chats on the Substack App….
I’m not sure how all that stuff works in practice. I think the idea is that if you want to interactively share comments on posts to a wider audience than just me, that’s the place to do it. Feel free to give it a try. I don’t think it will break anything.
While the predicted impact on children and the aged is extremely disconcerting how can you (or your author of the prediction) put the entire blame on the producers of fossil fuels when the whole economy depends on that source of energy?? China and India are opening 10 plus NEW mines each year. Even in New Zealand just look at the 8 lanes totally full with cars and trucks morning and night burning the product you want the oil producers to simply close off supply. What about the Governments being responsible for the children and elderly dying from temperature rise due to fossil fuel burning?? That temperature rise is a serious problem but not in a trillion years will the countries (including NZ) will ever stop producing that energy knowing the certainty of the chaos that would cause. You have to do better than just simply identify the problem. At the very least a complete set of implications that would result needs to be identified and the consequences on the Global citizenship accompanied with solutions from which to choose from. You will be surprised as to what people will choose. As a clue which reflects peoples “Concern for others” just observe the behaviour of people when the Covid Lock Down was put in place—-All the toilet paper was stripped from shop shelves along with all tinned food —- some will never go without no matter the consequences on others less able to compete