Trading convenience for human lives

It is true that as people begin to starve they will consume less. When they die they cease to consume altogether. But Stern's unit (a reduction in consumption) incorporates everything from the price of baked beans to the pain of bereavement. He then translates it into a “social cost of carbon”, measured in dollars. He has, in other words, put a price on human life. Worse still, he has ensured that this price is buried among the other prices: when you read that the “social cost of carbon” is $30 a tonne, you don't know - unless you unpick the whole report and its methodology and sources - how much of this is made of human lives.

The poorer people are, the cheaper their lives become. “For example,” Stern observes, “a very poor person may not be 'willing-to-pay' very much money to insure her life, whereas a rich person may be prepared to pay a very large sum. Can it be right to conclude that a poor person's life or health is therefore less valuable?”(7) Up to a point, yes: income, he says, should be one of the measures used to determine the social cost of carbon. Sir Nicholas was by no means the first to use such a formula. What was new was the unthinking enthusiasm with which his approach was greeted.

Stern's methodology has a disastrous consequence, unintended but surely obvious. His report shows that the dollar losses of failing to prevent a high degree of global warming outweigh the dollar savings arising from not taking action. It therefore makes economic sense to try to stop runaway climate change. But what if the result had been different? What if he had discovered that the profits to be made from burning more fossil fuels exceeded the social cost of carbon? We would then find that it makes economic sense to kill people.

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Consider the implications. On one side of the equation human life is being costed. On the other side, the value of delays to passengers is being priced, and it rises according to their wealth. Convenience is weighed against human life. The richer you are, the more lives your time is worth.

~ from An Exchange of Souls by George Monbiot ~