SALON "Negligent manslaughter": Study finds climate change could kill 1 billion mostly poor people
"A future person is killed every time 1000 tons of fossil carbon are burned," the authors report
By MATTHEW ROZSA
Staff WriterPUBLISHED AUGUST 30, 2023 12:25AM (EDT)
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energies
Quantifying Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Human Deaths to Guide Energy Policy
Joshua M. Pearce 1,*
and Richard Parncutt 2
1
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Ivey School of Business,
Western University, London, ON N6G 0N1, Canada
University of Graz, 8010 Graz, Austria; richard.parncutt@uni-graz.at
Academic Editor: Adel Ben Youssef Received: 26 July 2023 Revised: 9 August 2023
Accepted: 17 August 2023 Published: 19 August 2023
Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
Abstract:
When attempting to quantify future harms caused by carbon emissions and to set appro- priate energy policies, it has been argued that the most important metric is the number of human deaths caused by climate change. Several studies have attempted to overcome the uncertainties associated with such forecasting.
approaches to estimating future human death tolls from climate change relevant at any scale or location are compared and synthesized... consistent with the “1000-ton rule,” according to which a future person is killed every time 1000 tons of fossil carbon are burned (order-of-magnitude estimate).
If warming reaches or exceeds 2◦ C this century, mainly richer humans will be responsible for killing roughly 1 billion mainly poorer humans through anthropogenic global warming, which is comparable with involuntary or negligent manslaughter.
On this basis, relatively aggressive energy policies are summarized that would enable immediate and substantive decreases in carbon emissions.
The limitations to such calculations are outlined and future work is recommended to accelerate the decarbonization of the global economy while minimizing the number of sacrificed human lives.
