What is the cost of our
carbon footprint — not just in dollars
but in lives?
اضافة اعلان
According to a paper published Thursday, it is soberingly high,
perhaps high enough to help shift attitudes about how much we should spend on
fighting
climate change.
The new paper, published in the journal Nature Communications,
draws on multiple areas of research to find out how many future lives will be
lost as a result of rising temperatures if humanity keeps producing
greenhousegas emissions at high rates — and how many lives could be saved by cutting
those emissions.
Most of the deaths will occur in regions that tend to be hotter
and poorer than the United States. These areas are typically less responsible
for global emissions but more heavily affected by the resulting climate
disasters.
R. Daniel Bressler, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University,
calculated that adding about one-quarter of the output of a coal-fired power
plant, or roughly 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, to the atmosphere on
top of 2020 levels for just one year will cause 226 deaths globally.
By comparison, the lifetime emissions beyond 2020 levels of a
handful of Americans (3.5, to be precise) will result in one additional
heat-related death in this century.
Bressler also contrasted the effects of people in nations with
big carbon footprints with those in smaller ones. While the carbon emissions
generated by fewer than four Americans would kill one person, it would require
the combined carbon dioxide emissions of 146.2 Nigerians for the same result.
The worldwide average to cause that single death is 12.8 people.
The new paper builds on the work of William Nordhaus, a Nobel
laureate who first determined what is known as the “social cost of carbon” — an
economic tool for measuring the climate-related damage to the planet caused by
each extra ton of carbon emissions. The concept has been a crucial part of
policy debates over the expense of fighting climate change, because it is used
to calculate the cost-benefit analysis required when agencies propose
environmental rules. The higher the social cost of carbon, the easier it is to
justify the costs of action.
The current version of the Nordhaus model — the “Dynamic
Integrated Climate-Economy,” or DICE — puts the social cost of carbon at about
$37 per metric ton. The Obama administration’s estimates put the figure at $50
a ton, but the Trump administration cut the estimate to as little as $1. The
Biden administration is working on its own social cost of carbon, expected
early next year; a preliminary figure released in February roughly matched the
Obama administration’s.
In his paper, Bressler incorporated recent public health
research that estimates the number of excess deaths attributable to rising
temperatures into the latest version of the DICE model. The resulting extended
model produced a startlingly high figure for the social cost of carbon: $258
per metric ton.
He coined a term for the relationship between the increased
emissions and excess heat deaths: the “mortality cost of carbon.”
Heat waves, which have been made more frequent and more potent
by climate change, have been linked to illness and death, with profound effects
in less affluent countries. The recent off-the-charts temperatures in the
Pacific Northwest and Canada have already been linked to hundreds of deaths.
Others have tried to put numbers on the mortality associated
with climate change and the added costs that it entails, most notably the
Climate Impact Lab at the University of Chicago. Maureen Cropper, senior fellow
at Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan environmental research organization
in Washington, suggested that Bressler’s $258 estimate appeared to be too high,
in part because of the way that the paper looks at how people around the world
view the value of their own lives. She added that “although one may disagree
with some of the author’s assumptions, it is important for researchers to
continue the effort.”
Bressler acknowledged that there were areas of uncertainty in
the paper, including those built into some public health research investigating
excess deaths caused by heat. He also relied solely on heat-related deaths
without adding other climate-related causes of death, including floods, crop
failures and civil unrest. The result is that the actual number of deaths could
be smaller, or greater.
“Based on the current literature,” he said, “this is the best
estimate.”
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