These allocation exercises show the scale of worsening maldistribution of resources globally since the war. The trend was increasingly inequitable and unsustainable. OECD countries - although they do not yet admit to it officially - are now on the defensive about this state of affairs. Their principal tactic has been to blame developing countries for future impacts, rather than accept responsibility for the past and present impacts of the industrial countries. No-one is advocating hair-shirt politics. However, it is unrealistic for the industrial countries to promote the future as an extension of the present unless this includes a willingness to become accountable over the massive structural advantage which they have developed globally whilst running up this global environmental debt on everyone's account.
Overall, this is not a complicated debate. The resources in question are global common property and vital to survival. The well-being of all people now and into the future depend on the integrity of these resources being maintained. There is a simple choice to be made; - either we accept that everyone has an equal right to be here and to share the benefits of these resources or we reject that everyone has equal rights in this. This is choosing for equity and survival or for increasing inequity and loss of sustainability. It is that simple.
As a matter of principle and of prudence, GCI accepts and affirms that everyone has an equal right to be here. We base our modelling and analysis on that acceptance, and present our analysis as an affirmation of that right. We note that rights to income should be accompanied by responsibilities for its impacts, which effectively rewards efficiencies. Contrarily, the Global Cost/Benefit Analysts (now in the IPCC Working Group Three (WG3)) do no affirm the equal right to be here. They appear not even to accept it either. Certainly - at least by default - they are rejecting this right, as the analysis presented by them so far, suggests that rights increase proportional to income. Advised by these very people, the World Bank has openly promoted the idea that the right to emit carbon dioxide should be proportional to income for example. The policy measures for the mitigation of emissions proposed by many of these economists preparing material for WG3 are based on this formula of "rights-by-income". Mitigating emissions is presented by these analysts as a cost, and the "damages-avoided" by mitigating emissions are presented by them as the benefit.
As intended, all this sounds professional and innocent. But it is conceptually skewed, factually inaccurate and politically devious. In reality it is a velvet glove for the iron fisted insistence on business-as-usual. At worst it is the economics of genocide. Faced with this fist, we should recognise how its grip is exerted; - the exercise fundamentally depends on the analysts converting all the costs and all the benefits associated with climate changes to cash values. One immediate example of this is the need to give cash values to the human lives which are going to be lost (a "damage cost"). In their analysis, if the overall damage costs are calculated as high (and higher than the cost of mitigating emissions), this makes the costs of mitigation bearable, and wins the case for mitigating the emissions. If, on the other hand, the damage costs are low (and below the costs of mitigating emissions), the case has been made for business-as-usual, and the damage costs (including the loss of life) become bearable. Clearly the damage cost (cash valuation) that is put on a human life in this context is crucial.
The key question which now also arises is this: - are all human lives equally valuable or not? Moreover, should economists employed by the nations responsible for causing the problems of climate change, have the job of valuing the lives which are going to be lost? And even more to the point, should they value the lives of the people who are not responsible for creating the climate changes, as less valuable than the lives of those responsible? Surely we all have a fundamentally equal right to be here: surely each person is equally valuable in this fundamental way? So far the global cost/benefit analysts say no, this is not the case.
Take for example the (UK-government-funded) Centre for the Social and Economic Research of the Global Environment (C-SERGE) based in the UK. David Pearce is one of its directors and he is also the IPCC's convening lead author on "Social Costs". C-SERGE has already published a valuation of the lives to be lost. In a recent research paper it stated that the cash value of a "statistical life" in the EC or the USA is $1,500,000 per head, but in "poor" countries such as China, it is only $150,000. [The disparate figures are derived from peoples' ability-to-pay for damage insurance]. In global cost/benefit analysis, this means therefore these economists discard a real Chinese life ten times more easily than a real life in the EC or the USA. This an example of how you keep the damage costs below the emissions mitigation costs. You just quietly devalue the lives of the people who aren't in the EC and the USA and hope nobody questions "business-as-usual" with genocide written into the bottom-line. This approach is now formally embedded in the text of IPCC's Second Assessment Report (SAR) in the section prepared by the Western economists dominant in Working Group Three (WG3) on "Economic and other Cross-Cutting Issues". This approach is one of the great scandals of our times. It has now been dubbed "the Economics of Genocide" in some of the world's major media and an international protest campaign over this has been growing since it was launched by GCI in June 1994. (See overleaf)
The Godfather of these economists, William Nordhaus, has stated that "the economic perspective in global cost/benefit analysis attempts to condense the complex set of impacts over, space, time and sectors by summarising them in a scalar measure of value . . . the fact that the scalar is in monetary units is not really crucial: it could be in spotted-owl equivalents." For GCI this is evidence of confusion in the reasoning of these economists at this fundamental level. On the one hand they say that monetary units are not crucial [spotted-owl equivalents will do just as well as money] and on the other hand they say that monetary units are crucial [peoples varied ability-to-pay - in money - determines their rights and their relative worth].
The question that haunts their confusion is this: why if one spotted owl equals one spotted owl, doesn't one human equal one human? In the twisted logic of global cost/benefit analysis, it turns out that people do not have an equal right to survive even though spotted owls do. This is another way of saying that people do not have an equal right to be here in the first place; your rights are proportional to your income. In terms of achieving sustainable development globally, this is nonsense. For practical as well as ethical purposes, each human being is - and must be recognised as - the fundamentally equal unit for measuring sustainability and this is the irreducible level of decision-taking.
At sub-global levels of 'economic' debate, this kind of wrangle is of a familiar vintage. It is the substance of the traditional left/right arguments where those without the money make "equity-for-equity's sake" (principle) arguments, whilst those with the money make "efficiency-for efficiency's sake" (practicality) arguments. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this approach, equity and efficiency are seen as being traded off against each other between the left and the right. Much of the history of our political economy is a story about this false dichotomy.
At a global level this kind of economic discrimination is simply suicidal. It is discriminatory on a greater scale than before. But it is also dangerous and different in a manner which is without precedent. First there is nowhere else to go. There isn't a global carpet under which the waste, the pollution and the "poor" can be swept and then ignored. The causes and the influence of these things in the system needs to fundamentally inform the analysis under-taken. This is true because large numbers of people are not going to accept being made the discards of a sub-system which values itself 10:1 over everyone else, let alone a system which hasn't demonstrated sustainable consumption patterns since industrialisation began.
The "Conference of the Parties to the Climate Convention" cannot succeed in its task if these issues are not faced head on. The 'Economics of Genocide' must be rejected now and for always.
Return to "defending the value of life"
Return to GCI home page