Just how much is a human life worth? According to one recent report by German economist Samuel Fankhauser, a person living in an industrialized country such as the United States is worth $1.5 million, a Russian $300,000, while an inhabitant of China or Africa is valued at $150,000, ten times less than the US citizen.

Throughout, his paper, Global Warming Damage Costs: Some Monetary Estimates, Fankhauser assigns the richer people in the North, together with their land, their wetlands, and their endangered plant and animal species, a value ten times that allocated to the poor in the South. Fankhauser claims that he is not ascribing moral worth to human life:

"This of course does not mean that the life of, say, a Chinese is worth less than that of an EC citizen. It merely reflects the willingness to pay for increased safety (a lower mortality risk) is higher in developed countries."

But his acceptance of "willingness to pay" as a criterion for political decision-making makes this distinction sophistical.

Fankhauser is by no means a lone economist making controversial calculations. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (the Climate Convention), signed at the 1992 UNCED "Earth Summit", includes a clause which states that precautionary measures should be taken in response to climate change&emdash;and that these measures should be cost effective. Fankhauser is one of seven economists co-authoring an assessment of the "social costs" of climate change which is intended to assist UN climate change negotiators in "allocating responsibilities" under the Climate Change Convention. Fankhauser's paper was commissioned by the UK government-financed Centre for Social and Economic Research of the Global Environment (C-SERGE), headed by "green economist" David Pearce, former environmental adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and convening lead author of the social costs assessment. The assessment is due for publication in the second half of 1995, but revised drafts are being circulated to governments for comment prior to a meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Climate Convention, which gathers for the first time in March 1995 in Berlin.

The Economics of Genocide

It is the attempt to determine whether or not mitigation measures are "cost-effective" that has generated the loudest outcry in the South, though not yet in the North.

Although Fankhauser's paper is the most controversial of the seven papers under review, all of them form part of a growing consensus within the world's richest countries to use cost-benefit analysis to minimize enforcement measures agreed to in the Climate Convention. All put forward the same basic argument: that income determines whether human, plant and animal lives have "value"&emdash;and "value" determines what action should be taken. This "rights by income" approach means that those countries with higher incomes will continue to determine what action, if any, will be taken to halt the effects of climate change, while the poorest countries will suffer disproportionate consequences. The economists who have embraced this cost-benefit approach acknowledge that, as a result of growing greenhouse gas emissions, there will be an increase, by some estimates, of tens of millions of deaths by the middle of next century, a growing tide of disease, hunger, dislocation and other hardships, particularly in poorer countries. But, they argue, these will cost less overall than curtailing our fossil fuel habits. Besides, they rationalize, just think how many hungry people could be fed with the money saved! Indeed, some economists, such as Yale economist William Nordhaus, go so far as to argue that the richer nations could profitably adapt to global warming. Such claims are now being used to add much-needed substance to the less-than-weighty arguments of the oil and coal industries which have been saying for quite some time now, "Let's wait and see".

Critics charge all authors, to varying degrees, with using a methodology that is deeply flawed to reach conclusions which are dangerously elitist. For example, Fankhauser calculates that 229,545 extra deaths will result from a global doubling of carbon dioxide levels within the next 25 to 50 years, an "insignificant" figure in comparison to the 10 million people that presently die of starvation every year. Yet his figure is an extrapolation of data generated by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)&emdash;data which applies only to the US and tends to regard phenomena like heatinduced deaths and hurricane casualties as the major kinds of mortality caused by climate change. Climate-related deaths due to crop failure and starvation&emdash;by far the single largest anticipated cause of death in the Third World&emdash;are not included in EPA data. Neither Fankhauser nor any of the other economic studies determining the social costs of climate change consider this likely loss of human life in the Third World.

Yet extrapolation from present data suggests that in developing countries, there might be a total additional mortality of between 135 million and 900 million people if levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere double, as anticipated, by the year 2030. Some scientists argue that an increasing scarcity of freshwater due to increasing temperatures could catapult the number of the dead due to climate change into the billions. For example, according to the results of a study published in Nature in January 1994, people in tropical and subtropical countries are likely to face more starvation and malnutrition than ever before in a warmer climate, despite the best efforts of farmers to counter the effects of rising temperatures on their harvests.

The economists' logic is thus highly selective. Aubrey Meyer, coordinator of the London-based Global Commons Institute, concludes:

"The global cost-benefit analysis now being prepared by these economists is certainly deluded, but also sinister on a scale without precedent. It is the economics of genocide. "

International Concern

These economists' reports represent tlle latest move in an arcane and highly technical power struggle in which the interests of the oil, gas, coal and automobile industries, and of Northern countries, are pitted against those of the rest of the world. The battle revolves around the bitter irony that while the US and other Northern countries top the list of leading greenhouse gas emitters, it is the Southern countries &emdash;whose citizens contribute less than 30 percent of all greenhouse gases&emdash;which are predicted to suffer the most serious consequences.

Scientific concern about these consequences began to emerge as public policy with the publication of the first report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), under the sponsorship of the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, in January 1990. That report&emdash;written after a survey of the international scientific literature&emdash;stated, unequivocally, that human-induced changes in the global climate had begun. To avert possibly catastrophic changes on a global scale and to stabilize the rapidly-escalating concentrations of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere, the IPCC advised an immediate reduction in carbon dioxide output of between 60 and 80 percent. Without this cut, it predicted that mean surface temperature would rise by 1 .5°C to 4.5°C within the next century, ushering in unprecedented changes in the biosphere. (A comparable shift in temperature over a much longer time-span brought on the last Ice Age 18,000 years ago.)

There was, however, an element of uncertainty in the IPCC report: because climate change involved so many unpredictable and interactive factors&emdash;such as the impact of a volcanic eruption on cloud cover, or the interaction between methane given off by cattle and the carbon-absorbing grasses they feed on&emdash;scientific accuracy in determining when or how climate change would occur was, to all intents and purposes, impossible. Nevertheless, recent data confirm the report's view that climate change has already started:

• The eight hottest years on record have occurred since1980;
• The number of forest fires in the 1980s, many of whichwere linked to higher temperatures, was greater than in any other decade of the century;
• Coral reefs are dying as ocean temperatures rise.

Significantly, insurance claims for natural disasters linked to the weather have jumped recently, driving several major companies out of business.

Nevertheless, the oil, coal, chemical and auto manufacturing industries seem to hold stronger sway over most Northern governments, including the US Administration, than does the IPCC. For example, one year after President Bill Clinton signed the climate change declaration on behalf of the United States (President Bush had earlier refused to sign), the administration admitted that the US was not going to be able to meet even the levels it had set for itself&emdash;reduc-

ing emissions of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by the year 2000 &emdash;a reduction far smaller than that recommended by the IPCC. Instead, it asked industry to continue emissions reductions voluntarily.

Meanwhile, according to Greenpeace, US power companies are proposing to increase power plant capacity by 20 per cent over the next 20 years, adding over 160,000 megawatts, 85 per cent of which will come from fossil fuels&emdash;a clear message to the Clinton Administration that industry will ignore both national and international pleas for voluntary action to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Countering Science with Economics

The implications of the first IPCC report for the future of fossil-fuel based industrial development in the North were extremely serious. Within a matter of weeks industry had begun to marshal its response. Although a few maverick scientists rapidly gained a reputation on the lecture circuit by asserting that the greenhouse effect was a myth, most of those supporting a "business as usual" approach argued for "adaptation" to climatic conditions which they admitted might be changing.

William Nordhaus, professor of economics at Yale University, was the first to try to supplant scientific concern with economic scepticism. In February 1990, a month after the publication of the IPCC report, he announced to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that no economic data existed to support immediate action on climate change:

"Those who argue for stronger measures to slow greenhouse warming have reached their conclusion without any discernible analysis of the costs and benefits of climatic change or control strategies. Indeed, as of early 1990, there exist no reasonably complete studies comparing the costs and benefits of different approaches to the greenhouse effect."

Over the last four years, Nordhaus and a number of other neoclassical economists, such as Pearce and Fankhauser, have taken centre stage in the debate, quoting statistics which they claim are harder and more "factual" than the climatologists' ones&emdash;and which more often than not suggest that it is cheaper to wait and adapt to climate change than it is to stop causing it.

Their views, predictably, have been adopted by the fossil fuel industry and now appear to be gaining influence at the UN level. Nordhaus has established himself as the most outspoken proponent of this so-called "adaptationist" camp. His claims that the economic effects of climate change on the US over the next 100 years will be "negligible" are quoted widely in the media:

"My best guess, surprise-free scenarios show that in 100 years, in high income countries, the impact of climate change will be negligible, in the aggregate. The winners will be happy; the losers will be miserable."

By "happy", Nordhaus has explained he means that the "winners" will have accumulated those things which have "human value"&emdash;things people pay for&emdash;"such as education, food, whether they ski or not, whether they camp or not." As for things which are largely external to the marketplace, like coral reefs and forests, these are without "human value" because, says Nordhaus, economists can "not impute value to what coral reefs feel."

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