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As government documents show, Sir Nicholas Stern accidentally launched a trade in human lives.
This is a column about how good intentions can run amok. It tells the story of how an honourable, intelligent man set out to avert environmental disaster and ended up accidentally promoting the economics of the slave trade. It shows how human lives can be priced and exchanged for goods and services.
The story begins in a village a few miles to the west of London. The British government proposes to flatten Sipson in order to build a third runway for Heathrow airport. The public consultation is about to end, but no one doubts that the government has made up its mind.
Its central case is that the economic benefits of building a third runway outweigh the economic costs. The extra capacity, the government says, will deliver a net benefit to the UK economy of £5bn(1). The climate change the runway will cause costs £4.8bn(2), but this is dwarfed by the profits to be made.
There is plenty of evidence suggesting that the government's numbers are wrong. A new analysis by the environmental consultancy CE Delft shows that the official figures overestimate both the number of jobs the runway will generate and the value brought to the United Kingdom by extra business passengers(3). In an excoriating article in the Guardian last week, Professor Paul Ekins demonstrated that the government has rigged the cost of carbon(4). (Delightfully, the web address for the consultation document ends completecondoc.pdf.) But while the runway's opponents don't like the results, most people seem to agree that weighing up economic costs and benefits is a sensible method of making this decision. The problem, they argue, is that the wrong figures have been used.
When Sir Nicholas Stern published his study of the economics of climate change, environmentalists (myself included) lined up to applaud him: he had given us the answer we wanted. He showed that stopping runaway climate change would cost less than failing to prevent it. But because his report was so long, few people bothered to find out how he had achieved this result. It took me a while, but by the time I reached the end I was horrified.
On one side of Stern's equation are the costs of investing in new technologies (or not investing in old ones) to prevent greenhouse gas emissions from rising above a certain level. These can reasonably be priced in pounds or dollars. On the other side are the costs of climate change. Some of them - such as higher food prices and the expense of building sea walls - are financial, but most take the form of costs which are generally seen as incalculable: the destruction of ecosystems and human communities; the displacement of people from their homes; disease and death. All these costs are thrown together by Sir Nicholas with a formula he calls "equivalent to a reduction in consumption", to which he then attaches a price.
Stern explains that this "consumption" involves not just the consumption of goods we might buy from the supermarket, but also of "education, health and the environment."(5) He admits that this formula "raises profound difficulties", especially the "challenge of expressing health (including mortality) and environmental quality in terms of income"(6). But he uses it anyway, and discovers that the global disaster which would be unleashed by a 5-6° rise in temperature, and which is likely to involve widespread famine, is "equivalent to a reduction in consumption" of 5-20%.
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.
This is what the government has done. Its consultation paper boasts that "our approach is entirely consistent with the Stern Review"(8). It has translated his "social cost of carbon" into a "shadow price of carbon", which is currently valued, human lives and all, at £25 a tonne(9).
Against this is set the economic benefit of a new runway. Part of this benefit takes the form of shorter waiting times for passengers. The government claims that building a third runway will reduce delays, on average, by three minutes(10). This saving is costed at €38-49 per passenger per hour(11). The price is a function of the average net wages of travellers: the more you earn, the more the delays are deemed to cost you, even if you are on holiday.
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.
The people most likely to be killed by climate change do not live in this country. Most of them live in Africa and South Asia. Hardly any of the economic benefits of expanding Heathrow accrue to them. Yet the government has calculated the economic benefits to the United Kingdom, weighed them against the global costs of climate change and discovered that sacrificing foreigners - especially poor ones - is a sensible economic decision.
I can accept that a unit of measurement which allows us to compare the human costs of different spending decisions is a useful tool. What I cannot accept is that it should be scrambled up with the price of eggs and prefixed with a dollar sign. Human life is not a commodity. It cannot be traded against profits or exchanged for convenience. We have no right to decide that others should die to make us richer.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. The net benefits are estimated at between £4.4bn and £5.2bn: Department for Transport, November 2007. Adding Capacity at Heathrow Airport: Consultation Document, p74.
2. Department for Transport, November 2007. Adding Capacity at Heathrow Airport: Consultation Document, p125. http://www.dft.gov.uk/162259/165220/302152/completecondoc.pdf
3. Bart Boon et al, February 2008. The economics of Heathrow expansion: Final report. CE Delft. http://www.hacan.org.uk/resources/reports/4504.final.report.pdf
4. Paul Ekins, 13th February 2008. Path of least resistance. The Guardian.
5. Sir Nicholas Stern, October 2006. The Economics of Climate Change. HM Treasury, Part 1, page 28. http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics_climate_change/stern_review_report.cfm
6. ibid, Part 1, page 30.
7. ibid, Part 1, page 30-31.
8. Department for Transport, ibid, p10.
9. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, December 2007. The Social Cost Of Carbon And The Shadow Price Of Carbon: What They Are, And How To Use Them In Economic Appraisal In The UK. http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/research/carboncost/pdf/background.pdf
10. Department for Transport, November 2007. UK Air Passenger Demand and CO2 Forecasts, p128. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/aviation/environmentalissues/ukairdemandandco2forecasts/airpassdemandfullreport.pdf
11. Finding the figures on which the government based its benefit estimates was a struggle. The consultation document led me to the passenger demand forecast (see note 10), which in turn referenced this paper:
European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, 2005. Standard Inputs for EUROCONTROL Cost Benefit Analyses. http://www.eurocontrol.int/eatm/gallery/content/public/library/CBA-standard-values.pdf
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
36 Comments so far
Show AllNice post minitru. You have outlined sources of our problems elequently. Until our econimic standard is no longer GDP, we will continue to be led by the noses like sheep to slaughter by an economic machine that turns all life and resources into commodities for profit.
Unfortunately, just identifying the problem which has been done many times over (as indicated in the historical references in your post) is not enough. An alternative has to be presented, heard, responded to and ushered into existence. The alternative will not come from those who are in power. It will not come from a slow reform of current governmental and economic entities. It will only come from each and every one of us developing sustainable environments and economies at every level beginning with ourselves and extending to our communities our regions and forward.
The first step beyond our individual lives needs to be solid engagement with our neighbors and communities to start to build the policies and infrastructure that will enable self-sustaining communities; this means energy systems, local food systems, economic systems, education and yes even entertainment, culture and fun. We must develop core values of sharing and cooperation rather than individualism and competition.
We can make it happen and sooner than you think, but to place our hopes in political candidates to provide "reforms" is to build straw men and sand castles. It takes work not politics to achieve our goals.
You want to change the world? Go ahead, place your vote - then get off your asses and make the changes you want to see. Start organizations in your community, engage people you don't know. listen before you speak, but speak passionately. Start building partnerships within your communities. Take back your infrastructure. Create a cooperative venture. Invest in where you live, not in wall street. Support you local economies. Work for community owned and operated renewable energy systems. Develop local food systems with the farmers in your area. Give a damn!
Time is indeed running out. It's won't be Clinton, McCain or Obama who'll lead you to the promised land. It won't be your preferred religious entity who makes a first, second or final appearance. In the end it will be YOU. You are the leader who will make it happen and if you leave that task to someone else, you are the one who will be responsible for the future. We all die alone, but while we're alive, we should chose to do it together.
Isn't it clear that ABSOLUTELY NOTHING is going to be done to reduce carbon Dioxide emissions. Wail away but the numbers of cars on the road multiply every day, and trucks are needed to build the cities of modernity that everybody wants. The petroleum engine is the great miracle it always was, and everybody wants one!
Enjoy the sauna! Enjoy mild winters and summer storms! No principle of environmental balance can hold a flame to the desire for a middle class life. And that boosts CO2.
Then everbody also wants books and paper for their kids education, and furniture for their new middle class apartments, so kiss what's left of the rainforests good bye! Carbon sinks gone!
Minitru: you have expressed in such perfect terms, what I have been unable to do in "layman's terms", and I hope that it is understood and digested by many.
MINI TRU -- Your response is very well spoken," once "economic" behavior became separated from ethics and human values the total victory of the economic machine, which was supposed to run according to its own laws ("rule of the market" in modern parlance) was only a matter of time."
I just finished a long response of a similar nature, or another thread from today: Taking the Responsibility to Protect, by Desmond Tutu
Our cultural change and personal ones, come from within, or we risk literally ourselves and the Earth. It is foremost our perceptions that must change, to enable the rest.
Thank you for your expression of this.
Namaste … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … Mahatma Gandhi … … … … … … … … … …
« We must be the change we wish to see in the world »
« There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed »
« We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself » — ML King
David Grayling: "
... man has been killing his fellow creatures to enrich himself for the last ten thousand years and nothing is going to change anytime soon.Only through genetic engineering will the base human instincts of greed, lust and killing be modified. Sorry."
Human behaviour is NOT determined by genes, it is mainly the product of socialization, the code of ethics in a certain culture, social conditioning in the family, in school, in society in general, etc. Genes are not all-powerful, independent control units but part of a sophisticated information-network in the cell and the whole organism, which reacts to different environmental situations. Social experiences can alter gene-expression so this is not a one-way street of control and command.
The "Selfish Gene" is an absurd concept whose main purpose is to excuse the devastating consequences of an insane economic ideology which encourages greed and selfishness, even claims that selfish behaviour will be good for the whole of society. Greed is not the result of "genetic interests" but part of the "pathogenic nature of our present social character" to use the words of Erich Fromm in his masterpiese "To Have or to Be" .
His conclusion was, that the economic system needed to generate egotism, selfishness and greed in order to function (to ensure ever encreasing consumption and profit) and that this self-damaging behaviour would eventually create a sick society and destroy the environment. Fromm also pointed out that once "economic" behaviour became separated from ethics and human values the total victory of the economic machine, which was supposed to run according to its own laws ("rule of the market" in modern parlance) was only a matter of time.
But based on socio-anthropological findings, for him (and for me, too) man is an essentially moral and social being, which thrives on solidarity, compassion, love and shared emotions with other people, not material abundance or lust for power
To think that we are genetically inclined to cheat, lie, steal, or kill is the result of a disturbingly reductionist view of biology. Why has nature endowed us with a conscience? Why do we feel good when we help others, why are we capable of empathy and compassion - even for strangers and animals - when competition and selfishness are the ruling principle of nature? Why do people risk their lives to fight for justice? Why does Monbiot feel inclined to raise public awareness of corporate greed, political deception and environmental destruction in his writings?
The looming ecological catastrophe is NOT the result of unconstrained "genetic interests" but the consequence of the pathological pursuit of profit and power by TNC´s and unregulated "financial markets". The only problem is that most governments, too, have succumbed to neoliberal ideology, the rule of globalized markets and the idea that the value of human beings depends solely on their ability to increase GDP. The ugly truth is that humans, all forms of life, even soil and water HAVE BECOME COMMODITIES in this globalized market society. For economists, they have no intrinsic value, their price is determined by the market, by the law of supply and demand. The "labour market" is in reality a market for human beings, their economic "value" of course constantly falling, because downsizing,automation and outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries creates more and more "redundant" people...
The madness of economic theory can also be realized in the fact that nature is treated as "income" not as capital. To let economists calculate the "cost of climate change" is totally useless since they are incapable of understanding Einstein´s wise words: "Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted, counts....."
The intrinsic (and economic) value of functioning ecosystems is so great it can never be and need not be demonstrated in financial terms. Just a basic knowledge of biology and ecology is needed to realize that the totalitarian ideology our economic system is based on ("growth" as in cancer..)is incompatible with the "natural economy" on which our lives depend. The great irony is, that too much "freedom" is going to kill us in the end because in the market society it means freedom from responsibility for short-sighted, stupid and arrogant producing and consuming patterns that are destroying the equilibrium of the natural production system for short term profits. Long term ecological damage and the undermining of social cohesion, are simply not factored in so the "success" of market rule and unfettered capitalism is an illusion.....
To talk about taking effective measures to combat climate change (read global catastrophe) and at the same time build more airports, roads,etc. to generate even more destructive "growth" shows that these politicians are part of the problem,not the solution. Nothing can survive (for generations) on this planet without a self-limiting principle. Cancer cells seem to be very successful for some time but in the end they commit suicide by killing their host.....
Greenpeace had a slogan in the 1980ies...(adopted from native Americans / Indians: something like "Not Before the last river will be polluted, not before the last tree will be felled, the last fish will be gone, etc. will they realize that money cannot be eaten..."
The whole concept of individual liberty (read: selfishness) would have to be replaced with a profound sense of community, of responsibility for the future of the whole planet. Everything we do, what we buy, what we eat, etc. has ecological, economic and social repercussions, often thousands of miles away...
Luckylefty: yours was a good comparison, meat for the machine.
When I started work back in the mid seventies, we had personnel departments, where you could talk to people - person to person.
Over the last decade the personnel departments have given way to human resources (sometimes just resources)departments, and you only talk to these people when you start at the firm or when you leave(retire or sacked). Now, getting back to the word "resource", this would suggest that I am like petrol, oil or coal, and that I am simply to be used up in the course of the business, and then replaced when I serve no useful purpose.
I also know, that when Tony Blair and other cabinet ministers were questioned on the environment, and cheap air travel, they suggested that people would have to say goodbye to cheap flights and holidays, in order to save the planet. This of course, is aimed at the poorer members of society, who have one holiday a year, courtesy of a cheap flight. The politicians never tell us the "carbon" cost of their specially chartered flights, in nearly empty aircraft.
This just goes to show how rich and poor lives are valued on different scales.
Ouch! I continue to try so hard everyday to make some change to save my species while every night wondering if we're really worth saving. I Love a little documentary, I think I may have seen on PBS or Science or History channels entitled "Life after humans". Seems like a pretty good world.
"SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE" - yum,yum! maybe we could get ourselves out of this mess by valuing a human steak made with meat from rich people much higher than hamburger made from the poor. That way the rich would eat themselves into extinction and the poor could become vegetarians. I think I need a little more sleep!
Our perceived sanctity of human life is the source of the problem. We've been so busy making sure that WE survive that we have altered all of the normal balances in the world. What comes'round, goes 'round. Think we can fix this one? Think again.
This kind of debate is so typical of the modern corporatized world. Is it surprising to anybody how easily human lives are commoditized? With the kind of precedents already being set??
Greenethanthou: "How many people have died in Iraq per dollar of profit made?"
I calculate it would be easier and cheaper to shovel Iraqi civilians and US Marines directly into the furnace in my basement rather than bother with what the US govt is doing: sacrificing their lives to convert to oil for me to put in the furnace.
T. Boone Pickens makes $1.5 billion a year. The same as 10 million Africans. The same as 10 million Bolivians. Or we could go with Warren Buffet or Bill Gates, who make $6 billion a year... each. The same as 40 million Africans. The same as 40 million Bolivians. Or we could go with net worth, which would be the same as 400 million Africans... each.
So I guess according to Mr. Stern's 'scientific' calculations it takes 400 million deaths of those people to equal one death of one Warren Buffet. See how nice and 'scientific' Economics is? At that rate, America still has about 1,200 billion more people to kill before 9/11 is avenged. Tit for tat. Boy, America better speed it up.
To paraphrase Milton Friedman, money requires theft, wealth requires murder. To paraphrase Bush, money is stolen so wealth can kill.
The definition of a terrorist act seems to be something like the following: out of the blue terrorists kill people living peacefully in their own countries, for the terrorists' own twisted reasons and selfish gain. What does that make Mr. Stern? What does that make America and Britain?
Storm's coming.
And even those who are awake to hear its approach spend as much time bickering as preparing.
Shaping up to be an interesting century, now if I can just live long enough to really appreciate it.
-matti
That rationale of who is more worthy merely encourages, justifies the wealthy to keep squandering everyone's dwindling resources.
Hope you'll like mud cookies.
I fail to see how 1 additional runway in this world to meet increasing demand of passengers flying into or out of Heathrow will significantly impact global warming.
It sounds like if they do not build it, the passengers will need to fly into some other airport and then take a train or car, or even a smaller plane.
Also, last time I checked is Heathrow was on an Island. Island dwellers have the most to lose from global warming. Real estate in London might lose some of it's value if it is underwater.
The major theme of those global warming environmentalists and peak oil scare mongers (left meets right), is that there are too many people. It is not the per-capita increases in consumption and carbon utilization in the developed world that scares them, they are already lowering our standard of living, it is the developing world and 3rd world that have 80% of the population that scares them, since this is increasing, rapidly.
So we suppress them with arms shipments and civil wars, high oil prices, dependence on the USD and debt from the IMF/World Bank that forces them to adopt polices to keep them poor, free trade which keeps the developing world impoverished by destroying local industries who can not compete with multi-nationals, dependence on food with agri-business using WTO to force GMO seeds on them, etc.
Fascinating reading...
I normally like Monbiot but there are a couple of things here I do not agree with.
1) The applied economic twaddle really annoys me.
It is the same type of Bull shit that tries to say that private ownership of national assets and infrastructure can only be a good thing, even though we all know that such an arrangement leads to shifting of costs away from and siphoning of profits towards greedy (wannabe rich) bastards on boards and parasitic shareholders, leaving very little to maintain and run the business. i.e Sanctioned asset stripping..
Let us cut through the crap and state the bleeding obvious...
The cost of Extinction is incalculable.
2) This piece is particularly Human Centric.
We are but one species on this planet, which will go on long after it has shaken us off. The tragedy is that we have hastened our own demise and are taking many other species with us.
On the bright side, we may be a force for evolution, both our own and others.
The Monbiot conclusion has a historical reciprocal, revolution.
Thank you - Bill BRG February 19th, 2008 2:44 pm for the reminder about the Gulf Stream,
"The slowing down of the Atlantic Conveyor isn't mentioned. Imagine the increase of fuel used to heat the British Isles and potentially N. Europe?"
What with the destruction of our Constitution, the War, with Greenland turning Green, I had almost forgotten. Last time I looked, the conveyor had slowed by 30%. If I got it right, the last time Europe had a major slow-down of the Stream, they had a mini Ice Age. I think that was about 500 years ago. Not certain on the timing. If they lose even 80% of the flow, they all get very cold for a very long time.
Peace.
In a full costs in prices scenario, the Heathrow expansion would only be proposed with full accounting for the mitigation that Heathrow users must pay to the victims of climate change, very likely to be cost-prohibitive.
Arms with the ideal in a model such as full costs, progressives may analyze these proposals, quickly develop counter-proposals, and move to the next step when the capitalists reject the counter-proposals.
Full costs leave the capitalist no escape hatch. Full costs effectively cages the capitalist and puts him to work serving the society's better interests. This has been the intent of the society and the charter of the government all along.
An ancient pastime, weighing the cost of a human life but one never asked except by the richer man and never by the poorer nor by God.
Are the negative results of wealth being concentrated into the hands of a few ever calculated? What is the price of an Exxon stockholder who delays action on global warming which damages so much yet is done by so few? Lobbyists et al uber alles? And so forth.
Moreover where is the calculation of those many millions of very poor people who by dint of their own efforts invented a valuable new addition to humanity whether an invention or started a business which became a success? Do those poor people get counted when they were still young children and poor?
What is the cost of a poor man's life... is only asked by the rich man.
"Only through genetic engineering will the base human instincts of greed, lust and killing be modified."
Sorry, David Grayling, but I have to disagree with you. If you had written, "Only through genetic engineering will the base human instincts of greed, lust and killing be eliminated," I would agree with you. But if we believe that there's no way that we can modify or reduce the horrors that exist in the world caused by greed, lust and killing, than why should any of us bother to read any of the articles on this site? Why bother to vote? Why bother to get up in the morning? Why bother to do anything at all?
There are a hundred good reasons not to build another runway at Heathrow, and why Monbiot chose this bathetic approach probably has more to do with fatigue than any better reason. Sometimes you just get tired of making the same good arguments, when it never really matters...
No calculation about the long term cost of global warming is worth the microwatt of electricity it takes to display it on a monitor. There is no reasonable estimate, there is no ballpark estimate, there is no upper bound of the damage...
We can't predict the global effects of a methane mega-mega-mega-bubble bubbling out of Siberia, or a hundred other nightmare scenarios. Sir Nicholas Stern is just another pompous bullshitter bullshitting all of us into totally unpredictable catastrophes with his inane "economics of climate change."
All these university bureacrats are just a front for whatever the billion-pound developers want to do at Heathrow, and neither bathos nor sweet reason will ever stop them.
Stern - whose report will I think be regarded as infamous by the coming generations, actually fudged his arbitrary calculations of cost/benefit to get the pro-prevention result that his brief required.
Under his amoral doctrine of setting the cost of human life as a commodity to be traded off, he neglected to account for the growing impoverishment that Climate Destabilization will (and has already begun to) inflict.
Under the Stern doctrine, as the poor get poorer, their lives are worth less and less.
Given the looming impacts, that impoverishment is likely to be taken to extremes for very large numbers of people.
Meaning that, according to the Stern Doctrine, it would in fact be more profitable to take no action against Fossil Fuel dependence.
Stern is not only a genocidal bigot, he is also a fraud.
Regards,
Billhook
There is a key point here that it seems to me no one has made. The problem is not really that whil you can weigh benefits to the rich at Heathrow in economic terms, you can't thus weigh the costs of the risks to the poor who suffer from global warming and losing their London neighborhood. The problem is that the third question of cost-benefit analysis is, as usual missing: asking WHO benefits and WHo pays the cost. If it's not the same people, then the thing is unjust, even if the costs are light and the benefits large.
I must say I'm shocked that the report ecplicitly values vacationers' time by income, and the vlaue of lost lives also by income.
Jacob, you are wrong. Acknowledging a risk of 0.0001% in construction or transport is definitely not the same as the issue Monbiot raises. He outlines how human lives are valued and then a conscious decision is made to sacrifice them – with 100% certainty.
Jacob: Your logic isn't logical. People CHOOSE to ride a bus, be a pedestrian, or drive a car. We don't know before hand that the bus will hit a pedestrian or that we will have an accident. Sure, there is a statistical CHANCE that these things will happen, but there is no certainty. These are random accidents. It is not a choice to breath air, drink water, or need a habitable planet.
And, by the way, there may have been a cost/benefit analysis by the jokers that bid on the building of the bridge, but the worker(s) that dies knows going in that his job is a risky one. And that worker also relies on OSHA to enforce worker safety rules to increase his chance of survival on the job. But of course, greed will always triumph over worker safety. It's probably all part of that cost/benefit analysis I guess. Maybe if the cost were increased dramatically for taking human life, the benefits wouldn't look so good to these greedy monsters.
Every time a bridge is built, there's a certain likelihood that someone will die building it. Cost-benefit analysis involving human life necessarily figures into every large scale decision.
Human life is not a commodity. It cannot be traded against profits or exchanged for convenience.
But every time you ride a bus, there's a chance it will run down someone in the street. How many people who applaud Monbiot's silly article are willing to avoid anything as risky to human life as a bus?
For those few, the sky-clad Jains of India are an appropriate paradigm... naked, brooming all forms of life out of their way lest they crush something underfoot.
But bus-riders, automobile drives, and anyone else who uses any industrial product whatsoever, like indoor plumbing, should recognize Monbiot's article as just the sort of stupid bathos that discredits the real arguments against monstrosities like the new runway at Heathrow.
"We have no right to decide that others should die to make us richer," says Mr Monbiot.
This may come as a surprise to him but man has been killing his fellow creatures to enrich himself for the last ten thousand years and nothing is going to change anytime soon.
Only through genetic engineering will the base human instincts of greed, lust and killing be modified. Sorry.
www.dangerouscreation.com
The Dodo went extinct because it was trusting and didnt realize what a human really was. As Swift said: the most pernicious race of odious little vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl on the face of the earth.
Ostriches might stick their head in the sand but humans have it stuck in a different hole that is a real contortionist trick.
Not a new idea at all. Jonathon Swift proposed it in 1729. "A Modest Proposal" it was called. You can read it here--> http://www.online-literature.com/swift/947/
The problem in 1729 wasn't airport runways, it was an England overrun by orphans and understocked with food, and suffering a high crime rate and homeless rate as a result. Not to mention the unsightliness of starving, dirty, unruly children lolling about in the streets, making decent folk uncomfortable and inconvenienced. Swift proposed a very economical and expeditious solution to all these problems--eat the orphans.
One minor difference between Swift and Stern. Swift was being facetious. Stern is stark raving mad.
The new fangled jets can now fly upto 16hours without refuelling, so most of the people can get exactly halfway across the globe without stopping.
So all those trying to go somewhere without stopping at Heathrow will be able to do so just fine.
And they wont have to build that doggone runway.
The only measure of human life should be how many people will the miss the love of the deceased person.
That would make most of the greedy right wing Americans dirt cheap.......
In addition to the cost in lives, the quality of living, for most on the planet not good, will continue to deteriorate. And for what?
The slowing down of the Atlantic Conveyor isn't mentioned. Imagine the increase of fuel used to heat the British Isles and potentially N. Europe?
Let's change the official US birrd to a cross between a Dodo (flightless) and an ostrich (sticking head in sand).
Did I mention the Dodo's extinct?
Wow.
Reminds me of the book "Triage" by Leonard Lewin (which I highly recommend, BTW). Amazing what you can justify when people become nothing more than entries in a bookkeeping ledger. (Hey, didn't someone do something like that about 60 years ago...?)
How many people have died in Iraq per dollar of profit made? I don't know why all of a sudden he's shocked, shocked to find that in a capitalist system human life is a commodity, and a cheap one at that.
As far as I'm concerned, Lee Iococca tried to kill my Dad. The Ford Motor company made a cost/benefit analysis of the price of fixing the Pinto, and decided that it was cheaper to pay death benefits than to fix the car.
He no more knew who he was going to kill then the Tylenol killer of around the same time, but the corporate media treated the 7 deaths of the Tylenol killer as the most outrageous depravity possible, and the Pinto killer as a businessman, later lionized when he obtained tax dollars to keep Chrysler out of bankruptcy.
Luckily, no one rearended my Dad, and he's still alive today, but no thanks to corporate morality.
Monbiot is exactly right, which is why my economic framework is based directly on human well-being. The following is from my website (needsandlimits.org):
"ENL [the Economics of Needs and Limits] differs sharply from standard economics in its treatment of value and cost. Because standard thought is closely tied to capitalism and the business world, it defines these concepts in financial terms for most analytical purposes. ENL instead defines value and cost in terms of concrete well-being, measured by physical health, thus establishing the foundation for an economic logic that serves humankind."
Unfortunately, only a few people on the planet have thus far perceived the correctness of this approach. Occasionally a George Monbiot will pop up and offer an accurate insight, as in this article, but as a movement we have failed to grasp the nettle and build our own economic theory on this basis. The time has now surely arrived.
"Human life is not a commodity."
That, George, IS the problem. Richfilth and economists and Prime Ministers and Predisents (Bushism), and all the Overseers on Master's Plantation KNOW that we are NOTHING MORE than meat for their machine. I am merely surprised that Stern "valued" us so highly. Given that "cheap" ground beef is running at $1.76/lb in the 10lb chub at Food For Less in So. Calif (30% fat), I didn't expect we'd even get $2.25/lb, and of course a lot of us in America are more than 30% fat, aren't we. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I mean if you're in "survival" mode you want to eat the fat bunny don't you?
Life in the Abattoir before The Great Shattering. Answer: Eat the fat bunny. Besides, Easter's coming and they make those terrible eggs.
Peace.
A few analogies (call it a stream of consciousness) come to mind having read the above article. First, that a lawyer friend once referred to chess as war played by intellectuals. Second, an article that appeared in Harper's a few years back that made the rounds with an insurance appraiser whose job it was to quantify the value of a (lost) life. Third, last night on The History Channel a program--on the history of the joke--was aired. A British intellectual had all sorts of statistics in his search for the best joke. I link these items because economics, like chess, is a war based on intellectual assumptions and it always sees the poor as its chosen collateral damage. Second, leave it to the Brits to come up with some arcane formula that supposedly can measure something as abstract as the massive losses that will and are resulting from the business elite's decisions whether they involve direct warfare, or the capitalistic chess game that generally results in the same outcome: devastation for far too many. Until LIFE is held as sacred, until its diversity in human and biological expression is honored, this pyramid will continue where only those at the top can make a claim to the last rites of safety, while en masse the ship of the world sinks.