The 1,000-ton rule is Richard Parncutt’s suggestion for reframing the political message of the severity of global warming in particularly vivid human rights terms; it says that someone in the next century or two is prematurely killed every time humanity burns 1,000 tons of carbon.
I came across this paper while (in the spirit of Nuno’s suggestion) trying to figure out the ‘moral cost of climate change’ so to speak, driven by my annoyance that e.g. climate charity BOTECs reported $ per ton of CO2-eq averted in contrast to (say) the $ per death averted bottomline of GHW charities, since I don’t intrinsically care to avert CO2-equivalent emissions the way I do about averting deaths. (To be clear, I understand why the BOTECs do so and would do the same for work; this is for my own moral clarity.)
Parncutt’s derivation is simple: burning a trillion tons of carbon will cause ~2 °C of anthropogenic global warming, which will in turn cause 1 − 10 million premature deaths a year “for a period of several centuries”, something like this:
Modelling the rise in global mean surface temperature (GMST) as a function of carbon burned is already very hard; Parncutt doesn’t try to model premature deaths as a function of GMST but just makes a semi-quantitative order-of-magnitude estimation anchored extensively at the lower and upper ends to various catastrophic outcomes discussed in the literature on climate change, and assumes a lognormal distribution around a billion future deaths with a 10x range for worst-vs-best case scenario, which over time looks ‘very approximately’ like this:
The lower line represents deaths due to poverty without AGW. As the negative effect of AGW overtakes the positive effect of development, the death rate will increase, as shown by the upper line. In a more accurate model, the upper line might be concave upward on the left (exponential increase) and concave downward on the right (approaching a peak).
Based on the 1,000-ton rule, Pearce & Parncutt suggest the ‘millilife’ as “an accessible unit of measure for carbon footprints that is easy to understand and may be used to set energy policy to help accelerate carbon emissions reductions”. A millilife is a measure of intrinsic value defined to be 1/1000th of a human life; the 1,000-ton rule says that burning a ton of fossil carbon destroys a millilife. This lets Pearce & Parncutt make statements like these, at an individual level (all emphasis mine):
For example in Canada, which has some of the highest yearly carbon emissions per capita in the world at around 19 tons of CO2 or 5 tons of carbon per person, roughly 5 millilives are sacrificed by an average person each year. As the average Canadian lives to be about 80, he/she sacrifices about 400 millilives (0.4 human lives) in the course of his/her lifetime, in exchange for a carbon-intensive lifestyle
and
… an average future AGW-victim in a developing country will lose half of a lifetime or 30–40 life-years, as most victims will be either very young or very old. If the average climate victim loses 35 life-years (or 13,000 life-days), a millilife corresponds to 13 days.
Stated in another way: if a person is responsible for burning a ton of fossil carbon by flying to another continent and back, they effectively steal 13 days from the life of a future poor person living in the developing world. If the traveler takes 1000 such trips, they are responsible for the death of a future person.
and for “large-scale energy decisions”:
… the Adani Carmichael coalmine in Queensland, Australia, is currently under construction and producing coal since 2021. Despite massive protests over several years, it will be the biggest coalmine ever. Its reserves are up to 4 billion tons of coal, or 3 billion tons of carbon. If all of that was burned, the 1000-tonne rule says it would cause the premature deaths of 3 million future people. Given that the 1000-tonne rule is only an order-of-magnitude estimate, the number of caused deaths will lie between one million and 10 million. … Many of those who will die are already living as children in the Global South; burning Carmichael coal will cause their future deaths with a high probability. Should energy policy allow that to occur?
Pearce & Parncutt then use the 1,000-ton rule and millilife to make various suggestions. Here’s one:
Under what circumstances might a government ban or outlaw an entire corporation or industry, considered a legal entity or person—for example, the entire global coal industry? …
Ideally, a company should not cause any human deaths at all. If it does, those deaths should be justifiable in terms of improvements to the quality of life of others. For example, a company that builds a bridge might reasonably risk a future collapse that would kill 100 people with a probability of 1%. In that case, the company accepts that on average one future person will be killed as a result of the construction of the bridge. It may be reasonable to claim that the improved quality of life for thousands or millions of people who cross the bridge justifies the human cost.
Fossil fuel industries are causing far more future deaths than that, raising the question of the point at which the law should intervene. As a first step to solving this problem, it has been proposed a rather high threshold (generous toward the corporations) is appropriate. A company does not have the right to exist if its net impact on human life (e.g., a company/industry might make products that save lives like medicine but do kill a small fraction of users) is such that it kills more people than it employs. This requirement for a company’s existence is thus:
Number of future premature deaths/year < Number of full-time employees (1)
This criterion can be applied to an entire industry. If the industry kills more people than it employs, then primary rights (life) are being sacrificed for secondary rights (jobs or profits) and the net benefit to humankind is negative. If an industry is not able to satisfy Equation (1), it should be closed down by the government.
… the coal industry kills people by polluting the air that they breathe. … In the U.S., about 52,000 human lives are sacrificed per year to provide coal-fired electricity. … In the U.S., coal employed 51,795 people in 2016. Since the number of people killed is greater than the number employed, the U.S. coal industry does not satisfy Equation (1) and should be closed down. This conservative conclusion does not include future deaths caused by climate change due to burning coal.
One more energy policy suggestion (there’s many more in the paper):
Applying asset forfeiture laws (also referred to as asset seizure) to manslaughter caused by AGW. These laws enable the confiscation of assets by the U.S. government as a type of criminal-justice financial obligation that applies to the proceeds of crime. Essentially, if criminals profit from the results of unlawful activity, the profits (assets) are confiscated by the authorities.
This is not only a law in the U.S. but is in place throughout the world. For example, in Canada, Part XII.2 of the Criminal Code, provides a national forfeiture régime for property arising from the commission of indictable offenses. Similarly, ‘Son of Sam laws’ could also apply to carbon emissions. In the U.S., Son of Sam laws refer to laws designed to keep criminals from profiting from the notoriety of their crimes and often authorize the state to seize funds earned by the criminals to be used to compensate the criminal’s victims.
If that logic of asset forfeiture is applied to fossil fuel company investors who profit from carbon-emission-related manslaughter, taxes could be set on fossil fuel profits, dividends, and capital gains at 100% and the resultant tax revenue could be used for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects or to help shield the poor from the most severe impacts of AGW. …
Such AGW-focused asset forfeiture laws would also apply to fossil fuel company executive compensation packages. Energy policy research has shown that it is possible to align energy executive compensation with careful calibration of incentive equations such that the harmful effects of emissions can be prevented through incentive pay. Executives who were compensated without these safeguards in place would have their incomes seized the same as other criminals benefiting materially from manslaughter.
I have no (defensible) opinion on these suggestions; curious to know what anyone thinks.
The 1,000-ton rule is Richard Parncutt’s suggestion for reframing the political message of the severity of global warming in particularly vivid human rights terms; it says that someone in the next century or two is prematurely killed every time humanity burns 1,000 tons of carbon.
I came across this paper while (in the spirit of Nuno’s suggestion) trying to figure out the ‘moral cost of climate change’ so to speak, driven by my annoyance that e.g. climate charity BOTECs reported $ per ton of CO2-eq averted in contrast to (say) the $ per death averted bottomline of GHW charities, since I don’t intrinsically care to avert CO2-equivalent emissions the way I do about averting deaths. (To be clear, I understand why the BOTECs do so and would do the same for work; this is for my own moral clarity.)
Parncutt’s derivation is simple: burning a trillion tons of carbon will cause ~2 °C of anthropogenic global warming, which will in turn cause 1 − 10 million premature deaths a year “for a period of several centuries”, something like this:
Modelling the rise in global mean surface temperature (GMST) as a function of carbon burned is already very hard; Parncutt doesn’t try to model premature deaths as a function of GMST but just makes a semi-quantitative order-of-magnitude estimation anchored extensively at the lower and upper ends to various catastrophic outcomes discussed in the literature on climate change, and assumes a lognormal distribution around a billion future deaths with a 10x range for worst-vs-best case scenario, which over time looks ‘very approximately’ like this:Based on the 1,000-ton rule, Pearce & Parncutt suggest the ‘millilife’ as “an accessible unit of measure for carbon footprints that is easy to understand and may be used to set energy policy to help accelerate carbon emissions reductions”. A millilife is a measure of intrinsic value defined to be 1/1000th of a human life; the 1,000-ton rule says that burning a ton of fossil carbon destroys a millilife. This lets Pearce & Parncutt make statements like these, at an individual level (all emphasis mine):
and
and for “large-scale energy decisions”:
Pearce & Parncutt then use the 1,000-ton rule and millilife to make various suggestions. Here’s one:
One more energy policy suggestion (there’s many more in the paper):
I have no (defensible) opinion on these suggestions; curious to know what anyone thinks.