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2018 - The farcical update on this is that the US economist behind this value of life scandal
has just received the Nobel Prize for not solving the problem of 'climate economics' (stet).

It is worth keeping in mind that growth optimists are just doing God's good work.

Between 1992 & 1995 & at the request of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC],  GCI contributed analysis highlighting the worsening asymmetry, or Expansion & Divergence (E&D) to IPCC 2nd Assessment Report (SAR).

It was a blunt critique of the 'Global Cost Benefit Analysis of Climate Change' (GCBA) introduced by Economists William Nordhaus of Yale University, David Pearce of CSERGE (UEA UCL) and his students Richard Tol and Samuel Fankhauser.

The guts of the argument was in GCI's evidence here

GCI called GCBA,"The Economics of Genocide". It caused caused international outrage because: -

• 'Mortality-valuation' was proportional to income (15 dead Chinese people equalled 1 dead English person) &
• it was too expensive to solve the problem
• and anyway if it got a bit hot, 'we' had air-conditioning and shopping-malls.
  
  Nordhaus was removed from lead-authorship in the SAR. However, he understood the importance of the 'numeraire' (the unit of measument) and insisted it could all be done in spotted-owl equivalents if it was preferred to 'the $' as he wrote at the time.
  
  
  Spotted Owls and the 'Equivalence Principle'
  
  
  
  
  This became a monumental struggle over 'the numeraire' & 'the value of life'
  
  
  
  
  The 'Equivalence Principle' applies to face the existential threat of climate change
  
  Equivalence & equal rights are the numeraire of the solution - the Well Tempered Climate Accord and CBAT
  
  The 'Equivalence-Principles' first articulated by Galileo, were developed by Kepler and Newton, leading all the way to Einstein and General Relativity. NASA paid tribute to Galileo in this beautiful and inspirational movie.
  
  This equivalence needs be recognised in the numeraire for measuring sustainability globally; for practical/ethical purposes, each human being is equivalent.
  
  Inequivalence revealed the Paradox of Inequivalence that led straight back to the economics of genocide.
  
  Unwittingly David Pearce et al revealed the 'Inequivalence Paradox'
  
  Introducing the $-vote into their 'Global Cost-Benefit-Analysis' (GCBA) of Climate Change, they calculated that in the human mortality caused by climate change, the 'value of the statistical lives lost' meant that 15 dead poor people equalled 1 dead rich one.
  
  The 'inequivalence-paradox' is that globally poor people are much more 'carbon-efficient' than rich people as is clear from the chart.
  
  GCBA was based on false assumptions trying to justify the growth ideology where people do not have an equal right to be here in the first place; people's rights are deemed proportional to their income and not to their impact. Accelerating entropy is what the $-vote comes to.
  
  Notwithstanding that, in the twisted logic of the Pearce-Nordhaus global cost/benefit analysis (Pearce died in 2005; Nordhaus just won the Nobel Prize for failing to solve climate change), people still do not have an equal right to survive (even though spotted owls do) as people (& spotted owls) are dying as result of the climate change they did not cause.

To this day, the question that haunts all our 'economic-confusion' is simply the equivalence principle: -
"if one spotted owl equals one spotted owl, why doesn’t one human equal one human?"

As wealth & carbon-impact are so closely correlated at low efficiency values globally and this is fundamental to rational global analysis & precautionary/prevention-based global decision-taking for UNFCCC-Compliance.

Assuming equal rights to the global commons leads to the Well-Tempered Climate Accord This is not 'long-term' or 'short-term' but 'full-term' (i.e. its shorter that we think), which means C&C is the numeraire underpinning the solution to the climate-dilemma.

There really was a huge outcry about this whole affair

However, GCI's critique was upheld by the IPCC in SAR and
many other economist have begun to take a much more enlightened view.

However, as we contemplate the growing and now existential threat of climate change, this discriminatory and dysfunctional 'economic approach' still defaults to dominance at this time, as 100's of millions of people have already become deceased as a result of climate damages and we are still causing the problem faster than we are responding to avoid it.



It is officially now a 'climate-emergency'.

If we are serious about addressing it, this is what it now comes to: -
Rapid rates of global contraction & convergence