In my last post I brought up an article I wrote two years ago about Canada’s burgeoning oil industry and a new report that calls it the most destructive project on the planet. Surprisingly, there’s more new information worth noting in regards to that old story.

Just days before my article was published in 2006, renowned British economist Sir Nicholas Stern released a groundbreaking report that showed it would be far cheaper to stop runaway climate change than to ignore it. Essentially, the Stern report was the proof environmentalists had long waited to hear from the political establishment. So, naturally I made note of it in my article. Unfortunately, in the near two years since–as Guardian reporter George Monbiot recently pointed out–Stern’s report has become a tool not of environmentalists who recognize the damage climate change will bestow particularly on developing regions of the world, but rather of Western capitalists who believe their lives to be more valuable.

This is mainly the fault of Stern himself because his conclusions on the cost of climate change are based on a formula called the “social costs of carbon” that by incorporating “everything from the price of baked beans to the pain of bereavement” essentially puts a price on human life.

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?” 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.

Monbiot’s then provides a current example where that is actually the case. The British government wants to build a new runway at Heathrow Airport and to argue its point economists have tried to prove that the economic benefits of new jobs, more business passengers, and less delays far outweighs the costs of more carbon emissions.

Its consultation paper boasts that “our approach is entirely consistent with the Stern Review”. 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…

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.

Ultimately, Monbiot’s real beef is not with the weighing of costs and benefits to the environment, but rather the inclusion of human beings in such an equation.

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.

If the Western world, by far the greatest contributors to climate change thus far, could ever realize this principle, we might have a chance of saving the world.