What's a million deaths between friends?

A throw-away line about methane leaks that encapsulates an entire, messed-up worldview

I was reading this interesting (though paywalled) story about the oil industry’s nasty habit of venting methane from its operations into the atmosphere by Attracta Mooney and Jana Tauschinski in the Financial Times when this graf stopped me in my tracks.

Methane is the main contributor to the formation of ground-level ozone — a hazardous air pollutant responsible for the deaths of 1mn people from respiratory illnesses globally each year. But the real threat is to the climate. [emphasis added.]

Now hold it right there.

Wait just one minute.

You just finished telling me this pollutant kills a million people a year.

One. Million.

But somehow that’s not the real threat?

The role the methane is then expected to have in adding an infinitesimal fraction of a degree to global warming matters more to you than the million corpse pile?

Are you out of your goddamn minds?

Climate cult framing usually leave this kind of inhumanity nicely tucked between the lines. I was almost impressed with Mooney and Tauschinski for going ahead and putting it out in the open, luxuriating on Methane’s climate impact while showing no concern of any kind for the victims of ground-level ozone: a catastrophically blinkered worldview comes into focus here. They seem numb to the inhumanity of what they’re writing.

There’s also a grave tale here about what sells and what doesn’t in contemporary climate journalism. You can’t sell an editor at the FT (or anywhere else) on a piece about air pollution in the caucuses because, manifestly, nobody in your audience gives a shit if a million people in poor countries choke to death on pollution. If you want an editor’s ears to prick up, you have no choice but to pitch a story like this as a climate piece.

Because Mooney and Tauschinski don’t really mean that methane’s climate impact is more important than the million deaths it causes each year. What they actually mean is that the reason they expect you to care, the reason this is in the FT, the reason you’re reading it, is that methane is also a greenhouse gas.

Which, depressingly enough, is probably true.

And yet something is very, very wrong with an environmental movement that can just insouciantly shrug off a million deaths here and a million deaths there in throw-away lines while they fixate on “a real threat” as recondite as this. And something is absolutely rotten with a climate journalism establishment that can’t identify the million-death-a-year outrage as the urgent emergency and the rounding-error-on-a-radiative-forcing-calculation greenhouse impact as the “oh, and by the way, also” afterthought.