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CO2 kills: Humanity's biggest problem

CO2 kills: Humanity's biggest problem

The right to life of a handful of influential climate deniers versus the right to life of billions of children in the global South. A human rights and climate activist sets the story straight

This is a draft (work in progress) and may contain errors. Last revised 2025

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Further information in German: link.

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The basic idea

Today's C02 ~emissions are causing future premature deaths. Burning very roughly 1000 tonnes of fossil carbon, or emitting 4000 tonnes of C02e, kills one future person. Every year, humanity is currently burning ten billion tonnes of fossil carbon, which is causing roughly ten million future premature deaths per year in connection with future global warming. Global warming of 2°C will probably cause roughly one billion premature deaths altogether over a period of 1-2 centuries; 3°C will probably cause 2 billion deaths.

From a human rights perspective, global warming is more serious than other global existential threats such as nuclear war or global AI-dictatorship. Global warming (and associated biodiversity loss) is already actually happening and is to some extent unstoppable, whereas other existential risks are still a matter of probability.

Relevant publications

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CO2 kills: Humanity's biggest problem

Abstract

In a 2012 blog with the outrageously provocative title "Death penalty for global warming deniers?" (note the question mark), I proposed limiting the death penalty to people who demonstrably cause a million deaths -- a move that would save all death-row inmates worldwide -- and pointed out that the most influential climate deniers might then become death-penalty candidates. Like Extinction Rebellion, founded five years later in the UK, my aim was to attract attention to the devastating future human consequences of global warming, probably the biggest problem of all time. I was determined to do that regardless of whether people would love me or hate me for it. Clearly, the survival of humanity was more important than my reputation. Given the enormity of the problem, I was also prepared to accept legal consequences in exchange for making progress toward global reductions of greenhouse-gas emissions and respect for human rights.

At that time, the average person had little idea how important global warming was. In fact, the predicted storms, heat waves, droughts, fires, and famines were already life-threatening for hundreds of millions or perhaps billions of people. The threat was comparable with that of nuclear war. When I talked to people back then about the threat -- even highly educated academics in different disciplines -- many looked at me blankly. Today, things have changed, but not much. Awareness has improved, but the risk is even greater. We still urgently need creative ways to wake people up -- ways to make it clear to people how important this problem is. For me that is the central issue in climate change communication: waking people up. That is what I was experimenting with in 2012, and like many others, I am still experimenting.

:{The public response far exceeded expectations. Deniers had a field day distorting and exaggerating my message. They were much better organized and funded than I could have known, having not yet read the brilliant 2010 book "Merchants of Doubt" by Naomi Oreske and Erik M. Conway. They pounced on a couple of carelessly formulated sentences in my text and created a scandal by presenting them out of context and ignoring my obvious intention.

Sensationalist media reports claimed I had "called for the death penalty for climate deniers" when in fact I had proposed limiting the death penalty in a way that would end it universally. The media were unsure whom to believe -- an academic with 100 international peer-reviewed publications, or professional deniers. Meanwhile, the exaggerations continued to accumulate. Apparently I wanted to kill people who disagreed with me, or so I was told.}:

Amidst the chaos, I deleted my text and apologized. But it was found in Google Cache and published elsewhere. My attempt to have that deleted failed. The original text is now linked to my German-language Wikipedia page. But in 2012 I had no idea what Google Cache was. I thought I could delete anything, and it would be gone. If I had known that "the internet never forgets", I would have left the offending text in the internet and merely edited it. The most serious accusations would then have disappeared. We live and learn.

Despite the shitstorm and public shaming, two important goals were achieved. First, many thousands of people thought for the first time about the deadly consequences of carbon emissions for untold millions of future people, and hence the urgent need to stop all carbon emissions as fast as possible, for that reason. Second, many realized the death penalty is never justified -- not even in the extreme cases I described -- or publicly proclaimed their total opposition to the death penalty. That was great progress, but it was accompanied by an even bigger failure. Over a decade later, influential climate deniers are still not being prosecuted for crimes against humanity (and arguably the worst crimes ever), although the global death toll in connection with global warming is gradually rising and the total long-term death toll due to global warming from current emissions is likely to exceed one billion.

My text was inspired by the aftermath of the Holocaust, history's worst ever crime. From the Holocaust, we learned that ordinary people are capable of horrendous acts -- both individually and collectively. We also learned that preventing tragedy is more important than regretting it afterwards. To prevent comparable crimes and catastrophes from happening in the future, we must be constantly alert, empathic, and courageous.

Meanwhile, the problem I addressed in 2012 is still the biggest problem of all time, and it is still being ignored. The International Criminal Court is still not trying the most influential climate deniers. The UN have still not decided to prevent a billion future premature human climate deaths by tackling the root cause of the problem, climate denial -- from that perspective, and with that degree of urgency. In the 1930s and 1940s, we waited until it was too late. Again, we are waiting. What for?

If you are reading this, I have a special request. Please help promote the right to life of young people worldwide. Become active in the global movement to promote climate-friendly government, business, and individual behavior. Support relevant organizations: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Greenpeace, 350.org, Fridays for Future, Climate Action Network, World Wildlife Fund for Nature, UNHCR, Scientists Warning, and many others.

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Organization of this page. The rest of this page is in two parts:

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CO2 kills: Humanity's biggest problem

Article draft

The intended message

In 2012, I wrote a blog entitled “Death penalty for global warming deniers?” (note the question mark, which some people seem to have missed, either accidentally or deliberately). The aim was to defend the right to life of hundreds of millions of future victims of global warming. That was obvious from that start, but many readers pretended it wasn't, and the text was widely misunderstood and misused. Some commentators -- usually climate deniers -- portrayed me as an evil killer. That may have been absurd, but I did indeed write the text in a deliberately ambiguous way. My intention was to wake people up by attracting attention to humanity's biggest and most suppressed problems. Along the way, some key points were not clearly explained. Here is a simpler, more direct account:

Climate mortality. Global warming will cause hundreds of millions of future premature deaths. More immediate causes will include heat stroke, the effect of heat on existing diseases, hunger caused by failed agriculture (e.g., due to droughts), floods, fires, wildfire smoke inhalation, conflict, and migration. If all human lives have the same inherent value, and that value is the foundation of our value system, this issue is the most important issue, ever.

Shared responsibility. Responsibility for future premature deaths from global warming is shared by many people in proportion to their fossil fuel consumption. But the sharing is very unequal. The most responsible are the most influential climate deniers -- those who cause or promote the most carbon emissions, and lie to justify their actions. The crime of climate denial is financially motivated: influential deniers often rake in fantastic amounts of money.

Cause and effect. A few of the most influential climate deniers could have indirectly caused a million future deaths. The chain of cause and effect comprises four points, connected by three causal links:

  1. Promoting fossil fuels and/or blocking climate action leads to:
  2. More greenhouse-gas emissions, which lead to:
  3. More anthropogenic climate change (changing seasons, shifting plant and animal geographic ranges, heatwaves, storms, droughts, floods, fires, melting glaciers, ocean heating and acidity, dying coral reefs, rising sea levels), which lead to:
  4. More premature human deaths from direct heat, starvation, smoke inhalation, conflict, migration and so on.

The three causal links between these four points are obvious and have been confirmed countless times and in countless ways, but the deniers are stubborn and continue to invent counterarguments.

Persistence of the death penalty. The death penalty is never justified — not even in the most extreme cases such as mass murder. But it still exists in many countries: thousands per year in China; hundreds in Iran and Saudi Arabia; tens in Egypt, Iraq, North Korea, Singapore, Somalia, Vietnam, and USA; and smaller numbers in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Gaza, India, Japan, South Sudan, and Yemen. Regardless of the severity of the crime, the death penalty is always wrong. But about half of all people in the world still believe that the death penalty is justified for the most serious crimes. Those people can usually explain what kinds of crimes "deserve" the death penalty, in their view. Those so-called capital crimes usually involve causing large numbers of human deaths -- which is what influential climate deniers are doing.

A thought experiment. In the face of persistent public support for the death penalty, a realistic strategy to end it completely worldwide might involve phasing it out in stages. In a first stage, how about limiting it to people who cause more than a certain number of deaths? For the purpose of my text, and to make my opposition to the death penalty absolutely clear, I chose a ridiculous large number of deaths: one million. If the death penalty was limited to people who cause more than a million deaths, all prisoners on death row in all countries would be saved, their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. At the same time, the most influential climate deniers could become death penalty candidates. That's how serious the crime of influential climate denial is -- and that is the point.

How to solve the biggest problem ever? For three decades, global climate negotations have essentially failed. The main reason is climate denial. A promising route is legal. We could save hundreds of millions of future human lives by trying the most influential deniers for crimes against humanity. But how could such a trial be run fairly? How could expert input from scientists be incorporated? How can we be sure that the deniers are lying? These questions are not easy, but I tried to answer them.

An empty threat. The death penalty never achieves anything and should never be carried out. But the threat of the death penalty (if applied to people who cause a million human deaths) might be an effective way to minimize climate denial worthwhile. Such a discussion is appropriate given the exceptional stubbornness of the deniers and the overriding importance of saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Global warming versus the death penalty. We "woke liberals" are horrified by the death penalty. But our feelings are not necessarily a good indicator of relative importance or urgency. If we look at the problem objectively, we see that it is more important to stop carbon emissions. Our basic assumption must be that every human life has the same inherent value. Far more lives are threatened by global warming than by the death penalty. In round figures, roughly a billion people will probably die prematurely from global warming (if limited to 2°C) over the coming century. By comparison, roughly 100,000 will die from the death penalty (1000 per year). Over the coming century, global warming will probably cause 10,000 times more deaths than the death penalty. For every case of the death penalty, 10,000 people will die prematurely in connection with global warming. It's only an order-of-magnitude estimate, but it suffices to make an important point. Every preventable death is equally shocking.

Please support Amnesty International. Stopping the death penalty is a very important goal. Everyone should be concerned about it. That's why I have been financially supporting Amnesty International every year for three decades. If you are not doing that, please consider it. Please also consider including Amnesty in your will. But we also need to remember that the death penalty is not the most important issue. From a human rights perspective, stopping carbon emissions is far more important. Amnesty is also concerned with global warming, which is infringing human rights in multiple ways.

Why make such comparisons? An approach of this kind is promising for several reasons. First, it wakes us up and gets us talking. Second, it clarifies the equal importance of every human life and the overriding importance of preventing premature deaths, regardless of the cause. That is a discussion we really should be having, and for so many reasons. If we are deeply shocked by the death penalty, we should be equally shocked by every future preventable death caused by global warming. Every single one, even when there are millions of them.

What happened

In 2012, I wrote a blog with a deliberately provocative title: “Death penalty for global warming deniers?” Many people read only the title (even missing the question mark). Others found out about the blog from sensationalized media reports and never read the original. When people mention the incident to me now, they sometimes act as if it was some kind of joke. It was not. I was talking about what probably was and still is the world's most important and most neglected or suppressed issue. Nothing could be more serious.

What I actually proposed was to limit the death penalty to people who cause a million deaths (or a very large number of deaths). The idea was reasonable: history suggests that the death penalty can only be sustainably ended in stages. One step at a time! Having explained that, I considered the implications. One was that a few of the most influential climate deniers might beome death penalty candidates.

The climate deniers of the world were unamused. Public exposure of their guilt was what they feared the most. They were also far more numerous and better organized than I had imagined. Many didn’t read beyond the heading of my text. They then quickly set about destroying my reputation. If you know about my text, it’s probably because deniers turned it into a scandal and alerted the media. The first news you heard about it could well have been something along the lines of "A very evil person has done a very evil thing".

In fact, I had written a text with the aim of defending the basic rights of millions or billions of future people. The text made some ethical comparisons and asked some legal questions. The title was a question. There was no clear conclusion. I did not "call for" anything, as many claimed. I have freedom of speech, like everyone else.

To my knowledge, the only person who suffered as a result was me. The deniers put me through hell with their distorted accusations. They did that to detract attention from their own guilt. Unlike me, they were in fact guilty. The world's most influential climate deniers were (and still are), in fact, indirectly causing thousands or in extreme cases millions of future deaths by promoting fossil fuels or blocking climate action.

For information about the staggering emissions of the rich, see literature by Oxfam. Given the important role of wealth, perhaps I should have been talking about rich climate deniers rather than influential ones. I chose the word influential because it includes more than wealth. Some newspaper columnists and (today) social media influencers are not especially rich, but they do manipulate the opinions of enormous numbers of people.

Meanwhile practically everyone -- politicians, journalists, academics, legal scholars, environmentalists, even activists -- are still looking the other way on this issue. Things have improved since 2012, but not much. The number of publications on climate mortality is steadily increasing, but they are not perceived to belong to mainstream climate science.

On the bright side, a few courageous NGOs and individuals have tried to prosecute the worst deniers. Here is the chain of thought that makes the worst deniers guilty:

  1. Global warming is causing millions of present and future human deaths (more).
  2. Influential deniers know that, having been repeatedly informed by leading experts for decades.
  3. But they are continuing to promote fossil fuels and block climate action by spreading climate misinformation and disinformation.
  4. They are therefore knowingly causing future human deaths.

We are all guilty, but to very different degrees. Take aviation for example. Every time we fly in an airplane, we steal a few weeks from the life of a future person. Just 4 tonnes CO2e causes 1/1000 of a future death according to the 1000-tonne rule, or 3 weeks out of 60 years. For every hour we spend on a plane in economy class, we steal a day from the life of a future person (more). The moral dilemma is extreme, and that's just one way in which we regularly burn large amounts of fossil carbon.

On 4 August 2025, AD Mitchell wrote the following in a Facebook chat:

If your mother is on life support and going to die in a month and I come in and pull the plug before the month is elapsed would you be ok with that? I find attempts to make individual actions more innocent than they are quite shocking. We are signing the death warrant for trillions of life forms a million whole species and among them billions of our own. This is a total house on fire emergency and folks are still chatting about it like we time and latitude to negotiate solutions that don’t discomfit those who are in fact most guilty of driving this disaster.

Mild forms of climate denial are still prevalent, even among academics. Back in 2012, even fully informed and aware people were acting as if the existential threat of global warming did not exist. Others understood the point of the blog but were reluctant to publicly defend it. Few found the courage to defend the right to life of the hundreds of millions or billions who will die prematurely as an indirect consequence of greenhouse gas emissions. Many were more afraid of being associated with someone who might possibly favor the death penalty in some cases -- which of course I do not, although apparently half the world's population still does.

Was it necessary to write that blog? Evidently it was, because it helped people understand what could be the world's biggest moral problem, ever. The problem is evidently difficult to deal with, given the small number of people that are directly talking about it, even today.

I may have been a bit naive, but I had little idea what might happen. I was not writing with an audience of climate deniers in mind. On the contrary, my imagined audience was filled with people who are concerned about global issues and want to alleviate mass death and suffering, wherever and whenever it occurs, and for whatever reason. My ideal readership realized how serious global warming is, and wanted to address the issue at the highest level.

Over a decade later, the issues I addressed have only become more important, but still almost no one is talking about them. That’s what this page is about: awareness raising about the most important ethical issues of the 21st century. Questions of life and death for hundreds of millions of people.

The moral status of life and death

The death penalty is never justified. It's barbaric. Revenge achieves nothing. Dangerous criminals can be jailed. If we want to stop people killing each other, we have to stop participating in the killing. That's why we liberal lefties are horrified by the death penalty. We know the reasons why it is always bad and never justified, and we throw up our arms in horror when anyone seriously suggests that there could be something good about it. Because truly nothing is good about it.

But we same people are driving our fossil cars, flying in our fossil planes, and heating and cooling our homes with fossil gas and electricity, knowing full well that today's emissions are causing untold millions of premature deaths in the future: deaths from heat stroke, hunger, exacerbation of existing diseases, conflict, migration, and lots of other stuff that we haven’t thought about yet. We could have thought about it, but we pushed it aside.

We also know that death is death. Death is not more pleasant if it is caused by hunger or disease, by comparison to the usual methods of capital punishment. The future deaths that we are causing with our emissions, from the subjective viewpoint of the victims, are every bit as bad as deaths caused deliberately by governments and legal systems. Moreover, the intrinsic value of a human life is always the same. Every preventable premature death is a tragedy, whether the death is due to the death penalty or global warming. (From the point of view of crime and criminal law, murder -- comparable with the death penalty -- is worse than manslaughter, which in turn is worse than neglect -- but that is a different issue.)

People may not want to know these things, but I am writing them anyway, because some things are more important than being liked. Like Bertrand Russell in his Unpopular Essays (1950), I am not trying to be popular. Instead, I want to defend the most basic rights of young and future people worldwide -- especially in the global South, where people are often more vulnerable to the effects of global warming, for a combination of ecological and economical reasons. For example, as global temperatures rise later this century, many millions will be forced to migrate out of vast areas, mainly in the tropics, because rising temperatures and humidity will have made those areas uninhabitable. The climate nichewill have shrunk. Where they will go, and what they will find when they get there -- who knows? Currently, there is no plan to save those people.

The intrinsic value of human lives

This page is about the right to life of every conscious human on the planet, including those many millions or billions who will die prematurely as a result of global warming caused by carbon emissions. It's about Thou shalt not kill: What that phrase means, and how we can stop people from killing each other in the modern world.

Every conscious human life has the same value. Therefore, a threat to a million lives is a million times bigger than a threat to one life. Our response should be a million times bigger. If it is not, we are not respecting the fundamental rights of every individual person. We are not living up to the standards that we have set for ourselves as moral beings.

The trouble is, our response to a million deaths is typically way less than a million times our response to one death. That is because we don't perceive the relationships that way. We are so shocked by the death of one person that it is hardly possible to be twice as shocked by the death of two people, let alone a million times as shocked. Similarly, the death of ten thousand people seems much less than ten times worse than the death of one thousand people. But here's the thing: our failure to respond appropriately to massive tragedies does not change the fact that every conscious human life has the same inherent value.

Our relationship with non-human animals is similarly distorted. We love our pet cats and dogs. At the same time, 900,000 cows and 200 million chickens are slaughtered for human food every day (more). I am not questioning that human lives should be regarded as more important than non-human lives (because we presumably have a kind of consciousness that they do not have). The problem is one of scale. The number of non-human animals we are killing every day is so enormous as to be beyond comprehension. Most people could easily cut down on meat in their diet, and in fact, the health of most people in rich countries would improve if we ate less meat. But most people seem incapable of perceiving a connection between animal suffering and their diet. We are somehow more shocked by one animal being killed (if we actually witness the killing) than a million (if it happens inside slaughterhouses that we have never seen).

Emotional numbing is a well-known psychological effect. We need to recognize that, and in addition realize that we cannot use it as an excuse. If our stated goal is to treat every individual person as equally important, we must actually do that, regardless of psychological limitations. Similarly, innate psychological tendencies toward racism and violence (including sexual violence) -- effects of evolution on human nature -- are no reason to condone such behaviors. Something is not necessarily good because it is natural (more).

My background

There is a personal story behind this. In 1998, I accepted the offer of a professorship at the University of Graz. Soon after arriving in Austria (having previously lived in the UK), I was shocked by a blatantly racist election campaign by the far right. How could that be possible in a country that was co-responsible for the Holocaust? For decades after the war, Austria had pretended to be innocent, but meanwhile most people had realized that was not true (more). Evidently, not all people had seen the light.

I was even more shocked when the far right joined the conservatives in a federal governing coalition that lasted from 2000-2005. That experience inspired me to get involved in anti-racist activism from the perspective of diverse academic disciplines. So I created a group called Universitäre Initiativen gegen Fremdenfeindlichkeit (uigf; university Initiatives against Xenophobia). The name was later changed to Forum for Applied Interculturality Research fAIR. In 2010 I organized a "Conference on Applied Interculturality Research" (cAIR) Members of fAIR and speakers at cAIR later contributed to the creation of Forschungsnetzwerk Heterogenität und Kohäsion (Research Network on Heterogeneity and Cohesion), a dynamic and diverse research network at the University of Graz in humanities and social sciences.

After 2010, my attention shifted to global political problems that were even worse than racism, although related to it. In response to growing inequality, I started a global wealth tax initiative and developed a proposal to combine unconditional basic income with flat income tax (BIFT). Having discovered Effective Altruism, I decided to limit my political activities to problems that from a human rights perspective seemed to be the world's biggest. Top of my list was premature deaths in connection with poverty (probably 18 million per year). The amount of suffering caused by poverty is enormous, and it could be avoided relatively easily by making the global economic system fairer (as advocated by attac). I became interested in specific reasons why people die prematurely in connection with poverty (e.g. 3 million children die of hunger each year) and the moral, political, and legal implications. You can read what I wrote in early 2012 about poverty here.

That led to an additional realization: Climate change would cause many millions of deaths by increasing the existing death toll in connection with poverty. From a moral standpoint, that is an even more serious problem than poverty without climate change, which is theoretically beyond the control of the rich countries if it is caused by the unique circumstances of those countries (failing economies or drought, for example). Things are more complex than that, of course, but it is at least possible for the rich countries to argue that they are not directly responsible for the poverty that exists in other countries. When large numbers of people die in a famine in a far-away country, we usually do not consider ourselves responsible, despite what we know about the history of colonialism.

Climate change was different. We in the rich countries were directly causing it, and doing so in full knowledge of the deadly consequences for untold millions of people. The solution was clear: emit less CO2. In 2012, countless people were already talking about practical ways of reducing emissions. The discussion had been going on for at least two decades. But people were being prevented from doing this existentially important work by influential climate deniers, who in turn were being promoted by think tanks, which in turn were financially supported by fossil fuel industries (as we later found out). The most efficient way to solve that problem would have been (and still is) to identify the most influential climate deniers and prosecute them. From a legal standpoint, that was also a realistic prospect, given the fatal consequences of influential climate denial for untold millions of people, and the ease with which those consequences can be demonstrated. Influential climate denial had become one of the worst crimes in all of human history.

These things may seem obvious now, but back in 2012 it was hard to find people who would openly agree. Even the kindest and smartest people looked the other way or changed the subject. The legal systems of the world, including the International Criminal Court, seemed to have no idea. They should have been prosecuting the biggest climate deniers for crimes against humanity -- but given the almost total lack of discussion, and the silence of the relevant academic journals on the fatal consequences of global warming, the failure to respond was no surprise.

Another option would have been to tap the wealth of the global rich with a globally coordinated wealth tax and use the proceeds to tackle global poverty. Adaptation to climate change costs money and eliminating poverty would seriously reduce the likely future death rate. But the world was very far away from taking such a proposal seriously.

Clearly, a shakeup was needed. Given my privileged position -- my freedom of speech, good education, and secure income -- I felt that the needs of other people were more important than my own. Having identified this problem and its possible solution, I was morally obliged to act, regardless of any personal consequences.

The climate-denial death-penalty scandal

In 2012, I published a proposal that, if agreed internationally, could have saved the lives of all prisoners awaiting execution on all death rows, everywhere. If we include secret executions in China, that's thousands of people, every year. At the same time, my proposal might have mitigated future anthropogenic global warming (AGW) to the extent that hundreds of millions of lives would be saved in the future.

My text created an international scandal. Vehement public objections came from the entire political spectrum, from far left to far right. My green friends were remarkably silent.

Several media published sensational headlines suggesting I had "called for" (in German: gefordert) the death penalty for climate deniers. In fact, I had not "called for" anything. My text was more like a philosophical discussion than a political manifesto. I had considered what might happen if the death penalty was limited to the worst imaginable crime, the crime of genocide. I expressed that crime quantitatively: the crime of causing one million human deaths. I did that on the assumption that every conscious human life has the same value. Therefore, the number of caused deaths is an important factor. Of course, genocide can involve much smaller or larger numbers of deaths, but one million corresponds to our usual understanding of genocide as an order of magnitude.

The threshold that I proposed for the death penalty (knowingly causing one million human deaths) was the highest threshold that anyone has ever proposed for any punishment. The high threshold reflected my more general belief that punishment should generally be a last resort after other strategies to prevent criminals from re-offending have failed. Connected to that is the idea that revenge is never a useful strategy. It’s better to think rationally about how best to protect society -- and especially its most vulnerable members -- from dangerous people.

The crime of genocide involves causing a very large number of human deaths and doing so deliberately, with awareness of the consequences. That is the worst crime for which one might reasonably expect a criminal court to conduct a trial. That makes genocide effectively the highest criminal bar in modern law, in practice. Personally, I don't think the death penalty is appropriate for any crime, but I also acknowledge that many legal scholars disagree. They see capital punishment as the only proportionate response to genocide. One can also argue that there is no proportionate response to a crime of that magnitude: the death penalty is both not enough and too much.

But it is possible to imagine a worse crime than genocide. Omnicide, a term coined by philosopher John Somerville, refers to the destruction of all life, or at least all human life. Today's nuclear weapons make it possible. In that case, civilization would be destroyed, and along with it our legal institutions. Therefore, no punishment would be possible. In any case, the perpetrator would probably already be dead; if not, she or he would certainly be lonely. My proposal was to limit the death penalty to the worst crime for which punishment is reasonably possible, which does not include omnicide. Given that only a handful of people are guilty of genocide (now, or at any other time in history), and given that even fewer are actually being tried, my proposal was tantamount to ending the death penalty universally.

When considering the consequences of my proposal, I realized that influential climate deniers were not alone in committing the worst possible crimes. The Catholic church's condom ban had contributed to the spread of AIDS, especially in the 1980s, which probably indirectly caused millions of AIDS deaths. The church was urged by medical and developmental organizations to abandon the condom ban, but their advice was ignored. If, in my fictive scenario, the death penalty was limited to people causing a million deaths, and if the pope (or any one of a series of popes) was primarily responsible for the condom ban in the sense that he could quickly and unilaterally have ended it, that raised an obvious further question about the death penalty. To my knowledge, not one of the media got that story right, although some came close. For further information, see "Media response" below and my separate statement about the condom ban.

My article considered the possibility of the death penalty for a highly influential climate denier on the assumption that her or his (probably his) activities had caused a million future deaths. The intention was to shock, and people were indeed shocked. They were shocked not only because the death penalty is always shocking, but also for two additional reasons:

In the midst of media exaggerations (driven in the background by climate deniers), I found myself surrounded by shocked but well-meaning people, many of them highly educated, who seemed more inclined to believe climate deniers than myself. People who had built their academic careers on their ability to distinguish good sources of information from poor ones suddenly seemed blind to conflicts of interest and incapable of following a simple argument.

My proposal

My proposal was to limit the death penalty to people who cause a million deaths. Such a proposal is only relevant for countries that still have the death penalty (it has nothing to do with Austria or Australia, for example) and it would be a step toward ending the death penalty universally. But I was not "calling for" this proposal to be implemented. Instead, I wanted to raise awareness by encouraging people to think about this idea, in a kind of armchair experiment.

As I explained at the start, my paper was about the anticipated death toll from global warming and how best to reduce or prevent it. One option (and it is still promising) is legal action against influential climate deniers, based on the causal relationship between their actions and the premature deaths of future people. Limiting the death penalty to people who cause a million deaths might turn a handful of highly influential climate deniers into death-penalty candidates. That's how serious climate denial is, and we should be taking it that seriously.

The way things are developing, 2°C of global warming will cause roughly a billion deaths in the long term (source). In my 2012 statement, I talked more conservatively about "hundreds of millions" of future deaths. Even using that more conservative estimate, it was likely that a few of the most persistent and influential climate deniers had already caused more than a million future deaths each. After all, 90 corporations cause 2/3 of all emissions (The Guardian, 20 November 2013).

From that viewpoint, the magnitude of the crime of influential, long-term climate denial was and is unprecedented. The legal principle of proportionality suggests that the perpetrators should face the worst available punishment. In my world, that means imprisonment for the remainder of the perpetrator's life. It does not imply the death penalty, and in my 2012 text I explained why the death penalty is never justified, using the usual arguments (see Amnesty International). But about half of the world's population still clings to the death penalty as a kind of last resort -- a belief that is associated with political conservatism, which in turn is linked to climate denial. Personally, I do not think the death penalty was justified for the worst Nazi criminals after the Nuremberg trials, despite the staggering enormity of their crimes, but I am relatively lonely with that opinion, and it is also important to consider historical context.

The question of whether the death penalty can ever be justified is of course a very important one. But the death penalty was not the main point of my text. It was a hook to attract attention. From a objective human-rights viewpoint, in which every human life has the same inherent value, questions about the death penalty are less important than we think. Ending the death penalty worldwide would save tens of thousands of lives, whereas getting global warming under control worldwide would save millions or even billions of lives.

Needless to say, the global climate denial community was not impressed by an article with the provocative title "Death penalty for climate deniers?". But I was merely trying to attract attention to an existentially important question. From a human rights viewpoint, that question was and is probably the most important question in the history of humanity. How can we best save a billion human lives that are threatened by global warming? A billion!

To attract attention to this problem, I had presented a logical argument or thought experiment, in the style of a philosopher. I could instead have left out the death penalty and merely argued that the most influential climate deniers should be identified and jailed. That is what the International Criminal Court should be working on -- and nothing could be more urgent. But if I had written that, no-one would have read my text.

A decade later, the magnitude of the crime of climate denial is still being wildly underestimated. The right to life of a billion children is still being trashed. I can still hardly write these things down, they are so shocking. We still don't have words to describe how bad things have become, which is one reason why most people are still in denial. That justifies using shock tactics in an attempt to wake people up before it's too late.

The most amazing thing

If there is one amazing thing about the "Death penalty for climate deniers?“ affair, it is this: Why were people so upset about the idea of the death penalty for someone who (in my thought experiment) causes a million deaths, but at the same time so unfazed about the prospect of a million people dying, their deaths having been caused by one climate denier? Why were people intuitively but unconsciously treating the life of a (rich white male?) denier as a million times more valuable than that of the average person? A million times!

Imagine this scenario. Person A gets hold of an assault rifle and starts killing a large number of people in a school or a church. Person B manages to kill that person before they kill even more innocents. Person B is celebrated as a hero. Now imagine an alternative scenario. Person A is in the process of indirectly killing a million future people by promoting fossil fuels. A million! Person B recommends that the courts consider a severe punishment, to stop the killing. The request is ignored. Person B is reviled and despised.

If people had taken my 2012 text seriously and supported my call for legal proceedings against the worst climate deniers, millions of future lives could have been saved by now. But my text was not taken seriously. On the contrary, well-informed and well-meaning people went out of their way to denigrate it. That ensured that the necessary action was not taken, which indirectly contributed to the future death toll.

The number of future deaths we are causing with our emissions is truly very large. About half a million people are dying prematurely every year as a result of global warming, according to estimates from the past few years by Global Humanitarian Forum, DARA, Lancet, and WHO. But none of those estimates considers all the ways in which global warming kills. None carefully and systematically considers climate-sensitive disease, humid heat, hunger, air pollution, conflict, migration, extreme weather, and geophysical disasters -- leaving out nothing. Expressed as an order-of-magnitude estimate, the true figure is about one million per year, and it will probably rise to several million by 2100. The global warming caused by emissions of the past few and next few decades (assuming a medium emissions scenario, see IPCC) will cause roughly one billion premature deaths over a period of two centuries (roughly, 2000-2200; compare my article on this topic).

Today, we are still deeply in denial about the mega-fatal consequences of our dishonesty and greed. For every day that we refuse to talk openly about this problem, we miss opportunities to save enormous numbers of innocent lives. We have a choice: we can either face the truth courageously or pretend it doesn’t exist. But it seems that most of us are too weak, self-absorbed, or (dare I say it) dishonest to defend the right to life of a billion children. That is not intended as a value judgment (although of course it is); it is intended as an objective statement, based on available facts.

Over a decade after my scandalous 2012 text, little has changed. If anything, the situation is worse. Humanity is inching ever closer to the threat of massive irreversible global climate change. It is still normal and profitable to trade massive amounts of fossil fuels while lying about the consequences. New forms and strategies of denial have emerged, as the rate at which people die prematurely as result of global warming steadily increases.

Still not one influential denier has faced a charge of mass manslaughter or climate genocide in any national or international court. But it's never too late for the judiciaries and public prosecutors of the world to wake up and start protecting the public interest. They should be trying and convicting the real criminals and not, for example, non-violent climate activists.

Next century, after global warming has decimated human populations worldwide, the survivors will find my 2012 text and think to themselves: Yes, the death penalty for influential climate deniers would have been a good thing, way back then. Why didn't they listen to Parncutt? I will then rise from my grave and remind them to re-read the part of my text where I explained that the death penalty never achieves anything. The enormous amount of death and suffering that global warming will have brought will have been preventable by jailing the most influential deniers. It's high time the International Criminal Court and comparable national and international legal institutions started taking that seriously.

My motivation

It was clear in 2012, and it is still clear today, that hundreds of millions of people will die in the future from AGW. Possibly, billions. It was also clear, and remains so, that influential climate deniers are indirectly causing those future deaths by promoting fossil fuels and blocking climate action.

As if that was not shocking enough, almost no-one in the world was talking about this connection. A group of people was (and still is) causing hundreds of millions of future deaths by spreading misinformation. People were (and still are) talking about the misinformation, but no-one was mentioning that the misinformation was causing enormous numbers of human deaths. That the deniers were causing the future premature deaths of enormous numbers of future people.

How does one respond to such an urgent situation? I decided on a new strategy: to speak the language of the deniers, many of whom support the death penalty (along with a shopping list of other conservative desiderata such as no abortion, low taxes, market deregulation and so on). I would do that with the obvious intention of defending the right to life of countless millions of people. As a last resort in a desperate situation, and given the country-by-country correlation between fossil fuels and the death penalty (both being prominent in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, USA, Japan, Nigeria), I would threaten the influential deniers with death (not from me, but from their governments -- and only if found guilty of causing a million deaths, which is a very tall order) unless they changed their evil ways. As a threat, the idea made perfect sense, and the text repeatedly made it clear that it was only a threat. What else could it be?

Which is worse: global warming or the death penalty?...

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GL 6 26

[### CO2 kills: Humanity's biggest problem - Richard Parncutt parncutt.org

https://www.parncutt.org › ...](https://www.parncutt.org/dp2.html)

... professor called for death penalty for the Pope"). In fact I had discussed ... The GW deniers are simply of the opinion that the GW scientists are wrong.Read more

[### Austrian Prof: Deniers should be jailed & sentenced to death Climate Depot

https://www.climatedepot.com › 2012/12/23 › austrian-p...](https://www.climatedepot.com/2012/12/23/austrian-prof-deniers-should-be-jailed-sentenced-to-death-the-death-penalty-would-have-been-justified-in-terms-of-the-enormous-numbers-of-saved-future-lives-parncuttunigrazat/)

Dec 23, 2012 — “Even mass murderers [like Breivik] should not be executed, in my opinion.” “GW deniers fall into a completely different category from Behring ...Read more

[### Suppressing free speech

PhillyBurbs

https://www.phillyburbs.com › your-voice › 2015/10/09](https://www.phillyburbs.com/story/opinion/columns/your-voice/2015/10/09/suppressing-free-speech/17799498007/)

... have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.” Professor Richard Parncutt has called for the execution of prominent “GW deniers.

[### global warming deniers should be sentenced to death

JoNova

https://joannenova.com.au › 2012/12 › death-threats-any...](https://joannenova.com.au/2012/12/death-threats-anyone-austrian-prof-global-warming-deniers-should-be-sentenced-to-death/)

Dec 25, 2012 — For this reason I propose that the death penalty is appropriate for influential GW deniers. Here's how the deadly reasoning goes. How does he ...Read more

[### Authoritarian Roots of the Green New Deal - IER The Institute for Energy Research

https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org › authoritaria...](https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/climate-change/authoritarian-roots-of-the-green-new-deal/)

Apr 26, 2019 — Professor Richard Parncutt has called for the execution of prominent “GW deniers.” Climate Progress Editor Joe Romm called for deniers to be ...Read more

[### Prof. Richard Parncutt: Death Penalty for Global Warming ...

Tallbloke's Talkshop

https://tallbloke.wordpress.com › 2012/12/24 › prof-ric...](https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/prof-richard-parncutt-death-penalty-for-global-warming-deniers/)

Dec 24, 2012 — In this article I am going to suggest that the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for influential GW deniers. But before coming to this ...Read more

[### Progressive Professor Demands Death Penalty for Global ...

FrontPage Magazine

https://www.frontpagemag.com › progressive-professor...](https://www.frontpagemag.com/progressive-professor-demands-death-penalty-global-daniel-greenfield/)

In this article I am going to suggest that the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for influential GW deniers. But before coming to this surprising ...Read more

[### Beyond bizarre: University of Graz music professor calls for ...

Watts Up With That?

https://wattsupwiththat.com › Climate ugliness](https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/23/beyond-bizarre-university-of-graz-music-professor-calls-for-skeptic-death-sentences/)

Dec 23, 2012 — “Even mass murderers [like Breivik] should not be executed, in my opinion.” “GW deniers fall into a completely different category from Behring ...Read more

[### Kill the sceptics

Herald Sun

https://www.heraldsun.com.au › Blogs › Andrew Bolt](https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/kill-the-sceptics/news-story/fcbd16e2b77b5a9d71adfe36a9b7f76f)

Dec 25, 2012 — Similarly, the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for GW deniers who are so influential that one million future deaths can with high ...Read more

[### Professor says execute Pope Benedict

WND

https://www.wnd.com › 2012/12 › professor-says-exec...](https://www.wnd.com/2012/12/professor-says-execute-pope-benedict/)

Dec 27, 2012 — Parncutt wrote, "GW deniers fall into a completely different category from Behring Breivik. They are already causing the deaths of hundreds of ...Read more

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