When reading this book, one has the feeling of having landed in the horror version of a benefit calculation: “20 EU citizens will kill another person through air pollution in the course of their lives”; “Arithmetically” each consumer kills “0.1 people during his lifetime” due to poor working conditions; “modern man in the West is on track to kill more people through climate change than Germans through the Holocaust or World War II.” The sustainability economist Jakob Thomä is not afraid to write down such sentences. For that reason alone one would have every reason to put one’s book down in disgust. But the absurdity of his calculations makes evident what is otherwise a phrase in Sunday speeches: the human species has irreversibly grown together into a single civilization.
“Sometimes our life is like a bullet that was blown out of the barrel when we were born.” For 33-year-old Thomä, who has already launched various sustainability initiatives in the financial world, this is not a wild metaphor. According to his book, just by living the way we live, we will contribute to the premature deaths of at least half a billion people this century. He came up with this result when he was looking for a sustainability indicator “that didn’t need 300,000 data fields or pages of explanations of methods and indicators or pictures of cute pandas and trees”. He was looking for a number that, on the one hand, could coolly express what was, on the other hand, a brutal matter. With the “kill score” he found one. This draws on the most recent studies and data to roughly gauge how certain aspects of the Western way of life contribute to reductions in overall human lifespan.
Even those who buy on the Internet are already taking part in the war of all against all
For this purpose, the reader is led to a total of five “crime scenes”: “Climate change, waste and exhaust gases, work, anonymous consumption as well as war and conflict”. Despite all the abstract calculations, Thomä knows how to give clear examples of the course of events: A little boy in the Japanese city of Toyota, who collapsed in the classroom in July 2018 and finally died, owed his fate, like 1000 other deaths, to a heat wave whose occurrence has become extremely much more likely due to climate change. Or in the words of the author: “A sacrifice on the altar of our consumer society.” Because the amount of CO₂ that a German releases on average corresponds to a person who dies from climate-related heat or flooding.
But not only our greenhouse gases, our plastic consumption, our electronic waste, our causing overtime and our wars – “a bloody conflict in Mexico can only come about because we eat avocados” – are in the eyes of Thomäs murder weapons in the truest sense of the word. Even those who order online instead of going to the retailer around the corner are taking part in the secret war of everyone against everyone. After all, over the next few decades, “about every 20th death will be due to loneliness.”
Jakob Thomä: The Kill Score – On the trail of our ecological and social footprint. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2022. 304 pages, 25 euros.
(Photo: Klett-Cotta)
Although the author knows and repeatedly emphasizes how difficult it is to speak of responsibility or even guilt at this level of abstraction, he decided to organize his book in analogy to criminal proceedings. There are not only the crime scenes mentioned, but also a “trial” in which “accusation” and “defense” occur one after the other – and finally a “judgment”. Despite the numbers, some of which make you shudder, all of this also has an involuntary comedy about it.
Because a variable that somewhere and somehow statistically leads to a higher probability of death as a side effect of our actions in the aggregate has almost nothing to do with murder or manslaughter. At best, it is a skewed analogy that reminds us of the externalities of our current actions, at worst it is the excesses of a way of thinking for which human lives are just numbers among others. Much to the annoyance, the book allows for both interpretations.
As absurd as the method of calculation is at times, “Kill-Score” reveals what it means to live in a globalized world. Not only do we exchange goods worth trillions, we also jointly pay the price of burdening one another with problems. In other words, anyone who decides to dispose of their old television properly in this country cannot, in any relevant sense, “help it” that a 19-year-old boy in Ghana dies of cancer resulting from the incineration of electronic waste. And yet individual everyday decisions have long-distance effects of this kind due to the interlocking of world civilization.