Is the carbon emitted by three Americans enough to kill one person?

The carbon emissions to the air of three and a half Americans would be high enough to kill another person by 2100, a recent study said.

Its author relied on the average pollution resulting from the lifestyle of an inhabitant of the United States.

The work published in

Thursday also assumed that an individual would die prematurely for every 4,434 tonnes of CO2 released.

By way of comparison, it would take 25 Brazilians or 146 Nigerians to shorten the life of another inhabitant of Earth.

Daniel Bressler, at the origin of the research, did not however specifically wish to point the finger at the Americans.

"People should not take the mortality caused by their emissions too personally," said the specialist, as quoted by

.

Study the human and social costs

The researcher from Columbia University in New York explained that these “emissions depend very much on the technology and the culture of the place where we live”.

Its work has also shown that a single coal-fired power plant could kill 904 people around the world by the end of the century.

Daniel Bressler's goal was to study the social cost of carbon and assess its human cost.

If all global greenhouse gas emissions stopped by 2050, 74 million lives would be saved in the 21st century.

Daniel Bressler nevertheless insisted that the figures put forward in his study were only estimates.

He warned that they could be "greatly underestimated".

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