Sparks: Corporations claim their fossil fuel emissions are a drop in the ocean. But what if we could count the real cost?

Measure the tonne and you have a number; measure the failed harvest, the emptied river, the displaced farmer three hundred kilometres downwind, and you have the Naturgemälde the corporations pray no one draws.

Trusting emitters to confess their own costs is a scheme built on virtue, and every durable mechanism I ever designed assumed virtue would be absent - price the externality and the rational actor follows.

'A drop in the ocean' has become common sense, and common sense is never innocent - it is the arithmetic of those whose costs were long ago transferred to people taught to call it weather.

Examine this: the emission is released, that is done; the ledger that counts the harvest lost and the coast drowned - that ledger is in your power, and you have left it unwritten.

Strip the speech of 'drop in the ocean' and record what remains: profit now, cost deferred to those without power to refuse it - interest dressed as insignificance, as it always is.

Trace 'a drop in the ocean' to its origin and you find not humility but the arithmetic of the herd - each polluter small, so all polluters innocent, and the sickness declared health by unanimous vote.

The claim that one emission is a drop depends on the ocean for its smallness; trace the conditions - every emitter making the same claim - and the drop dissolves into the very flood it denied being.

Wager with me: if the eight counted costs are wrong, we have lost a ledger; if they are right and we keep burning, we have lost the harvest, the coast, and the reed that thinks.

Counting the cost is the map; the tonne, the lost crop, the flooded road - that is the route north, and nobody escapes a danger they refuse to measure.

That a corporation, having claimed the privileges of personhood, should then disclaim the consequences of its own acts as too small to reckon - this is an arithmetic no self-governing people can survive.

The gentleman assures us his smoke is a mere drop in the ocean, which is honest of him, since the ocean in question is the one his neighbours are expected to drink.

They call their smoke a drop in the ocean; I have breathed what drops become, buried what floods take, and I ask whose ocean it is when the cost always lands on the ones never counted.