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The world’s top corporations have caused $28 trillion in damages related to the climate crisis, a new study seeking to help attribute climate costs to individual polluters finds.
In a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature last week, Dartmouth University researchers find that the global economy would be $28 trillion richer if extreme heat caused by climate emissions from the top 111 carbon majors had never happened. This is nearly the equivalent value of a year’s worth of all goods and services created in the U.S., as The Associated Press points out.
Ten top fossil fuel companies, including entities like Chevron, ExxonMobil and Saudi Aramco, are responsible for half of those losses, the study finds.
The study authors say that their goal is to provide a scientific linkage between individual companies and financial losses due to their emissions, in hopes of bolstering efforts to hold polluters accountable for the climate crisis amid a growing wave of climate lawsuits and as more states and lawmakers pursue “polluter pays” laws.
“Our framework can provide robust emissions-based attributions of climate damages at the corporate scale. This should help courts better evaluate liability claims for the losses and disruptions resulting from human-caused climate change,” said a study author, Justin Mankin, a professor of geography for Dartmouth.
To date, there have been hundreds of lawsuits filed in attempts to hold corporations and trade associations accountable for climate damages and other issues like deceptive advertising and greenwashing.
However, many lawsuits and other accountability initiatives have been stopped or hampered by the inability to tie companies to their specific impacts. Though it is well-established that fossil fuel companies bear large responsibility for the climate crisis, there is a lack of research putting an exact figure on damages they’ve caused, Mankin points out. Fossil fuel companies have used a lack of such direct linkages as a way to argue that plaintiffs in these lawsuits lack standing, the article says.
For instance, fossil fuel companies may ask, “Who’s to say that it’s my molecule of CO2 that’s contributed to these damages versus any other one?” Mankin told Euronews. The study, on the other hand, “lay[s] clear how the veil of plausible deniability doesn’t exist anymore scientifically. We can actually trace harms back to major emitters.”
Laying out these exact links has been “termed the Holy Grail of climate litigation,” the study says.
“Our findings demonstrate that it is in fact possible to compare the world as it is to a world absent individual emitters,” said the study’s first author, Christopher Callahan, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.
“The affluence of the Western economy has been based on fossil fuels, but just as a pharmaceutical company would not be absolved from the negative effects of a drug by the benefits of that drug, fossil fuel companies should not be excused for the damage they’ve caused by the prosperity their products have generated,” Callahan said.
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