New science on climate harms could boost litigation
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A buzzy and important paper linking extreme heat's economic toll to specific companies could boost climate litigation — but also dives into questions of responsibility that science alone can't answer.
Why it matters: The peer-reviewed study in Nature comes as many states and local governments are suing oil majors for damages linked to climate change.
- And so far two states — New York and Vermont — have passed "climate superfund" laws to hold fossil fuel companies financially accountable.
Driving the news: The paper uses an "end-to-end attribution framework" for heat, but the authors see opportunities to apply the methods to other harms.
- It involves modeling emissions' contribution to warming and estimated economic losses it causes.
- It's then layered onto past emissions assigned to 111 large upstream fossil fuel producers using the third-party "carbon majors" database and isolates specific companies' roles.
What they found: Emissions from these firms caused $28 trillion in heat-related economic losses from 1991-2020.
- State-owned oil and gas giants Saudi Aramco and Gazprom have the largest individual totals.
- But investor-owned majors Exxon, Chevron and BP — who are targets of various U.S. lawsuits — combine for a cumulative estimated average of $5.34 trillion.
Friction point: "We argue that the scientific case for climate liability is closed, even if the future of these cases remains an open question," senior author Justin Mankin, an associate professor in Dartmouth's geography department, said in a statement.
The intrigue: The AP and NYT nicely unpack the findings, so let's explore a different aspect — whether companies that extract oil, gas and coal are responsible for emissions down the supply chain.
- Various studies have tied emissions to producers, rather than, say, power companies, automakers and other fossil-reliant industries (or consumers, or policymakers, or take your pick).
- Assigning "cause" is hardly just a scientific concept — it's also a moral, political, and borderline metaphysical question.
- And fossil fuels have "produced immense prosperity" that is not modeled in the analysis, the paper notes.
What they're saying: I asked the authors about the upstream focus.
- Mankin noted that their earlier work focused on national-scale contributions.
- "Part of the point of the present analysis is to illustrate that this type of attribution is possible and can be done at myriad scales, from a nation's economy, to a sector of the economy, to a corporation, to a private jet," he said via email.
"Our approach can easily be applied to other actors — we present upstream producers as an initial proof of concept," said co-author Christopher Callahan, a Stanford researcher who worked with Mankin while at Dartmouth.
- They're a "logical place to start given the current legal and political context," he adds, noting the recent New York and Vermont laws, and that producers are defendants in many lawsuits.
What we're watching: Whether the paper's contribution to attribution analysis influences current and future litigation.
