New research showing that “climate attribution” science, which can forensically connect particular polluters to a specific climate disaster, is now reaching a critical threshold.
A reckoning is coming.
Over the last decade, scientists have rapidly developed the field of climate attribution research, teasing out the role played by global warming in individual natural disasters. Meanwhile, their ways of tracking a single emitter’s influence on temperature or sea-level rise have grown more sophisticated, as research into climate economicshas advanced.
The result is that it’s now possible to quantify the climate damages caused by each of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies, according to a paper published last week in the journal Nature. Those calculations could be brought as evidence in court.
“This has long been articulated by the legal community as a barrier to legal pursuits for liability claims” for harmful climate impacts, said co-author Justin Mankin, a climate scientist and associate professor of geography at Dartmouth College. “Scientifically, it’s not really an issue anymore.”
In the paper, Mankin and co-author Christopher Callahan, a postdoctoral researcher in Earth system science at Stanford University, say they have devised a transparent, low-cost analytical tool for interrogating a key question in liability, or tort, law. Many such cases pivot on whether a plaintiff would have suffered “but for” actions of the defendant. The new paper offers what’s described as a way to demonstrate harm that wouldn’t have occurred “but for” a company’s or companies’ greenhouse gas pollution.
Climate lawsuits have multiplied around the world in recent years. In the US, groups of citizens, cities and states have sought redress for climate impacts, with different groups testing different legal theories. The cases vary wildly in approach and many drag on for years, end up dismissed or both. Only a small fraction have succeeded globally, and none of those resulted in liability damages.
Environmental attorney Matthew Pawa, who has been involved in high-profile lawsuits against energy and chemical companies, said the new paper gives an important analytical tool to plaintiffs, particularly in courts that are more inclined to consider direct (“but for”) causation. But public nuisance law doesn’t necessarily rely on that, he said; individual companies have been held liable even when, as with climate change, there are many polluters and many people harmed.
“It’s inevitable that at some point the fossil fuel companies will be held liable,” he said. “I’m where I was 20 years ago: You can’t do this much harm and not have committed a tort.”
Although no one has won a liability suit against a large emitter, some cases are now lasting longer and reaching fact-finding stages, said Martin Lockman, a climate law fellow at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. (Two Sabin Center researchers are thanked in the paper’s acknowledgements.)
“We’re well past the exploratory stage, and starting to get to the stage where courts are really getting to grips with the facts and this chain of causation,” he said.
The new research comes as some US states move to hold large emitters responsible for their contributions to climate change. New York and Vermont both recently passed “climate Superfund” laws, which would require energy companies to pay toward the repair and resilience of infrastructure threatened by global warming. Other states are discussing similar laws. Mankin submitted testimony to the Vermont legislature in February 2024, which included a draft of the Nature paper.
Both Vermont and New York face legal challenges to their new measures. More than 20 other states sued in February to block New York’s law. President Donald Trump this month signed an order directing the Justice Department to look at state and local climate laws for “overreach.”
“There is a long way to go before a plaintiff actually recovers damages from a fossil fuel producer,” said Callahan, the paper’s co-author, noting that strength of scientific evidence is only one factor in a case’s success. “That said, we believe our study closes a significant scientific gap in the theories underlying those cases.”
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I interviewed solar engineer Josh Pearce years ago at Michigan Tech University, and he saw this coming clearly.
Ok, I’m going to say it and I daresay none of you are going to like it:
This article is disgusting. This article is dishonest. This article is counterproductive. Let’s count the ways.
* ” The new paper offers what’s described as a way to demonstrate harm that wouldn’t have occurred “but for” a company’s or companies’ greenhouse gas pollution. ”
If that new paper was about GHG emissions made by petro-companies during the manufacture of oil and gasoline, that would be one thing. But, that is NOT what the paper is about. It is about distorting the very definition of the words “pollution” and “emissions” and “emitters” into something they most definitely are not.
The title of the first graph, which opens this article is a case in point:
“Biggest CO2 emitters: A new study estimates climate losses from company emissions”
This is egregiously dishonest. Exxon has relatively miniscule actual emissions. It is NOT a “big CO2 emitter”.
It sold trillions of gallons of gasoline. Gasoline does not emit GHG emissions, unless and until it is burned, and Exxon did NOT burn that gasoline. YOU and I and every person and institution on the planet did. Happily and willingly, and in full cognizance of the environmental consequences.
What Exxon et al did was to produce and sell a completely legal and needed product. A product needed by society so much that the government subsidized its production. A product which was under heavy regulation by government. A product that was under EPA regulation and about which the EPA said NOTHING. Fuck all.
To frame this not as our own collective responsibility, but as the responsibility of Exxon through the use of the deliberate and calculated mutilation of the common accepted meaning of words is what fascism does. This is what we sometimes see from Trump. And here in this article you present it as a positive! Yup – that’s disgusting.
“Although no one has won a liability suit against a large emitter…”
Again, the false characterization of Exxon as “a large emitter” when it is not. There is a word for that in the English language and the word is “dishonesty”. As well, an admission of the fact that liability law does not support holding Exxon culpable for the actions of others.
Trying to game the legal system through the use of Orwellian Newspeak’s distortion of language is a certain recipe for failure, especially in the legal system. This will not play well in Peoria. This effort will be the poster child for counterproductivity.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, what do we hear about the true crimes of Exxon et al – the deliberate decades-long propaganda campaign of disinformation and misinformation about climate change? Crickets, that’s what.
Those are exactly the excuses used by fossil corporation flacks and shills and right wing politicians. They’re at the level of excuses used by defensively defiant self-righteous children and criminal psychopaths throughout history. “He started it”. “I was only following orders.”
Exxon, BP, Aramco, Lukoil, Koch, the nihilistic psychotic psychopaths formerly named Monsanto, and all the other fuel, car, ag, rail, media, banking, and other corporations, oligarchs, and industries lied; misled; distorted; attacked; smeared; intimidated; bought up and destroyed alternatives (like transit); bought up and destroyed democracy (or its potential); polluted; murdered; aided, abetted, and committed genocide; promulgated industrial capitalism—the most destructive justification for Wetiko psychosis in history—and much more, in their ongoing effort to delay the inevitable shift to 100% renewable energy.
With the collaboration of far right political kapos and the cynical manipulative fanning and use of fear, rage, racism, religious and ethnic and class prejudice, misogyny, jealousy, stupidity, systematic diseducation, and deeply wounding childhoods, they’ve fooled millions of people in the US (including, apparently, you—or are you just lying?). Repeated confused, bewildered, and gerrymandered votes for far right psychopaths selected by the rich, and 2 centuries of short-sighted but anyway forced choices have destroyed the alternatives. Many people drive only because the only other choice is to withdraw from society and take what’s essentially a vow of poverty.
Previously the lies, almost all generated and disseminated in the US by the monstrous, right wing, tens-of-billions-funded and pseudo-think-tank-staffed science denial and disinformation industry, fooled many in other, mostly English-speaking countries, but those people and countries still have more-or-less functioning democracies and public education, and have mostly recovered. Only autocracies—Russia, the doomed middle eastern oiligarchic monarchies, and of course the US for example—persist in the world-destroying insanity.
At the root of it all of course is the Wetiko complex—attachment disorders, nature deficit disorder, trauma and developmental trauma from abuse and neglect, the resulting fear, rage, hatred, and shame, and above all, elites’ addiction—to domination, sadism, and fossil and fissile fuels that symbolically and “really” epitomize domination-by-destruction.
Over and over I keep pointing out (and yet another study just confirmed this week) that even in the US, though they bizarrely refuse to admit it or identify themselves as such, people are overwhelmingly progressive. On issue after issue, poll after poll, for decades, majorities of 60-95% agree most with one of, if not the farthest “left” choice offered in the poll. But over and over and over and over a distressingly high and disturbingly increasing percent are taken in by the lies and manipulation of the extreme right. “And thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”
Not the fault of the liars and manipulators? Get serious.
It used to be I only disagreed strongly with you about meat. Now it seems you’re offensively right wing on almost everything, and uncreatively spreading the tired decades-old talking points of the most criminally insane people in human history.
I’m concerned about you. What happened?
Wtf does any of your word salad have to do with the specific points I made ?!?
What I maintain was a unique, thoughtful, and insightful explanation of the truth you ignored was perfectly understandable by anyone not in the grip of irrational compulsions and delusions. Your attack on the article consisted mostly of overused, far-right fossil-fueled fallacies. 3/4 of it was a recitation of those, and when you finally got around to recognizing what are indeed actual crimes by fossil fuel corporate officers and others you ignored the obvious ramifications. (I’m no lawyer but I gather that securities fraud and thus millions of counts of felony murder/depraved heart murder are among them.)
For oil majors and others collaborating with them to deny responsibility for climate catastrophe on the basis of those spurious (aka bullshit) excuses is the height of offensiveness. IT is what’s disgusting, cowardly, manipulative, and devious, and your 3rd party weaponized projection and insults are equally offensive.
You exhibit similar behavior every time meat production’s ecological effects are discussed. Radical irrational anti-scientific dogmatic rigidity, lack of empathy, personal defensive attackiness. It’s tiresome and annoying as well as counterproductive to action to solve the existential ecological crisis. I hope you can control it in the future; I strongly recommend psychotherapy.
Your reply was anything BUT ” unique, thoughtful, and insightful “. It was a highly partisan rant, devoid of objectivity. In fact, it was a screed so certain of its own premises as to be sophomoric. And it did not address a single point I made.
In case you cannot comprehend it – I am a liberal. I have voted for exactly ONE Republican candidate over my entire life – James Jeffords of Vermont. I have a science background. I call ’em like I see ’em. Evidently, that’s not ideologically PURE enough for the Progressive in you. Like all Progressives, you see the world in binary: Progressives are right and moral, and anyone who disagrees is the immoral enemy. I got news for you J4 – that is not how the world or logic or objectivity or rationality works.
Conservatives are wrong about many things. They also are right about many things. Same for Liberals. Same for Progressives. The key is to approach each issue with an open mind, do your own rigorous research, and come to your OWN conclusions. Sorry, but you don’t seem capable at this point of your life.
Everything you said about me is wrong. Everything you said about my comments is wrong.
I’m pretty confident you’ll be dismissive, arrogant, and insulting, of the obvious conclusion that what you say about everything else thus can’t be trusted.
Please stop projecting your own intolerance onto me. (“Like all progressives, you see the world in binary…” Your contradiction after is meaningless.) Your rejection, even hatred, of all progressives—and with it all progressive positions?—is more clear now. You share that with the far right, however you vote (all neoliberals, who are the main block to effective climate action? Refer to MLK’s thoughts on liberals in regards to social change.) You also seem more and more to share their propensity to addiction, whether it’s to meat, tobacco, oil, “order” (insistence on no more than incremental change, even if that means no change, avoidance of anything that might provoke anxiety?) or the many illusions about civilization and most life on Earth being able to survive the deadly combination of insane conservatives and criminal liberals, who both refuse to even contemplate the now-radical, sweeping change needed, because of their own addiction, inability to tolerate anxiety, or bizarrely, even being anxious about their (and your) anxiety about anxiety. And the angry, defensive reaction to being criticized for 1. missing the obvious and 2. being angry and defensive from the start, as shown by your attack on the article, is the whole problem here, and exactly what I addressed.
You failed to see the flabbergastingly obvious unbreakable connections between fossil fuel addicts’ and shills’ lies and their inescapable undeniable responsibility for the continued use of their products (like tobacco addicts’-and-shill’s use of exactly the same argument for the purpose of getting people to continue using their addictive product. And of course to excuse their inexcusable behavior.) Your original point, (absolutely without doubt taken from far right science-denial-and-disinformation-industry-created deceptions) was a forgivable single mistake, maybe said in the heat of the moment. To attack and insult the article’s author as a result is less excusable; to defensively refuse to understand when someone points out the “mistake” is even less excusable.
I’m stopping now as this is utterly pointless and until you get serious about change, especially yourself, will have no effect on you. You will continue to not understand and to be defensive and attack others as a result. It’s a tragedy, as we can use all the allies we can get. Again, I recommend psychotherapy.
PS. To claim no one is talking about Exxon et al’s deception is flabbergastingly, utterly absurd, only partly because the basis of every lawsuit is precisely that systemic deception. No wonder you have such nutso ideas about things—you seem to have no sane sources of information or are unable or unwilling to grasp their ideas. That must be how you’ve been on this site for so many years without absorbing any of the scores of posts on that deception.
“Exxon Lied” eg.
Big oil Should be sued to the shthouse for lying, obscuration, funding moransphere denyrism, and on and on. Hell yea!
Complaining they produced a product that 99.999% of the world USED to Live, from better up to great, is silly. ESSENTIAL that it is replaced.
To add to the downthmmys, shame the assassin missed trump.