Not just tallying damages, naming, blaming and shaming corporations, and maybe uniquely, individuals.
Like the Epstein list – not one you would want to be on.
Nature – Quantifying climate loss and damage consistent with a social cost of carbon:
Climate change is causing measurable harm globally. Political and legal efforts seek to link these damages with specific emissions, including in discussions of loss and damage (L&D); however, no quantitative definition of L&D exists, nor is there a framework to link past and future emissions from specific sources to monetized, location-specific damages. Here we develop such a framework, which is integrated with recent efforts to estimate the social cost of carbon7. Using empirical estimates of the non-linear relationship between temperature and aggregate economic output, we show that future damages from past emissions—one component of L&D—are at least an order of magnitude larger than historical damages from the same emissions. For instance, one tonne of CO2emitted in 1990 caused US$180 in discounted global damages by 2020 ($40–530) and will cause an additional $1,840 through 2100 ($500–5,700). Thus, settling debts for past damages will not settle debts for past emissions. In other illustrative estimates, a single long-haul flight per year over the past decade leads to about $25k ($6,000–77,000) in future damages by 2100, and US emissions since 1990 caused $500 billion ($180–1,300 billion) of damage in India and $330 billion ($110–820 billion) in Brazil. Carbon removal offers an alternative to transfer payments for settling L&D, but is increasingly ineffective in limiting damages as the delay between emission and recapture increases.
The paper has a number of unique calculations, including the long term climate impacts attributable to major emitting corporations, but also a list of the top carbon emitting global citizens, by virtue, especially of private jet travel.
Bill Gates tops the list, Taylor Swift is a name that jumps out.
Among the top damaging corporations, Saudi Aramco and Exxon Mobil.
The basic idea is to consider the emission of a unit of greenhouse gas (GHG) as the creation of an asset that produces a subsequent stream of value.
Unlike many assets, this value might be negative (for example, a liability) and its flow accrues to individuals who did not create the asset. These features are not unique to GHG assets, and similar assets are commonly traded in markets. For example, household garbage generates a flow of costs for whoever takes ownership, and households typically must compensate a waste disposal firm to take the garbage and store it on their premises. We compute an analogue to the value of unpaid garbage collection bills that would be owed for past GHG emissions if individuals were paid for the costs imposed on them by this waste. The total sum of these costs are the residual loss and damages suffered by populations due to climate change.