The world’s biggest corporations have caused $28 trillion in climate damage, according to a new study that is part of an effort to make it easier for people and governments to hold companies financially accountable.
A Dartmouth College research team came up with the estimated pollution caused by 111 companies, with more than half of the total dollar figure coming from 10 fossil fuel providers: Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, National Iranian Oil Co., Pemex, Coal India, and the British Coal Corp.
For comparison, $28 trillion is a shade less than the sum of all goods and services produced in the United States last year.
At the top of the list, Saudi Aramco and Gazprom have each caused a bit more than $2 trillion in heat damage over the decades, the team calculated in a study published last week in the journal Nature.
The researchers figured that every 1 percent of greenhouse gas put into the atmosphere since 1990 has caused $502 billion in damage from heat alone, which doesn’t include the costs incurred by other extreme weather such as hurricanes, droughts, and floods.
The study is an attempt to determine the “casual linkages that underlie many of these theories of accountability,” said its lead author Christopher Callahan, who did the work at Dartmouth but is now an Earth systems scientist at Stanford University.
The research firm Zero Carbon Analytics counts 68 lawsuits filed globally connected to climate change.
The bigger a company is, the more responsibility it should have, especially when it comes to responsibility and accountability as far as the planet and its environment is concerned. However, as this study demonstrates, that is usually not the case, and those who have done the most damage are the ones that can get away with it. This should be a wakeup call for governments to do more so such giants, who can also cause gigantic harm, start doing more so they do less damage.*
