by Washington (AP) – The world’s largest companies caused climate damage of 28 trillion dollars. A new study estimates that people and governments, such as tobacco giants, are folded into account.
A research team from Dartmouth College developed the estimated pollution caused by 111 companies, with more than half of the total number of dollars of 10 providers fossil fuels: Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, Exxonmobil, BP, Shell, National Iranian Oil Co., Pemex, Coal India and The British Coal Corporation.
For comparison: 28 trillion US dollars are a shadow 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 caused a little more than 2 trillion dollars of thermal damage over the decades. The researchers found that all 1% of the greenhouse gass set into the atmosphere since 1990 caused damage of 502 billion US dollars solely by heat, which does not contain the costs caused by other extreme weather such as hurricanes, droughts and floods.
People speak of paying polluted, and sometimes even bring them to court or say goodbye to laws to contain them.
The study is an attempt to “determine the causal links that are based on many of these arithmetic theories,” said his senior author Christopher Callahan, who did the work in Dartmouth, but is now a scientist from Earth Systems at Stanford University. The research company Zero Carbon Analytics has 68 complaints that have been submitted worldwide on the damage of climate change, with more than half of them in the USA.
“Everyone asks the same question: What can we actually say about who caused this?” Dartmouth Climate Scientist Justin Mankin, co-author of the study. “And that really depends on a thermodynamic question, can we go back to climate and/or their damage to certain emitters?”
The answer is, Callahan and Mankin said.
The researchers began with well-known final emissions of product-like petrol or electricity from coal-fired power plants that were produced by the 111 largest, carbon-oriented companies that go back to 137 years, as this is longer than the emission data of the company data for longer than these emission data. They used 1,000 different computer simulations to implement these emissions in changes for the global average surface temperature of the earth by comparing them to a world without emissions of this company.
Using this approach, they found that the pollution of Chevron, for example, increased the earth temperature by 0.045 degrees Fahrenheit (0.025 degrees Celsius).
The researchers also calculate how much the pollution of each company has contributed to the five hottest days of the year by using 80 other computer simulations and then using a formula that combines extreme heat intensity with changes in economic production.
This system is modeled on the established techniques that scientists have been using for more than a decade to attribute extreme weather events such as the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave to climate change.
Mankin said that in the past an argument of “Who says that it is my molecule of CO2 that contributed to this damage compared to another?” He said his study “really realized how the veil of plausible denial no longer exists more scientifically. We can actually trace damage to important emitter.”
Shell rejected a statement. Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and BP did not respond to inquiries about comments.
“All methods that you use are quite robust,” said the climate researcher from Imperial College London, Friederike Otto, who leads the world weather attribution, a collection of scientists who try fast attribution studies to determine whether specific extreme weather events through climate change and if so, how much. She did not take part in the study.
“From my point of view, it would be good if this approach were more accepted by different groups. As with the event assignment, the more groups, the better the science and the better we know what makes a difference and what is not,” said Otto. So far, no climate jam against a large carbon mitter has been successful, but maybe it can show how overwhelming the scientific evidence is, she said.
In the past, damage caused by individual companies has been lost in the noise of data so that it could not be calculated, said Callahan.
“We have now reached a point in the climate crisis, in which the total damage is so immense that the contributions of the product of a single company can run at $ 10 billion a year,” said Chris Field, a climate scientist at Stanford University who did not take part in research.
This is a good exercise and proof of the concept, but there are so many other climate variables that the numbers that Callahan and Mankin have provided are probably a great underestimation of the damage that companies really caused, said Michael Mann, a climate science at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study.
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