Scientists say they can calculate the cost of oil giants' role in global warming

Source: Washington Post

April 23, 2025 at 4:33 p.m. EDT


Oil and gas companies are facing hundreds of lawsuits around the world testing whether they can be held responsible for their role in causing climate change. Now, two scientists say they’ve built a tool that can calculate how much damage each company’s planet-warming pollution has caused — and how much money they could be forced to pay if they’re successfully sued.

Collectively, greenhouse emissions from 111 fossil fuel companies caused the world $28 trillion in damage from extreme heat from 1991 to 2020, according to a paper published Wednesday in Nature. Industry officials have contested this sort of reasoning, and Trump administration officials, along with some congressional Republicans, are working to shield oil and gas companies from legal liability for climate-related damages.

The new analysis could fuel an emerging legal fight. The authors, Dartmouth associate professor Justin Mankin and Chris Callahan, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, say their model can determine a specific company’s share of responsibility over any time period. “There’s long been this veil of plausible deniability that any emitter could hide behind: ‘We’re all emitting greenhouse gases, so who’s to say that mine are the ones responsible for outcome X, Y or Z?’” Mankin said. “We can now do that accounting exercise.”

Many climate advocates have hoped that establishing blame in a way that can be submitted into evidence could result in court rulings that make polluters pay. And outside researchers say this model goes further than anything that has come before it in connecting company actions to concrete harm. “This is the first time I’ve seen this done in a really comprehensive way that isn’t just for one specific event,” said Kevin Reed, a professor at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences. “This is the real deal.”

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2025/04/23/climate-attribution-damages-lawsuit/