Washington (AP) – The largest companies in the world have caused 28 billions of dollars climate Damage, a new study considers in the context of an effort to facilitate the responsibility of companies and governments tobacco giants were.
A research team from Dartmouth College has created the estimated pollution caused by 111 companies, with more than half of the total dollar figure from 10 Fossil fuel suppliers: Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, Exxonmobil, BP, Shell, National Iranian Oil Co., Pemex, Coal India and the British Coal Corporation.
For comparison, 28 billions of dollars are a nuance lower than the sum of all goods and services produced in the United States last year.
At the top of the list, the Saudi Aramco and Gazprom have each caused just over 2 billions of dollars of heat damage over the decades, the team calculated in a study published in Wednesday Nature Journal. The researchers thought that each 1% of greenhouse gases put in the atmosphere since 1990 have caused $ 502 billion in heat -caused damage, which does not include the costs incurred by other extreme times such as hurricanes, droughts and floods.
People talk about making polluters pay, and sometimes even bring them to justice Or adopt laws intended to brake them.
The study is an attempt to determine “the causal links that underlie a good number of these theories of responsibility,” said its main author, Christopher Callahan, who did the work in Dartmouth but is now a scientist of the earth systems at the University of Stanford. The zero carbon analytics search firm counts 68 prosecution filed Globally on climate change damage, with more than half of them in the United States.
“Everyone asks the same question: what can we really claim who caused this?” said Dartmouth’s climateness Justin Mankin, co-author of the study. “And it really comes down to a thermodynamic question, can we trace the climatic dangers and / or their damage to special issuers?”
The answer is yes, said Callahan and Mankin.
The researchers began with known final emissions from products – such as petrol or electricity from coal power plants – produced by the 111 largest carbon -oriented companies that go back to 137 years, because it is as far as all business emission data and carbon dioxide remain in the air for much longer than that. They used 1,000 different IT simulations to translate these emissions into changes for the world’s average surface temperature of the earth by comparing it to a world without the emissions of this company.
Using this approach, they determined that chevron pollution, for example, increased the land temperature by 0.045 degrees Fahrenheit (0.025 degrees Celsius).
The researchers also calculated the amount of pollution of each company contributed to the hottest five days of the year using 80 additional computer simulations, then applying a formula that links extreme heat to changes in economic production.
This system is modeled on the Techniques established scientists have used for more than a decade to award extreme weather events, such as 2021 Pacific northwest wave, climate change.
Mankin said that in the past, there was an argument: “Who can say that it was my CO2 molecule that contributed to these damage to another?” He said that his study “clearly clearly indicated how the veil of the plausible denial no longer exists scientifically. We can really trace damage to major issuers.”
Shell refused to comment. Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and BP did not respond to requests for comments.
“All the methods they use are quite robust,” said climatologist Imperial College London, Friederike Otto, who directs the world’s weather attribution, a collection of scientists who try rapid attribution studies to see if specific extreme weather events are aggravated by climate change and, in the case, by how much. She did not participate in the study.
“It would be good in my opinion if this approach was more adopted by different groups. As with the allocation of events, the more the groups do, the better science becomes and the better we know what makes a difference and what does not make,” said Otto. Until now, no climate responsibility trials against a large carbon issuer has succeeded, but perhaps “how extremely strong scientific proof is” can change this, “she said.
In the past, the damage caused by sole proprietorships have been lost in data noise, so it could not be calculated, said Callahan.
“We have now reached a point in the climate crisis where the total of damages is so immense that the contributions of the product of a single company can represent dozens of billions of dollars per year,” said Chris Field, an climatist from the University of Stanford who did not participate in research.
It is a good exercise and good proof of concept, but there are so many other climatic variables that the figures that Callahan and Mankin have offered are probably a great underestimation of the damage caused by companies, said Michael Mann, an air conditioning from the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study.
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