ExxonMobil is the majority owner of Imperial Oil, whose refinery and chemical plant is seen on the St. Clair River in Sarnia, Canada on Feb. 7, 2021. Jim West / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
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Researchers from Dartmouth College have estimated that the biggest corporations in the world have caused a total of $28 trillion in climate damage.
The results of the study are meant to help with efforts to hold the companies financially accountable, reported The Associated Press.
“Here we detail the scientific and legal implications of an ‘end-to-end’ attribution that links fossil fuel producers to specific damages from warming,” the researchers wrote in the findings. “Using scope 1 and 3 emissions data from major fossil fuel companies, peer-reviewed attribution methods and advances in empirical climate economics, we illustrate the trillions in economic losses attributable to the extreme heat caused by emissions from individual companies.”
The researchers looked at pollution from 111 companies, with over half of the total cost coming from just 10 fossil fuel providers — Chevron, BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Permex, the British Coal Corporation, Coal India and the National Iranian Oil Co.
Topping the list, the researchers found that Gazprom and Saudi Aramco have each caused over $2 trillion in heat damage.
Men row a fishing boat on the Volga Delta near Russia’s biggest gas industry complex, controlled by Gazprom, in Seitovka, Russian Federation in May 1997. Reza / Getty Images
The $28 trillion total is a little less than the cost of all the goods and services the United States produced in 2024.
The researchers calculated that for each one percent of greenhouse gases pumped into the planet’s atmosphere since 1990, $502 billion in damage has been caused from heat alone. This does not include the costs of other extreme weather like droughts, floods and hurricanes.
Lead author of the findings Christopher Callahan, now a Stanford University Earth systems scientist, said the study was an attempt to determine “the causal linkages that underlie many of these theories of accountability” in polluter pay laws and lawsuits, as AP reported.
According to research firm Zero Carbon Analytics, there have been 68 climate damage lawsuits filed worldwide, with over half in the U.S.
“Everybody’s asking the same question: What can we actually claim about who has caused this?” said co-author of the findings Justin Mankin, a climate scientist at Dartmouth. “And that really comes down to a thermodynamic question of can we trace climate hazards and/or their damages back to particular emitters?”
Mankin and Callahan said the answer is “yes.”
The pair of researchers began by looking at the products’ known final emissions — such as electricity from coal plants or gas — produced by the biggest fossil fuel companies going back 137 years. They then translated the emissions into changes in the planet’s global average surface temperature and compared them to an emissions-free world using 1,000 different computer simulations.
They found that Chevron’s pollution, for example, had increased Earth’s surface temperature by 0.45 degrees Fahrenheit.
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The researchers also calculated the amount of pollution each company contributed to the planet’s five hottest days using 80 additional computer simulations and applying a formula connecting extreme heat intensity to fluctuations in economic output.
The system was modeled on established techniques that have been used by scientists for over 10 years to attribute extreme weather to climate change.
Mankin said the study “really laid clear how the veil of plausible deniability doesn’t exist anymore scientifically. We can actually trace harms back to major emitters,” reported AP.
Callahan said in the past it hadn’t been possible to calculate individual companies’ damage because it would get lost in the data.
“Drawing quantitative linkages between individual emitters and particularized harms is now feasible, making science no longer an obstacle to the justiciability of climate liability claims,” the researchers wrote in the findings.
The study, “Carbon majors and the scientific case for climate liability,” was published in the journal Nature.
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