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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/05/cost-of-emissions-from-five-major-australian-resource-companies-more-than-900bn-study-finds>
"Five of Australia’s biggest fossil fuel producers could be on the hook for
hundreds of billions of dollars in damages after a US research team developed a
method to link individual companies to specific climate harms and put a dollar
figure to the impact.
This is the result of a new peer-review study published in the journal
Nature
that sought to establish a method that would allow courts to quantify the
economic loss caused by fossil fuel producers for one kind of climate impact –
extreme heat.
Looking at the period 1991 to 2020, the researchers, Christopher Callahan at
Stanford University in California and Justin Mankin at Dartmouth College in New
Hampshire, used historical emissions data for the world’s five biggest oil
producers: BP, Gazprom, Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil and Chevron.
They then sought to understand how the emissions from these companies
contributed to extreme heat. This was defined as the temperature of the hottest
five days in a year.
The team developed a replicable method to quantify the damage linked to a
single company, with the figure running into the trillions for the world’s
largest fossil fuel producers.
It suggested state-owned oil companies Saudi Aramco and Gazprom were
responsible for US$2.05tr and $2tr in damages respectively. Chevron, ExxonMobil
and BP were each found to be responsible for $1.98tr, $1.91tr and $1.45tr in
losses respectively.
In a separate analysis of emissions data for five major Australian resource
companies – BHP, Rio Tinto, Santos, Whitehaven Coal and Woodside Energy –
Callahan assessed the total damages from their collective emissions at more
than US$600bn, or A$929.47bn.
“Our analysis is very explicitly thinking about emissions that are already
occurred and the sort of historical changes in extreme heat, and attributing
those to emissions that have been already detected and attributed to specific
actors,” Callahan said.
“Even just from that we get numbers in the trillions, when you aggregate
globally over the last 30 years in terms of the losses associated with any
individual company, but GDP growth losses from extreme heat are a very small
fraction of the total cost of climate change.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
