Due to the federal government’s ongoing failure to effectively address the climate crisis, over 50 subnational entities have been taking increasingly aggressive steps to mitigate carbon pollution. Recently, Vermont (VT) and New York (NY) passed legislation to hold the oil and gas industry financial responsible for extreme weather events supercharged by their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. (Eleven other states are presently working to do the same.) The VT law tallies up the financial damage and then determines proportional responsibility; NY identifies in advance a damage amount and then proportionally bills responsible fossil fuel companies. VT and NY’s legislation is based attribution science. Simply explained, the methodology attempts to measure to what extent anthropocentric warming caused by fossil fuel use of specific entities supercharges extreme weather events. Last month, Stanford’s Dr. Christopher Callahan and Dartmouth’s Dr. Justin Makin published, “Carbon Majors and the Scientific Case for Climate Liability in the journal “Nature.” The authors calculated the trillions of dollars in economic losses attributable to the extreme heat caused by emissions from individual companies or carbon majors. For example, emissions attributable to Chevron caused between $791 billion and $3.6 trillion in heat-related losses between 1991 and 2020.
Drs. Callahan and Mankin’s April 24 “Nature” article is at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08751-3 (subscription is required).
A summary of the article is freely available via “The Guardian,” at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/05/cost-of-emissions-from-five-major-australian-resource-companies-more-than-900bn-study-finds.
Info on Dr. Callahan is at: https://profiles.stanford.edu/326897 and for Dr. Mankin, at: https://geography.dartmouth.edu/people/justin-s-mankin.
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