How much climate damage do polluters actually cause? New method comes up with price tag

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By Warren Cornwall, Science. 

Excerpt: In the wake of devastating floods, Vermont lawmakers last year passed legislation making fossil fuel producers liable for damages from natural disasters supercharged by their greenhouse gas emissions. ...But so far, no company has had to pay a penny under Vermont’s law. A key challenge: tying disasters to the actions of a specific producer and calculating its share of the cost. Now, two scientists say they can do just that. In a paper appearing today in Nature, the researchers spell out a method for quantifying how much the emissions from a particular polluter contributed to a given heat wave. ...All told, the researchers say, the world economy lost $12 trillion to $49 trillion in productivity between 1991 and 2020 because of heat waves tied to pollution from the 111 largest individual polluters. The Saudi Arabia–owned energy company Saudi Aramco was responsible for the largest share of that cost, an estimated $850 billion to $3.6 trillion. Chevron ranked highest among public companies, at $790 billion to $3.5 trillion. ...The wide range of potential costs is a sign of the vagueness that comes with a cascading series of models, each with its own uncertainty.... 

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