Pirate's Cove

This is totally not about scamming some money, right?

The world’s biggest companies have caused $28 trillion in climate damage, a new study estimates

The world’s biggest corporations have caused $28 trillion in climate damage, a new study estimates as part of an effort to make it easier for people and governments to hold companies financially accountable, like the tobacco giants have been.

A Dartmouth College research team came up with the estimated pollution caused by 111 companies, with more than half of the total dollar figure coming from 10 fossil fuel providers: Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, National Iranian Oil Co., Pemex, Coal India and the British Coal Corporation.

For comparison, $28 trillion is a shade less than the sum of all goods and services produced in the United States last year.

At the top of the list, Saudi Aramco and Gazprom have each caused a bit more than $2 trillion in heat damage over the decades, the team calculated in a study published in Wednesday’s journal Nature. The researchers figured that every 1% of greenhouse gas put into the atmosphere since 1990 has caused $502 billion in damage from heat alone, which doesn’t include the costs incurred by other extreme weather such as hurricanes, droughts and floods.

“Estimated.” In other words, they’re pretty much making it all up, running it through their computer models, and assigning Blame.

People talk about making polluters pay, and sometimes even take them to court or pass laws meant to rein them in.

The study is an attempt to determine “the causal linkages that underlie many of these theories of accountability,” said its lead author, Christopher Callahan, who did the work at Dartmouth but is now an Earth systems scientist at Stanford University. The research firm Zero Carbon Analytics counts 68 lawsuits filed globally about climate change damage, with more than half of them in the United States.

So cultists trying reinforce cult dogma about making Other People pay. Weirdly, the “study” fails to blame all the Warmists who use fossil fuels themselves. And refuse to give them up themselves. What’s the damage for all the use of fossil fuels to travel to all the UN climate conferences? But, it is funny how it always comes down to taking Other People’s money. (and bigger government and authoritarianism.)