Fossil fuels are bad business

Climate damages now quantified, climate scientists dismissed, and students can cut waste on campus

A new study puts a dollar amount on just some of the climate damage the world’s biggest corporations have caused: $28 trillion. Scientists looked at emissions for 111 companies, finding that only 10 fossil fuel providers — Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, National Iranian Oil Co., Pemex, Coal India and the British Coal Corporation — caused half the total amount of damages.

And those are the damages only from extreme heat. The number doesn’t include the devastation from massive floods like the ones in Spain last year or the damages from stronger hurricanes like Helene and Milton. It doesn’t account for crop and water losses during droughts; or the infrastructure destroyed by wildfires such as those that swept through Los Angeles earlier this year; or the smoke from Canadian wildfires, a single week of which was estimated to have cost the province of Ontario alone “over $1.2 billion in health impacts such as premature deaths, increased hospital visits, and health emergencies,” the Canadian Climate Institute reports.

All the same, “climate attribution that goes from emissions to impact at the corporate scale is now possible, addressing a substantial hurdle to climate liability,” the authors wrote. And Fredi Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who heads World Weather Attribution and guest-edited Talking Climate in March (read her edition here) agrees.

“All methods they use are quite robust,” she says. “It would be good in my view if this approach would be taken up more by different groups. As with event attribution, the more groups do it, the better the science gets.”

Ever since I read Fredi’s book, Angry Weather, which clearly shows how science can quantify the share of the damages from extreme weather caused by climate change, and became aware of Richard Heede’s Carbon Majors work, which traces carbon emissions since 1850 to specific companies, I’ve been waiting for someone to connect the dots. I bet a lot of lawyers have been waiting, too. This new study finally does this, connecting polluter to impact and providing legal efforts with key evidence to help recover economic damages in courts.

I’ve served as a lead author of the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA) under the Bush, Obama, and first Trump administrations. I know how administrations opposed to climate action see scientific facts and evidence as a threat to their policies. And I’ve experienced first-hand attempts to bury the report and discredit its findings.

So I was saddened but not surprised when the current Trump administration first cancelled the National Nature Assessment; then fired the long-term support team that staffs the U.S. Global Change Research Program to support the IPCC and the NCA; and finally, last week, dismissed all of the nearly 400 climate scientists working on the upcoming Sixth National Climate Assessment.

NCAs are congressionally mandated reports – published every four years – that provide the granular information at the regional and sectoral level that U.S. cities, states, and organizations need to plan for a changing future.

As I explain here, we humans have been making decisions based on the past for thousands of years. It’s like driving down the road looking in the rear view mirror. But now, thanks entirely to human emissions, we’re facing a curve in the road greater than we’ve ever seen. This curve in our climate puts us all at risk, and without information that looks ahead to guide our decisions, the future will be much more dangerous.

Climate change is a global issue, but national reports like NCA bring its impacts down to the level of our lives and our communities, as I explain here. If I care about food or water or transportation or insurance or my health, this report shows what climate change means to our food, water, transportation, insurance, health, and much more; and how these will affect us depending on where we live.

Although the National Nature Assessment is continuing with private funds, the National Climate Assessment is an order of magnitude larger and by definition requires participation from 12 federal agencies; so it would be much more difficult to produce a similar report without government support.

However, two U.S. scientific societies, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, have teamed up to invite scientists to submit studies for a “first-of-its-kind special collection focused on climate change in the United States.” This will provide updated science needed to continue to pursue solutions to climate change, AGU President Brandon Jones says. But it's still only a fraction of what goes into a full National Climate Assessment.

Left: Photos of TTU Climate Center promoting their Move-Out Donation Drive Event

Are you a university or college student nearing the end of the school year, or do you know one? If so, think about how to sustainably move out of your dorm or campus apartment.

The average student throws away some 640 pounds of items yearly, with a “significant spike” coming at the end of the year, according to an estimate from Planet Aid. It’s estimated we consume 100 billion tons of raw materials every year, and all that extraction and consumption increases our heat-trapping gas emissions as well as contributing to land degradation and water shortages. What we do with our stuff matters!

At Texas Tech, where I teach, our Climate Center is hosting its first Move Out Donation Drive this week, on May 9 and 10. When student outreach coordinator Favour Egbune learned about how much was being thrown out, including furniture and appliances, she knew she had to do something. So Favour and the Climate Center team found three local charities willing to take donations like furniture, clothing, toiletries, food, and more right in the dorm’s parking lot. She said, “Our goal is to reduce waste, promote sustainable practices on campus, and support the local Lubbock community.”

Georgia Tech started a similar program for students in 1998 and now has a Green Goodbyes Thrift Shop that operates year round, where students can come shop for gently used household items to fill their homes. Brown University has a donation event called Clean Break where they can donate small household items and several local nonprofits offer pickup services for larger items that students wish to donate. Dickinson College, which I featured in my newsletter last year, also has a green move out event and will actually let you fill out a form to schedule to have your items picked up!

Temple University has a new partnership with Habitat for Humanity while at Marquette University, the Move Out for Hunger program allows students to donate unopened, nonperishable food items as well as personal care items at the end of the semester.

At Georgetown, donation pods are set up around campus during the university’s Move Out Drive and students who live off campus can schedule pick-up of their items. Each year, students donate some $300,000 worth of items, which are given to local charities. And at Boston University, the Goodwill, Not Landfill program began in 2009 and has diverted several hundred tons from landfills during that time.

As you can see, this is a huge list—and it’s only US universities so far. Do you know of programs outside the US? Comment below and I’ll provide an update next week! And if one doesn’t exist for your school or the one your kids or family attend, why not help start one? Reach out to the campus sustainability office for ideas on how to do this.

Sun June 22 at 6pm MT - "Saving Us: Book Discussion" with Calgary Climate Hub, The Wisdom Centre and the Calgary Interfaith Council - in person at 800 St. SE Calgary, Alberta - $15