Cost of emissions from five major Australian resource companies more than $900bn, study finds | Greenhouse gas emissions

Five of the largest fossil fuel producers in Australia can be hooks hundreds of billions of dollars as compensation after an American research team developed a way to link individual companies to specific climate damage and put a person in dollars to influence.

This is the result of the study of a new counterpart review It was published in the Nature magazine This sought to create a method that allows the courts to determine the economic loss caused by fossil fuel producers for one type of climate effect – severe heat.

Looking at the period from 1991 to 2020, researchers and Christopher Callen at Stanford University in California and Justin Mansin at Dartmath College in New Hampshire used historical emissions data for the five largest oil producers in the world: BP, Gazprom, Saudi Aramco, Exxonmobil and Chevron.

Then they sought to understand how the emissions of these companies contributed to extreme heat. This was defined as a five -day temperature per year.

The team has developed a repeated method for measuring the damage associated with one company, as the number was run to trillions of the largest fossil fuel producers in the world.

Saudi state -owned oil companies, Aramco, Gazprom, have suggested responsible for 2.05TR and 2 TRAMERS in the damage, respectively. Chevron, Exxonmobil and BP are found responsible for 1.98tr, 1.91TR and $ 1.45 in losses respectively.

In a separate analysis of emissions data for five major Australian resources companies – BHP, Rio TintoSantos, Whitehaven Coal and Woodside Energy – Calhaan has evaluated the total damage of its mass emissions with more than 600 billion US dollars, or 929.47 billion dollars.

“Our analysis is very frankly thinking about the emissions that have already occurred and the type of historical changes in severe heat, and those are attributed to the emissions that have already been discovered and deposited to specific actors.”

“Even only from that we get numbers in trillion, when they have been gathered globally over the past thirty years in terms of losses associated with any individual company, but the gross domestic product losses of extreme heat are a very small part of the total cost of climate change.”

It has made the difficulty in creating a causal relationship and calculating the contribution of one company to climate damage to courts in many judicial states, especially in Australia, which refrains from confronting individual fossil fuels to calculate the climate impact of their projects.

Upon pursuit of approval to build and operate it at a value Santos It was asked by the Australian Conservation Corporation if it had looked at the potential climatic damage.

Santos responded by saying, “There are restrictions on linking emissions from activity to any specific effects of climate change.”

The company said: “Santos called for more information on how to conduct an analysis that connects climate change effects from activity to specific environmental environments or systems.”

Callen said that the work provides a basis for future research to link the activities of oil, gas and coal producers specified with additional climate damage such as dehydration, floods and sea level rise, although he added that there is still a “long road” before a tobacco or asbestos lawsuit succeeded.

He said: “Even two weeks ago, it was not clear whether scientific support was possible to say that the individual motivation can be linked to the effect you receive or try to recover costs. This scientific communication can be made completely.”

“It is no longer a scientific support to the actors to argue that there is a reasonable refusal, and that it is impossible to link any of the individual actor with any effect on climate change.

“This statement, that there is a kind of irreversible gap between the place from which you are emitting and some other effects on the road, we have shown that it is wrong.”

Several important lawsuits were submitted against major American oil companies, including Portorico municipality against Excone Mobil Corp And other cases provided by the government of individual American states.

Friday, Hawaii It became the tenth American country Let’s transfer fossil fuel producers to court due to the alleged deception of the climate, which prompted an anti -seizure by the Trump administration in an attempt to prevent deposit.

Besides the United States, Australia is the second most jurisdiction in the world for climate litigation, according to the litigation database at the Melbourne College of Law at Law College It is currently following 627 cases.

Many of these cases include smaller decisions that include council planning or regulations or access to information as the database uses a broader definition.