1 day Ago By Ketan Joshi
The fossil fuel industry has been conspicuous by its reluctance to take obvious sides in Australia’s federal election campaign. The gas lobby chimed in briefly when Dutton suggested reserving a tiny proportion of exported fossil gas for domestic use. There have been a lot of “gas is good” billboard posters, and some shady front groups with probable industry links have been pushing ads.
But there has been no major campaign from the fossil extraction or combustion-reliant industries to push for one candidate or another. If this is due to them feeling largely unthreatened by either potential winner, that’s a serious problem. The extractive companies have been responsible for a large proportion of Australia’s domestic emissions, due to the huge volume of fossil fuels required just to dig up other fossil fuels.
But what they dig up and sell is also burned, and that causes climate change. A recent published by researchers at Dartmouth College, the damage caused by the use of products sold by fossil fuel companies. “Emissions linked to Chevron, the highest-emitting investor-owned company in our data, for example, very likely caused between US $791 billion and $3.
6 trillion in heat-related losses over the period 1991–2020, disproportionately harming the tropical regions least culpable for warming”. The calculations are theoretically simple but practically complex: a monetary cost is assigned to every unit of greenhouse gas emissions that’s produced as a result of the combustion of coal, oil or gas products, using the best available research. Importantly, this new research aims to arm activists that have been fighting fossil fuel companies in court aiming to hold them liable for the consequences of the use of the product they sell (in the same way tobacco companies were eventually made liable for the death and sickness relating to tobacco addiction).
The authors are unambiguous on what their research means for the liability of fossil fuel companies. “We argue that the scientific case for climate liability is closed, even if the future of these cases remains an open question,” said Justin Makin, the study’s senior author. The study’s first author, Christopher Callahan, said “”The affluence of the Western economy has been based on fossil fuels .
.. but just as a pharmaceutical company would not be absolved from the negative effects of a drug by the benefits of that drug, fossil fuel companies should not be excused for the damage they’ve caused by the prosperity their products have generated”.
The InfluenceMap Carbon Majors off which the analysis is based shows both direct and ‘indirect’ (from fuel use) emissions, broken down by a wide range of investor-owned, state-owned or nation-state entities. I asked Callahan about the place of Australia’s biggest fossil extraction companies in this database. “In our dataset, I was able to find five investor-owned companies that I believe are headquartered in Australia: BHP, Rio Tinto, Santos, Whitehaven Coal, and Woodside Energy”.
The main paper ran 10,000 samples to obtain an idea of the uncertainty in their analysis, but for the five companies above, Callahan ran 200 samples to get a rough idea of the damages of the emissions of these companies. The number ends up at around a whopping $682 billion. “Our research provides clear evidence that emitters can be quantitatively tied to downstream climate impacts”, Callahan told me.
“Fossil fuel firms and trade groups have argued in the public and in legal filings that any individual emitter cannot be scientifically linked to an individual climate impact, and our research shows this claim to be fallacious”. Australia has a deep history already of – many of the cases directly involve companies that extract fossil fuels. tend to relate to consumer issues, such as false advertising through dodgy net zero claims.
Some have whether or not climate impacts were properly considered in approvals processes. Some have been . But there doesn’t seem to be any court case brought against Australian fossil fuel companies holding them liable for the damages they cause through the use of their core product.
Fossil fuel companies tend to shake off any responsibility for the consequences of their product use. The line is, generally, ‘consumers pick up what we put down’, and often actively presents fossil fuels as improving living standards and lifting people out of poverty; one of the key tropes of modern fossil fuel disinformation. ” Ultimately, where to place responsibility is a political choice, not one that science can entirely answer”, Callahan said.
“However, it is also worth remembering that some of these firms have engaged in decades-long campaigns of delay and disinformation in order to prevent alternatives to fossil fuels from making it to market”. It is true: the suppliers of fossil fuels actively spread disinformation regarding their product, to manufacture demand for it. Woodside, for instance, presents fossil gas as a climate solution.
Other companies are facing legal action for greenwashing and shoddy net zero targets. The world has been shifting towards producer liability for some time. It’s not obvious, because the headspace shift required to understand that the company that sells the product bears some responsibility for its use is alien in the energy world.
We get it when a pharmaceutical company sells a defective drug, or when the tobacco companies sell addictive cigarettes. But when a company sells a product that causes hundreds of billions in damages to human society, it’s almost considered absurd to hold them liable for it. This research takes a big step towards correcting this weird exception we have in fossil fuel world, and holding the producers liable for their actions.
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