In 2023, the Winooski River in Vermont poured its banks, kissing the Green Truss bridge that had it. The water of the river was poured into the marble floors of the state house. Up to nine rainfall fell within 48 hours, causing hundreds of millions of dollars.
A year later, Vermont adopted the law on the change of Superfund climate, which owns oil and gas companies that are financially responsible for the state’s climate damage. Similar legislation passed in New York in 2024 and pending in California, Maryland and Massachusetts.
The support of laws is the science of performance, which modeling huge scenario numbers using global temperature data to determine the possibility that extreme weather events such as floods or heat waves are associated with emissions of oil, gas burning emissions.
A new document published Wednesday in Nature magazine expands this type of work to link the broadcasts from specific broadcasts to the financial burden of extreme events.
“The oil industry is worried by the laws of the state superfund climate and their growing popularity because they are the first policies adopted anywhere in the world that make climate pollutants pay a fair share of the huge damage caused by the products caused by the products.” Rockefeller.
The reaction to the laws was fast. In February, western Virginia and other democratic states were sued to prevent New York law, saying that only the federal government could regulate the broadcasts. President Trump signed an executive order this month by calling on the state laws “ongoing and ideological motives” and asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to prevent their enforcement.
For decades, environmental lawyers are considering how to make damage from greenhouse gas emissions, according to Martin Lockman, a climate colleague at the Sabin Center at Columbia University.
“Performance science is extremely important because it draws a relationship between specific activities from a company that benefits from fossil fuels and specific damage to states and communities,” Mr Lockman said. “If you cause harm, you should be responsible for cleaning it. It is so simple.”
The new study improves an approach known as “from end to end” performance, which connects a particular transmitter (a company, for example) to a specific climate -related effect (extreme heat, for example) to a specific damage (recession in the global economy).
The study found that Chevron’s broadcasts had caused up to $ 3.6 trillion in heat -related damage to the global gross domestic product. Christopher Callahan, a postdoctoral scientist on Earth at Stanford University and the author of the study, said that such a high cost is still a gross depreciation of the global impact on the combustion of fossil fuels, especially in the poorest.
“This shocking figure represents damage from a single climate effect,” said Delta Merner, deputy director of the scientific gulf for climate difference in the union of interested scientists. “The total damage attributed to large emissions is undoubtedly much higher when taking into account the full range of climate risks.”
In a statement, Chevron said that the article of nature “ignores the scientific inability to deliver specific climate and weather events to any particular country, company or energy company”.
Overall, the document found that people would be $ 28 trillion richer if it was not for the extreme heat caused by the emissions of 111 large carbon producers between 1991 and 2020.
Since 2017, more than 100 climate -related lawsuits have been filed each year, according to the new study. However, the performance of cases based often have failed to link emissions to estimated financial allowances.
This new framework could provide a function similar to other major cases of damage and loss, such as the restraint of tobacco companies responsible for lung cancer or pharmaceutical companies for opiate addiction.
“Legal scholars have named this kind of performance of the Holy Disc of Climate Responsibility,” said Justin Mankin, a professor of geography who focused on climate science at Dartmouth College and a writer of nature.
The global weather performance, a team exhausted by Imperial College London, has regularly published performance reports over the last decade.
“Unfortunately we are still the only ones who really do this and we are not an institution. It is essentially a work I do as a university professor who works with a group of people,” said Friederike Otto, a physicist who helps to lead the world’s world performance.
Dr. Callahan and Dr. Mankin have used open source tools for their models and have made the code and sources they used to develop the global cost of climate change available publicly on their websites.
“We believe in openly transparent science, especially since the work was paid by US taxpayers,” Dr. Mankin said, noting that much of research support was funded by the National Foundation of Science and Noaa, two of the largest science services of the nation.
Extreme weather events continue to disturb its communities and financial executives. The flood of 2023 costs Vermont hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Anne Watson, a Senator of Vermond, who funded the bill that quantified state compensation between 1995 and 2024.
Julie Moore, secretary of the Bermond Natural Resource Organization, has helped organize the request for more information to help the state better understand different approaches to performance science and how to distribute damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
“The charge for us is to adopt rules on how to implement performance science and eventually send costs of cost rehabilitation,” Moore said. State law says that oil and gas companies will receive letters in early 2027.
“Hope is that it will lead to a significant amount of money coming to Vermont to help pay for the damage and help us adapt to a warmer, humid climate that is the result of this carbon in the atmosphere,” Ms Watson said. “We have to go to the source of who is responsible for it.”
