Emissions to impact: How climate science will hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the climate crisis

Advances in climate attribution science are helping to make the case that individual fossil fuel companies should be made to pay compensation for climate change linked disasters.

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

Two weeks into 2025 and it already feels like a turning point for climate action - for good and bad. We start the year with news that the Earth experienced yet another ‘warmest year on record’ and global temperatures surpassed the 1.5-degree mark for the first time. Los Angeles is on fire in the middle of winter, and Donald Trump is returning as US President.

The task ahead of us - phasing out the use of fossil fuels, investing in clean energy technologies, and protecting vulnerable communities from the locked-in impacts of climate change - remains huge.

But the task is not insurmountable and there are reasons for optimism that fossil fuel companies will be held legally and financially responsible for the damages caused by climate change, thanks to progress in the field of climate attribution science.

Bridging the gap between polluters and legal liability

I recently attended the Attribution Science and Climate Law Conference in New York, hosted by Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law (recordings of the conference should be available soon via the center’s YouTube channel). It was a deeply enlightening conference that generated significant optimism among climate scientists and lawyers alike around potential applications in climate litigation.

The conference served as a strong demonstration of the progress that is being made in the field of climate attribution science, which promises to deepen our ability to quantify and attribute the climate change-related damages for which individual companies, countries, and fossil fuel projects should be held responsible.

Climate attribution science is not a particularly new field. It is the field of science that - using real-world observations and climate models - established the link between a surge in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, starting from the Industrial Revolution, and the observed increases in global temperatures and changes in the Earth’s climate patterns.

Attribution science works to confirm the linkages between five core components of the causes and effects of climate change, these being:

1. The sources of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions

2. Increases in the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases

3. Changes to the Earth’s climate, particularly increased temperatures

4. Changes to climate-related hazards, including extreme weather events, droughts, flooding, sea-level rise, etc.

5. The damage attributable to changes in climate and weather patterns (property damage, displacement, social and cultural loss)

At the start of the attribution chain are polluters and the producers of fossil fuels. At the other end of the chain are the economic, social, cultural, and ecological damages caused by climate change.

Establishing the links across the full attribution chain with sufficient certainty and higher levels of specificity is often one of the hardest aspects of climate science. We often hear claims that it is impossible to attribute an individual extreme weather event to climate change or the individual contributions of a fossil fuel project to global warming.

But the increasing sophistication of the field promises to bridge any gaps or uncertainties that may remain in the attribution chain with amazing levels of specificity - we are reaching the point of assessing the impacts of emissions from individual countries, individual fossil fuel companies and even individual emitters.

For example, speaking at the Sabin Center’s conference, researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research demonstrated how it is now possible - using climate data and models - to trace a year’s worth of emissions from the use of a single private jet. Such as the one owned by Elon Musk, during the year 2022. Researchers were able to calculate the extent to which those emissions would lead to an increase in global temperatures, and then estimate how much economic damage (via reduced aggregate global GDP) the resulting warming would cause (the answer is more than $1 million in cumulative future climate change damages between now and 2100).

Such is the growing sophistication of climate science that responsibility for climate damages will be able to be quantified on the basis of individual countries and regions. It could enable young people to sue fossil fuel companies for future climate impacts, and it could provide the evidentiary basis for countries, like small island states in the Pacific, to seek compensation from major fossil fuel producing countries, like Australia.

Simplifying the complexity of climate accountability

The global climate system is large and complex, and the large number of carbon polluters means each argues they individually contribute only a ‘small’ and ‘trivial’ share of the observed increase in global greenhouse gas concentrations. The ‘drop in the ocean’ argument.

But, as we know, the aggregation of all those ‘small’ sources of pollution adds up to the unprecedented release of carbon and is resulting in measurable changes to the global climate.

Demonstrating the causal link between an individual fossil fuel producer and the damage caused by climate change is also one of the hardest aspects of climate litigation. Courts will readily dismiss claims for legal intervention or financial compensation if the link between a cause and the resulting damage is considered too uncertain, or the contribution of the defendant appears too trivial.

For example, in the Sharma appeal (also known as the ‘duty of care’ case), the Full Federal Court ruled the federal environment minister did not owe young people a duty of care to protect them from climate change in part because of the “the tiny contribution of [the minister’s coal mine approval] to the overall risk of harm… the intermediation of countless other people around the world [and] the indeterminacy of the liability.”

But the number of polluters isn’t actually that large - a landmark study published by Richard Heede in 2013 identified a list of the ‘carbon majors’. A recent update to Heede’s study finds that 70 per cent of historical greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to “just 78 corporate and state producing entities” - including Australia’s BHP, which is responsible for around 0.5% of historic global greenhouse gas emissions.

By arguing that their individual contributions are trivial, these ‘carbon majors’ seek to undermine any argument that they should be held responsible for the resulting damage caused by climate change. But as climate attribution science is increasingly able to demonstrate, while the individual contributions may sound trivial, the causal links can be readily demonstrated and the resulting damages are anything but trivial.

To provide some perspective, a study published by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research estimated that 2 degrees of global warming could generate economic losses as high as US$38 trillion annually by 2050.

This would put BHP’s proportional liability for the economic damages caused by climate change at somewhere around US$200 billion annually, or about 60% more than its current market capitalisation. Science will soon be able to pin responsibility for damages on an individual company like BHP, and potentially enable impacted communities to sue for compensation.

A tool to reveal the impact of proposed fossil fuel projects

Another opportunity created by climate attribution science is the potential to quantify the future climate damage of proposed fossil fuel projects.

Just as fossil fuel companies seek to avoid responsibility for climate change damages caused by historical emissions, companies also work to trivialise the future contributions of new coal, gas, and oil projects when seeking development approvals.

These arguments, unfortunately, are too often swallowed and regurgitated by regulators. This includes the current federal environment minister Tanya Plibersek, who sought to trivialise the climate change impacts of the expansion of the Mount Pleasant coal mine, when approving the project under the EPBC Act.

The Mount Pleasant coal mine expansion will result in an increase in coal production of as much as 21 million tonnes annually to 2048. According to the federal climate change department, the resulting emissions from the use of the coal would lead to an additional increase in global temperatures of 0.00024°C. Plibersek cited this figure in her reasons for approving the coal mines’ expansion. She said:

“I found that the amount of coal to be combusted from the proposed action, and the possible increase in net global GHG emissions and global average temperature that would result from combusting this amount of coal, are very small. I concluded that the proposed action would not be a ‘substantial’ cause of the physical effects of climate change on World Heritage properties.”

- Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek

But in the context of massive potential economic damages - returning to that $38 billion figure - a rough estimate the proportional share of economic climate damages attributable to the Mount Pleasant coal mine expansion results in a figure that is no longer trivial. The share of climate change damages for which the expansion would be responsible could be as much as $4.5 billion annually.

The growing sophistication of climate attribution science will allow more detailed and more accurate assessments of the future economic damages that may be caused by a proposed project in the future, and would present a compelling case that such damages - and the climate change significance of individual projects - are not trivial and, crucially, not acceptable under environment and planning laws.

Further reading

• An informative paper by Georgetown University’s Associate Professor of Law

  Aisha Saad on using climate attribution in tort law

• An article by Vishal Yashoda Manve - From Wildfires to Courtrooms: How Attribution Science Fuels Climate Justice

• The working draft of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s paper on climate attribution (including initial estimates of climate damages caused by private jet use)

• A paper co-authored by conference speaker Jessica Wentz on The Law and Science of Climate Change Attribution