A recent report by Richard Heede titled Carbon Majors identifies precisely who these fossil fuel companies are and how much climate damage they have contributed. Here is a table from the report listing the top twenty worst offenders:
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Who Should Pay for Solar Geoengineering Liability?
I have been conducting research on the problem of liability and compensation in the context of solar geoengineering, that is, how would the international community address damages resulting from large-scale testing or deployment of SRM? This is a multifaceted problem, and one of its most difficult aspects would be determining who should pay for such damages. One solution that has suggested itself is to set up an international compensation fund financed by the fossil fuel industry. Since any damages caused by SRM would essentially be the negative side effects of a response measure intended to remediate harms caused by excessive fossil fuel use, and fossil fuel companies have been the primary direct beneficiaries of this activity, it stands to reason that they should be the ones to pay for its cleanup. This is precisely how the international oil spill liability regime works--the International Oil Pollution Compensation (IOPC) Funds, financed exclusively by oil companies, have paid out more than $700 million in compensation since 1978, while the frequency and severity of oil spills have fallen dramatically.
A recent report by Richard Heede titled Carbon Majors identifies precisely who these fossil fuel companies are and how much climate damage they have contributed. Here is a table from the report listing the top twenty worst offenders:
This is hardly a definitive assessment of the carbon legacy of coal, oil, and gas producers, but it is a good start, and provides a valuable quantitative estimate of contributions to cumulative carbon and methane emissions. Such estimates could conceivably form the basis of formulas to determine "carbon major" contributions to a solar geoengineering liability compensation fund.
A recent report by Richard Heede titled Carbon Majors identifies precisely who these fossil fuel companies are and how much climate damage they have contributed. Here is a table from the report listing the top twenty worst offenders:
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> fossil fuel companies have been the primary direct beneficiaries of this activity
ReplyDeleteOooh, dodgy. What about consumers, who have happily consumed these fossil fuels? I'd argue that they are the primary beneficiaries of FF use.
> any damages caused by SRM would essentially be the negative side effects of a response measure intended to remediate harms caused by... how the international oil spill liability regime works
But you see the difference immeadiately, even if you didn't point it out. The harm from fuels spills is caused directly by the companies. The harm from SRM isn't. Your proposal, taken literally, would mean that an incompetent SRM company that accidentally fried Australia would have its legal bills picked up by an oil company. You see the problem, of course.
I'm also somewhat surprised not to see coal burning in China anywhere in that table.
Consumers and society at large have certainly benefited from the use of fossil fuels, no question about that. But in terms of direct benefits from unearthing and selling the stuff, a case can be made that the fossil fuel industry is the big winner. The industry also constitutes a bounded group of readily identifiable actors, which is important when figuring out who will pay in practice.
DeleteI agree that SRM and oil spill liability are not the same thing--a legal chain tying fossil fuel companies to SRM damages would be longer and more tenuous than a chain connecting an oil company to an oil spill. But even in the latter case it's not so straightforward: tanker owners are the immediately responsible parties under international law and bear primary liability for spills (the IOPC Funds form a second tier).
I also assume that governments, not companies, will run any SRM deployment.
Thoughtful blog, thanks for posting.
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