Lab Coat Lawfare

A made-for-litigation study by political activists with PhD’s calculates the tab energy companies owe the world.

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” - Richard P. Feynman

Marie Curie. Nikola Tesla. Gregor Mendel. Norman Borlaug. Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. Alexander Fleming. These are just a few scientists whose work changed the course of humanity in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Whether it was disease (Fleming), food production to feed a rapidly growing population (Mendel, Borlaug, Haber and Bosch), physics (Curie), or electrification (Tesla), all of these scientists were motivated to solve problems to improve the lot of humanity. None were motivated by intent to punish anyone, any product, or any industry.

We asked Perplexity AI: “what is the true purpose of science?” It gave us the following response (emphasis ours):

The true purpose of science is to systematically seek, generate, and refine knowledge about the natural world through observation, experimentation, and critical reasoning. At its core, science aims to understand and explain, predict outcomes, solve problems, challenge assumptions, and inspire curiosity and wonder.

The true purpose of science is to pursue truth about the natural world, foster understanding, and apply knowledge for the benefit of humanity-always guided by evidence, transparency, and a willingness to question and learn.

Grok AI provided a similar answer to the query, also emphasizing the pursuit of truth and knowledge of the fundamental laws of the natural world. It added innovation as a key theme.

Neither of these AI systems mentioned that the purpose of science is to function as a weapon for political purposes. We imagine that the greatest scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would surely consider using science in that fashion a serious abuse and breach of public trust.

In the case of “climate science,” that dynamic jumped the shark some years ago. In our view, the inflection point came around the time of the “Climategate” email scandal in November 2009. The treatment suffered by former Chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech Judy Curry, the actions and legal travails of Michael Mann, and the manner in which legacy media has covered the developments since serve as milestones in the evolution of the politicization of science related to “climate change.”

Attempts by scientists to attribute specific weather events to CO2 and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are not new. Today, few have the appearance of science for the purpose of gaining knowledge, and most are tinged with the air of political activism.

“Attribution science” has a decades-strong foundation in certain environmental fields. It has been used to determine the sources of contamination via physical samples and laboratory analysis of soil, groundwater, surface water or sediment (now with detection limits down to parts per trillion) for decades to identify responsible parties (RPs) for pollution and as evidence in toxic tort litigation. In the U.S., this form of “attribution science” has been used to hold RPs liable for site investigation and remediation expenses under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA, aka Superfund) for decades.

Superfund has three unique features. Retroactive liability makes RPs liable for past contaminant releases that were lawful at the time. Joint and several liability makes RPs responsible for the liabilities of other parties to a contaminant release that are insolvent and incapable of meeting their obligations. And it imposes strict liability far beyond traditional negligence-based civil liability standards.

These concepts have begun to coalesce in the context of climate litigation. Put climate “attribution” science together with Superfund’s strict, retroactive, and joint and several liability legal doctrines and you have a litigator’s wet dream for attacking oil and gas producers.

In 2024, New York and Vermont passed “Climate Superfund” legislation attempting to hold major energy companies liable for “damages” associated with the CO2 emissions from the past legal sale and use of their products. As we wrote this January in An Offer You Can’t Refuse about New York’s version:

Among other premises, New York’s Climate Superfund law relies on the idea that it is now possible to determine with great precision the portion of GHGs emitted by individual oil and gas companies over many decades. Accordingly, the law attempts to “assign liability to and require compensation from companies commensurate with their emissions.”

In that piece, we speculated that the New York legislation was driven by “attribution science” emanating from the Columbia Center for Sustainability Investment (CCSI, a joint center of the Law and Climate Schools at Columbia University in New York). In 2022, CCSI issued a study attempting to quantify the emissions of 6 U.S. and European “oil majors.”

Establishing a causal connection between GHG emissions and specific impacts has been the Holy Grail of “attribution science” for around two decades, and a new study by two Dartmouth scientists attempts to go even further, by linking the specific emissions of five major oil companies to “damages” from “extreme heat” in eye watering amounts. What did they find and what were their methods? What shortcomings do we find in the analysis? Which “climate litigation” proponents contributed to and even funded the study? What are their objectives?

Put on your safety glasses and grab your notebooks. We’re going into the climate modeling lab to investigate lab coat lawfare’s latest computer model weapon.

We begin our story with the study’s two authors. Christopher W. Callahan and Justin S. Mankin are PhD scientists in the Program in Ecology, Evolution, Environment and Society, and the Department of Geography at Dartmouth College. Mankin is also a member of the Department of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth, and affiliated with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. Together they have previously published three studies, one dealing with the economic effects of “climate change (published in Science, 2023), another developed methods to attribute damages to specific countries and emitters (Climate Change 2022), and one dealing with global economic losses due to heat waves (Science Advances, 2022).

Heat losses, economic damage, and attribution of damages to specific countries and emitters are their specialty. This type of scientific work is generally not performed for the purpose of discoveries that lead to innovative products, methods, or services, or solve seemingly impossible problems constraining human advancements.

The authors do not portray their study as concerned with those traditional types of positive roles for science. In “Carbon majors and the scientific case for climate liability” Callahan and Mankin (C&M) make this point very clear from the very first sentence in the study’s Abstract:

Will it ever be possible to sue anyone for damaging the climate? Twenty years after this question was first posed, we argue that the scientific case for climate liability is closed.

The study notes that “more than 100 climate-related lawsuits have been filed annually since 2017” and suggests that “the consensus developed around event attribution methods suggests that they could meet legal standards for admissibility”. The term “litigation” appears five times in the seven page study. The term “court(s)” appears nineteen times.

Published in Nature April 24^th, the C&M authors “estimate the economic losses resulting from the extreme heat caused by emissions from major fossil fuel companies (‘carbon majors’) over the period 1920–2020.”

The most obvious argument against relying on “attribution” to establish “damages” in litigation is one noted by the authors in their study:

“...the causal chain from emissions to impacts is nonlinear, and uncertainties compound from emissions, to warming, to hazards, to impacts.”

It is precisely for these reasons (and others) that attempting to use proportionate emissions to "attribute" liability is more a political and litigation exercise than a scientific one. That will not deter some political activist scientists from trying.

The type of “end-to-end attribution” C&M believe they have made possible requires (at least) two leaps of faith: First that it is scientifically possible to connect individual emitters to actual weather events and impacts. This largely relies on existing climate models using counterfactual, “leave one out” experiments (i.e., “but for” the emissions of X). Second, that climate science can differentiate between weather-related damages caused by GHG emissions and natural variability, and social scientists can use econometric models to accurately assess those damages. No other religion requires this much faith.

C&M notes their “generalized framework uses econometric dose–response functions that parameterize relationships between climate hazards and human outcomes.” “Parametrization” is a computer modeler’s means of replacing complex processes that occur at scales too complex to be resolved within the model’s equations with simplified versions that approximate the average effects on larger-scale systems.

Instead of using higher resolution coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) favored by most climate scientists, the authors chose “reduced complexity” models (RCMs), noting that AOGCMs are “opaque” and “computationally” expensive. They describe this as a “computationally tractable” approach (read: easier, cheaper, quicker) that “accurately simulates the behavior of the Earth system using a smaller number of equations.”

As the adage goes, all models are wrong, and some are useful, and even the more sophisticated, higher-resolution AOGCMs have issues “accurately simulating the behavior of the Earth system.” Parameterization across large grid sizes (hundreds and sometimes thousands of square kilometers) renders a coarse resolution which fails to accurately account for small-scale features like topography and cloud cover. They struggle with cloud physics and the question of whether clouds have a net warming or cooling effect. These are just a few examples.

C&M uses the even less sophisticated RCMs to compute “subnational changes in extreme heat,” which they define as the “temperature of the five hottest days in each year”, then using econometric models, extrapolates economic damages from a generalized relationship between extreme heat intensity and economic growth. Using historical hydrocarbon production figures, the authors then apply a portion of the calculated heat damages to the fraction of each major oil company’s cumulative total Gigatons (Gt) of CO2 emissions from 1920 – 2020. C&M thus requires faith that combining these reduced complexity climate models with the use of econometric models to establish economic “damages” based on extreme heat is not layering uncertainty on top of uncertainty but actually increasing attribution precision.

As for their findings, C&M concluded (emphasis added):

“The global economy would be $28 trillion richer in 2020 US dollars were it not for the extreme heat caused by the emissions from the 111 carbon majors considered here.”

The authors find the world’s investor-owned energy companies responsible for $14 trillion of those damages. As for the 5 investor-owned major oils they analyzed (Exxon, Chevron, BP, Aramco, and Gazprom), C&M find the group responsible for $9 trillion of those damages solely from their emissions over the thirty years from 1991 – 2020.

The authors would like you – and courts around the world - to believe that using “reduced complexity models” (knowing the more sophisticated AOGCMs are merely tools for attempting to represent earth’s complex, non-linear, ocean/atmosphere/terrestrial climate system), “extreme heat days,” and extrapolating damages from a single variable (“excess heat”) based on generalized relationships between extreme heat and economic growth should be sufficient to pin a $9 trillion tail on the 5 major oil donkeys. In an objective world, this approach would fly about as well as Evel Knievel’s 1974 attempt to jump the Snake River canyon in miniature rocket ship.

Missed it by that much! | Popular Science

As if these layers of uncertainties weren’t enough, one key element of C&M’s chosen methodology seems an insurmountable legal hurdle if their objective is to hold major oil companies responsible for excess heat related or other damages: the choice of which CO2 emissions they counted and attributed to the investor-owned companies.

For those unfamiliar with the three categories that CO2 counters use when calculating emissions, Scope 1 are emissions from the company’s own activities. Scope 2 are emissions related to the company’s vendors, suppliers, contractors, subcontractors, service providers, etc. Scope 3 are emissions from the company’s customers’ use of its products or services. C&M chose to count not only Scope 1 emissions (as one would expect), but also Scope 3 emissions – your emissions from burning the energy company’s produced oil in the form of gas and diesel in your internal combustion engine cars and trucks. It appears the researchers also included natural gas burned in power plants, used in chemical feedstocks, and other industrial applications.

We pulled the most recent CO2 emissions data from 5 major oils that report all three CO2 emissions scopes, including four companies that are targets subjects of the C&M study. (Gazprom and Aramco do not report Scope 3 emissions.) The graph below displays the portion each company’s Scope 3 emissions represent as a percentage of their total CO2 emissions (i.e., Scope 1 + Scope 2 + Scope 3). The average among the five corporations is 90%.

We do not hold automobile manufacturers liable for illegal drunk driving deaths, or firearm and ammunition manufacturers liable as accessories for illegal homicides, or spoon manufacturers liable for making people fat. But Callahan and Mankin and the Climate Litigation Cabal™ believe it is appropriate to hold energy companies legally liable for the warming effects of their customers’ use of their products (Scope 3 emissions), and that courts should award economic damages on that basis.

Climate “attribution science” in a nutshell

For perspective, the chart below compares the alleged damages to each of the five major oil’s 2024 pre-tax earnings and free cash flow. (Note: Gazprom figures are best estimates derived from the company’s published data.)

Holding these 5 major energy companies responsible for the $9.3 trillion C&M calculate equates to:

· ~63 years’ worth of their combined 2024 free cash-flow

· ~31 years’ worth of their combined 2024 pre-tax income

· ~8% of the value of all goods and services produced globally (world GDP)

· Nearly 20% of the combined GDP of the G7 economies (U.S., Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan)

The $28 trillion C&M calculated for all 111 energy companies studied is more than 25% of global GDP. All of these figures include Scope 3 emissions associated with their customers’ legal use of their products, which represents ~90% of those emissions as we have shown above.

Callahan and Mankin’s study troubles us not least because economic and social “damages” from “extreme heat” are nearly impossible to reliably quantify, holding energy companies responsible for the GHG emissions of their customers is absurd, and like the U.S. EPA’s Social Cost of Carbon and the UK’s Stern Review and many other studies before it, all benefits of hydrocarbon energy are ignored while costs are wildly exaggerated.

The fact that GDP and primary energy consumption are nearly perfectly correlated is beyond controversy. Over the 100 years for which C&M accumulated historical CO2 emissions data for their study, hydrocarbons provided 80-90% of all primary energy worldwide. Over that period, in 2021 International dollars (explanation in graph below), here is what happened to global GDP:

Despite the fact that the authors declare no conflicts of interest, some of the actors contributing to the M&C study and funding the work raise concerns about objectivity and motivations. In their “acknowledgments,” the authors thank a variety of well-known climate litigation activists for their contributions. One (Michael Burger) is a lawyer at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University who also serves as Of Counsel at the nation’s most notorious climate litigation plaintiff law firm (Sher Edling). The Nelson A. Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth provided some of the funding (as did your tax dollars via grants from NOAA and the National Science Foundation). The Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth was created by Rockefeller Family Fund, the New York-based charitable foundation that has been working tirelessly for years to destroy the very industry that built its fortune, in some strange form of confessional-redemption/keep 7 billion from reaching our living standards psychopathic political activism. RFF helped create New York’s state’s climate superfund law and work they funded was used in support of Vermont’s version as well. Overall, nearly a dozen states are considering such legislation.

These political activist scientists and the litigants using their work seek to destroy the world’s hydrocarbon energy companies financially. Failing that, two other motivations seem likely. One could be to force U.S. Congress’ hand to impose a carbon tax in return for some form of federal preemption to the growing number of states that have introduced some form of Climate Superfund laws like the ones passed in New York and Vermont. The other is more explicitly stated in the paper itself (emphasis ours):

A standing scientific body would be an essential resource for courts and citizens, providing tailored end-to-end attribution analyses, translation and, potentially, expert testimony, responsibly informing the coming wave of litigation to ensure claims use the best available science.

Science, possibly the greatest contribution to human progress emerging from the three centuries ending in the Enlightenment Era, should never have devolved into a computer modeling exercise intended to advance politically motivated lawfare. Yet here we are.

If these activists and litigants can successfully convince courts to render liability judgments against major energy companies based on this form of attribution and damages assessment merely for the five hottest days of the year, they will not stop there. The same methodology will be used to attempt to impose liability through the courts for every adverse weather event, from floods to hurricanes to tornadoes to heat waves to droughts. “Attribution science” will be used to support climate litigation attempting to bankrupt a disfavored industry. When used for this purpose, is science really fulfilling its highest mission, or has it becomes more of something that looks like a weapon: made for litigation, lab coat lawfare science?

We close with a thought experiment. Since Professors Callahan and Mankin seem to be fond of “counterfactual” and “leave it out” experiments and calculating “damages” related to energy use, we suggest they conduct an additional one.

Remove all CO2 emissions from all 111 energy companies in your original model for the entire 100-year time series. Contemplate a “counterfactual” world in which oil and natural gas never existed, and the $28 trillion in damages you found were avoided. Then calculate what global GDP would have been after removing those same sources, which provided 80-90% of the primary energy consumed over that same century.

Then contemplate what that difference meant to living standards and how all of these differences compare to the $28 trillion in damages found in your study. Demonstrate to the world under which of these scenarios the nearly 8 billion inhabitants of planet earth would have suffered greater “damages.”

We do not expect anyone in the academia to undertake such comparative analysis, or for the Rockefeller Family Fund to fund it. In its stead, expect more lab coat lawfare.

“Like” this post or we’ll report your Scope 3 emissions to the authorities.

Leave us a comment. We read them all, respond to most. Refuels the tank.

Subscribe to environMENTAL for free below.

Share this post. Helps us grow. We’re grateful for the assist.