Stanford Study: US Carbon Emissions Cost World $10T
Stanford researchers estimate U.S. emissions since 1990 caused $10 trillion in global damages with future costs per ton of CO2 about 10 times higher than past damages.
- On Wednesday, a Stanford University study published in Nature linked the United States to $10.2 trillion in global climate damages since 1990, with China and the European Union also identified as major sources.
- Researchers developed a quantitative framework linking warming temperatures to GDP, finding that emissions from Saudi Aramco caused $3 trillion in cumulative global economic damages between 1988 and 2015.
- Future climate costs from past emissions will be 10 times higher than previously incurred damages; one tonne of CO2 emitted in 1990 will cause $1,840 in damages through 2100.
- Lead author Marshall Burke stated the study provides scientific guidance but does not answer the "legal and ethical" question of compensation, as data excludes areas "poorly captured in GDP data."
- As a wave of lawsuits seeks accountability for climate "loss and damage," individual actions such as reducing driving by 10% could generate $6,000 in reduced future damages over a decade.
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40 Articles
A new analysis concluded that emissions from the United States of America (USA) since 1990 have already caused more than €8.65 billion (in English, €8.65 trillion) in global economic damage.
Quantifying climate loss and damage consistent with a social cost of carbon
Climate change is causing measurable harm globally1,2. Political and legal efforts seek to link these damages with specific emissions, including in discussions of loss and damage (L&D)3,4; however, no quantitative definition of L&D exists5,6, nor is there a framework to link past and future emissions from specific sources to monetized, location-specific damages. Here we develop such a framework, which is integrated with recent efforts to estimate the social cost of carbon7. Using empirical estimates of the non-linear relationship between temperature and aggregate economic output, we show that future damages from past emissions—one component of L&D—are at least an order of magnitude larger than historical damages from the same emissions. For instance, one tonne of CO2 emitted in 1990 caused US$180 in discounted global damages by 2020 ($40–530) and will cause an additional $1,840 through 2100 ($500–5,700). Thus, settling debts for past damages will not settle debts for past emissions. In other illustrative estimates, a single long-haul flight per year over the past decade leads to about $25k ($6,000–77,000) in future damages by 2100, and US emissions since 1990 caused $500 billion ($180–1,300 billion) of damage in India and $330 billion ($110–820 billion) in Brazil. Carbon removal offers an alternative to transfer payments for settling L&D, but is increasingly ineffective in limiting damages as the delay between emission and recapture increases. A new framework links specific emissions to monetized, location-specific climate damages, showing that future harms from past CO2 emissions far exceed historical damages and that delayed carbon removal cannot fully offset these losses.
US Emissions Have Caused $10T in Global Damage
The United States' role in warming the planet just got a price tag, and it's a staggering one: roughly $10 trillion in economic damage worldwide since 1990, per a new study in Nature . Researchers say no country has slowed global growth more through its greenhouse gas emissions, with China close...
Paris. The economic cost of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is much more important than previously estimated, according to a study published on Wednesday, which blames the major pollutants on the responsibility of trillions of dollars for climate damage in the world.
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