Companies Called ‘Carbon Majors’ Are Responsible for Half the Intensity of Recent Heat Waves

This study finds that emissions from the carbon majors “contributed to about half of the increase in intensity of heat waves since preindustrial times, and that this contribution is rising.” This tracks along with the rest of our capitalist world defined by its natural lurch towards corporate consolidation, and further raises the salience of initiating policies like forcing carbon majors to carry some form of climate liability insurance.

Dutch pension fund giant PFZW did not renew their $14 billion contract with the largest asset manager in the world, BlackRock, because PFZW has a new model that equally weights financial performance, risk and sustainability. BlackRock, like all other financial firms influenced by Trump’s authoritarianism, has dropped its commitments to sustainability, which has now lost it some very big business on the European continent. The math behind our climate change problem is becoming pretty bleak, and finance knows it. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries at the University of Exeter published a detailed report which found that “Insurance leaders have unequivocally stated that if climate change raises average temperatures to 4˚C above pre-industrial levels most assets will be uninsurable.”

And this new study on the carbon majors does not go as far to ascribe blame as a previous one published in Nature earlier this year, and as Inside Climate News notes, “That study suggested that 111 carbon majors are responsible for $28 trillion in global economic losses stemming from extreme heat over the period 1991 to 2020.” That’s about $8.7 billion per year per company responsible for global economic losses. These carbon majors should have to pay that back, and then some.

If the entire world is trending towards becoming uninsurable because a group of carbon majors are polluting the planet, then logic holds that they should have to carry some sort of liability insurance for the externalities they are imposing on the rest of us. It’s just too bad we live in a warming world that has abandoned logic in the name of short-term profit, and these carbon majors will continue to warm the planet in the name of corporate profits, killing people through deadly heat waves and creating climate tipping points across the world.