The world’s largest carbon emitters owe a huge debt to future generations. Some experts say that debt can be quantified financially.
That’s largely because the negative impacts of climate change won’t fall proportionally to responsibility. Some of the countries most likely to be hit dramatically by the adverse effects of climate change, such as small island nations facing the threat of completely losing their land to rising sea levels, have historic emission contributions that are dwarfed by those of top emitters like the United States.
In a new study, researchers at Stanford developed a quantitative framework to link individual emissions to actual damages that have happened and will happen around the globe. The framework is based on an estimate linking warming temperatures to the GDP of each country, offering a glimpse into the impact climate change is having on our world. The actual impact is likely much more significant since the data doesn’t account for areas that are “poorly captured in GDP data,” the researchers said, like climate-related health problems or the loss of one’s cultural homeland.
According to findings published in Nature on Wednesday, the United States has already caused $10 trillion in global damages from carbon emissions since 1990. Specifically, the researchers were able to link U.S. emissions since 1990 with $500 billion of damage in India, $330 billion in Brazil, and $1.39 trillion in the European Union. The United States’ carbon footprint also took a heavy toll on the nation itself. The researchers estimated that the U.S. has suffered a $16.2 trillion hit from all global carbon emissions since 1990, with $2.97 trillion of this damage stemming directly from American carbon emissions.
Here’s the real kicker, though: past emissions not only continue to cause future damages, but those future costs will also be 10 times higher than the past damages from those same emissions, the researchers estimate. So, for example, one metric ton of carbon emitted in 1990 caused an estimated $180 in global damages by the year 2020, the researchers say, and will continue to cause $1,840 in damages through 2100.
“Thus, settling debts for past damages will not settle debts for past emissions,” the researchers conclude in the study.
The study used the framework to illustrate the debts of individual actions, too. For example, emissions from private flights taken in 2022 by Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jay-Z, and Taylor Swift will each cause more than $1 million in damages by 2100. In contrast, if you took a single long-haul flight per year over the last decade, then chances are your carbon footprint from that action will lead to roughly $25,000 in future damages by 2100, the study finds.
So individual actions have tangible consequences, but the good news is that it goes both ways. So, on the flip side, switching to a vegetarian diet or reducing your driving by 10% would each result in $6,000 of reduced future damages if you do them for a decade. Even if you were to cut down on your beef consumption by eating one less serving per month over a decade, that would generate at least $1,000 in global future benefits.
The beneficiary effect might not seem as large, sadly, as the impact the biggest polluters are having on the economy, but it is a place to start. There is a “lasting global impact of even relatively small changes in individual behavior,” the researchers conclude.
As for settling any debt by larger institutions, direct financial compensation is the most practical approach for addressing past damages, the researchers say. Despite its pitfalls—such as deciding which households deserve the money versus who actually receives it—it remains the most workable option. This framework could be a starting point for figuring that out, but the researchers note that absolute damages don’t necessarily indicate what is actually owed to each economy by other emitters.
“For example, we compute that the damages experienced by the US from global emissions since 1990 are greater than the global damages caused by the US by its own emissions over that period, but this need not imply that a framework for responsibility would necessarily assign the US to be a net recipient of transfers,” the researchers said.
But even when you settle up past debts, the past emissions continue to impact people around the world. For compensating future debt, the best method is to limit the damage.
Carbon removal technologies could be a solution, but even that has limitations. Besides the fact that the technology in its current form is usually expensive and energy-intensive, its effectiveness at preventing future damage diminishes if the carbon is not removed immediately upon its emission. So immediate carbon removal would eliminate all damages, but a 25-year delay would only result in a 50% reduction in damages, the researchers say.
Ultimately, the best way to combat future damage is to just produce less carbon dioxide, it seems. Who knew?!
English (US) ·