The climate liability litigation campaign is recycling old, debunked research in another attempt to make the case for investor-owned oil and gas companies to be sued for climate change. The updated research comes from the Climate Accountability Institute (CAI), one of the organizers of the infamous 2012 La Jolla conference – a gathering held specifically to design a legal strategy against oil companies.
CAI’s Rick Heede quietly released a “training manual” for his Carbon Majors database on Monday and appears to be calling it quits, noting that he has launched “the search for a long-term and durable institutional host to take on the responsibility of updating the Carbon Majors database that I started working on fifteen years ago.” In the manual’s acknowledgements, Heede notes that without the support of his generous anti-fossil fuel donors, he’d “be sipping rum at some beachfront on Bora Bora…Bring the rum!”
Heede’s training manual explicitly notes that the purpose of the Carbon Majors database is to support efforts “to hold oil, gas, and coal companies morally, financially, and legally responsible for exacerbating foreseeable climate damages.” Notably, the new CAI research suffers from the same flaws as the old research: It’s funded by anti-oil and gas groups, it attributes consumers’ emissions back to energy producers, it ignores broad swaths of the economy, and it gives state-owned companies a pass.
Oh, and it actually admits that its numbers are made up. Let’s dig in.
For the Climate Accountability Institute, It All Goes Back to La Jolla
CAI’s latest paper updates the “Carbon Majors” paper published by CAI’s Rick Heede in 2014. Heede and CAI were co-hosts of the 2012 La Jolla conference where anti-oil and gas activists hatched their strategy to sue oil and gas companies for climate change. At La Jolla, activists identified a need to be able to link specific emissions and damages back to individual companies, in hopes of establishing legal liability.
Heede took that charge and ran with it, publishing several papers on the topic while attracting criticism for “manipulat[ing] academic research to smear Exxon.” The final result, his “Carbon Majors” report, then became the basis for several other attempts to establish climate liability for oil and gas companies, including a report by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) – the other co-host of the La Jolla conference – took Heede’s research one step further and claimed to be able to attribute temperature increases and sea level rise back to specific companies.
The end goal of Heede’s and UCS’s research was to allow their papers to be used as evidence in complaints filed against oil and gas companies. “Big Oil must pay for climate change. Now we can calculate how much,” reads the headline of an opinion piece published by UCS’s Peter Frumhoff in The Guardian on the same day their study was published. Vic Sher, the plaintiffs’ attorney representing the majority of plaintiffs that have brought climate liability litigation against energy companies, gave a presentation in 2017 where he said he worked directly with Rick Heede to build his case:
“So how do we link emissions to specific corporate emitters? Obviously if you can’t tell who’s doing it, you have a problem. Well here we’ve been working primarily with an expert named Rick Heede who is with an outfit called the Climate Accountability Project in Colorado. Rick published in a peer-reviewed article in 2014 which is known in the literature as the Carbon Majors article…
“Now when Rick and I started talking, his original article went back to, uh, I think 1850, and maybe it was 1874, and I asked him how many companies that are either US companies or do sufficient business in the United States that we can sue them here, would it take to get to 25% of all of the global emissions, globally (did I mention that?) in the world between 1965 and 2015. We were having this conversation in 2016. And Rick identified 28 such companies that are by themselves, using his methodology, responsible for 25 percent of global CO2 and methane emissions – 1965 to 2015.”
Heede’s updated paper, which was funded and commissioned by the Union of Concerned Scientists, emphasizes that the purpose of this research is to support litigation:
“I wish to thank my colleagues at Union of Concerned Scientists who encouraged me to write this Training Manual — and indeed to launch the search for a long-term and durable institutional host to take on the responsibility of updating the Carbon Majors database that I started working on fifteen years ago. In particular I want to thank Peter Frumhoff, who has been the champion not only of the database but of its scientific value to climate modelers, analysts, climate leaders and policy experts, as well as to litigators in pursuit of climate justice and the protection of human rights. I want to thank my UCS colleagues Kathy Mulvey and Brenda Ekwurzel — with whom I have enjoyed close collaboration on several projects of mutual interest including their attentive edits of this Manual…
“It is also due to UCS funding that much of this work has succeeded…
“This Manual and the database and its methodology rests firmly on my early collaboration with colleagues at Greenpeace International (Kristin Casper, Jasper Teulings, & Nina Shultz) and Climate Justice Programme (Keely Boom, Steve Leonard, and Peter Roderick).
“I also want to acknowledge the crucial nature of philanthropic funding from Wallace Global Fund and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Without which I’d be sipping rum at some beachfront on Bora Bora.” (emphasis added)
Climate Attribution – Everything’s Made Up and the Points Don’t Matter
But no one can say with a straight face that CAI has any credibility because of its known bias against energy producers. For example, CAI has received funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund – the primary funders of the entire #ExxonKnew campaign.
The key flaw in Heede’s research is that it relies heavily on Scope 3 emissions and a lot of estimation. Scope 1 emissions are a company’s direct emissions, while Scope 2 emissions are those indirect greenhouse gases emitted by others to generate electricity to power the company’s operations. Scope 3 emissions are by far the biggest piece of the emissions pie and are those that come from the end-users of energy companies’ products. When you fill up your gas tank and burn that fuel, you’re generating the Scope 3 emissions. Multiply that by the 7.7 billion people on the planet and you can see why Scope 3 represents the lion’s share (88.5%!) of emissions catalogued in Heede’s report.
The problem with Scope 3 emissions, if you’re Heede, is that Scope 3 emissions are not under the company’s control and they are nearly impossible to account for. Companies cannot accurately track Scope 3 emissions, which is probably why they’re not required to report them. So, when Heede claims to have calculated a company’s total emissions, understand that he’s just making an educated guess, similar to how Drew Carrey awarded points on “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”
That’s a problem for the validity of his study, and for the lawsuits relying on his research, because it attributes the estimated emissions generated by consumers back energy companies. In other words, when Vic Sher says he’s identified the companies responsible for 25 percent of historic emissions, roughly 88.5 percent of those emissions are not generated by the companies.
Other Rockefeller-funded groups, like CDP, have also alleged that major oil companies are responsible for the vast majority of historic greenhouse gas emissions. But CDP’s work is based on CAI’s flawed research and singles out publicly-listed companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP, while ignoring state-owned entities like Russia’s Gazprom and National Iranian Oil, which allegedly contributed 59 percent of emissions since 1988. The Carbon Majors report also completely ignores high-emitting sectors of the economy, such as agriculture.
Heede appears to be handing off the Carbon Majors database to the Union of Concerned Scientists or another pro-climate litigation group to carry on his legacy. No doubt, they will continue to misrepresent the emissions of energy producers in hopes of holding a handful of companies responsible for the world’s emissions.
