Lung cancer victims have won massive damages from tobacco companies after years of using their additive products. A group of obese teenagers tried to sue McDonalds for 'making them fat' and 'deliberately misleading' them into thinking that some of their menu options were healthy and nutritious. Some in the scientific community believe that making big greenhouse gas (ghg) emitters pay for the consequences of their pollution might be a better solution to cutting ghg emissions than the arguably impotent Kyoto Protocol.
Dr Myles Allen, at Oxford University’s physics department, wrote in the journal
Nature that 'risk and probability analysis makes it possible to quantify a link between external inputs (such as greenhouse gases) and specific weather events'. Ok, it’s not quite as simple as that – you can’t take the severe storms which caused flooding around Montagu, Swellendam and Robertson in March 2003 and track them back to ghg emissions produced by a coal-fired power station in China two decades ago, for instance. But you can calculate by how much the risk of that event is increased by rising concentration of ghgs in the atmosphere.
Naturally, the smaller the scale of the event, the more difficult it is to pin down the relationship between the event and the source of emissions. However the heat wave which swept through Europe in 2003 – which was linked to the deaths of over 14 000 people and untold damage to agriculture and rail transportation – was the result of an anticyclone. Allen argues that while no one can 'sensibly claim that greenhouse gases caused that particular anticyclone', scientists can say that ghg emissions have 'loaded the weather dice ... increas(ing) the risk of an anticyclone causing a heat wave like that of 2003 by around a factor of four'.
It is well known that climate modelling has indicated that the risk of extreme weather events increases as ghg concentrations increase in the atmosphere. According to the World Resources Institute – a resource which is highly regarded by local energy academics – the United States is responsible for about 20 percent of global ghg emissions. Some of the 'biggest corporate emitters' of ghgs in the world include the likes of US-based ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil and General Electric (
www.ceres.org).
This trend is a stark reminder that atmospheric emissions of this nature do not pollute the area immediately around the source, but rather the fallout happens elsewhere on the planet. It’s a bit like dragging on a cigarette at the bar but exhaling in the alley out the back. Legal action might finally hold those at the source accountable.
In July this year the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland-Proserpine brought a federal case against the Australian government for 'failure to consider the emission of ghgs from the burning of coal ... under provisions of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act' which was geared to protect Australia’s environmental assets, 'including the Great Barrier Reef and Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage Sites'.
Meanwhile, a federal case has been brought against the Nigerian government, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation and several multinational companies (including Shell, ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, amongst others) by communities in the Niger Delta in June 2005.
Their aim is to prevent the wasteful and dangerously polluting process of burning off natural gas, a by-product of oil extraction, through flaring. This flaring, widely practice by the oil industry in Nigeria, is the single largest source of ghgs in sub-Saharan Africa. Now, I wouldn’t go filing any law suits just yet but you may want to keep an eye on the debate for a while. We may see some precedent-setting legal rulings in the near future, and a flurry of similar cases following suit.