Superfund Shakedown: Part 2, A Problem of Attribution

A threshold issue for any Climate Superfund scheme involves attempting to determine the share of global emissions attributable to any given company. This is one component of what is known as “attribution science,” the development of which was closely tied to the prospect of suing energy companies for climate change. As those lawsuits have fizzled and stalled, attribution science has been repurposed for Climate Superfund laws.

Carbon Majors

The New York Times has reported that Vermont is “very likely” to use the Carbon Majors database, developed by scientist Richard Heede, to implement its Climate Superfund law. Heede’s work has also been referenced as foundational to New York’s proposed law and to an earlier version of a federal Climate Superfund bill that was never passed. He was quoted in a press release announcing the Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act of 2024, calling it “a great step toward holding fossil fuel companies accountable.”

The Carbon Majors database provides what it claims are historical emissions figures for 122 oil, gas, coal, and cement producers worldwide. Heede has stated his belief that it is the only such compilation of companies in existence. In the context of Climate Superfund laws, the idea is to use the database to determine a given company’s share of total emissions, and then apply that in conjunction with applicable alleged climate-related damages to come up with an amount to demand from that company.

The concept is liable to substantial critique and criticism. Michael Gerrard of the Sabin Center called the idea of linking impacts to specific companies “very difficult” because “climate change is the result of the cumulative emissions of millions of emitting sources over more than a century.” Most crucially, approximately 88 percent of emissions included in the Carbon Majors database come from Scope 3 “use of sold products,” which in turn reflects humanity’s collective global consumption of fuels for some generally valuable and productive purpose.

The development of the Carbon Majors project specifically—and indeed, much of attribution science generally—was linked to efforts to hold energy companies civilly liable for climate change. Activist-backed lawsuits filed by the firm Sher Edling on behalf of government plaintiffs such as the states of Rhode Island and New Jersey, the cities of Baltimore and Chicago, and the counties of Marin and Santa Cruz in California cite Heede’s work in their initial complaints. The firm’s co-founding partner Vic Sher has credited Heede and his Carbon Majors project with helping to identify companies that could be sued.

Sher Edling filed its first such lawsuit in 2017, but the Carbon Majors database was originally released in 2013 through a Colorado-based charity called the Climate Accountability Institute, where Heede serves as director. From 2019 through 2022, the Climate Accountability Institute brought in a combined $463,259 in total revenue, including $389,030 worth of grants received. Of those grants, 62 percent ($241,000) came from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. An additional $65,000 was given through the Marin Community Foundation between July 2019 and June 2020, while $55,900 was given through the Schwab Charitable Fund between July 2022 and June 2023.

The Carbon Majors database is now housed on a website maintained by InfluenceMap, a nonprofit that will also handle future updates to the data. InfluenceMap has branches in the United Kingdom and the United States. Its major donors have included:

• The ClimateWorks Foundation, which gave $1.22 million from 2019 to 2023;
• The Denmark-based KR Foundation, which gave 10,520,012 DKK from 2020 to 2024 (equivalent to approximately $1.53 million as of October 2024),
• The IKEA Foundation, which gave €701,810 in 2023;
• The Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation ($250,000 from 2020 to 2022);
• The Wallace Global Fund ($245,000 from 2019 to 2021); and
• The Walton Family Foundation ($225,000 in 2023).

In addition, as of 2024, the Laudes Foundation reported two active grants to InfluenceMap worth a combined €2,001,901, while the Quadrature Climate Foundation disclosed one worth $650,000.

Importantly, not all United States–based funders are required to disclose grants to InfluenceMap on their annual tax filings—at least with respect to the group’s British branch. Due to a quirk in reporting requirements for American nonprofits, 501(c)(3) private foundations publicly disclose their foreign grant recipients, but other tax-exempt entities (such as 501(c)(3) public charities) do not. Accordingly, even though an archived version of InfluenceMap’s website from March 2023 lists the Arabella Advisors–managed Windward Fund among its funders, it is impossible to determine how much money the Windward Fund actually gave.

Thoughts and Questions

At their core, Climate Superfund laws suffer from the same basic flaws as the climate lawsuits that they follow. The most glaring flaw is that energy companies are not cloistered inside walled-off industrial compounds spewing carbon into the atmosphere for their own insular purposes. They are bringing to market a product that is demanded by all of humanity and that remains utterly essential to our modern standard of living. It is profoundly unfair to assign liability (judicial or legislative) to such companies for any alleged consequences that arise solely because consumers—conspicuously including the very governments contemplating Climate Superfund bills—actually used the products that they purchased.

If vast sums of money are deemed necessary to mitigate the impacts of extreme weather events in localities under a given government’s jurisdiction and if that government convinces itself that climatic changes driven by the global consumption of fossil fuels is sufficiently contributory to those impacts that it can be described as causal, how does it follow that the producers of those fuels should be the ones responsible for footing the bill? Is it fair for the state of Vermont to fine Chevron or ExxonMobil because Burlington residents put gas in their cars or because the local government purchased fuel for its school buses and fire trucks?

For environmental activists, the ultimate objective is simply to hamstring the oil and gas industry, which one state legislator sponsoring New York’s Climate Superfund law went so far as to call “evil.” Heede has summarized his work as “hold[ing] the companies accountable for producing and marketing harmful products and for deceptively perpetuating the carbon age for fun and profit.” From this perspective, it doesn’t matter if Climate Superfund laws are unjust and economically ill-advised. Instead, what matters is that they target an industry disfavored by those activists.

This is all an extension of the ends-justify-the-means rationalization common to many dedicated political issue activists, but particularly characteristic of the environmental Left. Climate change activists are convinced that the issue represents an impending existential crisis for humanity, and they therefore relegate all other concerns to positions of secondary importance. Economist Thomas Sowell remarked that “there are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” When it comes to balancing the goal of reducing emissions against the need to continue powering the planet, Climate Superfund laws would appear to be an especially bad deal.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/superfund-shakedown-part-2-a-problem-of-attribution/