The Growing Significance of Climate Lawsuits

For the past decade, analysts have debated how much of a threat the clean energy transition poses to the oil and gas industry. The longer it takes to move to a clean economy, the better positioned those companies will be. But a new trend is emerging as a significant X-factor for the industry’s financial wellbeing: the growing effort to attribute climate damages to individual companies.

A new study this week published in the journal Nature underscores this trend with an analysis of more than 200 heat waves that occurred since 2000. Researchers found that climate change made the heat waves more intense—and links those heat waves to what they call the 180 biggest carbon majors, essentially high-emitting companies, from coal to cement producers. If that claim were to be accepted in a cour