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Study: A third of the West's burned forests can be
traced to fossil fuel companies
The research could advance
court cases seeking to hold polluters accountable for climate-fueled
disasters.
May 15, 2023
Artur Widak / NurPhoto via Getty Image
The American West has always had forest fires —
just not like this. Blazes are spreading further and burning longer,
incinerating towns and exposing millions of people to noxious smoke.
While a century of fire suppression and other land management choices
contribute to the severity, climate change is a key factor fueling
these fires, roughly doubling the acreage burned over the last 40
years. A new study takes this connection one step further, making the
case that a significant chunk of burned forests — nearly 20 million
acres — can be traced back to major fossil fuel companies.
The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental
Research Letters on Tuesday, is the first to quantify how corporate
emissions have made wildfires worse. Experts say the new research
could help advance growing efforts to take polluters to court.
“These companies should be held accountable for their fair share of
the damages that they’ve caused,” said Carly Phillips, a coauthor of
the new study and a research scientist at the Science Hub for Climate
Litigation at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “They lied and
engaged in this orchestrated campaign of deception for years, and it
didn’t have to be this way, right?”
Researchers from the Union of Concerned Scientists and the University
of California, Merced, found that 37 percent of forest burned across
the western United States and southwestern Canada since 1986 can be
linked to carbon pollution from 88 of the world’s largest oil, gas,
and coal companies. That group includes Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, and
Shell; state-owned oil producers like Saudi Aramco and Gazprom; and
cement manufacturers. Researchers considered emissions directly
emitted by these companies’ operations as well as the indirect
emissions from the products they sold.
Since 2017, cities and states have filed around 20 lawsuits against
fossil fuel companies based on state laws that prohibit deceptive
advertising, seeking money to adapt to the effects of climate change.
The suits were set in motion by investigations showing that Exxon,
Shell, and coal companies had known about the dangers of skyrocketing
carbon emissions for decades, but publicly downplayed the threat.
After years of delays, the Supreme Court declined to get involved in
these cases last month, clearing the way for them to proceed —
potentially to jury trials.
The study comes as spring fires scorch western Canada during an
unusually hot and dry spring, with about 1 million acres burning
across the province of Alberta. An early heat wave pushed temperatures
above 90 degrees in parts of the typically temperate Pacific Northwest
over the weekend, with Seattle and Portland breaking heat records at
least three days in a row. The same heat dome is expected to fan the
flames of nearly 90 fires burning across Alberta.
It’s hard to draw a direct line between global warming and wildfires.
But recent advances in “attribution science,” the field that
identifies climate change’s role in heat waves, droughts, rising seas,
and other phenomena, have made it possible to quantify its effect on
fires. The new study relies on a key risk factor called the “vapor
pressure deficit,” a measure of how “thirsty” the atmosphere is.
Hotter temperatures cause moisture to be pulled out of vegetation,
turning forests into tinderboxes just waiting for a spark.
Wildfires tore through western Alberta, Canada,
leaving a burned landscape, May 10, 2023. Megan Albu / AFP via Getty
Images
To figure out how companies’ emissions contributed to fire-danger
conditions in the West, researchers built on a previous study that
linked emissions from 88 big fossil fuel producers to rising
temperatures. Then they compared two models of how dry forests would
be under different climate scenarios — one modeled on the real world,
and the other excluding the emissions associated with the 88
companies.
“The major contribution of this study is to connect all of the dots
between specific sources of human-related carbon emissions and recent
increases in forest fire activity,” said Philip Higuera, a professor
of fire ecology at the University of Montana who was not involved in
the study. “Most of the links have been well known for a long time,
but this is the first study to connect the dots, quantitatively.”
Exxon and BP did not respond to Grist’s request to comment in time for
publication.
Jessica Wentz, a fellow at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for
Climate Change Law, thought the findings could be used to support
existing lawsuits, or provide the impetus for other local governments
to file their own. Wentz said the research might be relevant to a case
in Colorado, where the city and county of Boulder, along with San
Miguel County, sued Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil, seeking millions of
dollars to update their infrastructure to withstand climate change.
“That’s the one lawsuit where wildfire-related damages are forefront
and central,” Wentz said.
Translating the research to a specific court case could prove thorny,
though. The study looked at a large region, the whole North American
West, and the aggregate of 88 companies’ emissions. It’s possible that
attorneys could use the new research to calculate wildfire risk over a
smaller area — say, Boulder County — but it would require some
extrapolation. For calculating damages, a court might want to see a
more fine-grained analysis, Wentz said. “It’s really a totally open
question of how courts will look at the evidence, and just how
granular will plaintiffs need to be in terms of providing scientific
data to support their claims. We just don’t know yet.”
In a way, the long delays in these climate court cases have actually
given some ammunition to cities and states looking to hold fossil fuel
companies accountable. The extra time has allowed the science of
climate attribution to mature, so that if these cases end up going to
trials, cities and states have more evidence to support their case.
“It’s sort of a weird silver lining,” Wentz said.
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