#gasses

Fall into the Infinite – Abstract Sci-Fi Art

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Corporate America Owes the Rest of Us $87 Trillion

“The latest clue comes from those known lefty rabble-rousers at the, uh, University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Booth finance professor Lubos Pastor and two Wharton researchers recently estimated that the social cost of the carbon emissions of US companies will amount to a cool $87 trillion through 2050. That was 131% of the total value of corporate equity at the time they measured and about three times the size of GDP.

This is researchers’ latest effort to quantify the damage rising temperatures will inflict on the global economy, and they keep getting more specific. A study published last year by the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated a 12% hit to global GDP for every 1 degree Celsius of warming above pre-industrial averages.

They’re also starting to zero in on the culpability of individual companies. Last month, Dartmouth College and Stanford University researchers published a study in Nature suggesting 111 fossil-fuel companies inflicted $28 trillion in global damages between 1991 and 2020. They even assigned numbers to individual companies — $2.05 trillion to Saudi Aramco, $2 trillion to Gazprom PJSC, $1.98 trillion to Chevron Corp., and so on.

To come up with their $87 trillion figure, Pastor et al. used the Environmental Protection Agency’s measure of the social cost of carbon. The metric is meant to put a price on the many ways a chaotic climate affects human health, property, social stability, farming and more. That hasn’t been easy or uncontroversial. The first Trump administration pegged the carbon cost as low as $1per ton. Biden’s EPA figured it should start at a baseline of $190 per ton for 2020 emissions and rise every year after, and this was the far-more-realistic scale Pastor's group favored. Trump’s current EPA would prefer to forget the concept altogether.

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And that tally doesn’t include the many other companies and countries spewing greenhouse gases around the world. Topping the Carbon Majors league tables of the world’s biggest emitters, produced by the UK nonprofit InfluenceMap, are the former Soviet Union, China and Saudi Aramco. Only four US companies — Chevron, Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips and Peabody Energy Corp. — even crack the top 25.

In other words, $87 trillion is a mere fraction of the total damage being done.

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These damages might be cut by as much as a third if we could get our act together and meet the goal of the 2015 Paris agreement to limit heating to less than 2 degrees, the Booth paper notes. But we have strayed far from that path, which requires zeroing out greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.

No doubt, weaning the global economy from fossil fuels quickly enough to get back on track won’t be cheap. It will cost $192 trillion in spending on electric vehicles, renewable power, batteries and more by 2050, according to BloombergNEF. But most of that technology is already mature and getting cheaper and more effective as time passes. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Liam Denning and I have often noted, $192 trillion is a bargain relative to the potential costs.

Using metal organic frameworks to provide a safer and cleaner way to handle fluorinated gases

A team of chemists from Cornell University, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology and Southern Methodist University, has found a way to use metal organic frameworks to provide a safer and cleaner way to handle fluorinated gases. Their study is reported in the journal Science. Gaseous fluorocarbons are known to be hazardous reagents, which can make them particularly challenging to deliver and use, requiring special equipment. They are also flammable and toxic. And when released into the atmosphere, they deplete ozone. Thus, it has been known for quite some time that a better means for handling and storing them is needed. In looking for a better way to deal with fluorinated gases, the research team knew they were going to need a special kind of material to hold it, one that was porous and had a high gas sorption capacity. They also knew it would need to interact with the gases they contained to keep the gas from leaking out—and it would have to remain stable for reasonable amounts of time. That led them to test the uptake of one type of fluoride (vinylidene) in 12 particular MOFs. MOFs are compounds made of clusters of coordinated organic ligands with different types of structures.