The Vermont Legislature is advancing legislation requiring big fossil fuel companies pay a share of the damage caused by climate change after the state suffered catastrophic summer flooding and damage from other extreme weather.
The state Senate is expected to give final approval this week to the proposal, which would create a program that fossil fuel companies would pay into for climate change adaption projects in Vermont. It will then be considered in the House.
“In order to remedy the problems created by washed out roads, downed electrical wires, damaged crops and repeated flooding, the largest fossil fuel entities that have contributed to climate change should also contribute to fixing the problem that they caused,” Sen. Nader Hashim, a Democrat from Windham County, said to Senate colleagues on Friday.
Maryland, Massachusetts and New York are considering similar measures, but Vermont’s bill is moving quicker through the Legislature.
We have economic and environmental models for that.
In economics these extra effects are called externalities because the price we pay for a good doesn’t reflect the true cost to society that other people have to pay due to the production of that good (healthcare, disaster insurance and management, etc.)
Here’s one report that lists methodologies of calculating true costs of pollution
Another method is assign an equivalent monetary value to what averting one death would cost, so if pollution, floods are killing X people then the monetary costs to human life are that which can be levied collectively on to oil firms.
This paper tries to calculate the global costs of extreme weather that are attributable to climate change. This is what you were asking for.
Just split up this unpaid cost to the state caused by fossil fuel firms by their annual global revenue on emissions causing products.