One-off events like Deepwater Horizon leave a lasting impression, but the normal burning of fossil fuels has an even worse impact.
By Gernot Wagner and David Ho
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico a dozen years ago was a human and environmental tragedy. It killed 11 people, dumped millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf, and cost BP Plc more than $65 billion in cleanup costs and damage payments.
But had all that oil instead been sold and used, it would have been even deadlier and more devastating to the environment.
This was the case made recently by today’s newsletter co-writer, climate scientist David Ho, in what turned out to be a much-shared tweet:
Sometimes I think about how Deepwater Horizon was a huge environmental disaster that killed 11 people and cost BP more than $65 billion — but if that oil had been captured, sold, and used, it would be worse for the environment, killed more people, and BP would have made money.
— David Ho (@_david_ho_) January 28, 2022
I (Gernot) was skeptical at first. But the basic calculation holds, and it’s not even close.
The spill caused an estimated 200 million gallons of oil to flow into the Gulf of Mexico. Burning as many gallons of oil and diesel in combustion engines would have emitted over 1.4 million tons of CO₂, not even counting, for example, emissions from refining and transporting the oil. Translated into average lives lost due to the resulting climate change implies about 325 deaths over the course of the century, linked to higher temperatures alone. That doesn’t include deaths from the fine particulate matter generated by burning that fuel, which could amount to another 350 premature deaths in a year.
Twitter being Twitter, the responses necessitated a follow-up from David: “My point isn’t that we should spill crude oil.” We shouldn’t. There are plenty of other environmental costs not captured by the 11 deaths and $65 billion. The devastating impact on wildlife can only be partially reflected in any monetary damage number. Some of the oil spilled burned uncontrollably, again releasing CO₂. Oil that’s not burned but eventually evaporates also causes plenty of environmental harm.
Alas, there is a big difference between a statistical calculation based on global damage estimates and being able to put faces and names to deaths, as to those on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform. Eleven deaths are a tragedy, while 325 statistically estimated ones are just that, a statistic.
There is another difference — what in legal terms is called proximate cause. Cary Coglianese, a professor of law and political science at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, describes this as basically “a legal version of being able to put faces and names to deaths.” Any reasonable court would agree that the 11 Deepwater Horizon deaths were immediately linked to the explosion and fire on the platform.
Thanks to rapid advances in the new field of attribution science, climate-related deaths and other damages can now be linked more directly to tons of CO₂ emitted. Indeed, an increasing number of lawsuits are closing in on establishing a proximate cause via climate damages, but no oil company so far has been forced to pay damages linked to the burning of its products sold to customers.
Then there’s another, all-too-human reason why 11 deaths in a one-off event weigh more heavily than 325 future ones. Penn’s Coglianese likens the difference between climate change and the BP oil spill to that between the Covid-19 pandemic and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: “September 11th killed around 3,000 people,” he says. “We had about that many Covid deaths in the U.S. yesterday alone.” More than 900,000 Americans died from Covid over the past two years, well over 5.5 million worldwide, and those are just the directly attributed deaths. “We seem to be getting numb to this daily catastrophe,” adds Coglianese.
We must not, of course, get numb to either thousands of Covid deaths a day, or to the hundreds of deaths conservatively linked to a BP-spill-size amount of oil that is burned as intended. The links from selling, to burning fossil fuels, to the damages immediately attributable to the resulting emissions, are all too clear. It’s high time our laws and courts catch up with that reality.
Written with David Ho, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and a research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, currently at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Follow him on Twitter: @_david_ho_.
Gernot Wagner writes the Risky Climate column for Bloomberg Green. He teaches at Columbia Business School (on leave from New York University). His latest book is Geoengineering: the Gamble (Polity, 2021). Follow him on Twitter: @GernotWagner. This column was first published by Bloomberg Green on February 11th, 2022, and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.