The world is heating up due to air pollution caused by human activity, most notably the burning of fossil fuel sources. In the past, individual polluters have avoided accountability for the effects of climate change because it is happening on such a massive, global scale that it is difficult to link any particular instance of pollution with any particular death or economic damage. 

However, a team of scientists writing for The Conversation contended that, with modern science, it is possible to predict the approximate impact of any given project in degrees of global warming and the number of human lives lost.

What's happening?

As an example, The Conversation examined Woodside's Scarborough gas project, located off the coast of Western Australia. The project is intended to harvest gas, mostly methane, and compress it into a liquid for burning as fuel, which will convert it into roughly 99% carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas. The project has already been approved.

According to The Conversation, if Scarborough proceeds as planned, this specific, individual facility will cause between 0.00024 and 0.00055 degrees Celsius of global warming over its lifetime. If so, it will be directly responsible for an additional 484 human deaths in Europe alone by the end of this century and could affect over 500,000 people globally.

Why is this analysis important?

It is already widely accepted in the scientific community that the fossil fuel industry is destructive to the climate. The United Nations specifically recognizes fossil fuels as the primary source of the Earth's rising temperature, and it is also vital to consider the toxins that these substances release into the air when burned and into the soil and water when extracted. They are not good for the public, but wealthy oil companies have lobbied long and hard to block any effort to switch to cleaner options.

Part of the reason this is possible is that it has been difficult to attach responsibility for any specific effect of climate change to any polluting individual or company. There are no laws to hold corporations accountable for making the Earth slightly less habitable to humans.

However, if this method of scientific analysis is accepted and allowed to inform policy, then companies and projects could be evaluated on the basis of the lives saved or lost by allowing them — and that could lead to real change.

What's being done about Scarborough?

For now, this offshore gas project is still going ahead. This approach to evaluating the harms of fossil fuel projects is still in its infancy. However, many countries have made commitments to reduce their production of air pollution, and as they look for ways to fulfill those promises, they may turn to analyses like this one to inform their policies.

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