A story in The New York Times Magazine’s current issue on the economics of climate change highlights the work of Richard Heede, director of the Climate Accountability Institute in Snowmass, Colorado. Allen Best, writing inMountain Town News, further unpacks how Heede’s data could be pivotal in climate change lawsuits in Colorado and around the world. The Times explains that Heede has spent much of the last 16 years searching through archives to find reports about how much fossil-fuel companies extracted during their sometimes long histories. He then “estimates how much fossil fuel was used for a company’s own operations, how much diverted for things like asphalt or petrochemical production, how much volatilized into the atmosphere.” It is, says the NY Times Magazine writer, Brooke Jarvis, tedious work. But Heede’s work is also perhaps pivotal to a growing body of lawsuits being filed around the world against fossil fuel companies. They include a lawsuit filed last year by Colorado’s San Miguel County and two other local jurisdictions, the municipality of Boulder and Boulder County, linking the profits of Suncor and ExxonMobil with emerging impacts of increased wildfire, extreme weather, and so forth. To view the full article visit Mountain West News.
