Big Polluters' Share Prices Fall After Climate Lawsuits, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 44
Climate litigation poses a financial risk to fossil fuel companies because it lowers the share price of big polluters, research has found. From a report: A study to be published on Tuesday by LSE's Grantham Research Institute examines how the stock market reacts to news that a fresh climate lawsuit has been filed or a corporation has lost its case. The researchers hope their work will encourage lenders, financial regulators and governments to consider the effect of climate litigation when making investment decisions in a warmer future, and ultimately drive greener corporate behaviour.
The study, which is currently being peer reviewed, analysed 108 climate crisis lawsuits around the world between 2005 and 2021 against 98 companies listed in the US and Europe. It found that the filing of a new case or a court decision against a company reduced its expected value by an average of 0.41%. The stock market responded most strongly in the days after cases against carbon majors, which include the world's largest energy, utility and materials firms, cutting the relative value of those companies by an average of 0.57% after a case was filed and by 1.5% after an unfavourable judgment. Although modest, the researchers conclude that the drop in the value of big polluters is statistically significant and therefore down to the legal challenges.
The study, which is currently being peer reviewed, analysed 108 climate crisis lawsuits around the world between 2005 and 2021 against 98 companies listed in the US and Europe. It found that the filing of a new case or a court decision against a company reduced its expected value by an average of 0.41%. The stock market responded most strongly in the days after cases against carbon majors, which include the world's largest energy, utility and materials firms, cutting the relative value of those companies by an average of 0.57% after a case was filed and by 1.5% after an unfavourable judgment. Although modest, the researchers conclude that the drop in the value of big polluters is statistically significant and therefore down to the legal challenges.
shut em down (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: shut em down (Score:2)
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I guess you could call destroying the climate and living things "revolutionized the world".
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And you don't live next to a power plant. You probably have the fake coal pouring out of your oversized pickup that you have no idea how to drive.
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What will you put in your car?
Found a car owner. Why do you even use it in the first place?
I have moved close to work specifically so I can bike there; as a backup I have public transport. Never in my life have I owned a car -- so please don't assume everyone is as hypocritical as you.
Alas, the public transport at the moment consists of fossil fuel buses; there are electric buses in the core of the city but not here. When I was young, they were trolleybuses instead -- and if not for fossil fuel bastards, we'd have them powered from t
Re: shut em down (Score:2)
Re: shut em down (Score:2)
It is impossible for all of us to live close enough to work to bike in. It is also impossible for all of us to live in inner cities where public transport can obviate the need for a car unless you would like to live like a monk. (I say this as someone who walked or took public transport to work for most of my working life).
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Not so much hypocritical, just better informed, or did you think your bike grew on a renewable bicycle plantation and was harvested prior to you owning it? What do think the tires and brake pads on your bike are made out of? What do you think is the source of the hydrogen for the ammonia based fertilizer that was u
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Found a car owner. Why do you even use it in the first place?
Yeah I use my car maybe once every 2 weeks. I typically cycle everywhere and use public transport. But it's hillarious that in the list of things that I gave for fossil fuels you gravitate towards the car as if you think that oil is only used to make the those stupid things move rather than being an integral part of our society.
You can walk all you want, unless you walk all the way to the farmer to pick your own fruit your life is supported by fossil fuels. You can live in denial about this, or you can join
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Electricity (generated by solar)
I have a completely electric house and cars powered by my solar panels.
Yes, it's possible.
Fossil fuels are killing all of us. Just say no.
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Electricity (generated by solar)
I have a completely electric house and cars powered by my solar panels.
Yes, it's possible.
Fossil fuels are killing all of us. Just say no.
He posted ignorantly while being blissfully unaware of the amount of fossil fuels that go into the production of the very device that he posted that with. Other Slashdot users ponder if msphor actually thinks food appears in supermarkets through teleportation. One can only assume he was at some point a child who saw pictures of trucks and tracktors in a colouring book.
Sorry kid, you can be as green as you personally won't. You're not fossil fuel free. You're just ignorant of how much you use. Converting you
Re: shut em down (Score:2)
Yes, fossil fuels are ubiquitous now.
My point is that everything can be converted to electric.
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Unless you've developed a Star Trek style replicator or something, I'm pretty sure nothing you can hold in your hand can be created purely from electricity. Plastic, modern rubber, pavement, solar panels, etc. The list of things that can't be produced purely from electricity is quite possibly endless, and a whole lot of those require fossil fuels to be affordable.
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Not sure of your point here. Electricity is energy with no mass so you can't "create" anything "purely from electricity".
OTOH, electricity can be substituted for fossil fuel energy just about anywhere.
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If you're thinking, "well, polluters", then I hope you are prepared to have the same done to you. Open that door and it may never shut.
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Fossil fools deserve to die poor
But if you know WHEN and HOW to sell them short you can make loads of money.
After all, life is all about the Benjamins baby !
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And fuel for these reactors is mined by elves and brought to them by caravans of unicorns. Zero environmental impact...honest! And Three Mile Island will never happen again. Chernobyl won't, either. And Fukushima was a fluke, too.
Another fairy story: finally one nuclear generating facility built on time and on budget, that produces electricity at the promised rate and is maintained/repaired at the forecast cost.
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Well, including Three Mile, Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power is still so much safer and less polluting that even the best of renewables, much less any fossil fuels. Only geothermal is close (but still worse), while available only in some places.
As for cost: nuclear is also cheapest, as long as you give a fair comparison. For coal, you'd need to put condoms on every chimney, add multiple layers of containment in case of a failure, and store combustion products until they decay (which for coal means n
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The bloated costs of nuclear are due to contractors lying their faces off, and nuclear facilities that routinely fail to live up to life cycle promises.
Pickering in Ontario is an excellent example. Repair costs were a couple of hundred million bucks over budget before the first screw was turned.
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So riddle me this. If "bastards" were able to make nuclear incredible expensive and impossible to build, how come they haven't been able to do the same with renewables? Surely, with all the money it spends on astroturfing shills and the like, the nuclear industry could have simple done the same thing in retaliation, and made itself at least as competitive by way of sabotage.
Oh that's right, it's because it's not actually some conspiracy against nuclear, it's that nuclear has serious problems and no solution
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Most of the anti-nuclear propaganda was done before renewables were really a thing.
And, you had the massive pro-fossil lobby machine (which exists to this day) working together with hippies. Try to beat that.
Today, we do have that astroturfing done against renewables as well, but this generation's hippie equivalents are all pro-renewable. And anti-nuclear...
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It's pretty easy to believe in a fossil fuel conspiracy against nuclear, because they've had fossil fuel conspiracies against trains and buses.
But it's very difficult to believe that it succeeded through astroturfing, because The People are barely listened to in general.
And all of it's orthogonal to whether nuclear is bad.
The ancient Romans were using wind power, so I'm not hearing this "before renewables" thing.
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So what is your plan to deal with these powerful hippies?
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And I'd jail every German bundestagcritter that voted that way
To be clear you're proposing jailing politicians who were voted in democratically to enact a policy for enacting the policy, a policy which was overwhelmingly supported at the time?
thus they're literally worse than Hitler
And yet you're the one against democracy. I don't say this often because I rarely feel the need to do so, but you're one seriously dangerous dumb fuck.
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Could you please compare your response to paragraph 1 with the text you quoted from paragraph 2?
Hmm, don't we have a case of politicians who were voted in democratically, with a policy which was overwhelmingly supported at the time, and who ended up jailed (or dead)?
I'm just saying that killing X folks because of your ideology that you knew was ill-founded at the time, compared to killing Y folks for the same reason, is objectively worse if X > Y.
Yes, I'm comparing burning lignite with killing Jews (espe
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"bastards who first made nuclear expensive", who are these dastardly people? Vogtle 3 and 4 got $12 billion in federal loan guarantees, will cost more than $30 billion instead of the original $14 billion, and will be at least 6 years late. We need to find the culprits who made it so expensive!
and I have a bridge to sell. (Score:3)
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Yes. From the article:
Although modest, the researchers conclude that the drop in the value of big polluters is statistically significant and therefore down to the legal challenges.
Statistical significance does not exist in a vacuum and is quite meaningless on its own since you can make anything statistically significant with a large enough N. Its interpreted relevance comes from context. In this case, with respect to stock prices. And as you point out, 0.57% is a pretty inconsequential effect.
So yes, litigation did have a significant effect on stock price. But the authors should have added a proper contextual interpretation "... but the effect is mostly harmles
You don't need a study (Score:2)
Just point it out, we can check market prices any time.
Re: What if the polluter support the LBGHQT+ peopl (Score:2)
Any personal struggles you'd like to share with us? Cos totally OT here, again, yet you seem to let no occasion pass to bring up the topic.
So. Anything you wanna share with us? Put it out, we won't tell your mom.
They'd fall even further... (Score:4, Insightful)
Insurer/Hedge fund scare story. (Score:2)
So does their growth rate change (Score:2)
If the stock price goes down .57% (57 dollars on a 10,000 dollar investment) that isn't a big deal. Stocks go up and down by whole percentages on any given day with any given news. That said if the stocks growth rate goes down .57% that is interesting to me. I mean it was growing at 10% now it is growing at 9.43% - you are making 57 fewer dollars every year.
I mean if it is just the stock goes down .57% for a short while and then continues to grow at 10% - woo hoo. Time to load up and catch the wave. Be
Don't any lawsuit cause a share price drop? (Score:2)
At least any semi legit seeming lawsuit will probably cause the average company's share price to drop, at least from my understanding.
What is so special about climate lawsuits?