In a report issued last year, Swiss Re, an insurance giant, compared the suits to those that led dozens of companies in asbestos industries to file for bankruptcy, and predicted that "climate change-related liability will develop more quickly than asbestos-related claims".
Decommissioning costs ate up around half the budget for the now-disbanded department of energy and climate change, after the liabilities for cleaning up old nuclear plants were effectively nationalised in 2004 and 2005 when two companies faced financial problems.
Environmental Research Letters, May 2015"Liability for climate change".
That is as near as you can get to saying global warming caused a weather event.The science of weather attribution started in 2003 with an article in Nature, "Liability for climate change"by Myles Allen of Oxford University.
Critics said the agreement would still condemn hundreds of million of people living in low-lying coastal areas and small islands, after US negotiators demanded the exclusion of language that could allow the agreement to be used to claim legal liability for climate change.
This is very different from the "compensation" that some developing countries are insisting on from rich countries, because of the effects of their emissions, but developed country governments do not want to admit legal liability for climate change, in part because emissions from emerging economies are rapidly overtaking those of the already industrialised world.
Yes, we have to invest more in the early years, but we potentially save later, not to mention the liabilities of climate change that we potentially avoid.
Get investment bankers on board: Long-term investors will strongly feel the impacts of climate change on pension and insurance liabilities.
Chris Huhne, the new secretary of state for energy and climate change, revealed that nuclear decommissioning liabilities will cost the government £4bn more than it was expecting to pay over the next three years.
A recognition that many countries will suffer losses and damage from the effects of climate change, but which specifically excludes any liability or compensation claims as a result of the agreement.
