Energy Tradeoffs Podcast #33 – Michael Burger

Another week, another EnergyTradeoffs.com podcast episode. This week, Michael Burger of Columbia University talks with the University of Texas’s David Spence about Michael’s work on “Climate Litigation & the Green Transition.”

Michael and David talk about the variety of lawsuits that have been brought to try and hold fossil fuel companies responsible for the costs of climate change. (A chart collecting and organizing the wide variety of these cases can be found here.) Michael and David discuss the difficulty of finding just some companies liable for global climate change caused by many companies around the world. They also describe the possibility that climate change could be attributed to the consumers that burn fossil fuels rather than the companies that sell the fuels and how plaintiffs could draw analogies to lawsuits over tobacco, opioids, and guns.

The conversation builds on some of Michael’s recently published research including co-authored papers titled “The Status of Climate Change Litigation: A Global Review,” and “The Law and Science of Climate Change Attribution.”

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