Steel & Geistfeld on Causation and Climate Change

Sandy Steel & Mark Geistfeld have posted to SSRN Causation and Climate Change.  The abstract provides:

We identify two kinds of causal difficulties that affect liability for climate change in tort. First, the problem of attenuated causation is that no particular emitter’s wrongful emissions may be necessary for a particular harm, and so the law’s standard but-for test of causation is not satisfied, even if the harm would not have occurred but-for wrongful emissions. Second, the causal-proof problem exists when it is recurrently infeasible to prove that wrongful emissions caused the harm, because the background risk of the harm was more substantial. We argue that both problems can be overcome in a normatively distinctive category of cases in which a person’s harm would not have occurred but-for the wrongful emissions of a group of persons, each of whom materially contributed to the harm or the risk of the harm.