Most climate-change deniers don’t even bother fighting the established science anymore: The planet is warming, human activity is the cause, and we can do something about it if we really try. Modern deniers will concede all that, but fire back that the “do something about it” part is too hard, too expensive to be worth trying. We have to be pragmatic, they’ll say, and keep burning fossil fuels to make life easier on people.

But we keep finding evidence that not doing something about it will be far more expensive and hard on people. Being truly pragmatic means leaving fossil fuels behind as quickly as possible.

The latest clue comes from those known lefty rabble-rousers at the, uh, University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Booth finance professor Lubos Pastor and two Wharton researchers recently estimated that the social cost of the carbon emissions of U.S. companies will amount to a cool $87 trillion through 2050. That was 131% of the total value of corporate equity at the time they measured and about three times the size of GDP.

This is researchers’ latest effort to quantify the damage rising temperatures will inflict on the global economy, and they keep getting more specific. A study published last year by the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated a 12% hit to global GDP for every 1 degree Celsius of warming above pre-industrial averages.

They’re also starting to zero in on the culpability of individual companies. Last month, Dartmouth College and Stanford University researchers published a study in Nature suggesting 111 fossil-fuel companies inflicted $28 trillion in global damages between 1991 and 2020. They even assigned numbers to individual companies — $2.05 trillion to Saudi Aramco, $2 trillion to Gazprom PJSC, $1.98 trillion to Chevron Corp., and so on.

To come up with their $87 trillion figure, Pastor et al. used the Environmental Protection Agency’s measure of the social cost of carbon. The metric is meant to put a price on the many ways a chaotic climate affects human health, property, social stability, farming and more. That hasn’t been easy or uncontroversial. The first Trump administration pegged the carbon cost as low as $1per ton. Biden’s EPA figured it should start at a baseline of $190 per ton for 2020 emissions and rise every year after, and this was the far-more-realistic scale Pastor's group favored. Trump’s current EPA would prefer to forget the concept altogether.

Suffice it to say that disasters, famines, pandemics, wars and other such apocalyptic horsemen all have an economic impact. Add it up over 25 years of escalating and compounding damages, and $87 trillion starts to seem like a low bid.

And that tally doesn’t include the many other companies and countries spewing greenhouse gases around the world. Topping the Carbon Majors league tables of the world’s biggest emitters, produced by the UK nonprofit InfluenceMap, are the former Soviet Union, China and Saudi Aramco. Only four U.S. companies — Chevron, Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips and Peabody Energy Corp. — even crack the top 25.

In other words, $87 trillion is a mere fraction of the total damage being done.

Not every industry is equally polluting. As you’d expect, the U.S. energy sector generates more than 20 times its market cap in social costs, according to the Booth paper. Most of that falls under the category of “Scope 3” emissions, which are those created indirectly in the production and use of its products, including the gasoline burned in cars and the natural gas burned in homes. But most of the others still have large carbon burdens, including manufacturing, utilities and finance, all of which create at least five times their market value in social costs.

These damages might be cut by as much as a third if we could get our act together and meet the goal of the 2015 Paris agreement to limit heating to less than 2 degrees, the Booth paper notes. But we have strayed far from that path, which requires zeroing out greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.

No doubt, weaning the global economy from fossil fuels quickly enough to get back on track won’t be cheap. It will cost $192 trillion in spending on electric vehicles, renewable power, batteries and more by 2050, according to BloombergNEF. But most of that technology is already mature and getting cheaper and more effective as time passes. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Liam Denning and I have often noted, $192 trillion is a bargain relative to the potential costs.

The Booth paper notes that an effective carbon tax — making emitters pay for their pollution — could offset the carbon burden. Unfortunately, such taxes are political poison. In fact, far too many governments subsidize fossil fuels. Between explicit handouts to encourage more burning and the implicit gift of not taxing carbon, the fossil-fuel industry gets $7 trillion in government largesse every year, according to the International Monetary Fund. Erasing that would go a long way toward covering that $192 trillion.

Another, less friendly way for society to get payback would be to sue the companies spewing the carbon, as many local governments and activists are increasingly doing. New York state and other places are pushing for polluters to kick into “Climate Superfunds.” These efforts haven’t succeeded yet, but the burgeoning science of attributing specific costs to individual companies will only boost their arguments.

Everyone pays as climate chaos grows. How painful that will be is still up to us.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

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