The extreme cost of extreme weather

2025 was a year marked by extreme weather. January brought devastating wildfires to Los Angeles. Texas experienced deadly hail storms and floods in March. Destructive tornadoes swept across the Midwest from March to May. These are just some of the 14 disasters that each cost over $1 billion in the United States in the first half of 2025. If it seems like these types of events are happening more often and causing even more destruction, it isn't just in your head. Extreme weather is intensifying, and its costs are rising.  

This hits close to home for me. As a child growing up in Northern California, I didn't realize how fragile the environment around me was. Now, its vulnerability becomes clearer with each passing year as fire seasons grow longer and more destructive.  

In 2017, the Tubbs fire erupted overnight in Calistoga, sweeping through the community and the land we shared with mountain lions, red-tailed hawks and rattlesnakes. My mother evacuated with her two dachshunds while my father stayed behind to fight the fire, alone. He managed to save my childhood home, which he had designed and built himself. I am grateful that my family's home is still standing and that my father survived, but heartbroken for the countless others who were not so lucky, and worried the next fire will be his last.  

While extreme weather has occurred as long as the Earth has existed, its frequency, intensity and cost are increasing. According to models that compare the current climate to a world without human-caused warming, 74% of 600 extreme weather events were made more likely or more severe because of climate change. 

The warming that is associated with dangerous changes in weather patterns is inextricably tied to pollution of just 57 companies that together produce 80% of the Earth's carbon emissions, many of them oil and gas companies. Yet the companies responsible for the pollution causing extreme weather are not held responsible for the costs of extreme weather.   

Without accountability, extreme weather events and their dire consequences will continue to worsen. ClientEarth works to address this crisis by going straight to the source, taking legal action against those who are responsible for it.  

After ClientEarth’s 2021 complaint accusing Saudi Aramco of the largest ever climate-related breach of international human rights law by a business, the United Nations warned Aramco and its financiers over their human rights violations. In the first case of its kind, ClientEarth sued Shell’s Board of Directors for their failure to transition away from fossil fuels. In the United States, ClientEarth has initiated a class-action lawsuit against companies that abandon oil and gas wells after pumping out the oil instead of cleaning them up, leaving behind over two million “zombie wells” that belch methane and other pollution, massively contributing to extreme weather, just to avoid paying the remediation costs. 

Read more about how ClientEarth USA is taking action against zombie wells

Extreme costs of extreme weather demand extreme responsibility. For a safer, healthier planet, we must put the onus on the polluters, and not allow them to foist it on us. Make a donation to support our fight to hold these polluters accountable today. 

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Alexander Reid is the chair of the ClientEarth USA board and a partner at BakerHostetler