{"id":1262322,"date":"2023-10-12T05:52:07","date_gmt":"2023-10-12T05:52:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=298112"},"modified":"2023-10-12T05:52:07","modified_gmt":"2023-10-12T05:52:07","slug":"is-californias-climate-lawsuit-against-big-oil-a-gamechanger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/10\/12\/is-californias-climate-lawsuit-against-big-oil-a-gamechanger\/","title":{"rendered":"Is California\u2019s Climate Lawsuit against Big Oil a Gamechanger?"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>\n
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Photo by Robin Sommer<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

The depths of depravity into which unvarnished capitalism can plunge mortal souls is incalculable. It should come as no surprise then that oil company executives and the officials of petrostates like\u00a0Saudi Arabia<\/a>\u00a0have so assiduously lied to us about the catastrophic effects of climate change. After all, the executives of tobacco firms have been perfectly content to sell consumers a product long known and virtually guaranteed to cut their lives short, while\u00a0lying<\/a><\/ins>\u00a0about its harmful effects for decades. Likewise, the courts have now made the pharmaceutical industry\u2019s\u00a0responsibility<\/a>\u00a0for and grasp of the opioid crisis that killed half a million people all too clear.<\/p>\n

In both instances, state attorneys-general played an important role in seeking redress. Now, Rob Bonta, California\u2019s attorney general, has\u00a0filed<\/a>\u00a0a 135-page lawsuit against five major oil companies \u2014 ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and BP \u2014 which could prove an inflection point in the battle against human-caused climate change.<\/p>\n

On announcing the lawsuit, Bonta\u00a0said<\/a>, \u201cOil and gas companies have privately known the truth for decades \u2014 that the burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change \u2014 but have fed us lies and mistruths to further their record-breaking profits at the expense of our environment. Enough is enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born in the Philippines to an American father and a Filipina mother, Bonta spent his early years near Keene, California, where the United Farm Workers had established its headquarters. There, both his father\u00a0Warren<\/a>\u00a0and his mother Cynthia helped organize Filipino-American and Mexican-American laborers. Bonta went on to get a Yale law degree and ultimately entered politics, being elected to the California State Assembly in 2012.<\/p>\n

His background clearly impressed upon him the special vulnerability of working-class groups to climate change. \u201cWe will meet the moment and fight tirelessly on behalf of all Californians,\u201d he pledged, \u201cin particular those who live in environmental justice communities.\u201d\u00a0 As he explained in a footnote in his\u00a0brief<\/a>\u00a0for that lawsuit: \u201c\u2019Frontline communities” are those that are and will continue to be disproportionately impacted by climate change. In many cases, the most harmed are the same communities that have historically experienced racial, social, health, and economic inequities.\u201d<\/p>\n

The destructive impact of human-caused climate change on California has, in fact, unfolded before our eyes.\u00a0Eleven of the 20<\/a>\u00a0largest California wildfires have taken place since 2018. Unusually frequent, wide-ranging, and ever-fiercer wildfires have even chased from their homes some of the Golden State\u2019s most famous celebrities, leaving behind just glowing cinders. The now-seemingly annual rampages of those increasingly massive conflagrations can cause us to forget how remarkable the damage has been in these years.<\/p>\n

In 2018, pop singer Miley Cyrus\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0that the Malibu home she shared with her then-fianc\u00e9 Chris Hemsworth had been devoured by flames, writing on social media, \u201cCompletely devastated by the fires affecting my community. I am one of the lucky ones. My animals and LOVE OF MY LIFE made it out safely & that\u2019s all that matters right now. My house no longer stands but the memories shared with family & friends stand strong . . . I love you more than ever, Miley.\u201d\u00a0 That year, Orlando Bloom, Bella Hadid, Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian, and Gerard Butler suffered similar losses.<\/p>\n

Well-heeled celebrities, however, have the resources to get through such crises.\u00a0Farm laborers<\/a>\u00a0who must harvest crops while breathing soot-filled air risk adverse health effects, including respiratory and heart disease. Others have lost their jobs and incomes entirely when wildfires encroached on fields and orchards. Not getting paychecks thanks to raging fires at their worksites can, in turn, cause such workers to miss mortgage payments and lose their homes. And sometimes, of course, their own homes, like those of the stars, have been torched.<\/p>\n

Connecting the Dots<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2021, wildfires almost entirely razed the town of Paradise, California. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg visited the aftermath. On hearing one man\u2019s devastating account of how he and his family barely escaped their fiery, collapsing home, she\u00a0said<\/a>, \u201cWe see all of these things repeating themselves over and over again. People die, and people suffer from it. But we completely fail to connect the dots.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her evident frustration at the time should be considered significantly more consequential than it might seem. A team of Norwegian researchers has\u00a0found<\/a>\u00a0that, of all the emotions provoked by human-caused climate change, the one most associated with activism against it is anger. Anger at politicians or CEOs who have played key roles in enabling the phenomenon that causes such destruction animates many climate protesters. As they suggested, Thunberg\u2019s vivid speeches are but one example of the righteous anger provoked by those who could have but haven\u2019t moved to mitigate the effects of global warming.<\/p>\n

For his part, Attorney General Bonta isn\u2019t in any doubt about where to lay the blame. As he\u00a0put it<\/a>, \u201cWith our lawsuit, California becomes the largest geographic area and the largest economy to take these giant oil companies to court. From extreme heat to drought and water shortages, the climate crisis they have caused is undeniable. It is time they pay to abate the harm they have caused.\u201d By focusing on five major oil companies, he and California Governor Gavin Newsom have given the state\u2019s environmentalists a target for their anger.<\/p>\n

Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Rhode Island are already\u00a0pursuing<\/a>\u00a0similar legal actions and small wonder why. When it comes to California, for instance, scientists have\u00a0recorded<\/a>\u00a0a fivefold increase in the summer burned areas in forests stretching from the middle of the state north during the past two and a half decades. And that devastatingly large burn area is anything but just the result of cyclical droughts. In fact, researchers\u00a0demonstrated<\/a>\u00a0this summer that almost all of it has been caused by the human production of carbon dioxide through the burning of gasoline, natural gas, and coal. Worse yet, their projections suggest that ever larger and more devastating burn areas will be part of our landscape in the decades to come as humanity pumps out yet more carbon pollution.<\/p>\n

The heat and long-term drought that\u2019s gone with it have transformed California\u2019s northern forests into so much tinder.\u00a0 After its wildfires of 2020, leading climate scientist Michael Mann\u00a0observed<\/a>, \u201cThese are known as compound drought and heat wave (CDHW) events and refer to situations wherein a region experiences both prolonged hot temperatures and a shortage of water.\u201d\u00a0 His team predicts that such events will more than double in number and in duration, while quadrupling in intensity, if carbon pollution continues to be produced at its current rate.<\/p>\n

Atmospheric Rivers<\/strong><\/p>\n

Worse yet, California now faces a double whammy \u2014 not just vastly increased wildfires and drought in some regions but major flooding in others. And in drought-stricken areas, sudden, massive rainfall simply runs off desiccated soil, adding to the risk of overflowing waters.<\/p>\n

As it happens, human-made global warming hasn\u2019t just heated up lands across the planet, but the oceans, too. In fact, this summer, ocean water temperatures\u00a0broke all previous heat records<\/a>\u00a0and that also puts more moisture into the atmosphere. Worse yet, climate change has heated the atmosphere itself and warmer air holds more moisture. That change has, in turn, made the \u201catmospheric rivers<\/a>\u201d carrying moisture from the tropics to the temperate zone far more destructive.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, then, on the last day of 2022, 5.5 inches of rain\u00a0deluged<\/a>\u00a0downtown San Francisco, while putting all six lanes of Highway 101 to its south under water. A week later, Governor Newsom watched as sheets of rainfall, driven by 70-mile-an-hour winds, knocked out power to 345,000 people in the state capital, Sacramento.<\/p>\n

This summer, the giant State Farm and Allstate insurance companies, ever more aware of the toll climate change was taking on their bottom lines in California, announced that they would no longer accept new customers there. As an explanation, State Farm\u00a0cited<\/a>\u00a0\u201crapidly growing catastrophe exposure.\u201d Take a moment to let that sink in. The situation humanity has created is now so calamitous that insurance companies are no longer willing to take on the once-safe bet that most houses will continue standing unharmed for decades.<\/p>\n

If California were an independent country, it would have the fifth-largest economy in the world. As Attorney General Bonta notes, it has the deep pockets to take on the oil companies. And significantly, that state\u2019s government is already among the world\u2019s most forward-looking in combating climate change. In 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order requiring that\u00a0all cars<\/a>\u00a0sold in California by 2035 be battery-electric or hybrid vehicles. The plan has spurred similar actions by six other states.<\/p>\n

In the past five years, electric vehicles as a percentage of new vehicle registrations in the Golden State have indeed\u00a0skyrocketed<\/a>\u00a0from 2% to 22%. No less impressive, around 60% of the state\u2019s electricity is now\u00a0generated<\/a>\u00a0by low-carbon sources like wind and solar. To smooth out the transitions between solar and wind generation, California has put in\u00a05 gigawatts<\/a>\u00a0of battery power, the most of any state, to forestall blackouts and avoid the necessity of using natural gas to fill the gap.<\/p>\n

They Lied. They Deceived.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The attorney general\u2019s\u00a0filing<\/a>\u00a0against the oil companies asserts their culpability: \u201cOil and gas company executives have known for decades that reliance on fossil fuels would cause these catastrophic results, but they suppressed that information from the public and policymakers by actively pushing out disinformation on the topic.\u201d This duplicity, the suit argues, was itself grounds for seeking redress.\u00a0 \u201cTheir deception,\u201d it continues, \u201ccaused a delayed societal response to global warming. And their misconduct has resulted in tremendous costs to people, property, and natural resources, which continue to unfold each day.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an\u00a0interview<\/a>\u00a0with KCAL television, Bonta pulled no punches: \u201cThey must pay for their own actions\u2026 They lied. They deceived. They falsely advertised. They undermined the science and made claims that were counter to the truth. We\u2019re holding them accountable for that.\u201d When challenged by the interviewer, who warned the attorney general that he would need a \u201csmoking gun\u201d showing that the corporations were deceitful, Bonta didn\u2019t hesitate: \u201cWe have smoking guns. Multiple. We have one from the 1960s. We have others in the decades that have followed. It is a very clear trend.\u201d<\/p>\n

His complaint is, in fact, festooned with such damning pieces of internal evidence, including a 1982\u00a0memo<\/a>\u00a0by Exxon scientist Roger Cohen, which admitted \u201ca clear scientific consensus\u201d on the expected effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide on the climate and suggested that doubling greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere would result in roughly a 3\u00b0 Celsius (5.4\u00b0 Fahrenheit) average global temperature rise, bringing about \u201csignificant changes in the earth\u2019s climate, including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1800, as the industrial revolution began, there were just 282 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Today, in part because of energy industry foot-dragging, there are about 420 ppm of CO2 and we\u2019re speeding toward the 564 ppm that Cohen predicted would radically change our very biosphere. Climate scientist Michael Mann has pointed out in his new book\u00a0Our Fragile Planet<\/em><\/a>\u00a0that, during the Pliocene era, 3.5 million years ago, that kind of ramp-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere produced a tropical world with ocean waters 30 feet higher than they are now.<\/p>\n

Despite the warnings of Cohen and others, in 1989, Exxon joined other oil companies in forming the Global Climate Coalition, which\u00a0combated<\/a>\u00a0attempts to reduce fossil-fuel consumption, while assuring journalists and politicians that \u201cthe role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood.\u201d Some of those companies like Exxon even\u00a0funded<\/a>\u00a0climate denialism when they knew perfectly well that it was a lie.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s and thereafter, the oil companies, the California lawsuit alleges, went on to use organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council lobbying group to pressure Washington to do nothing about carbon pollution. At the same, they attempted to convince concerned Americans that climate change either wasn\u2019t happening or, if it was, had nothing to do with burning fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

In a distinctly overheating world, where heat records of all sorts are now regularly being\u00a0broken<\/a>, the denialism of Big Oil and its henchmen, including today most of the\u00a0Republican Party<\/a>, is already a crime of the first order.\u00a0 The California suit is cleverly crafted.\u00a0 If there is one thing you can\u2019t do in societies like ours, where property rights are so central, it\u2019s damage someone\u2019s property knowingly and under the cover of deception.<\/p>\n

The internal memos of scientists that have surfaced in such abundance from the very bowels of the petroleum corporations could be their biggest Achilles heel. They demonstrate that the injuries they have inflicted on the Earth are not simply an unforeseen side effect of their product but, at least in part, the result of a deliberate cover-up.<\/p>\n

At last, Greta Thunberg\u2019s hope that someone, especially someone with the power to do something, would finally get mad and connect the dots is being fulfilled. Let\u2019s hope that California succeeds in both setting a meaningful precedent and making those companies pay in a big way, ending impunity for the most dangerous and deceitful assault on our environment in human history.<\/p>\n

This column is distributed by TomDispatch.<\/em><\/p>\n

The post Is California\u2019s Climate Lawsuit against Big Oil a Gamechanger?<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The depths of depravity into which unvarnished capitalism can plunge mortal souls is incalculable. It should come as no surprise then that oil company executives and the officials of petrostates like\u00a0Saudi Arabia\u00a0have so assiduously lied to us about the catastrophic effects of climate change. After all, the executives of tobacco firms have been perfectly content More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Is California\u2019s Climate Lawsuit against Big Oil a Gamechanger?<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5818,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262322"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5818"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1262322"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1262323,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262322\/revisions\/1262323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1262322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1262322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1262322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}