
The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever - metermaid
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/02/magazine/mag-oil-lawsuit.html
======
rayiner
What's tough and utterly ignored by this article is that it's not just the
lobbyists who oppose you, it's ordinary people. There is a sincere and deep
seated belief that it's morally objectionable to ask companies to answer for
their actions in a court of law, that there are no alternatives to destroying
the environment, and that such lawsuits threaten the existence of economies
like that in Lousiana.

That's why these politicians can take actions in favor of the industry with
impunity.

> Jones figured there would be a period of quiescence while the industry
> decided how to respond. Within hours, Jindal, who was in Aspen, Colo., at a
> meeting of the Republican Governors Association, released a statement. “This
> is nothing but a windfall for a handful of trial lawyers,” Jindal said,
> arguing that the suit came “at the expense of our coast and thousands of
> hardworking Louisianians who help fuel America by working in the energy
> industry.”

85% of people in Louisiana buy this stuff up. They'll buy it up until all the
oil is gone, and when the companies leave they'll have no jobs and their state
will be a wasteland unfit for any other sort of economy.

To be fair, it's not just Louisiana. During the last Presidential election,
Obama and Romney literally fought during one debate to show who was more pro-
coal. There's no point in doing that if you're just after campaign donations--
the coal companies can do their own advertising. No, such theatrics are to get
votes in places like West Virginia, Pennsylvania, southeastern Illinois, etc.

~~~
api
There's a deeper and equally sincere and deep-seated belief behind said
beliefs:

It's objectively true that increasing the cost of energy amounts to something
like a regressive tax: it will harm the poor and the middle class considerably
more than it will harm the wealthy. Among causes for our current middle class
woes, some have cited the peaking of domestic conventional oil in the 1970s
and the general end of _extremely_ cheap energy around that era.

The very existence of a middle class and a diamond-shaped social order is
probably in part an artifact of cheap and available energy. People do
understand this. They understand that an end to cheap energy will return
themselves and their children to serfdom. (Unless they happen to be members of
the tiny <1% financial elite that would probably become the new nobility.)

What people don't believe is that renewable energy can provide cheap energy.
They fear a world powered by renewable energy might be one resembling The
Hunger Games: tiny stratospherically rich technological enclaves served vast
impoverished precincts of serfs.

Meanwhile they're also either against nuclear outright, or are at the very
least suspicious of it.

So if the choice is between fossil fuels and a return to abject poverty,
people choose fossil fuels. I'm not sure they're really ignoring climate
change-- rather they're making a cost/benefit analysis to the effect that
climate change is better than a return to feudal serfdom.

They're probably right. It is demonstrably better to reign in hell than to
serve in heaven. Poverty is worse than any natural disaster I'm aware of; I'll
take a few million dollars and a hurricane every week over poverty and blue
skies.

This also explains why the "developing" world has shown no interest in moving
on carbon reduction. Cheap available energy is lifting billions out of
poverty. Their response is pretty much "screw you, we're poor." For them to
choose any different would be an act of huge-scale unilateral self-sacrifice.

The burden is on advocates of renewable energy to show that it can provide
cheap, abundant energy sufficient to sustain a diamond-shaped social order. If
it can't, it is politically dead and climate change is a foregone conclusion.
The burden is also on nuclear advocates to show that they can engineer
reactors that _cannot_ fail like Fukushima or Chernobyl. (I mean _cannot fail_
, not "low probability of failure," since anyone who understand entry-level
stats knows that small probabilities become large when you scale things up.
Think about what hard drive and RAM failures look like at data center scales
for example.) Neither of these milestones has been reached.

Renewable energy remains a favorite political option among the inhabitants of
uber-rich cities that resemble The Capital in The Hunger Games, like San
Francisco. It's viewed as a luxury feel-good toy for rich people. Meanwhile
the nuclear industry continues to iterate on the fundamentally flawed 1950s
submarine reactor design instead of rethinking the problem from first
principles and producing something truly engineered for civilian power
production. IMHO the situation is worse in the nuclear domain... nobody is
even trying, and the response to incidents like Fukushima is to double down on
PR instead of doubling down on engineering.

Over time I've become more and more skeptical of the "people are stupid"
answer to things like this. The reality is that people are _not_ as stupid as
you think they are. They just might be viewing things very differently or
conceptualizing the problem from the perspective of different needs and goals.

In AI terminology they have a different goal function. Understand their goal
function(s) and you understand their choices.

Another bugaboo in places like Louisiana is religious fundamentalism and
opposition to evolution, etc. I've started to doubt "people are stupid" there
as well. In that culture, the church is the center of social life. So you're
basically asking people to choose between friendship, camaraderie, and the
moral basis of cooperation and some esoteric scientific theory that does
nothing to help them in their daily lives. Which would you choose? Insulting
people and calling them idiots doesn't accomplish anything except to polarize
them and reinforce the underlying social pathologies responsible for the
problem. Poverty might also have some explanatory power here as well. Social
cohesion -- here provided by the church -- is more of a necessity if you are
poor than if you are rich. The poor do not have the luxury of choosing a
certain amount of social alienation in order to be right about scientific
precepts.

"People are stupid" is one of the great intellectually lazy answers of our
times. Dig deeper.

~~~
czr80
> It's objectively true that increasing the cost of energy amounts to
> something like a regressive tax.

No, this is not (automatically) true, it matters how the increase is
implemented. See, for example:
[http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-
consensus-97-...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-
consensus-97-per-cent/2014/jun/13/how-revenue-neutral-carbon-tax-creates-jobs-
grows-economy)

~~~
api
I'm skeptical given the direct physical link between energy and wealth.

But it's also true that this link decouples at a certain level of energy
consumption. Thankfully so... But it hasn't been shown that this minimum level
can be achieved economically and safely at scale without fossil fuels.

------
robbiet480
Lobbying and what seems to me to be unchecked flouting of the law is utterly
disgusting.

------
selimthegrim
I saw John Barry speak; had no idea he had a doctorate. Brought down the
house, a real barnstormer.

------
thinkcomp
I think that articles about lawsuits should allow readers to actually see the
lawsuits themselves, and should always at least mention the case number. So,
in that spirit, here it is:

[http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/1zzhdj2de/louisiana-
eastern...](http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/1zzhdj2de/louisiana-eastern-
district-court/board-of-commissioners-of-the-southeast-louisiana-flood-/)

------
cpursley
One of the things that attracts me to libertarianism is how environmental
disasters are handled. _Shocker_ but under a more libertarian system, there
would not be laws that protect wealthy corporations specifically allowing them
to get away with pollution. Public and private land owners would be able to
rightfully sue culprits for property damage.

In fact, some of the worst polluters are nations where the state owns the
majority of land and/or production like Soviet Union and China. I was both
dumbfounded and sad to see the amount of trash in the Black Sea along the
Russian coast that was dumped there or floated into it via the danube river
during soviet rule.

It's especially sad to see this sort of thing happening in the United States,
which is a relativity environmentally conscious country with large swaths of
protected land. I wouldn't take it as far is the following article details,
but some of the ideas here would be better than the current system:
[https://mises.org/daily/5978/The-Libertarian-Manifesto-on-
Po...](https://mises.org/daily/5978/The-Libertarian-Manifesto-on-Pollution)

~~~
rayiner
As a litigator, I appreciate the sentiment, but litigation is ineffective at
enforcing the rights of large numbers of people. Say there are no bank
regulations, and a bank skims $100 of the accounts of ten million customers.
The bank makes a lot of money, but it's not worthwhile for any given
individual to sue. Your only recourse is the class action lawsuit, with all
the limitations that entails.

The situation is even more problematic when the injured parties are not in
contractual privity with the wrongdoer. If a coal plant in Chicago causes
$1,000 of health damage to each resident, that's a multi-billion wrong. But
unlike with a bank, the residents can't simply decide to do business with a
different company.

There's a lot of money to be made doing two things: 1) selling people more
risk than they think you're selling them; 2) foisting risk and costs onto
third parties that aren't in a contractual relationship with you. So long as
you do these things to a large number of people with a relatively small dollar
value for each injury, you'll make a lot of money at it, and the legal system
isn't great at stopping such behavior.

~~~
pdq
What you are describing about banks is outright theft, which under any system
would be punished.

Even if courts did not exist, very few business would be that dumb to steal
from their customers, because once details of it were known to the public, all
rational customers would take their money out of the bank and it would
eventually go out of business.

~~~
rayiner
There's lots of ways to steal a little bit from people in ways they don't
realize or can't do anything about. Stealing $5 bucks outright is of course
the obvious thing; disproportionate overdraft fees or ordering transactions to
maximize overdrafts is another; selling something with apparent X% risk and
real X+Y% risk is more subtle still.

Information asymmetry isn't a theoretical construct--it's the basis of a lot
of different ways to steal from people without their knowing.

------
spenvo
“Writing is pretty isolated,” Barry said. “I enjoy the action. I like to
fight.” // More coders should feel this way when it comes to issues about
which they're passionate. In other words, more of us should consider becoming
hacktivists -- at least on the side. As hacktivists, a wise first step towards
making a difference is to treat political science as continuing education.
Yes, articles like this should pique your interest. Read them. But also pick
up some books and get serious.

To that end, as an alternative to "Rising Tide" by John Barry (from the linked
article): I highly recommend reading (as did Aaron Swartz)[0][1] "The Power
Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York". It is a brilliant, Pulitzer-
prize-winning case study of the forces at play in broken/corrupt governments
(and how opaque the processes which formulate and execute the policies of
governance truly are).

In Aaron's own words: "For nearly forty years, Robert Moses controlled New
York. Controlled it almost absolutely, overruling every mayor, governor,
president, and public pressure group. He did it all without anyone ever
knowing: the press, when it did cover him, covered him only in the most
glowing, reverent terms. He did it all without winning a single election: the
two times he did dare run for office, he was defeated so soundly as to become
a joke.

"_The Power Broker_ is the story of how our "democracy" really works. How men
gain power and how it corrupts them. How cities get built and how real people
suffer for it. How we became a nation desperately dependent on the car."

I will add that Robert Moses was the pioneer of eminent domain (a massive blow
to the philosophical underpinnings of property rights in the USA) and modern
public authorities (highly insular entities which are hybrids bodies corporate
& politic -- receiving money from the public with zero effective
accountability to taxpayers -- hard to summarize implications, but they have
been enormous).

[0] -
[http://www.amazon.com/review/RXOVNQ3JLY6GF](http://www.amazon.com/review/RXOVNQ3JLY6GF)

[1] - [https://zolabooks.com/list/aaron-swartz-reading-
list/1](https://zolabooks.com/list/aaron-swartz-reading-list/1)

[2] - for those who'd prefer to listen, an excellent narration is available on
Audible -- [http://www.audible.com/pd/Bios-Memoirs/The-Power-Broker-
Audi...](http://www.audible.com/pd/Bios-Memoirs/The-Power-Broker-
Audiobook/B0051JH67K)

Next I'd consider: "Hacking Politics" (about SOPA/PIPA) or "Understanding
Power" \- a collection of talks by Noam Chomsky -- not for his ideological
insights but for his manner of making observations and thought-provoking
perspectives.

~~~
dankohn1
I'm 3/4ths through the audio book of the Power Broker and second your
recommendation. I started it while doing the 100 mile NYC Century last month
(the only all-urban century), and it has changed the way I think about New
York City, democracy, power, and journalism.

