Some of these lawsuits may be aimed not just at winning in court, but at pushing broader changes in policies or public awareness. Even if these cases are challenging to win, they can influence public opinion and policy, encouraging stricter environmental regulations and corporate practices.
Personally I think lawmakers should focus their effort on making stricter legal frameworks for today's world. Use the full force of the law to make companies behave better. It's the only language they understand.
they sell... Oil, gas and other minerals that make our life go around... It makes that computer your typing on, and gets 90% of us to work/ around.
I get it, use of gas and oil causes pollution... But that's on the end user, no? I know people love to villify gas companies, but they are some of the most productive engines of society.
One of the roles government can play is to take the negative externalities of an activity (e.g., pollution) and internalize it so that those costs are paid by those who are profiting. The way to do that is to create taxes, fee structures, etc. so that those making money on activities contribute to the overall societal cost.
Effective regulation could actually have made clean coal plants. In principle that junk can be filtered, but it was cheaper to lobby for rules exemptions than to pay for filters.
Sometimes damage can be prevented instead of remediated. Sometimes it isn't about victims getting paid, but preventing people from being victimized.
Effective regulation was not achieved, so it makes sense to demand the next most beneficial action for users. I wouldn't trust the people in charge though.
Not necessarily. Often the incumbent technology remains that way simply because it’s cheaper. If the taxes cause the price to go up enough that it has a similar cost to an alternative, the alternative has a chance of becoming the preferred option. It doesn’t matter where the extra tax money goes for this to be effective.
Sure it would be nice if it helped victims, etc, but getting that part figured out would be a prime target for the incumbents to derail the whole process.
But villifying the companies that sell "oil" is getting ridiculous at this point. Not to mention, the "Big, bad oil companies" are some of the biggest investors in clean energy. They look at themselves as energy companies... the keyboard warriors here seem to thank that their entire marketing budget is going towards denying climate change... Comparing oil to drugs is a prime example of that line of thinking.
Pollution is a tragedy of commons scenario, so our best tools for solving it are laws and policy that force behaviour.
I'd be surprised if it's completely impossible to do the resource extraction without minimising impact, we just don't tend to have much pressure to innovate in that direction.
The end user on the other hand, has the least power to change any of the dynamics you're describing and is usually least able to choose to do without.
I think you underestimate both the value and importance of individual action by users.
The best tools for preventing tragedies of the commons are collective and individual desire to do so.
Taking action and paying personal costs are incredibly important.
On the flip side, it is extremely difficult to force change top down without people willing to lead by example.
Looks at any place with nice commons and they are maintained though widespread desire to do so by individuals. Japan isn't free a litter due to harsh fines, regulatory action, and policing.
Except the commons in this case is a shared atmosphere. Unless we get other countries to agree to equally punitive actions, all we end up doing is giving them the license to accelerate their economies at our expense.
Its a shared atmosphere, so they will suffer the effects of it equally. This isn't a "just the US" type of thing. if you suffer from hurricanes or monsoons, earthquakes, and so on, it is in your best interest to reduce the effects of pollution. China was the biggest polluter, they still are, but they are taking measures.
We also haven't agreed to punitive actions, tax credits incentivize cleaning, but there is barely any punishment or accounting of it. Else coal which is probably the worst form of energy production would not exist.
The end users have been lied to for half a century as the fossil fuel companies spent billions on PR campaigns, buying politicians, setting up think tanks and fake research groups, etc. claiming that something their own scientists were confident was happening was not happening.
Imagine the alternative where they’d gone to Nixon with their research and worked with governments to gracefully transition, support rather than oppose efficiency improvements, etc. The difference in deaths will be measured in millions, and the cost to the global economy would have been trillions of dollars less.
Fundamentally speaking, government decisions are based on the individual egocentric needs of each member, not the needs of the population at large. This is why you can't trust governments to do the good thing: to make sure they do good you must coerce them as you would a private company.
I’m not sure what connection that has to the topic - it sound tautological to say that good oversight will lead to better outcomes than poor oversight.
I'm saying that "good oversight" is fundamentally impossible, at least in a humanistic sense. Because individual people have individual ideas about what "good oversight" is.
This includes government officials. Your views will certainly collide with a politician's views on what's "good oversight".
A single exploratory ocean oil well costs as much as a Mars rover with design, launch and operations. There are thousands of them.
We owe our modern world to O&G, but by now they could be producing oil & gas from CO2 -> Methane using solar / wind (/ nuclear?) and the CO2 in the air around us.
The infrastructure to do so sounds enormous, but we gloss over all the diplomacy, wars, foreign & domestic wells, tankers, refineries, ports, trucks, pipes, gas stations, etc etc we had to build in the last 100 years to actually make O&G the everyday industry it is. How many trillions? The ROI was totally worth it, but maybe it's time for more I and less R.
It's not that the industry or even oil itself is evil, it's that we can do better.
Who conceal the truth and lobby against any change so they can force society to continue to depend upon them despite that dependency destroying the planet.
It's a way to large responsibility to put on the individual end user.
If there are many lawsuits like these, and the oil companies loose some of them, the result is that some of the exernalities are partially compensated by some of the ones earning the most on the original fault. It makes the world a slightly more fair place. The best would have been if the cost was baked in from the beginning, but alas.
Oil and gass is unfortunately still important for our economy, that's true. But it's also an existential threat to our modern way of life. Given what we now know about the absolute massive external costs, we need drastic change. We should extract as little as we can, and every single penny of surplus should go towards green energy and mitigating actions.
However, I think we need to add that being one of "the most productive engines of society" comes with great responsibility. The record profits for share holders and executives may not be enough incentive to maintain appropriate levels of that responsibility.
This is why selling opium should be legal. The consequences of use are on the user not the seller. Sellers never should have culpability assigned to them. Ditto for lenders.
The problem is not about just pollution, it’s about their commitment to use their profits to drive the lobbying and bullying anything or anyone that comes across as a threatening to their business. Not just that, they publish “research” which is essentially disinformation campaign against anything. And many more..
No, it's not "on the end user", in my not-so-humble opinion. We should have been much more heavily investing in renewables & carbon neutrality (factories to make batteries and solar, nuclear, anything) by the time the fracking boom happened. Fossil fuel companies were investing in misleading the public about global warming instead, in the same way that tobacco companies invested in misleading the public about the health issues caused by smoking. To this day they are still working to undermine efforts to transition to cleaner energy, for the sake of greater profits, even while their public relations efforts pretend they are pro-"green". The country/world was steered toward a cliff by self-interested people without sound judgement or morals pulling financial levers to enrich themselves.
I'm all for users taking action to regulate their behavior, and then for governments to also regulate behavior where appropriate.
I see it a lot like cigarettes, in that individuals can make very restrictive choices, governments apply looser restrictions, and manufacturers provide supply.
Like cigarettes, there was likely some legally actionable misinformation long ago that should be addressed, but nobody today can honestly claim they are tricked into thinking smoking is healthy.
And unfortunately the people pushing for using anti-oil energy policy are implementing it it appears to gain more control over the general population, and to implement more authoritarian policy.
The fastest and non-violent way to achieve the most efficient results is through the relative free market, education and voluntary adoption - and through purchasing power, but not through forced purchasing power - nor nonsense tax policy like the "CO2 tax" on all fuel - and therefore all products and transport involved with production and distribution of all products vs. only having a CO2 tax specifically on products from countries who's CO2 emissions are increasing or skyrocketing; penalize weighted based on actual emissions; whether CO2 emissions are actually harmful or not, CO2 can be released without releasing polluting particulate - of which CO2 isn't pollution itself.
I could have been more careful with my language: it's the ones at the top, the ones positioning themselves to take lead positions and/or being positioned as useful puppets, manufacturing and weaponizing an ideological mob that doesn't care about or follow critical thinking to actually find out what the truth is, and how urgent or not urgent climate change is or how severe and how easily mitigable human impact on climate is.
Are you familiar with the concepts of manufacturing consent, fear mongering, regulatory capture, turnkey authoritarianism, tyranny, etc?
Behave better like make Puerto Rico not suffer from the bad weather events? How do you see that happening? Or make their local government (or for that matter, the federal government) less corrupt and incompetent, so they could better prepare for extreme events and have recovery plans that do not resemble headless chicken running around when it happens? How would energy companies fix that?
I think this is just a publicity stunt meant to shift attention from those whose task was to prepare and handle the problems and who failed spectacularly in that task - to those who had nothing to do with this failure, but the real culprits expect the popular opinion to blame. It's not us being crappy at governing, it's those evil villains we're suing.
I really hope that it’s about more than public awareness. The power of public awareness is a liberal fiction. The “public awareness” of climate change gets co-opted and neutralized by limp-wristed slogans like bicycle-to-work (where, on the pedestrian-hostile US commuter roads?) and upper-middle class solutions like “buy more Teslas”.
And now everyone knows about climate change. Only there are two camps: those who believe it’s real and those who think it’s a conspiracy theory. More awareness so to speak only makes the two camps dig their heels in further.
The only way to make corporations change is to threaten their bottom line. But at this point I’m sure many have been convinced that the corporations have no responsibility in this.
I remember that 20, maybe 25 years ago, the major oil companies were all rebranding themselves as "energy" companies because "we all knew" that we had to be weaned off oil and onto alternative energy sources. Then somehow that effort seems to have petered out.
Turned out unicorn farts are not a good source of energy, nuclear energy is a good source but is scary because scary, and the rest is way too hard (and slow) to scale to the energy levels we need. Yes, I know some tiny country managed to produce 100% of it's energy by some exotic source, just as I know somebody implemented a fully functional OS in Brainfuck. That doesn't mean Brainfuck is a viable industrial system programming platform. And exotic energy is still not a viable stand-alone solution for overall world energy needs (especially if you count transportation). So PR is one thing, but the reality turns out to be a bit different.
That is all branding. They greenwash themselves publicly but still to this day show PowerPoint presentations to investors about how they are working to undermine renewables and electric transportation in order to fatten their wallets. (Source: climate town youtube channel.)
I think the shale revolution probably changed the calculus.
It removed the "dependency on foreign oil" argument from the debate completely in the U.S. (though you still hear it mentioned from time to time without merit).
It also reduced the cost of energy in the U.S. which eliminated a lot of the economic pressure.
My impression is there aren’t really subsidies for fossil fuels other than as a rhetorical tool. What is calculated as subsidies are things like wars in the Middle East or not pricing in externalities. So everyone can go “ra ra remove the subsidies” and then the politician is left with no subsidy to remove. Instead they have to do much more difficult work of passing new legislation that to the average voter sounds like punishing fossil fuels.
And another 6 Trillion in implicit subsidies by ignoring the costs of local pollution etc.
But yeah, if you categorically define something as "too hard" then it's too hard. Getting some percentage of that blood money back as campaign contributions and bribes is I'm sure not a factor, it's just those pesky voters to blame.
Thanks for sharing.
Notably to me the “explicit” category appears near zero in North America which is what I’m most familiar with and concerned about, and where I mostly hear people complain about subsidies.
But for sure would welcome those other regions to remove their subsidies!
Anti-intellectualism and the push to the right is a drive to prevent a global consciousnesses. The best thing we can do is encourage critical thinking regardless of ideology. Education cures all ills.
That's what Socrates thought. But I don't think it's correct. Education enables, but does not cure. What one chooses to do is not a product of what one knows alone.
I wonder if a lawsuit like this could ultimately indemnify petrochemical companies for a known and finite amount, with the most lasting "benefit" being warning signs on gas pumps and anything else produced using petrochemicals:
"WARNING: This product is known to the territory of Puerto Rico to cause more and more severe meteorological events."
Then at some later time in the inevitable march to Idiocracy, bright minds at low margin businesses will start tossing some food grade paraffin on everything so they don't have to distinguish between SKUs that need the sign and those that don't.
Does this have legal legs? Also, if “Puerto Rico says it expects to pay billions of dollars in the future to cope with catastrophes made worse by climate change,” why are they only asking for $1bn?
No idea on standing. But as for the amount being asked for: it's possible that the lawyers determined that only so-and-so much of PR's expected climate damages could be clearly attributable to oil and gas companies, even if the total damages are significantly higher.
Also, if they win the suit and fossil fuel companies are forced to pay for damages in Puerto Rico, then they've established a precedent, opening a floodgate of similar suits from e.g. New Orleans.
Nevermind the billions of people who (still) drive cars and buy shipped products because there hasn't been a more cost-effective alternative. This entire oil-based economy situation is simple supply and demand and transitioning to clean energy takes a lot of time. I get that their motive comes from oil companies not disclosing the risks to the environment but this is a bit of a stretch and an obvious political stunt.
It's more than that, it was the willful misrepresentation of the truth. The oil companies didn't accidentally end up in this situation. They knew back in the 80s the effects that oil consumption would have on the ecosystem and they covered it up and actively pushed lies that prevented any kind of meaningful change.
This is true, but my point is there weren't cost-effective alternatives at that time anyway so blaming climate disasters squarely on the shoulders of oil companies and not acknowledging the fact that demand fueled the value of oil doesn't make logical sense, even from an empirical perspective. Now, lawsuits for local disasters and oil spills do make sense.
It does if you think that alternatives to fossil fuel would have become economical earlier, had the fossil fuel industry not intervened.
Another framing: how many wind, solar, hydrothermal, etc. plants did we not build because their economic envelope was artificially dampened by investment and legislative preference for fossil fuels?
I do agree with this. They stifled progress as much as they could but that only slows things down, and because we don't truly know what would have happened, it's not productive to play the blame game and say we'd have a spotless utopia if it weren't for the oil companies. Who knows, not enough people at that time may not have cared or maybe we would have the utopia we all want. It's all guesswork and at this point we need to spend our energy moving forward instead of focusing on the past.
Say they’d gone to Nixon like they were considering, or Carter a little later. The U.S. might have ended up like France with a massive nuclear investment _and_ stronger investment in renewable and efficiency wins - the solar panels Reagan removed from the White House weren’t anywhere near modern standard but there was a ton of interest in lowering pollution which was derailed in the name of increased profit margins during the 80s.
No, it wouldn’t change everything but you don’t need carbon emissions to be 100% to be useful. Every bit you reduce buys time to work on the harder parts of the economy.
Punishing major corporations at scale might help prevent the next multi-generational fuckup, and help pay for the energy and changes moving forward.
I'm not really sure what it is you are trying to defend here? I understand arguing that you can't guarantee a different approach would have led to better results, but in this situation it seems fairly clear that corporations being open and honest would be superior.
The 'there weren't cost-effective alternatives at that time' as an excuse for at the very least inaction (morally condemnable) and at most criminal litigation-worthy propaganda, lies and damages, I find it, in all due respect, quite poor.
As an excuse on the part of the oil companies, I completely agree. But that point was directed at the supply/demand situation from the perspective of the world's consumers and not from the oil companies. So any effects emissions have had on the environment can't be placed squarely on the shoulders of the oil companies but the market (world population) as a whole.
Oh no, well if there aren’t cost-effective alternatives for the corporation to slot into the profit opportunity then that’s that. Can’t blame the poor corporations who just wanted to make money, their God-given right after all.
Epistemic uncertainty: I wasn't alive back then and haven't done a deep dive on the historical evidence to form a strong view on the claim.
However, Sabine Hossenfelder recently made a post about that [0]. My understanding is that there was still a lot of uncertainty in the scientific community during the 80s, although around the 90s there was a movement by oil companies to downplay the impact of climate change.
With that being said, whether or not oil companies were aware back then doesn't mean they cannot still be held accountable in the present. And we definitely have evidence of oil companies engaging in bad faith since the turn of the millennium to obfuscate our understanding of climate science.
I doubt it would have changed much. An Inconvenient Truth came out almost 20 years ago, and traditional ICE cars (excluding hybrids) still have 80% market share. It's fairly well-known at this point that going vegetarian (or vegan) cuts individual CO2 emissions dramatically, but people aren't signing up for it.
People aren't willing to sacrifice their lifestyle for the environment.
At least some of that inaction is due to the billions of dollars spent encouraging it. For example, ICE SUVs are common because they’re subsidized by the government. If there wasn’t a huge mass of climate denial funding it into a political litmus test, removing those subsidies would mean that the median vehicle on the road burns half as much gas.
More chance to build better habits with next generation than trying to convience gran’pa doing differently…
In France we (edu and ecology ministers iirc) tried to have only vegetarian meal one day per week in public schools. Agriculture ministers got very angry as well as a bunch of noisy parents. Legislator choose to abandon the project.
There is lot of choices individuals could make. Forgo EVs, only walk or bike. Instead of living in large spaces, move to something much smaller like capsules. Forgo electronics and internet in general.
I don't disagree but I've always found that argument a bit disingenuous. Have you ever seen an oil well getting drilled in a movie or on TV? Or just seen oil? Or seen and smelled the gas that goes into cars?
Is anyone able to say with a straightface that they didn't know oil that oil is bad for the environment? I get that the oil companies have more blame than other people, but this argument of "the global population was fooled, nobody knew it was bad so we kept using oil, and those mean people at the oil company kept the information from us"... Everyone knows. The same way everyone knows most weird smelling chemicals aren't great for the environment either, but if we have a stained tshirt we'll use them.
We're all complicit, and while I agree some are more to blame than others, it's not necessary to pretend the rest of us are innocent.
This actually, according to hard economics, is potentially an optimal solution.
Fossil fuels provide a great benefit to one party but produce negative externalities to other parties (people in hurricane zones, people born into hot regions, people who live in the future). If it's worth it economically because the value is so great, then an optimal economic solution is to say "You can have this thing, but you are accountable for the damages it causes to other parties"
Once we start pricing in the costs of the side-effects of fossil-fuels, the tradeoffs will be more clear, and the market will create faster incentives toward the ideal tradeoff.
The problem is that there isn't a direct connection to negative externalities. If there are now 20 hurricanes instead of 10, who is responsible for those extra 10?
And that's literally what they are claiming, that oil companies are causing hurricanes to hit Puerto Rico
> In the complaint, Puerto Rico says it expects to pay billions of dollars in the future to cope with catastrophes made worse by climate change — including storms like Hurricane Maria, which killed thousands of people in 2017 and triggered monthslong power outages.
Why not the beef or farming industry? Or China? Isolating oil companies alone seems silly. Even more so because the entire world, including Puerto Rico also be benefits from the fruit of the last 100+ years od oil production.
On top of all that, climate change was going to happen. The idea that our climate was ever static and unchanging is silly, and only a child’s view is the history of the world would suggest otherwise. Did the early inhabitants of Austin Texas sue whatever they thought caused their premium glacier front property to drop in value over the last billions of years they receded?
The fact is that humanity is hooked on oil. IRS not going away. Not at least without billions of people suffering and dying. Oil has brought clean water across the world. It has allowed a technology boon by the way of its by products coating the majority of wires made, preventing horrific house fires from the days of paper wrapped wires.
Oil and its byproducts are engrained into humanity and its economical efficiency has been a blessing to humanity and every single last person on this planet has benefited.
The answers pretty simple, it's a wealthy party they have political control over and which they can attempt to extract money from, and if they lose, which is likely, they can double down on victimhood.
And that's not even going into the fact that we would already be pushing for more fuel efficiency in vehicles especially if gas wasn't so incredibly subsidized here in the United States. We pay absurdly low prices compared to basically everywhere else and you cannot convince me that is not a significant factor in why we still have so many massive trucks, SUV's, and V8 sports cars.
And don't get me wrong, I love my sports car and it's big thundering V8. But I also know the negative effects it has and I'm completely fine paying a higher price at the pump to offset that.
I hear this often, but my understanding is that gas is has very high sin taxes, there are no subsidies, and some tax breaks, but are the type that most businesses qualify for.
Every time I look it up, the results are so full of rhetoric and conflating I can't find an answer.
Most top line numbers count on priced externalities as a implicit subsidy. That's fine and well for some analyzes, but very different than Direct Cash subsidies or tax breaks
I thought the oil and gas industry famously got about $4B in subsidies per year, and about $20B to fossil fuel industries in general. Has that changed recently?
Is that a 20B check the federal government paid them? Is that 20B of tax deductions from carry forward losses that every company in the US gets? Is that 20B of carbon taxes that some analyst thinks would be fair, but there is no law requiring them to pay?
The IMF says things like this[1]:
>This includes $3 billion in explicit subsidies and $754 billion in implicit subsidies, which are costs like negative health impacts and environmental degradation that are borne by society at large rather than producers (i.e., negative externalities).
This link [2] goes a little more into what the "direct subsidies" are:
Intangible Drilling Costs Deduction - Not sure why this is a subsidy. Most business costs are tax deductible for other industries.
Clean Coal Investment and Nonconventional Fuels Tax Credits - These are incentives to decarbonize. I agree that they are subsidies in the traditional sense, but not subsidies to increase carbon production. Something like a 30% tax credit for money spent on upgrades that sequester >75% of the carbon emissions seems like a good thing.
No one will ever accuse me of being an optimist, but I'm beginning to have a hard time seeing how this doesn't end with human extinction, and I wonder how that balances on the spreadsheet. It's quite depressing.
Humans evolved from some of the most inhospitable climates and continue to live in such environments to this day. Humans will do what we've always done - adapt and overcome.
I mean how many people thought you could build a bunch of casino's in the middle of a desert and think people would move there and it would grow into almost 3M people?
Companies like British Petroleum have used marketing to frame climate change as “consumers doing bad things” with their “carbon footprint”. So if that’s what your mind goes to first, that’s no coincidence.
It’s all about the money. Money buys media which buys narrative and mindshare.
And these fossil fuel companies aren't just doing this in the US. When you look at what they view as the path forward to keep selling oil to burn, it's all about doing things like setting up floating power plants for developing nations and subsidizing road construction to aid in the sale of ICE vehicles.
The problem with these companies is the externalities of their actions are not priced in. For them, it's more a simple game of figuring out how to get the world to burn more oil.
This lawsuit may not have merit, but it does point to the need for trying to price in the impact on climate change with oil burning.
> Companies like British Petroleum have used marketing to frame climate change as “consumers doing bad things” with their “carbon footprint”. So if that’s what your mind goes to first, that’s no coincidence.
It's also common sense. Literally nothing stops first-world consumers from not buying stuff that requires emission of greenhouse gases except for their lifestyle preferences.
> It’s all about the money. Money buys media which buys narrative and mindshare.
Yep, you bought into the idea that you don't have to change your lifestyle because it is all fault of the big oil.
You call it a lifestyle preference, I call it staying alive. But that bag of potatoes I just bought wouldn't be in the grocery store without a long chain of greenhouse gas emissions.
Lies repeated enough become truth which becomes common sense.
> Literally nothing stops first-world consumers from not buying stuff that requires emission of greenhouse gases except for their lifestyle preferences.
Literally nothing. Uh-huh as if we’re talking about buying a monster truck compared to a Volvo instead of the lifeblood of the whole modern (inefficient) supply chain.
> Yep, you bought into the idea that you don't have to change your lifestyle because it is all fault of the big oil.
True and it does bring some awareness, but this is lazy approach. I love the passion people have in cleaning up the environment but we all know (especially the engineers among us) that building a solution, or contributing to one, is far more effective than complaining about a problem.
They are arguing that the companies concerned were not, but should be compelled to, price in at least some of the negative externalities of their product.
Not doing so of course makes their product's price not reflect its true cost to produce, and distorts that same supply and demand.
I completely agree if these negative externalities weren't several degrees of separation. Car companies could have produced cars with better emissions which isn't the fault of the oil companies, people could get their products later instead of next-day (I'm also guilty of this), you get the picture. I'm glad oil companies are having to be more transparent but the blame is on the entire population of the world.
Fossil fuel companies are valued on their infrastructure, and its shareholders leverage that value (VAL) for gains/loans/financial strengths in other pursuits.
Fortifying VAL necessarily means discrediting any harms by fossil fuels. It necessarily requires winning against renewable energy suppliers. How can these "necessities" be made moot? By getting the shareholders to also invest in renewables, using the loans leveraged from VAL. But then the loaners will be invested in VAL.
Solution is to make sale of fossil companies and infrastructure illegal. Government should buy it out.
Not a lawyer, so no idea if this will get somewhere.
But on the moral side of this, yes, if the operation of oil companies incurs damages to other entities/people, they have to make them whole.
The "Netflix wouldn't exist without fossil fuels" argument is silly. The cost of restoring the environment should be factored in to the cost of producing oil, like any other liability. If that makes everything go up in price, well ... that's the actual cost of that product, consume accordingly.
All human civilization (not just use of fossil fuels) is going to cause some level of environmental damage. This is inevitable. The cost of "restoring the environment" is infinity. So, it's really just a question of what level of damage we're willing to accept. Different people prefer different levels of damage on that spectrum.
If not for fossil fuels then we would be living in essentially an 18th century civilization. A lot more stuff then Netflix would never have been created without the safe and cheap energy supplied by fossil fuels.
Who is "we"? Why do you get to decide whether Africa's heatwave is 52C instead of 48C? Are you going to compensate them for that heatwave, and the resulting strain on their growth & development and political stability?
That's the crux of this case. There are significant negative externalities that are not being priced in by the market. The people doing most of the damage owe some compensation to the people who have to bear most of the consequences of their activity.
>The cost of "restoring the environment" is infinity.
It's not, actually.
And if it turns out that your business does something so expensive to repair that for all practical purposes could be considered "infinite damage", then your business shouldn't exist at all (e.g. the Sackler family and Oxycontin).
It is, actually. Completely restoring the environment means killing off 99% of humans and going back to a stone age existence. At which point our money would cease to have any value, hence the cost would be effectively infinite. We can maybe slightly reduce our environmental impact but keeping civilization means accepting a large amount of environmental damage. Anyone who believes otherwise is simply disconnected from objective reality and doesn't understand how the things we have are made.
If I eat a bag of chips and throw it to the ground, "restoring the environment" does not mean going back to the stone age, it means picking it up and putting in on a trash can (plus whatever downstream actions that are involved). Anyone connected with objective reality understands that.
If oil companies (and any other company), by carrying out their operations, incur on some environmental damage, they have to be held liable for it.
That's absurd. Everything that civilized humans do, including producing renewable power, incurs non-zero environmental damage. It's just a question of how much damage we're willing to accept and what trade-offs we're willing to accept.
You write "we" but I've never been approached by any company to talk about the trade-offs I'm willing to accept. I don't think companies do that sort of thing, but has that been the case with you?
One could argue "well, vote with your wallet then", but there's overwhelming evidence showing that people choose cheap over any other quality of a product, also, sometimes there's not even the possibility of a choice to be made.
What solution would you propose, then, around this?
You don't have to "choose cheap". You can just choose not to buy things at all. As a solution I propose you live in a shack in the woods with no electronics or medicine, and hunt all your food.
That bag of chips on the ground represents way more than the garbage you're specifically talking about. People tend to think about what's right in front of them. It's so minuscule.
It's a comfort item, like your house. For it to exist there needs to be grocery stores. For that, there needs to be air conditioning. Otherwise the chips would be rancid from 100 degree heat, let alone the fact it would have been shipped to the "grocery store" on horseback, again making the cost very extreme.
Every damn thing you have for comfort not only depended on cheap oil, it would be impossible for our civilization to even have the internet without it. You can't expect TCP engineers to work in tents right? We wouldn't even have the ability to order up a 9 yard concrete truck in 30 minutes.
So yes, for that bag of chips to exist, literally cost trillions of dollars.
Nuclear power is the most expensive option, though. They could shift a large percentage of their electrical generation to renewables with that much money.
PR has struggled to recover from the effects of hurricane Maria, and I get the logic behind the lawsuit, but she also lies near major fault lines that have caused 2.5-3.5 Richter earthquakes every day for millennia.
If PR were more creative she'd strike a tentative development deal with China to build a huge deep-water port capable of servicing the largest cargo ships AND the largest naval warships then sit back and wait for the U.S. to write a check to fund the strengthening of its relationship with its "strategic partner."
Assuming PR doesn't experience a leadership change shortly thereafter.
To be sure, Puerto Rico is a territory of the US. I imagine that making deals with China as you describe would draw the ire of Washington, if it's even "legal" in the first place.
Should Puerto Rico pay back the benefits it received from fossil fuels, like increased tourism from airplanes, and for allowing cars and combustible engines on the island? Are they going to get rid of ICE vehicles immediately now?
Are we going to start filing lawsuits against sugar manufacturers for all of the health issues they caused? What about manufacturers of fatty foods? Oh wait, are fatty foods good for you or bad for you? Fatty foods were bad for you in the 80s and 90s but now the science is showing the opposite.
The benefits that Puerto Rico has enjoyed are probably comparable to that of mainland America. While the downsides are presumably worse. Which is I guess whence the lawsuit.
No, they shouldn't pay back the "benefits", because they already paid for the fuels. No market failures there. There is a very obvious market failure with the downsides of fossil fuels however (negative externalities), and Puerto Rico claims said companies willingly misled the public about those — that absolutely is reason for a lawsuit.
> Are we going to start filing lawsuits against sugar manufacturers for all of the health issues they caused?
Like with the fossil fuel industry, the sugar industry also invested heavily into misleading the public about how damaging their product is. With that in mind, it seems at least somewhat reasonable for governments to file lawsuits against them to punish them, and to recoup some of the lost value due to their negative externalities.
As someone who lives here and understands the politics and nuance... eso es. ("This").
The people of Puerto Rico are fed up with the government and energy company here (LUMA) and do want change, current governor lost the primary and the candidate replacing him will likely win in November (even though it's the same party, business as usual) is partially because she's very, very anti-LUMA and appeals to the frustrations of people with the situation and is advocating change.
Unfortunately, decades of corruption have really impacted our politics and the energy and infrastructure here, and with the recent $4 million transformer issue, it doesn't surprise me that they are suing to try and get a windfall of money.
Clearly Puerto Rico do not want anything produced with oil or any petroleum products. Maybe these fossil fuel companies should give them their wish and ban their buyers from using their products to transport goods and people there and also in manufacturing of any goods sold there.
That way Puerto Rico could do their part in stopping these emissions. Surely it would not be too big sacrfice?
I think the climate movement is going to fail soon. This mentality of find villans and blame and attack them instead of looking for productive solutions isn't sustainable for a movement. I don't know about the future of the climate but I think unfortunately the climate change issue, like so many pressing issues might be one we have to give up on until we make fundamental changes in our societies
The climate movement wasn't taken seriously 70 years ago, but as people see its effects more and more and the more you live and remember that you could actually walk outside without AC and not melt the more its strengthened. So I highly doubt what you say.
That's the other reason it's going to fail, the dishonesty. Frankly I don't remember the weather being that much different when I was a kid. And aside from my personal observations or views, the bigger issue is climate and weather are different things.
It is scientific and backed by evidence to think that climate change is happeing and that the earth's climate is getting warmer. It is unscientific and not backed by evidence to think we can feel or experience that now in our current year at the level of weather. That doesn't mean that climate change isn't an important issue but there needs to be a serious change in the way it's presented to people, and I think a huge start is that things need to be led less by journalists and activists and politicans and more by climate scientists
We've been claiming that we need to take action by 2030 or there will be disaster. And the movement is going to pay a high price in 6 years from now when we notice that the weather isn't much differet.
Record breaking heatwaves is not scientific or something anyone can feel? It's news to me that humans are incapable of feeling heat, weird considering I'm using 2 fans and am still sweating, when I didn't before. or british folk are having heatwaves that their infrastructure can't handle because they're used to colder weather... or that humans can't feel wind considering "Beryl was the earliest Category 5 Atlantic hurricane on record." [0].
Look, you wanna plug your ears then do so, I do so as well, but claiming that the weather wont be that much different is provably false and irrelevant when we're undergoing a massive extinction event that is urgent, just because we have time limits. doesn't diminish from the situation or undermine from its continued urgency.
I do believe too that it is going to fail. Technology won't solve it. And people who got emissions now are not ready to do enough. And people who do not want the same things that people who do.
Outside rather small segment of population not enough people are ready to either substantially lower their standards of living or not increase them.
This is where I disagree. I think techonology can solve it, and policy can also solve it. But I think the movement has been hijacked by people with other agendas that differ from solving climate change. And I think you can sort of glimpse it here - the agenda is not solving climate change, it's making the oil companies pay.
Without fossil fuels we’d not have had progress. We’d have wood fires to cook, no AC, lots of missing modern inventions.
Now if fossil fuels were made illegal or were used illegally, sure. But it’s not like the gov outlawed them and now they are seeking damages.
If you want to sue, sue Jane Fonda and her then allies who misled people, corporation and government resulting in 50 lost years of nuclear power progress.
So no pollution but live like people in the north sentinel islands, or any third world country’s hinterlands where they still cut down trees to get fuel?
What is and was a viable (working in reality) alternative for the last 50 years or so?
Personally I think lawmakers should focus their effort on making stricter legal frameworks for today's world. Use the full force of the law to make companies behave better. It's the only language they understand.