Major international oil companies are being sued over climate change, even though all have websites espousing the need to “transition” to carbon-free energy.
Commentary
Once again, major international oil companies are being sued over climate change, even though all of them have corporate advertising and websites espousing the need to “transition” to carbon-free energy.
California is currently suing BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Phillips 66, Shell, and the American Petroleum Institute (API) because,
allegedly, these companies’ executives “deceived the public for decades about how fossil fuels are hurting our health and destroying our planet.”
It’s interesting to note that despite Saudi Aramco being the second-largest oil company in the world and supplying 7 percent of the oil imported into the United States, California failed to include it in the lawsuit. California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office asserts the same kinds of accusations made in the “ExxonKnew”
hoax pushed by green activists, which claimed that oil companies believed that the emissions from fossil fuel use would warm the planet dangerously decades ago and hid the information from the public. Finally, they accuse oil companies of greenwashing their product or labeling some products as green or clean while they still produce carbon dioxide.
But really, the latter should only be considered “greenwashing” if carbon dioxide (CO2) is a dangerous pollutant, which it isn’t, as it isn’t toxic in normal concentrations. So if oil companies downplayed or ignored CO2 concerns on that front, it doesn’t seem very alarming.
I’m not a lawyer, so there may be some legal nuance here that I’m missing, but when I see a case like the one that California is bringing, I can’t help but wonder how on earth these companies will be able to stand up to it, considering the fact that their own corporate policies and publications tout the idea of a “transition” to a fossil-fuel-free future as both desirable and necessary? Have they, as Vladimir Lenin said capitalists would, sold California the rope that will be used to hang them?
Disappointingly, every single one of the defendant companies and organizations has entire sections of their websites dedicated to environmental, social, and governance scores, “environmental justice,” “stakeholder capitalism,” and worse.
The API, ostensibly an oil industry advocacy group, is trying to play both sides at the same time,
affirming their interest in “ushering in a lower-carbon future” and support of the Paris climate agreement while also declaring that oil and natural gas will continue to provide “more of the world’s energy than any other source.”
Shell similarly said in a statement to
Rigzone for an article about the California lawsuit that “action is needed now on climate change, and we fully support the need for society to transition to a lower-carbon future,” before saying the courts aren’t the “right venue to address climate change.” Well, Shell, this is action, and it’s now, and because you gave up the game, you don’t get to choose the venue.
The API, along with many of the defendant companies, supports economy-wide carbon pricing (
pdf), such as cap-and-trade or carbon taxes, which
smaller companies oppose. Big oil assures us that a carbon pricing program should be transparent, however, and that the “carbon price” we’re being charged should be disclosed at the pump. Gee, thanks.
Carbon capture and storage is probably the best way for them to have it both ways—but, again, it needs to be funded by the taxpayers (
pdf), of course.
After willingly adopting the language and goals of climate alarmists bent on bankrupting the defendant companies, the API acts surprised and appalled when the explicitly anti-fossil fuel, “end all drilling on federal lands” Biden administration slaps the industry. Recently, we’ve seen new
regulatory reform to make pipelines more difficult to build, the
delay of scheduled lease sales, and the
cancellation of legally mandated Alaskan oil leases.
A lot of this nonsense could have been avoided had the major oil companies defended their product and services from the outset, looking at the best available science and data, which show that there’s
no climate crisis. That isn’t to say that climate change doesn’t exist, or that human activities play no role whatsoever, especially in cases such as the
urban heat island effect. However, the activists’ exaggeration has permeated all the way to the tippy-top of our government and institutions, and big oil was probably one of the few industries that could have called it out in the early stages.
The companies should have also aggressively pointed out that the very people and institutions suing them have benefited tremendously for decades from their products and still use and benefit from them. If oil and gas contribute to climate change, California’s voluntary use of oil and gas makes them co-conspirators responsible for the supposed crisis, disqualifying them from making claims against oil companies.
It’s tempting to assume that some of the defendants in this case act so two-faced because they’re, perhaps, leveraging the power of the federal government’s regulations to take out their smaller competitors—but if this is the case, they’re woefully unprepared for the day when the U.S. government turns on them, too.
The biggest losers in the end are American families, mom-and-pop operators, and domestic workers, because if and when mounting lawsuits bankrupt oil and gas companies or the Biden administration totally clamps down on the development of our own resources, most of these multinationals will take big losses but can still survive by packing it up and investing more heavily in petro-friendly countries, especially those in
BRICS.
Meanwhile, we get to enjoy the
energy rationing and instability of the “transition” here.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
