Democrats Seek $500B in Climate Damages from Big Polluting Companies | Hacker News Reader

Democrats Seek $500B in Climate Damages from Big Polluting Companies

nytimes.com

40 pointsscopio91838 comments

I have absolutely no love for oil companies, but retroactive penalties for actions that weren't illegal at the time and that all of American society contributed to seems misguided to me. This is in the same vein to me as letting websites get sued for actions of their users, and gun manufacturers getting sued for shootings. It's antithetical with the concept of personal responsibility and impossible for a business owner to plan for.

I wish our politicians would focus more aggressively on actually incentivising emission reduction/carbon capture investment and less on pointing fingers and shifting blame.

But if the companies knew what they were doing was harmful and did it anyways? Or what if the companies purposefully suppressed research that showed that their actions are bad?

> This is in the same vein to me as letting websites get sued for actions of their users, and gun manufacturers getting sued for shootings

I wonder why you think these are comparable to retroactive sanctions?

I think the idea is that the penalties are retroactive because the companies knew the damage they were causing and didn't care. A more similar comparison point would be retroactive fines against tobacco companies that knew they were making people sick and didn't care.

Or opioid manufacturers and distributors who knew they were getting people addicted and didn't care.

Or vice-presidents and their weapons companies and their Democrat cheerleaders, who knew Iraq didn't have WMDs and didn't care.

>the companies knew the damage they were causing and didn't care.

As implied in the next sentence- it seems to be a general trend of ignoring personal responsibility and choosing scapegoats after the damage has already been done which doesn't feel productive. I would rather energy be spent looking forward and addressing the root causes.

These are oil companies we're talking about. Their entire raison d'etre is the production of oil to meet global energy and materials demands. What would you have had them do instead? Any attempt to pivot outside the oil business would have been pointless as a competitor would have simply risen up to meet demand in their place. They couldn't exactly reduce oil consumption even if they wanted to- they aren't in the business of making fuel efficient cars, plant based plastics, etc. They simply collect and process a raw material which the rest of the world then pollutes with. I'm all for punitive action for oil spills and funding corruption, but retroactive emissions is just picking an easy target to lay blame on.

> What would you have had them do instead

Not undermine climate change activism and legislation at every turn?

It's one thing to be unhappy about climate regulation, another to blatantly lie about their own impact on climate.

This is the planet we're talking about, you realize that, right? There's a degree of responsibility especially if you are one of the biggest players in the undergoing change.

The proposed legislation doesn't punish them for lobbying against climate change legislation, it simply chooses a convenient decade and hammers some select companies with a nice round number of 500 billion in retroactive fines. It's lazy, likely illegal, and doesn't address any real problems going forward.

I'm an environmentalist who's tired of the lip service and grandstanding. Expand EV credits, extend solar credits, shut down coal plants, legislate reduced usage of plastics, enforce high energy efficiency in building codes, promote density, legislate electronics efficiency/reduced vampire power draw, and build high speed cross country mass transit. These are all real targets that would give us a better world and cut emissions in a much more tangible way than this drivel.

That’s fair and I don’t disagree with you, I just don’t think it’s reasonable to say we couldn’t have expected them to do any different than they did.

What about leaded fuel? They had their own handsomely paid "scientist" to "debunk" the "leaded fuel pollutes the air" hypothesis. We just had a discussion yesterday, in the ebay thread IIRC about big companies trying to silence people who try to challenge their highly profitable practices that detrimental to everyone else.

Did you miss https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28016921 ( Has the Lead-Crime Hypothesis Been Debunked? )

That's not really relevant. The detrimental biological effects of lead pollution that the gasoline companies knew about and lied about to try to stop regulation have not been debunked, and in fact are rather firmly established.

The lead-crime hypothesis was formulated after the phase out of leaded gasoline started. Drops in crime seemed to correlate well with the phase out, with variations in the crime drop matching variations in the implementation of the phase out.

Yes, from my European perspective this does seem weird. Sanctions must be ruled by the principle of legality which also prohibits retroactive punishment. So it's not possible to retroactively make something criminal. This principle ought to extend to tax law. I don't understand why they wouldn't just tax future emissions. They would still achieve the same result without being tied up in the courts.

Even if the actions were not illegal they clearly caused damage, and there is ample evidence the companies in question were aware that their action were causing damage. That seems like grounds for a civil action against the companies. If the federal government want compensation for damages caused maybe it should sue the companies in court? Is that even possible?

Counterpoint (not sure I believe in it myself, but worth thinking about): when France got liberated from Nazi occupation, companies that worked with Nazi Germany _did_ get sanctioned even though it wasn't illegal at the time. See for example Renault that got nationalised. There's probably other examples that don't hit Godwin's law, but this is the one I know.

If there can't be any retroactive penalty, corporations will always be exploiting loopholes and grey zones. The law can only play catch-up. If we want to incentivise companies to consider environmental impact at the cost of their profit, this sort of sword of Damocles could be a tool. Again, not convinced of it myself, but something to consider.

Pretty sure causing widespread damage was illegal then, just as it is now.

It's not illegal to throw a rock. It is illegal to throw a rock and break a window. Why should the same not apply for emissions?

I disagree.

So its okay that they denied climate change and actively downplayed its risks through misinformation campaigns? What kind of example would we be setting for this kind of behavior if we just let it go because it was ‘in the retrospective’.

Comparing with the tobacco companies, didnt the courts of law penalize them for hiding cancer and health risks? How is this any different then?

A one time $500B payment spread out over, multiple companies kind of seems like a gift to me... Pay once, and you're absolved of all past environmental wrongs. Sounds almost like the church 500 years ago ^^

Sealevel rise sounds very biblical as well.

Forget sea-level rise. That will take hundreds/a thousand years. Acidification of oceans wiping out much life and burning troposphere/biomass, both accellerating greenhouse gas concentrations headed straight for us in this lifetime.

Beware of the false prophets.

Gotta agree, this isn't enough. If you consider the generations to follow.

"Personal carbon footprint" was an incredibly successful PR campaign by the biggest polluters to shift the responsibility onto individual consumers (who have much less ability to actually change anything). I'm glad to see the trend of pushing back this narrative. It's clear that the biggest polluters have profited immensly from pushing their externalities onto the rest of the world.

As much as I do like my personal choices and responsibilites, I don't even know why some things are available for me to buy. Isn't it kind of insane to think that I could walk into a supermarket and buy chocolate that was produced with slave labour? Why is that even an option? Similar for any product with an outsized negative environmental impact.

I'm not sure that the Democrats' path here is the way forward (I'm not American and don't want to try to understand if something like this is even legally possible), but expecting consumers to educate themselves about climate change in a meaningful way as an approach to preventing disaster is doomed from the start.

Makes sense. The climate movement has always blatantly been about non-productive people appropriating money from others who have been engaged in productive enterprise.

A truly strange take. For decades people barely cared about scientists warning of the horrors to come. Participating in the climate movement is a very inefficient way to acquire money.

Was very inefficient perhaps. Now it is a prerequisite for politicians and scientists. Otherwise, no funds for you.

The climate movement has been about holding people accountable. Specifically people who have made money causing the biggest problem we have to date, and who are currently trying to slow down people actually fixing things.

If you made your money relying on the tragedy of the commons, then you were not in a productive enterprise.

Basically everyone has benefited and chosen to use energy generated from fossil fuels, except maybe remote hunter gatherer tribes. It’s ridiculous to single out enterprises involved in the extraction of generation part of the supply chain while the whole world cheerfully used their output. Unless you’re just a political money grabbing operation, in which case principles don’t matter, obviously.

We're so busy attacking supply, and yet demand continues to grow an grow.

Why do I feel like we're heading for another energy crisis?

https://archive.is/TqOuU

> "draft legislation [...] directs the Treasury Department and the Environmental Protection Agency to identify the companies that released the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from 2000 to 2019 and assess a fee based on the amounts they emitted

Seems pretty reasonable to retroactively tax previously untaxed externalities.

By 2000, the science was pretty conclusive. If fossil fuel companies' reaction was full-steam-ahead, they deserve what they get.

That said, the revenue generated should definitely be used to fund climate mitigation and backstop unfunded insurance shortfalls. I.e. costs directly caused by the profits made.

Also, cited in article as an example of work to base such a decision off of, Climate Accountability's "Carbon Majors Report": https://climateaccountability.org/carbonmajors.html (attempts to quantify emissions by company)

To play devil's advocate, you could make a similar counter argument.

By 2000, the science was pretty conclusive. If coastal city builders' reaction was full-steam-ahead, they deserve what they get.

IMO this kind of legislation isn't serious. It's a political stunt to grab headlines.

Coastal city building has a heck of a larger web of at-fault parties and rights issues in play.

For starters: oil companies understood climate change was linked to greenhouse gas emissions (because their own experts told them so, and they funded counter-arguments). They made profits on something that generated ~12 gigatons of emissions.

Those profits are directly related to (a) something they wilfully did and (b) that they knew would cause harm.

In coastal building, who's the analogous party that fulfills those criteria? The homebuyer? The developer? The local zoning board?

To play devil's advocate again:

These companies were providing goods and services demanded by US civil society, industry, and military. Surely US citizens and the US Government enjoyed the benefits of inexpensive fossil energy. Are they also not culpable?

Morally? Yes.

Practically? No.

Artificially cheap fossil fuels and active lobbying retarded earlier development of alternative energy sources. Which meant there was no energy alternative for those customers to buy.

Which ultimately unfolds into the "How much is the fossil fuel industry responsible for taking actions to protect itself and increase its profits?" debate.

And while that's certainly a question with a lot of valid answers, the answer definitely isn't "not at all."

The immediate problem is not sea-level rise, which will take hundreds of years for largest impacts [0].

Ocean acidification is already happening [1], and threaten ocean life.

"When pteropod shells were placed in sea water with pH and carbonate levels projected for the year 2100, the shells slowly dissolved after 45 days. ... The last time the ocean pH was this low was during the middle Miocene, 14-17 million years ago. The Earth was several degrees warmer and a major extinction event was occurring." [2].

Also as oceans warm, CO2 absorption go down: "As the oceans warm, they will become less and less capable of taking up carbon dioxide. As a result, more of our carbon pollution will stay in the atmosphere, exacerbating global warming" [3].

[0] https://earthsky.org/earth/anticipating-future-sea-level-pro...

[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/ocean-...

[2] https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-co...

[3] http://www.lteconomy.it/en/articles-en/articoli/the-power-of...

Phew! That was just the oceans, for starters!

Point. People underappreciate how big of a flywheel the ocean is, because it's generally worked "the same" in our recorded history (with regards to climate).

But once it gets going on a feedback loop, you get very serious effects (of magnitudes that dominate any human mitigation) very quickly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder

The American people have continued to enjoy the benefits of hydrocarbons for electricity, transportation, heating, and other uses. The "big polluting companies" produce legal products that meet vital needs. Demonizing them is hypocritical unless one lives like the Amish without electricity, and I doubt these retroactive taxes would stand up in court. It would be legal for Democrats to drastically raise the gasoline tax, but they avoid that because they know that people are not willing to pay much to ameliorate climate change.

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