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Sue Big Oil

suebigoil.ca

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Let's charitably assume we sue, win, and "big oil" goes completely bankrupt. Does anyone here actually think this will meaningfully change anything? That a void for fossil fuel energy production will just continue to exist unfilled?

Get rid of oil in a rapid fashion, and we go the route of Venezuela.

Getting rid of oil is the goal of the current Administration. They are having some success by making it difficult as possible.

Now we have a huge mess from it and elections are coming up, so goal is to blame oil for the problems caused by the Administration.

If you want to get off oil because you believe it's bad for environment. That is a respectable position. But there is a huge political price to pay when the poor in the country are suffering now from it.

The poor will be also starving when we will not be able to produce crops due to extreme weather.

Climate disaster is around the corner and we need to act yesterday. With our current approach it seems that we screw the poor both today and in the future.

How do you support your argument that the current administration is being effective in killing off oil? We are still a net exporter of oil [0] and crude oil production is about where it was at in late 2018. It took a dive during COVID-19 and has been recovering since.

0 - https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=m...

1 - https://www.macrotrends.net/2562/us-crude-oil-production-his...

You're joking right? He has been killing off pipelines, suspending leases, increasing regulations.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/27/biden-suspends-oil-and-gas-d...

My question still stands. We're near ATH of oil production and are a net exporter. Sure, the Boogeyman wants to kill oil, but has he been able to do that with great success in 1.5 years as president?

The way I've imagined it is an orderly winding down. Existing production continues but no expansion. All profits are redirected to aid in the transition with an emphasis on helping the poor in replacing their fossil fuel use.

i think that everyone including the FF companies ultimately wants a wind down, its a finite resource after all. it's a matter of how long will that take, and how long will winding up other energy industries take, be it building out the infrastructure, limiting the environmental impact of that build out, or researching the future technologies that will make 100% clean energy feasible. any timelines need to be reasonable. maybe a 50 year plan is doable and in the mean time, there is no sense in kneecapping the world by limiting expansion

and suing big oil is exactly the opposite of the way to achieve this.

if you can successfully drive western oil companies out of business, all our oil will have to come from saudi, russia, venezuela, etc. countries where we have no ability to tax the profits of oil companies and redirect that money to something beneficial.

I believe that it is likely BigOil that will finally solve much of our renewable energy needs.

They have the huge amounts of capital, and the management abilities to do nation-state levels of production around energy. Some of the more challenging ideas like space based power beaming on a massive scale would require the kind of capital and longterm projects current day BigOil can bring to bear. Truly massive solar farms are the same way, they require huge capital.

Carbon tariff at the border.

Yup, great idea and I absolutely agree.

But that's not part of the agenda for people pushing the abolition of domestic oil. Which makes the conspiracy theorist in me wonder how much of the north American anti-oil environmentalist movement is actually Saudi propaganda

And the way for this to happen is for people who want it to happen to start their own companies to do it. That's how free market competition works: if there is a genuine market need that is not being filled, someone starts a new company to fill it. You don't sue existing companies.

In the case of fossil fuels, this already is happening; there are plenty of companies working on alternative sources of energy. (And the "Big Oil" companies are among them.) As far as using government and the law to help, the single biggest impact ordinary people can have is to make it clear to our elected representatives that nuclear energy is a thing and we need more of it.

This is how it works in a free market economy. The incumbent (oil and gas) is directly state sponsored in the US.

> the US government alone spends $20 billion every year on direct fossil fuel subsidies. Of that figure, around $16 billion goes towards oil and gas, while the remaining $4 billion benefits the coal industry.

https://en.as.com/en/2022/03/29/latest_news/1648510535_73079...

> The incumbent (oil and gas) is directly state sponsored in the US.

The solution for that is not to sue Big Oil. It's to make it clear to our elected representatives that we want these subsidies to end, and vote them out of office if they don't do it.

Seize the assets, nationalize the oil industry, use the profits to pay for infrastructure.

We’d be better off suing ourselves. It’s we consumers who ultimately burn the oil for our homes, hospitals, schools, cars, and general electrical needs.

Instead of engaging in inflammatory rhetoric, let’s try something useful like a carbon tax that prices in the environmental impacts of fossil fuel consumption.

This "blame the consumer" bullshit has been happening since cigarettes... And it is bullshit.

These large corporations, controlled by a relatively small number of _people_ have a disproportionate and coordinated impact on the environment that outstrips anything the average person can do.

They need to be held accountable, like we have done to other polluters and entities that have threatened public safety and security in our communities and society.

I don't know if this particular effort is the right approach, but I sure am sick of naive people pointing the finger at the average person saying they need to be personally responsible for fixing problems created by large corporations.

Edit: not saying the average person should do nothing, but it's literally the least impactful thing that we can do. Corporations and sources of pollution need to be made accountable first. Everything else is just noise.

> This "blame the consumer" bullshit has been happening since cigarettes... And it is bullshit.

You see this with recycling plastics as well. YOUR fault for not tossing the yogurt container in the right bin.

That one apparently was a scam the whole time.

What pollution do you want to hold them accountable for exactly? Surely not the pollution created by the end users consumption.

Your comment makes it sound like you’re ok with the the oil companies and corporations just ceasing operations

> This "blame the consumer" bullshit has been happening since cigarettes... And it is bullshit.

Except that fuel is not literally addictive; it actually provides for some pretty basic needs for most people.

> These large corporations, controlled by a relatively small number of _people_ have a disproportionate and coordinated impact on the environment that outstrips anything the average person can do.

> They need to be held accountable, like we have done to other polluters and entities that have threatened public safety and security in our communities and society.

You might have point in some areas, but not demand for/use of fossil fuels. That is truly a democratic environmental problem.

It’s worse than addictive, it’s requisite for live in many parts of the US. That didn’t happen by accident.

> It’s worse than addictive, it’s requisite for live in many parts of the US. That didn’t happen by accident.

Yeah, because people prefer and choose to use modern, energy-intensive technology.

It's not like the oil companies forced cars or HVAC systems on people who didn't want them. What actually happened was people wanted to drive cars and live in warm homes without spending months chopping wood, and that created a lot of demand for fossil fuels.

the "large corporations" thing is bullshit too. that list that goes around of "these 100 companies are responsible for 99% of emissions" or whatever the percentage is, all the companies on that list are oil companies. but they aren't the ones burning the oil, they're the ones selling it.

individuals can't absolve themselves of responsibility by blaming the corporations that they buy their petroleum products from.

Consumer demand is not something that just appears. Demand for oil has largely been induced by decades of urban, housing and transportation planning centered around the automobile. E.G I do not want a car; I don’t like driving and maintaining one is expensive, but I don’t have a viable alternative for many trips I need to make.

Planning according to policies set in large part by auto and oil lobbyists.

You fail to understand the years of marketing, r&d, lobbying and outright anticompetitive practices these companies have been unleashing to "sell more product".

If we had any meaningful regulation, these companies would be forced to begin paying for their products' impacts on climate.

I'm not sure if I agree with you here. I don't know of a single smoker who actually blames the cigarette manufacturer.

You could argue prohibition was good because it drove all of those "evil" profiteering alcohol companies out of business, but at the end of the day the consumer demand was still there.

Poor analogy. Unlike cigarettes, we actually do need energy. Given antipathy toward nuclear and scale-up issues with renewables, fossil fuels have been the only scalable option over the last decades.

I wasn't comparing oil to cigarettes in terms of products, sorry if that's how it came across.

I was comparing the practice of large corporations who are actually to blame for societal problems deflecting that blame down to the end user.

I don't think a carbon tax will ever work in reality. Big companies are known for their tax evasions. We shouldn't bet the future of the planet on something that is known to not work.

Which is why carbon would be taxed at the point of consumption. Your method to avoid the tax would be picking alternatives.

> let’s try something useful like a carbon tax

The idea of a carbon tax is not new. Guess which lobby groups successfully delay an implementation?

How much does it cost to replace Earth? The idea, while totally impractical because the vast majority of countries would never do such a thing, cannot undo the damage that is being done.

> We’d be better off suing ourselves.

That's what accountability in politics is all about.

> It’s we consumers who ultimately burn the oil for our homes, hospitals, schools, cars, and general electrical needs.

This implies a willingness to ignore the entire complex context why humanity as a whole has ended up in this spot in the first place.

Consider this thought experiment. Try cutting out as many aspects as you can out of your life that depends on oil or it's derivatives. This includes the use of goods based on fossil-fuel based polymers, plastics or the combustion of oil for the generation of heat, light and movement.

The end result of that exercise would be you living a very different lifestyle and society being organized in a very different way. The vast majority would dismiss the idea as "reverting back to Medieval times" while a small niche is totally into homesteading.

Of course, there's a middle ground here when it comes to reducing the dependence on fossil fuels. But to be frank, it's a so-called Wicked Problem that comes with far more challenges then first meets the eye. In fact, the more you - or society - wants to try and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, the more deeply altering changes to your lifestyle you - or society - is going to have to accept. Beyond electrical cars, this implies changes to public infrastructure, how public space is being used, renewed thinking regarding the use of natural resources, agriculture, supply chains, construction of housing, packaging of goods, etc. etc. etc.

Suing oil companies kind of feels like asking for a refund after eating the whole meal.

It's not like consumers were begging for expensive and unreliable sources of energy until oil companies intervened and changed their minds.

Boo blame shifting.

Are you implying these companies have done nothing to deter alternate forms of energy from succeeding?

Fun philosophical and likely legal debate: do people and companies have an obligation to not do things - legal things - that are to the detriment of society or the planet as a whole?

And if so, how far can you take such a rule? I don't mean to invoke the 'slippery slope' excuse. I mean that we don't really have a legal framework around "Don't be bad". We just have specific laws around things you cannot do, and the rest is a free-for-all apparently.

One might argue- and I'm not certain that I even do- that it's the role of government to make laws to codify these things that cannot be done explicitly. Because should this come to a courtroom, big oil companies might say "Yes, we knew this would harm the planet. Yes, we did it anyway. What of it? There's no law against harming the planet as a whole."

Some very special groups would have you believe that if you disagree with their product or methods you should simply take your business elsewhere.

If the world dies despite this freedom, then that's what humanity implicitly wanted all along anyway, so who is this big government to tell me, the free man, what to do or not do?

There are extrenely broad laws against antisocial behaviour and being a neusance. So the problem isnt hard.

But climate change is even easier - make them liable for damages, allow all farners who lost their land to risibf sea level un bangladesh to claim compensation. Make companies liable every time an ekderly man dies of heat stroke or crops fail due to shortage of rain.

> But climate change is even easier - make them liable for damages, allow all farners who lost their land to risibf sea level un bangladesh to claim compensation. Make companies liable every time an ekderly man dies of heat stroke or crops fail due to shortage of rain.

What damages? They extracted the oil and sold it to you, but you were the one who burnt it to drive climate change.

Is GM and Anheuser-Busch InBev liable for damages if you got drunk on Bud Light, crashed your Chevy, and killed someone?

Mate, I have never in my life bought fuel, I don't have a car, my stove and heating is electric, so I don't know why you are attackibg me .

You do realise 87% of emissions are created by industry, not by end users?

Or is also my fault they burnt fuel when they dwmeliver goods?

We have quite a lot of legal framework for damages and environmental externalities. But included the "legal things" qualifier in your question so that makes it into the question of lack of coverage.

I have no special love for big oil, but for a decade G7 governments have worked on limiting the production and transportation of oil (look at pipeline projects in Canada and USA for example). Each oil extraction operation requires tens of millions of dollars to start and run with a closing window of time to recoup the investment.

On the other side, we have people yelling foul due to "record profits" I mean, yeah, nominally they are higher but they are not outpacing the inflation.

Also, it's easy to forget that when you pay $2.30 cents per liter here in Canada, literally 50% of that is various government taxes (provincial and federal) so when the state basically controls extraction, transportation and to a large extent pricing at the gas station - it's a little bit too convenient to blame the oil companies.

I think the case for activism like this is fairly simple:

(1) We need a managed decline of oil that does two things. One, achieves cost-effective emissions reductions on pace with limiting the rise of the global average temperature to 2C. Two, retains enough production for those activities that are difficult to find carbon-free substitutes for, like the kind of heavily concentrated thermal energy key to a lot of industrial processes.

(2) We are veering far past that trajectory. The policies of the governments of the world currently put us on course for an average expected 2.7C warming. [1] Current production plans suggest that in 2030 the world will be producing something like twice the oil it should. [2]

(3) We should use whatever sensible means possible to push oil production down towards the decarbonisation slope consistent with 2C (and ideally towards 1.5C), including - if and where it works - litigation.

[1] https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/

[2] https://productiongap.org/2021report/#2021downloads

This seems like a great way to ensure that the surplus value captured by resource extraction are squandered on something which isn't building a sustainable energy future.

So if a world with steady-state or reducing levels of CO2, one in which there's also enough energy to support a good life, if that appeals to you: these people are your enemy.

This is so silly.

British Columbia takes in half a billion in taxes a year from their own oil exploitation. Canada as a whole takes in about 80 billion in tax revenue from oil and gas extraction. This isn't just a money maker for oil companies, it's a money maker for the Canadian government.

The petition here is for the government to set aside citizen's money so that the government can sue oil companies? The same government that gives the oil companies their leases to extract oil and is a huge benefactor of taxes from said industry?

Even if you believed this was not just a special interest group asking for a government to set aside money for special interest groups - Canada only has 38 million people. $1 per person is only $38 million. There are already plenty of climate activist organizations that have way more than this. If that's all it would take to successfully sue oil companies, it can already be done.

Why not sue Big Coal? It's responsible for way way more emissions. Now, and in the future....

https://twitter.com/rosedotai/status/1530217546632335363?s=2...

The government sues big oil. We vote for politicians to enact laws. If politicians are in the pockets of big oil or any industry, vote them out. The problem is not enough people care about lobbying. So the real problem is with other voters not caring enough.

Also, where would we be without big oil? There is a lot of interdependency and bootstrapping necessary to get renewables and industries to transition. China, the largest centralized government that can turn on a dime because they have the "power" to do so, also cannot just kill fossil fuels and there was no "lobbying' to keep fossil fuels going.

So it's more nuanced than, let's kill off fossil fuels anon!

I think that enough institutional and retail investors have foresworn oil and gas companies for non-economic reasons that they will have excess returns going forward. I intend to benefit from this -- one simple way is to invest in the XLE ETF.

Since hydrocarbons make our comfortable modern lifestyles possible, I have no qualms in investing the companies that produce them. Studies have found that global warming may cause a loss of 5% of GDP by 2100. That is about 2-3 years normal economic growth and can easily be managed.

> Fossil Fuel giants have captured governments and banks, extracting mega-profits while the world burns. It’s time to Sue Big Oil.

Their statement here is contradictory. Either this tactic will be pointless and ineffective, or the "Fossil Fuel giants" will use their "captured governments" to pass laws making it so--laws that the courts will then have to enforce.

Corporations tend to have an easier time "capturing" regulatory bodies than legislatures, it is called "regulatory capture."

> Corporations tend to have an easier time "capturing" regulatory bodies than legislatures, it is called "regulatory capture."

Fuel prices are really high right now, and most people still need to buy it. If this kind of tactic causes them to go higher, I don't think it would be a hard sell to a legislature pass a law to negate the tactic.

Also having an "easier time 'capturing' regulatory bodies" doesn't mean they're not also pretty successful at influencing legislatures.

Fuel prices have to stay high for us to get off fossil fuels. Thats when it makes economic sence to invest in alternatives

> Fuel prices have to stay high for us to get off fossil fuels. Thats when it makes economic sence to invest in alternatives

Maybe so, but that doesn't make high fuel prices popular. In a democracy, a lot of people will vote for the guy who will bring them down now vs. one who deliberately tries to keep them high as part of some long-term strategy (all else being equal).

Pursuing widely unpopular policies to further other goals is something that that non-democracies tend to be better at.

Beware the unhappy middle where even numbered presidents raise fuel prices through policy but nobody builds solar because they're expecting odd presidents to lower it back down.

> extracting mega-profits

You realize these companies are largely publicly traded, and their financial statements can be looked at? For example, compare ExxonMobil (the firm Biden's ire has mostly been directed at) with Google:

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/XOM/key-statistics?p=XOM

>Profit Margin 8.34%

>Operating Margin (ttm) 10.86%

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/key-statistics?p=GOOGL

> Profit Margin 27.57%

> Operating Margin (ttm) 30.47%

Those are just in relative terms. In absolute $$$ figures, there's no comparison. Oh, Exxon also paid a tax rate double that of Google's.

The "price gouging" and "record profits" (as long as a company grows year to year, even if only at the rate of the wider economy, it will have record profits year after year by definition, assuming margins remain constant) rhetoric just proves these people are either lying or ignorant of basic finance and economics.

Of course it's from a .ca domain

OF COURSE IT IS because its about British Columbia

Sue Big Pharma.

Uh, no. I don't want my expenses to grow even more than they already have.

Why are activist sites like this making it to the homepage?

same reason as any other; it might be of interest to someone

How do you convince people about carbon based climate warming when the biggest proponents of global warming theory fly to conferences to discuss global warning in private jets, and love SUVs and large limousines like there's no tomorrow?

How do you prove that carbon output is responsible for climate warming?

Assuming you win your case what do Big Oil pay you with?

Assuming you win and they cease energy production to eliminate future liabilities where do you obtain your energy from?

I asked a question on climate change preparation a few days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31756033 and all I got was crickets.

> How do you convince people about carbon based climate warming when the biggest proponents of global warming theory fly to conferences to discuss global warning in private jets, and love SUVs and large limousines like there's no tomorrow?

Who are the "biggest proponents of global warming theory" in your estimation? Celebrities? Activists? Climate scientists?

It seems to me that the people running Sue Big Oil are pretty big proponents of seeking cultural change around climate change. Are they flying private jets?

> Who are the "biggest proponents of global warming theory" in your estimation? Celebrities? Activists? Climate scientists?

The Davos and WEF gang? COPD

https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverwilliams1/2021/11/05/118-...

Ok I'll bite:

>How do you convince people about carbon based climate warming when the biggest proponents of global warming theory fly to conferences to discuss global warning in private jets, and love SUVs and large limousines like there's no tomorrow?

Data. If the climate is warming, it is warming regardless of whether or not the people who are advocating for change are being responsible. Ad hominim attacks against people who hold a position really have no bearing on the truth of the position.

>How do you prove that carbon output is responsible for climate warming?

IMHO, it is impossible to prove causality in such a complex system. At best you can show a strong correlation, which the data does.

>Assuming you win your case what do Big Oil pay you with?

Money. They have a lot.

>Assuming you win and they cease energy production to eliminate future liabilities where do you obtain your energy from?

Solar and wind could cover a substantial fraction of our needs. It will not be an immediate switch, regardless of what people might want either way. For example, barring a giant battery breakthrough, aviation will likely be fossil fueled for quite a while longer. Rocketry is even worse. We need to figure out either substantially more grid-scale storage OR a super-conducting grid in order to match demand to supply. Otherwise, how do you heat your house on a cold, still winter night?

>I asked a question on climate change preparation a few days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31756033 and all I got was crickets.

Well you got 3 replies. Just like this one, that felt a bit like a leading question, so likely people did not want to engage.

I recommend reading "Carbon-Free, Nuclear-Free" from IEER[1]. It provides an interesting discussion of what would need to happen for the energy sector to go 0-CO2 without nuclear power. It's surprisingly feasible in terms of society scale projects.

1: https://carnegieendowment.org/files/CarbonFreeNuclearFree.pd...

To your first point:

Person A follows the philosophy “If another person is good and they say X, then I will believe X.”

Person A can be manipulated through some difficulty. A bad actor has to convince person A that they are actually good, and then they can mislead them.

Person B follows the philosophy “If another person is bad and they say X, then I will believe !X.”

Person B is trivially easy to manipulate. A bad actor pushing Y just has to say !Y then act like an asshole on twitter.

> biggest proponents of global warming theory fly to conferences

This what i call the caveman technique of debating. The other day on sky news:

'we should insulate houses to reduce fuel consumption.

> have you insulated your house?

> no, i don't own a house

> aha, got you!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com