Puerto Rico files $1B suit against fossil fuel companies
theverge.com
theverge.com
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.
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 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.
It'd be a worse situation if the money is spent, for example, running campaigns for the next elections.
A better arragement would be for the affected people to receive the tax payments directly.
Sometimes damage can be prevented instead of remediated. Sometimes it isn't about victims getting paid, but preventing people from being victimized.
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.
Victims most be compensated, but adding tax to a certain technology is just a failing band-aid as you exemplify.
The fundamental problem is people being out of the picture in all of this. The solution must necessarily have common people involved.
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.
> But that's on the end user, no?
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.
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 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.
One method of individuals expressing their collective desire in that structure is called making laws.
Murder is extremely easy and has a 50% closure rate. Most enforcement rates are much lower.
If you dont convince the vast majority of people to do something, you wont be able to set meaningful policy, and you wont be able to enforce it.
My point is to put the primary emphasis on people doing something about it, and not hypocritically telling other people to do something about it.
Overall, they deserve the hate.
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.
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.
Edit to add: use your words folks.
Are you familiar with the concepts of manufacturing consent, fear mongering, regulatory capture, turnkey authoritarianism, tyranny, etc?
There's a history of oil companies lying about the consequences of production and consumption...
Most users don't spend billions of dollars on climate-denial propaganda, so no.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This includes government officials. Your views will certainly collide with a politician's views on what's "good oversight".
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.
What happened?
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.
I’d say Carl Sagan nailed it:
https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...
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.
But for sure would welcome those other regions to remove their subsidies!
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.
From the current scorecard: Voter polls predict the next POTUS will be a man who has told us that "Climate change is a hoax."
"WARNING: This product is known to the territory of Puerto Rico to cause more and more severe meteorological events."
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Via what money?
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
we should ban lava too, have you seen the environmental damage it can do?
Have we not already? That seems like an oversight...
People aren't willing to sacrifice their lifestyle for the environment.
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.
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.
One persons stunt is another's advocacy.
Not doing so of course makes their product's price not reflect its true cost to produce, and distorts that same supply and demand.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-proposals-to-red...
https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...
> 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.
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.
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?
When do they get sued for fearmongering misleading and putting an industry fifty years behind where they’d be today?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
"(plus whatever downstream actions that are involved)"
>So yes, for that bag of chips to exist, literally cost trillions of dollars.
You're off by trillions of dollars. It's amortized cost is somewhere between zero and the dollar you paid for it.
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.
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.
This entire lawsuit is nonsense.
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.
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.
That way Puerto Rico could do their part in stopping these emissions. Surely it would not be too big sacrfice?
Outside rather small segment of population not enough people are ready to either substantially lower their standards of living or not increase them.
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.
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.
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.
What is and was a viable (working in reality) alternative for the last 50 years or so?
Fossil fuel co's knew from their own research that their product would bring disaster to the planet at incomprehensible scale.
Rather than make the knowledge clear and available to buyers, they chose to lie and deceive the public.
The result: fraud, false advertising, arson, and pollution on a global scale. All of those things are very fucking illegal and for very good reason.