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.

Comments

Political tax

[Dan East]

Tax dollars at work. Unless the armies of attorneys are doing the work for free out of the goodness of their hearts.

Re:Political tax

[gurps_npc]

Obviously, we should only spend money to stop poor criminals, because it is too expensive it to go after the rich ones.

If you want to complain about someone being innocent, do so.

Right now, all you are doing is telling the world how easy it is to bribe you.

Re: Political tax

[bobbied]

There are many ways to offset the pollution.

Why sue gas company instead of the car owner burning the gas?

Make no sense, this is just further bizarre social justice. The polluters suing the people who have them the means to pollute.

Because the Car owner is a voter and doesn't have that much money, but a big bad Oil Company doesn't vote and presumably has a lot of cash.

Re:Political tax

[gurps_npc]

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.

Re: Political tax

[Wrath0fb0b]

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.

Re: Political tax

[ArmoredDragon]

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?

Re: Political tax

[KeensMustard]

To be sued, there would have to be some sort wrongdoing or neglect that causes harm.

Car Drivers contribute to the harm, but will also pay for that harm, as economies collapse and bill for for mitigating further climate change and the bill for adapting the inevitable change all become due. So we will pay anyway. But will Oil Companies pay their share? And what constitutes that share?

Let's be clear: organisations and entities that actively seek or have sought to delay action on climate change have cost the rest of us dearly. In the case of oil companies, they knew the effects and cost of climate change form the beginning, but sought to mislead by creating the denialist movement, and sponsoring the likes of Judith Currie and Anthony Watts to be their mouthpiece. These originating entities, their mouthpieces (who at this point, are being deliberately misleading), and anyone else who profits from lying about climate should certainly be considered more culpable than someone who drives around minding their own business.

Re: Political tax

[Dog-Cow]

You start off with stupidity, so I didn't bother reading the rest of your diatribe.

has just been dumping it's nuclear waste in the environment where it's been seeping into water supplies and the food chain and causing massive damage.

That's illegal. Providing gasoline for sale is not. The difference should be obvious, even to NYS politicians, but I guess stupidity has no limits.

Re: Political tax

[Kiuas]

Why sue gas company instead of the car owner burning the gas?

Because it's quite clear at this point that the oil companies have been doing their utmost to obfuscate the discussion on climate change and spread outright misinformation.

Ask yourself this: why is the US the only developed country in which climate change is still a matter of 'debate'? Why is it that a matter of natural science that the experts of the relevant fields are in agreement about is being presented as an issue up for debate? Who benefits from there existing doubt over this? Who stands to lose if more strict actions are taken to control greenhouse gas emissions? The fossil fuel companies. The firms have a direct monetary incentive for there to be little or no environmental regulation. They also have vast wealth and hence vast lobbying power which they have used and are using to promote views and politicians that are entirely contrary to well understood science.

Tobacco companies a few decades past were doing the exact same deal and promoting false science to try and obfuscate the link between smoking and cancer, even though from internal documents it's quite clear that they were aware of the issue, and were actively promoting a view they knew to be false for their own economic benefit. This is no different. In fact a lot of the marketing companies that were in charge of the diversion tactics of the tobacco companies have since transitioned into the fossil fuel business. It's quite easy to do: you set up different 'think thanks' with environmentally friendly names, and you hire some scientists, often not even from relevant fields who're willing to shill for you. Then you produce non-peer reviewed pseudo-science papers on the matter. Then you drag these shills on tv and elsewhere into the media to advertise how there really is no problem and all the academics are just wrong. Once you've established enough doubt among the general public about the matter (I mean after all there was a 'scientist' on tv saying he doesn't think it's happening, so clearly it can't be settled right?) you spend some hundred or so million a year lobbying politicians to oppose any regulation on your industry. The fact that this strategy still works as well as it did in the past shows how easy it is to fool the majority of people who do not understand how science works.

If I manufacture a product the use of which does harm not just to me, but the entire ecosystem of the planet and all civilizations, and I then knowingly and willingly try to misrepresent or hide the damage it's doing to further my own profit, that's deceitful and damaging to everyone. and it's definitely something that one should get sued over.

Re: Political tax

[Hal_Porter]

Oil stopped NYC from literally drowning in horse shit

http://www.s8int.com/crichton....

Stepping back, I have to say the arrogance of the model-makers is breathtaking. There have been, in every century, scientists who say they know it all. Since climate may be a chaotic system-no one is sure-these predictions are inherently doubtful, to be polite. But more to the point, even if the models get the science spot-on, they can never get the sociology. To predict anything about the world a hundred years from now is simply absurd.

Look: If I was selling stock in a company that I told you would be profitable in 2100, would you buy it? Or would you think the idea was so crazy that it must be a scam?

Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horse****?

Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses? But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport.

Now, apart from Bill de Blasio virtue signalling antics, NYC generates very little horsehit.

Re: Political tax

[Hal_Porter]

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.

Re: Political tax

[danbert8]

It would be a bit unfair if the "nuclear waste" that's been released to the environment for years is the same substance emitted by every living animal on the planet. CO2 is not pollution at any level we emit today. No one considers the CO2 itself to be toxic at any atmospheric concentrations. It's the "global climate catastrophe" which is where they are claiming damages which is going to be hard to prove a causal link and even harder to establish a monetary value of damages.

This lawsuit is politics, pure and simple.

Re: Political tax

[sycodon]

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.

Alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps we should hold those burning fossil fuels responsible for doing so. The largest city in the world's worst polluting nation would be a good start. I propose that we sue New York City for their contributions to climate change.

Re:Alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Alternative

[bobbied]

Perhaps we should hold those burning fossil fuels responsible for doing so. The largest city in the world's worst polluting nation would be a good start. I propose that we sue New York City for their contributions to climate change.

I say we ban the import of Fossil fuels into the city and disconnect them from the carbon powered Electrical grid... Let them make due with bio-fuel, solar panels and windmills.

Re:Alternative

[aevan]

Don't forget the total removal and banning of all plastic-related products as well. Come on NYC, show us the way!

Re:Alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes you do.You just don't like it.

Re:Alternative

[Ichijo]

And then, because overfishing is bad, NYC should ban fish sales and consumption, right?

Re:Alternative

[JoshuaZ]

People in cities use less energy per a capita than people in suburbs or rural areas https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/translating-uncle-sam/stories/urban-or-rural-which-is-more-energy-efficient and NYC is one of the most energy efficient of major cities by multiple metrics http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/12/31/eco.cities/.

Re: Alternative

[TechnoCore]

The headline in that article does not say the same thing as the article itself. So what you believe is incorrect. While the treaty was signed in 1997, the base year for reduction calculations was 1990. Making the first graph in the article, eh missleading. To quote a comment to that article:

Russ R.
April 5, 2013 at 2:20 pm
You gotta read beyond the headline.
First: 5.2% was a weighted average collective target for all participating developed nations. The US target was 7%.
“The 5.2% reduction in total developed country emissions will be realized through national reductions of 8% by Switzerland, many Central and East European states, and the European Union (the EU will achieve its target by distributing differing reduction rates to its member states); 7% by the US; and 6% by Canada, Hungary, Japan, and Poland. Russia, New Zealand, and Ukraine are to stabilize their emissions, while Norway may increase emissions by up to 1%, Australia by up to 8%, and Iceland 10%.”

Second, while the treaty was signed in 1997, the base year for reduction calculations was 1990 (or 1995 for certain GHGs).
“The agreement aims to lower overall emissions from a group of six greenhouse gases by 2008-12, calculated as an average over these five years. Cuts in the three most important gases – carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N20) – will be measured against a base year of 1990. Cuts in three long-lived industrial gases – hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) – can be measured against either a 1990 or 1995 baseline. If compared to expected emissions levels for the year 2000, the total reductions required by the Protocol will actually be about 10%; this is because many industrialized countries have not succeeded in meeting their earlier non-binding aim of returning their emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000, and their emissions have in fact risen since 1990. Compared to the emissions levels that would be expected by 2010 without emissions-control measures, the Protocol target represents a 30% cut. The Protocol should therefore send a powerful signal to business that it needs to accelerate the delivery of climate-friendly products and services.”

So, if I’m going to nitpick details 7% below 1990 level is a bigger target than 5.2% below 1997 levels.

But that doesn’t take away from the main point that the US has indeed reduced emissions substantially in the last 5 years, thanks to a shale gas boom and an economic bust.

Also... https://www.theguardian.com/en...

Interesting idea..

[The Grim Reefer]

York City's five pension funds have about $5 billion in fossil fuel investments.

So if NYC wins, do they also have to take responsibility for being a a co-conspirator? They did help the oil companies by financing what they were doing with $5 billion in just the pension funds alone. What other investments do/did they have with oil and coal I wonder? How much fossil fuel was, and still is used by NYC? Are they going to shut down all of the ports that oil burning ships dock at? What about all of the freight by diesel truck and trains? How about all of the stock brokers on Wall Street that deal with investments in oil and coal? They should go after them too.

I'm all for being responsible for the environment, but this is just stupid.

Re:Interesting idea..

[bobbied]

Fossil fuel energy was a necessary step for modern civilisation, few would argue against that. The issue is that once we knew more about the many negative factors that came with it, we should've quickly started the long process of transitioning to alternative sources with a lot less negatives - but the fossil fuel companies have deliberately and provably obscured that knowledge and impeded those efforts, to their own benefit and to the great detriment of society as a whole. They should be held accountable for all the damage and health costs that could have been avoided, in that time and in the future.

That's garbage talk there... The oil companies suppressed nothing, they produced energy at the lowest possible cost is all.

What happened is fossil fuels remained cheaper than the alternative so the ROI wasn't there to justify alternate sources of energy. The market chooses the cheapest viable alternative. That was fossil fuels. The oil companies just delivered us what we where willing to pay for.

So, in your parlance and using your logic, the problem was regulation that didn't make fossil fuels more expensive... So government is the problem, if we use your logic.

Not that I agree, I think fossil fuels are a fine thing myself and has contributed mightily to the creation of wealth and increased standards of living world wide.

Re:Interesting idea..

[Namarrgon]

The American Petroleum Institute, in particular its members Exxon and Chevron, have been funding denial and manufacturing doubt ever since their own scientists told them of the risks of continued fossil fuel use back in the 80s (here is an empirical study describing their efforts to deny and deliberately misrepresent climate science findings, including from their own scientists).

And the reason fossil fuels appeared as cheap as they did was because the huge emission and pollution costs were being borne by the public, rather than the industry. If these externalised costs were factored in, the price of coal-fired electricity would triple (study) - and the RoI for investment in alternatives like renewables or nuclear would have been much larger. Likewise, the health and other external costs of oil exceeded $56 billion annually back in 2005, adding at least 23 to 38 cents per gallon (again without including climate costs).

External costs are a market failure. Regulation is one option to correct that failure, but it's not the only possible option. Feel free to choose a solution that fits your political preferences, but ignoring or hand-waving away the problem won't make it go away. You'll still be paying for it, with excessive health premiums, illnesses and lost productivity, and tens of thousands of avoidable deaths every year.

Correct response from oil company should be...

[SuperKendall]

Wait, you guys did WHAT with that oil we sold you? Do you know how hard that crap is to get out of the ground and make nice and smooth?

Well I guess if you can't care for oil properly that means *no more oil for YOU*.

Re: Can alcoholics sue a distillery now?

[omnichad]

Because that example would reveal that the lawsuits are successful

Re:Grab some popcorn

[Namarrgon]

I'm not sure we actually KNOW that the current warming trend is entirely man made

We know to a high level of scientific certainty. In fact, the evidence strongly suggests the world would still be slowly cooling, if it wasn't for our greenhouse gas emissions.

Given that the science behind this specific part of the question is far from conclusive

It absolutely is; that's why every scientific institution on the planet endorses the conclusion that we're causing the warming we're seeing. We can even quantify it - the IPCC AR5 WG1 summary says our emissions of CO2 alone have caused a radiative forcing of 1.68 W m^2 (+/- 0.3), plus another 0.97 W m^2 from methane - which dwarfs the cooling effects of atmospheric dust and nitrates at about -0.42 W m^2 in total. We know it's our CO2 that's causing it because a) we can easily measure the CO2 levels rising rapidly, and b) isotopic analysis shows a match with carbon from fossil fuels (not to mention the observed levels happen to agree nicely with our calculated emissions, and that nothing else has been observed that could come close to causing the effect we're seeing).

None of this attribution has anything to do with our land temperature models (which btw are working just fine).

What's still uncertain is exactly how much warming we'll see, and when. Not what's causing it.