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Judge Rules Big Oil Can't Be Sued For Climate Change Costs (cbsnews.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A U.S. judge who held a hearing about climate change that received widespread attention ruled Monday that Congress and the president were best suited to address the contribution of fossil fuels to global warming. So he threw out lawsuits that sought to hold big oil companies liable for the Earth's changing environment. Noting that the world has also benefited significantly from oil and other fossil fuel, Judge William Alsup said questions about how to balance the "worldwide positives of the energy" against its role in global warming "demand the expertise of our environmental agencies, our diplomats, our Executive, and at least the Senate. The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case," he said. Alsup's ruling came in lawsuits brought by San Francisco and neighboring Oakland that accused Chevron (CVX), Exxon Mobil (XOM), ConocoPhillips (COP), BP (BP) and Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A) of long knowing that fossil fuels posed serious risks to the environment, but still promoting them as environmentally responsible.
Glad the judge had enough sense to throw this case out.
Want to get public action on climate change? Convince people and win elections. Using the courts to forward your agenda can and will backfire.
I seem to remember a particular article written about a party using the courts to forward their agenda is bad.
(No, I don't own any oil stock.)
This is one of those things where the actual responsiblity is so spread out that it's just ridiculous to blame the vendor.
How many hundreds of times have YOU personally made the decision to fill your vehicle with fuel? You damn well knew (you did not merely suspect, you the person doing it knew) that it was definitely and inevitably going to pollute the air, with zero chance that it wouldn't pollute. And it was going to happen as a direct consequence of you running your engine after yyou having decided to turn the key.
But no, it's not all on you, because there are hundreds of millions of people, just like you, who were in exactly the same situation and made the same decision that you did. And just like you, those hundreds of millions of people knew for sure, without the slightly doubt or speculation, that their own vehicles were going to definitely going to cause air pollution, and that as a whole, all our vehicles working together were going to pollute in a large, significant way.
And me too. You can blame me for my share. I have filled my tank and driven many times.
Did we do this because we were tricked? Fuck no. We did it because we didn't have a better alternative. Whose fault is that? Reality's fault. It's a shame we don't have teleportation spells, but we don't, so we burn stuff for energy, knowing that it pollutes.
Some people make an effort to stop doing that. That's great. Fuck yeah! You're awesome. And that's the way ahead: high-five the people who make the choice to stop polluting, instead of blaming the people who .. well, no, not the polluters, but whose who sold us the means to pollute, as if We The Burners deserved less blame than they do. If you're going to point your fucking finger, point it at everyone. Point it at the earth itself. Point it at the gods for not giving us teleportation spells.
If you need to blame big oil for something, you might have a better case for pollution that is directly tied to drilling, like for spills, pipelines disrupting habitats, etc. That's totally fair game, because oil can be delivered without fuckups if people try hard enough and are willing to pay enough. (But that's not what this story is about. But I'm giving you an out here, if you need a bad guy and you refuse to accept that we are all the bad guys.)
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
San Francisco and Oakland: Oh please, let us sue the oil companies. Oh please let us sue them from our glass towers funded by hi-tech industry, fueled by the very energy we decry, birthed by the military-industrial complex we revile. Oh please, mr. judge we implore you! We're good liberals. Pay no attention to the prime mover behind the curtain.
Judge: No.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I love this logic - he must be on the payroll of 'big oil' to reach that conclusion, otherwise my long-held beliefs are wrong! it's right up there with 'the Russians threw the election, otherwise I have to admit that Hillary was a lousy candidate.
Ken
like what's causing the warming, and what the speed and essential content of response needs to be, should be decided by science, and then the results of that should be respected by political leadership.
Oh what a wonderful world that would be....
What to do about it, on a governmental level, is a political question.
Expert witnesses can testify, submit evidence, etc., but they don't decide cases. That's never how it works.
Um, computer science is a real actual science, so much so that major scientific experiments like the LHC couldn't operate and and process the amount of data that it does without their groundbreaking research into big data computation and storage any more than it could without physicists. Software professionals regularly encompasses computer scientists, so many computer scientists are software professionals.
But keep telling yourself scientists are some arbitrary thing that doesn't include what ego group you place yourself in. Meanwhile I, as a mathematician will sit here and laugh at whatever peasant group you place yourself in because I similarly view you as inferior.
Frankly, in this day and age, because so many computer scientists have to understand now just the computer science and software engineering principals to deliver, but also the domain knowledge of the subject they're delivering for, then they're far more capable than most so-called scientists like yourself anyway. A software professional that understands the physics, biology, and chemistry of the subject they're developing for will always be more capable than the "scientist" who believes their field is the be all and end all of science - your attitude alone negates your ability to be an even moderately competent scientist because one of the key traits required is that of modesty and the ability to accept and explore new ideas.
The courts are good at individual cases that have nuance and the technicalities of jurisprudence. That is not the place to drive social agenda to solve societal problems.
As a general proposition I agree but sometimes there is no other choice. The rest of the government doesn't always act in a manner that makes social change feasible.
People exhale CO2. When the EPA or courts expands the authority of the government to regulate CO2 as a pollutant they can effectively regulate your breathing.
That's one of the more ridiculous arguments I've read in a while. No amount of breathing by humans makes CO2 a pollutant. Massive release of sequestered CO2 from burning coal and oil does make CO2 a pollutant. Anything can be a pollutant if there is enough of it to screw up the ecosystem. Do you really not understand the difference between regulating industry emissions of a chemical versus respiration? Exactly how do you think an EPA regulation will deny you access to breathing?
We are *all* guilty.
Singling out the folks that dig the stuff out of the ground, clean it up, and bring it to the rest of us is just scapegoating.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick