Slashdot Mirror
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.
I think Big Oil needs to be punished for this misinformation campaign. Spreading the belief that Fossil Fuels are not causing global warming or global warming doesn't exist, also their effort to criticize alternative energy sources to prevent energy diversity is rather shady as well.
That said, Fossil Fuels offer a rather safe high density and portable energy source. Where failure of such companies to meet the demand for oil would also be harmful and criminal.
The Gasoline Automobile was considered an environmental friendly invention, at the time. Mostly due to the fact the pollution effect is less then the effect of having a lot of horses in a City, Needing food and cleaning, Attracting pests and plagues.
Alternate sources are getting close (I feel they would be closer if Big Oil didn't try to keep them down) to being as good as Fossil Fuels, Exceeding it in some areas, but behind in others. But I doubt we can truly get off Fossil Fuels, but we can be able to replace a lot of it.
Big Oil isn't the cause of climate change, it is the consumers who are.
The difference between Tobacco and Oil is that Tobacco doesn't have many or any real advantages other then for entertainment. So its harmful side effects which were hidden lied about and distorted (like what big oil had done) were not offset by its advantages.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
(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
That judge may or may not have the law interpreted correctly, but his spew about politicians making decisions about science rather strongly suggests the majority of his income derives from ExxonMobil or the equivalent Putin-owned company.
One more example of why judges should be required to accept the input of nonlegals like, you know, scientists and software professionals.
As long as we're getting our governmental wires crossed, let's have our elected representatives vote to lock him up!
Your view of the world is 'interesting'.
You think 'Big Oil' is a thing, like a group that holds meetings and makes decisions.
You imagine that judges decide what sources are used to defend a particular side in a court case - that is left to the attorneys.
I like how you lump 'software professionals' with scientists - I'm going to guess you wanted to be a scientist, but wound up a software professional, so you viewcthem as equivalent.
Ken
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"?
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.
> at an acceptable cost.
the sea will rise approx. 200 feet. if all ice melts. is that acceptable ?
Even the worst case examples put forth by scientists don't predict ALL ice melting. Sea levels won't rise 200ft.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
why judges should be required to accept the input of nonlegals like, you know, scientists and software professionals.
Never heard of Friends of the Court? Amicus curiae to the Latin speakers.
Please learn about how the judiciary works before you spew misinformation.
Let me see if I understand you correctly.
A. You think this judge is a jackass.
B. He's a jackass because he declined to unilaterally decide energy policy, instead leaving policy to policy-makers.
C. You would have preferred for the jackass judge to decide national energy policy himself.
Is that about right?
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?
Your view of the world is 'interesting'. You think 'Big Oil' is a thing, like a group that holds meetings and makes decisions.
Yes, in fact they were and they did, in the form of the American Petroleum Institute.
In a 1998 memo, they outlined their "action plan" for a campaign to cast doubt on climate science. Which they implemented pretty much as written.
(despite the fact that they had already-- in 1980-- identified climate warming due to carbon dioxide as a problem.)
(news article here.)
Citing inside climate news is like citing the daily mail.
There's any number of sites that have the memo on them. I cited those two because they have the actual scan of the memo on them, not merely the text file, and added the New York Times article, as a mainstream media source, but if you don't like those, I can send you a few dozen other links to the file. Or you could just google it.
By the way, everything you're accusing Exxon of is actually what a group of environmentalists and plaintiff's lawyers decided to do,
I gave a citation and links to three different sources. Where is yours?
Ah, you don't have a citation, you're making that up. Right. That's a trick right out of Göbbels, that "the cleverest trick used in propaganda" is to accuse your enemies of what you yourself are doing.
with funding by various Rockefeller foundations (among others). The main people that would benefit from this case being successful would be the class action attorneys, who would stand to make hundreds of millions if not billions.
Have you fully thought about the fact that the fossil fuel industry is a trillion dollar industry? Mere "hundreds of millions" is less than penny ante to them.
Who is more likely to fund a campaign, an industry that has a trillion dollars at stake, or some random collection of lawyers who say wait, maybe if we believe the science, some time in the far distant future some laws might or might not get written that might or might not allow a new grounds for lawsuit? Oh, wait, we know the answer to that, because we already have the American Petroleum Institute memo laying out their campaign and asking for 2 million dollars in funding... for the first year.
Yes, that's right-- the API considered this so important that they could ask fossil fuel companies to contribute a whopping 0.0002% of their cash flow to deal with it.