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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.
(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"?
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
The case is not reported adequately. The problem here is not that big oil companies have influenced climate (indeed, humanity benefited from the energy and plastics) - the problem is that they have known about their impact on climate for a while now and still kept spending resources to actively deny it and undermine research about it - similar to what happened with tobacco companies and health effects of smoking tobaccos. This fact, in my opinion, has enough merit for a trial.
It is futile though.
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.
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.)