Climate Change Reckoning Just Beginning for Big Oil

January 22, 2018 – About a week-and-a-half ago, New York City announced divesting its pension fund of fossil fuel interests. At the same time, it was proceeding with a lawsuit launched against five major oil companies claiming that they contributed to damages incurred by the city from climate-change-caused extreme weather events. The divestment from fossil fuel stocks impacts 50 oil and gas companies. Exxon-Mobil alone represents $1 billion of the more than $5 billion currently within the almost $191 billion investment fund. At the same time, the governor of New York State announced that the state pension plan will also divest itself of fossil-fuel stocks. That pension plan has more than $200 billion in assets and is the third largest in the United States.

New York City is not alone. In 2012 Seattle divested itself of fossil fuel investments. Washington, DC acted similarly as did many counties and cities in California, Colorado, and Massachusetts. After similar divestment announcements San Francisco and Oakland last September launched separate lawsuits against the five largest investor-owned fossil fuel companies in the world, holding them to account for costs incurred both present and future to harden the cities’ infrastructures in the face of climate change.

International divestment from fossil fuel stocks is happening from Capetown to Berlin. Last fall the city of Victoria, British Columbia, and two other Vancouver Island communities, Saanich and Highland, issued climate accountability letters to 20 of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies requesting that they pay for the costs these communities were incurring to fight climate change.

Such legal action against the oil majors is the beginning of a rising tide of litigation aimed at the fossil fuel industry that includes citizen lawsuits from The Netherlands, from children in U.S. states, and from individuals like Saul Luciano Lliuya, a Peruvian mountain guide who sees the melting of an Andes glacier near his hometown of Huaraz as linked to the use of fossil fuels.

The oil companies treat these cases as nuisance suits and argue that linking a storm like Hurricane Sandy to an Exxon-Mobil or a Chevron is unprovable. But those launching the suits have more than the money in mind. They are of a collective mind in showing the rest of the world how fossil fuel companies are no more ethical than Big Tobacco. That oil and gas companies have been in the know since the 1970s that their carbon emissions were warming the Earth’s atmosphere. That their scientists had conclusively linked the burning of fossil fuels to anthropogenic climate change.

The analogy to Big Tobacco is both stark and apt. The major cigarette producers all knew that the products they were making caused a range of diseases in their customers and denied the link between smoking and lung cancer, heart and lung disease, and other life-ending conditions. It is only in the last few years that Big Tobacco has been made to come clean in Western countries. The companies continue to sell their cigarette brands to the Developing World with abandon. I guess the litigators in these countries have yet to mount the kind of lawsuits and publicity to expose Big Tobacco’s lies. But in Europe and North America, Big Tobacco is coming up with ways to survive the end of cigarettes creating product alternatives deemed less harmful. Among these are e-cigarettes.

In launching the San Francisco lawsuit, City Attorney, Dennis Herrera stated:

“These fossil fuel companies profited handsomely for decades while knowing they were putting the fate of our cities at risk. Instead of owning up to it, they copied a page from the Big Tobacco playbook. They launched a multi-million dollar disinformation campaign to deny and discredit what was clear even to their own scientists: global warming is real, and their product is a huge part of the problem. Now, the bill has come due. It’s time for these companies to take responsibility for the harms they have caused and are continuing to cause.”

In the Oakland lawsuit, City Attorney Barbara J. Parker was equally blunt in her comments:

“Global warming is an existential threat to humankind, to our ecosystems and to the wondrous, myriad species that inhabit our planet. These companies knew fossil fuel-driven climate change was real, they knew it was caused by their products and they lied to cover up that knowledge to protect their astronomical profits. The harm to our cities has commenced and will only get worse. The law is clear that the defendants are responsible for the consequences of their reckless and disastrous actions.”

The fossil fuel companies are making some small moves into alternative energy hedging their bets against coal, oil, and natural gas assets losing value in a low-carbon future. Some are dipping into solar and wind energy. Others are dabbling with fuel cell technology and hydrogen. And some are investing in battery storage. This isn’t the first time the companies have looked at renewables. A decade ago when oil and gas prices were peaking, some of these companies had alternative energy assets which they dumped to put all their money into their fossil fuel operations. But now in the post-Paris COP 21  Climate Agreement world, the companies are once again starting to acquire wind farms, photovoltaic and solar thermal power plants, and battery storage technology companies.

But there remain hardliners like Koch Industries which continues to push a big oil and gas agenda, bankrolling minions like Donald Trump and funding climate change denial organizations like the Heartland Institute, all in the hope of putting off the day of reckoning. The Koch brothers put money before country and the planet.

We in the general population must push back. We need to make everyone aware of these Big Oil lawsuits. We need more cities, other government sub-jurisdictions, and citizens’ groups to join in and launch similar legal actions. In the end, it will exert a growing toll on Big Oil, and like Big Tobacco will eventually lead to a day of reckoning.

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• New York City is suing big oil for global warming