I'm all for reducing climate change. But there are ways to do that. First of all, get rid of all the oil subsidies! That's the first thing that should be done. Then, tax the oil industry and others pollutants proportionately to the amount of climate change produced, perhaps measured by the amount of resultant Co2.
I mean, that'd be amazing. Beef is way too cheap in America; we're just having our grandkids pay it.
That said, oil companies have known about the effects of climate change for a while, have known that their products cause it, and then with that knowledge funded climate change disinformation campaigns to persuade public policy.
You can liken it to a drug company knowing about the effects of thermeldahyde on pregnant women, but still pushing it as a cure for morning sickness.
[1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
Can we expect the companies to shift production to something other than oil? In fact, as we became more and more aware of human-influenced climate change, we LEARNED what caused the problem. It's easy to look back on when we first really determined humans and the biggest cause of climate change, and judge them based on what we know NOW. Taking 2017 knowledge and applying it to 1997 by saying "they've had a long time to fix this" is disingenuous armchair quarterbacking at worst.
Remember the name kids, Black Tar Sands Crude: that's Black Tar Sands Crude, the only bitumen-based-oil unnecessarily pumped through multiple countries that's fit for your family!
When the solution to climate change is “pay me” then I am skeptical. Perhaps the San Fran area ought to immediately ban all gasoline and diesel sales and close all highways to non electric vehicles. And close the shipping port. And the airport.
No, they won’t do that because this isn’t about some immediate threat, this is about getting paid. As long as there is a single gasoline station in the Bay Area, Oakland and friends are doing nothing more that leveraging FUD to get paid.
Compare this to the methane emissions of a single cow. You're being reductive to the point of being offensive.
The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld a lower court ruling on Crawford et al concerning FATCA; the 6th Circut overturned the precedent set by Susan B Anthony List v. Driehaus by adding a heightened requirement for standing; harm doesn’t need to just be credible to give rise to standing, it has to be credible AND certain.
Interestingly the recent 6th Circuit decision on Crawford gutted Roe v. Wade as well — essentially making the standing of any woman suing doubtful. Crawford rewrote the standing requirements of Roe v. Wade — and if applied to this current case, the cities will have the case thrown out because a harm from rising sea levels might be credible, but it definitely isn’t certain. That seas levels will rise at all is credible but also not certain. And beyond standing, the question is: did the oil company cause the harm? It could be argued that if an oil company caused a harm by supplying oil, Oakland and San Fran harmed themselves by using gasoline and oil for years and years themselves. So who is culpable? The addict or the dealer? How about city building codes that didn’t properly address the credible harm from rising seas? If such a harm were known and Oakland et al chose to ignore it and continue to issue building permits, then it casts doubt as to the credibility of that harm. If they issued a construction permit while being knowledgeable of the harm, they are negligent; if they don’t actually think it’s a harm enough to change building codes, then it’s obviously not harm enough to get paid by oil companies.
I realize that the 6th Circuit doesn’t apply to California, since they are in the 9th, but it’s highly likely Elena Kagen will grant Cert to the Crawford case — a case that’s going to have an incredible effect on standing requirements for lawsuits such as these.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
To give an example, we should be paying more for many electronics as the result of suits against most existing companies for not dealing with Tantalum sourcing.
Getting quantitative results is entirely useless if you don't want to think about the subjective qualitative reasons we thought some arbitrary metric might matter and how they might be limited. Having a high GDP or salary is about raising your quality of life and options. If you are actively prevented from living all sorts of other lives simply because they are not as profitable then you are poorer than the wild man.
I'd say that's giving organizations rights in civil matters that only are supposed to apply to individuals in criminal ones. The end result is thousands of companies actively trying to kill us and manipulate evidence and politics for much higher profits than the ones doing net positive work.
Why do companies make profit? It's because they're offering a product or service that people buy. Why do people buy the product or service? It's because the value they get from the product outweighs the cost. What this really means is that--- all successful companies are doing social good, simply by being in business. If a company is making a big profit, they're probably doing so by providing much more value in their product than what they are charging.
Some companies produce more good than bad. Some companies produce more bad than good, but the bad is primarily not affecting their customers. The latter is inherently easier which is why civil courts must be eternally vigilant.
I agree that we should include the negative externalities in any product, and that can be done by adding taxes to products. And that we should have a healthy civil court system. And I agree that companies often get to settle for far too little. But the way you phrased your previous comment was _really_ putting the carriage before the horse.
Also, though the article doesn't say it outright, it looks as if there's not even given any evidence of current damages, just hundred-year-out projections. (And the record of long-term predictions in this domain is certainly not precise enough to base legal arguments on.) So they're meant to pay now for hypothetical damages that may happen later, as punishment for providing the energy that runs our whole society. Okay?