Oil billionaires, not taxpayers, should pay for climate destruction

Product liability law is over 100 years old

Photo: Melissa Sue Gerrits/Stringer/Getty

The nation watched in horror as houses disappeared, highways snapped in half, and entire communities were wiped off the map. Hurricane Helene’s fury and aftermath jumped state lines from Florida, cutting a deep swath of destruction through Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina, killing at least 227 people.

Roads, bridges, schools, cell towers, rail lines, utilities, and thousands of homes must be rebuilt in six states; some will have to be relocated. The cost will be staggering.

One estimator puts the cost of repairing known damages (we won’t know the full extent for some time) between $225 and $250 billion. Multiply this cost by a factor of ten to twenty severe weather events a year-- a number that is climbing-- times twenty or thirty years, and a financial hellscape emerges.  Most cellphone calculators can’t even display that many zeroes. 

In covering the catastrophe, media outlets including the New York Times discuss how and why climate change is making weather more severe, and more deadly. But, at least so far, these same outlets have shied away from naming and blaming the culprit.

Pointing the finger may look opportunistic or distasteful, but continuing to skirt the truth is worse. It means people will continue to die, and families will keep losing their homes. So here’s the finger: Big oil, and those who have made trillions from it, should pay to rebuild these communities. Middle class taxpayers should not.

Burning fossil fuels is causing extreme weather

Scientists have long known that greenhouse gas molecules-- carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide-- are a by-product of burning fossil fuels. Scientists have also long known that increased levels of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, from burning oil, coal and gas, are heating the planet to temperatures that cannot be sustained, and are incompatible with life as we know it.

The world is hotter today and warming faster than at any other point in recorded history. As Porter  Fox, author of “Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them,” wrote in the NYT, “we are witnessing a new reality. Supercharged hurricanes are no longer outliers, freak disasters or storms of the century. Fossil fuel pollution has made them a fixture of life around the world, and they are going to get worse — with millions of people in their cross hairs.”

U.N. scientists have declared climate change a global emergency, and catastrophic events like Helene have been predicted for some time. So why is the largest economy in the free world dragging its feet on climate action? Because politicians, mostly Republican, rely on unlimited campaign contributions from fossil fuels.

In a nihilistic quid pro quo, conservative legislators refuse to act on climate because they are protecting their oil and gas donors. Some extremists, like Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis, have even adopted legislation that removes all references to climate change in state law, while also banning offshore wind-energy generation. Darwin is having a big belly laugh, but the people who lost their homes and loved ones don’t think it’s funny.

Big oil’s deception campaign

Climate disinformation from conservatives and the fossil fuel lobby has gone on for decades. American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers orchestrated an extremely well-financed campaign against the EPA’s tailpipe rules, calling the rules a “ban” on gas cars to mislead consumers and voters. The lobby has spent millions on ads in battleground states to lie to voters about EVs, claiming they will somehow restrict consumer choice.

Like immoral slavers in the nineteenth-century south, immoral fossil fuel companies are fighting to protect obscene profits. In 2023, ExxonMobil and Chevron reported their biggest annual profits in a decade. Three of the largest oil and gas producers, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Shell, reported combined profits of $85.6 billion in 2023 alone, which would go a long way toward rebuilding destroyed homes and highways.

In May of this year, the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability released Denial, Disinformation and DoubleSpeak: Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change. The report uses Big Oil’s own internal documents to reveal their decades-long campaign of deception:

“Documents demonstrate for the first time that fossil fuel companies internally do not dispute that they have understood since at least the 1960s that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and [that they] then worked for decades to undermine public understanding of this fact and to deny the underlying science…

Big Oil’s deception campaign evolved from explicit denial of the basic science underlying climate change to deception, disinformation, and doublespeak.”

The solution can be found in ordinary negligence and product liability law: Make Polluters Pay

Aided and abetted by grandstanding morons like Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump, who promised to gut environmental laws for $1b in campaign donations, the oil industry seems to have a death wish for the rest of us. Presumably the uber-wealthy think they can relocate to Mars.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, early polling suggests that most voters want polluters to pay for the destruction they cause. Such sentiment, along with longstanding principles of negligence law, support legislation like “Make Polluters Pay” bills pending in Congress and a handful of states (New York, Massachusetts, and Maryland). These bills, like legislation already passed in Vermont, reflect a simple reality: Whoever profits from climate disaster should pay the lion’s share of cleaning it up. 

Under ordinary product liability law, when a company manufactures and sells a product it knows is dangerous, it is liable for damages caused by that product. The cases are legion: Philip Morris and big tobacco; Dow Corning and silicone implants; Owens Corning and asbestos, the list of dangerous products resulting in legal liability is long.

Product liability law is over a hundred years old.  If it turns out a manufacturer actually lied about its product, and undertook a massive campaign of consumer deception, as the fossil fuel lobby has done for decades, the plaintiff’s bar starts to salivate.  Lying about a known danger can magically transform ordinary damages into punitive damages that even today’s SCOTUS radicals, with their deep ties to big oil, cannot dismantle.