Judge Rules Big Oil Can't Be Sued For Climate Change Costs (cbsnews.com) 418
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.
Big shocker. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [nationalreview.com] written about a party using the courts to forward their agenda is bad.
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On the other hand, if they are helping ensure that guys like Pruitt get in charge of the EPA and gut the regulations so they don't have to spend money to be poisoning us less, then that's a bit different.
Should advocating for a particular policy or politician that helps you be illegal? Why does a oil company not have the same rights as say, Netflix with Net Neutrality? Or even you personally.
IOW: Should rights be limited because a number of individuals pooled their resources toward a common goal?
That is the argument you are promoting. I say, no, rights are not limited because you pool your resources with like minded people toward a specific goal.
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On the other hand, if they are helping ensure that guys like Pruitt get in charge of the EPA and gut the regulations so they don't have to spend money to be poisoning us less, then that's a bit different.
Perhaps we could peacefully decide and manage such big, diffuse, divisive issues by, I dunno, electing representatives and stuff.
Re:Big shocker. (Score:5, Interesting)
It is futile though.
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This fact, in my opinion, has enough merit for a trial.
How do you quantify the damages to you personally for this 'misinformation campaign'?
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You didn't quantify anything. Conjecture does not quantify anything.
Misinformation campaign for tobacco: "I would have quit smoking in a year with correct information. That would have X effect my health which results in Y healthcare costs. I am claiming damages for the loss of monetary funds of Y. and the loss of life that X has resulted for a total of Z damages. These damages occurred because I was misled about the product I was buying from a company from a misinformation campaign started by the defendant
Re:Big shocker. (Score:4, Insightful)
So if I want to sue someone who has harmed me, I should try to win an election and get legislation passed as my remedy?
The reason for legislation is to get the harm done to you officially recognized as actionable harm in the first place.
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let me get this straight: if person X does damage to person Y, but this kind of damage isn't legislated, person Y can't defend him/herself ?
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let me get this straight: if person X does damage to person Y, but this kind of damage isn't legislated, person Y can't defend him/herself ?
Who's person X? Your next door neighbor who filled their gas tank today? Why or why not?
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I'm dying to know what the definition of "fart-rape" would be. It sounds worse than man-splaining.
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Dutch oven or crop dusting?
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> (you idiot)
sure. whatever. big boy.
Re:Big shocker. (Score:4, Insightful)
So if I want to sue someone who has harmed me, I should try to win an election and get legislation passed....
Yes. You don't get to sue just because someone "harmed you"; the other party also has to have harmed you in specifically an illegal manner such as a direct infringment on your legally recognized rights or by failing in a recognized duty to you (such as failing to uphold their part of a bargain) requiring redress by the courts to correct an injustice --- for example, if you lost money because my fancy marketing convinced someone to buy a good or service for me instead of you, then that's perfectly legal, and there's no grounds for suit.
So it is with Oil companies.... they might in theory have provided other companies petroleum products which resulted in CO2 releases that some groups claim related to global warming that you theorize has harmed you, But there was no law against their actions, there's no proof of a causal relationship, and even if you own property, there's no legal right to prevent someone from affecting the weather/climate over your property...
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What a bunch of nonsense. I love it when non-lawyers try to explain how they think the law works.
Except the GP is correct here. This is the same reason the tobacco companies fought long and hard to show no evidence of harm.
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No, it's too late. Your new legislation applied to old action is "ex post facto" and explicitly forbidden (although Bill Clinton got away with it for a tax increase.)
Re: Big shocker. (Score:2)
And what of the people that read those reports, but continue to drive 30 miles each way to work in their own car, burning fossil fuels and converting gasoline in to greenhouse gases - they are blameless?
The climate was impacted by millions, maybe billions, of people burning fossil fuel - the process of creating fossil fuels produces very little greenhouse gases by comparison.
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It's not a valid comparison. If the tobacco sellers stop selling tobacco, the result is people don't get to smoke.If the oil companies turn off the tap, people will die.
And even if they had put up their hands decades ago and said, "Hey, this isn't good for the environment, and it'll heat up the planet causing all sorts of problems!", would it have changed behaviours at all? The mountain of evidence available now isn't good enough to do that today.
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Agreed. It's apples and .. brussel sprouts, to use a better analogy. Tobacco has no real benefit to society, smoking is just an unnecessary, dirty personal habit.
Energy, OTOH, is absolutely critical to modern life, everything demands it, and the demand keeps increasing. 40, 30, even 20 years ago, there were no solid, widely available, viable alternatives. Solar technology was still highly inefficient.
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I'm not suggesting that oil producers should stop tomorrow, but they have been slow to take action even after it became apparent the harm that CO2 and lead were doing. Some are now investing in alternative sources of energy and fuel, which is the responsible thing to do when you have a product that is both necessary and harmful.
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I think that what he meant by "turning off the tap" was something more current and abrupt, not 100 years from now. And in that scenario, many people likely could die, without heat, or transport of food and medicine.
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Ok, let's hypothesize this. Whose responsibility is this, and why?
And just making sure: you're saying the public has less responsibility than the people who sold them the fuel, right? We could have gradually started using less and less, but it was more important that the vendor had the discipline to make sure they didn't sell us too much each year, correct? And were they also supposed to make sure a competitor didn't come in and fill the remain
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What are you complaining about, I've downsized to a 5 liter V8. (But I smeared some JB weld onto the cam lobes and put in a lower ratio final drive gear.)
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When Vermin Supreme is elected and we switch to a pony based economy, all these problems will be solved.
There are 200,000 ponies in America, 300 million people. Every person gets a pony, genocide might be required to make the math work.
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Have you seen the battery bank for that monster. ROI for running that thing is still unviable. Maybe in the future we will have cheaper versions, but for now that beast is out of reach for the vast majority of farmers.
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I'm betting you wouldn't have the guts to tell someone living in the poorest parts of Africa or Asia that the food they have to scramble to get to literally keep their kids from starving to death will cost twice as much because you want to virtue signal and outlaw the use of fossil fuels.
I'm betting they do. How many people die from Malaria in Africa? That's not stopping many from trying to ban DDT worldwide.
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Since we are going to run out of fossil fuels, we better have to. And if the burning of those last fossil fuels heats our environment so much that we will have a hard time growing food, what is the use of trying to distribute that non-growing food?
I have seen this argument before. When we do get close to actually running out of fossil fuels (50 years by some estimates), the free market is the best solution for finding answers to the problem. Using the court system to sue oil companies today only slows any progress they will put forth to find a new business model later. If you think companies like Shell or BP are not investing in energy for the future, then you are very naive.
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The courts are a good venue for this kind of thing, especially in the US where politicians are owned by corporations.
Judges are appointed by politicians, and are supposed to decide cases based on law that politicians make.
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judges appointed by politicians doesn't make a country communist. It makes it a bit fascist or totalitarian though.
Re:Big shocker. (Score:4, Insightful)
CO2, soot, lead... Yeah I hold the oil companies responsible. Not least because when it became clear what was happening they were extremely slow to do anything about it, just like tobacco sellers.
Well, technically the oil companies don't produce CO2, soot, or lead. You can blame the power plants, and the car owners for that. Their industry, pumping out oil doesn't produce much more CO2 than many other industries. It's how consumers (power plants, car owners) use the product that cause the CO2. If consumers watered their lawn with oil instead of using it to power their car, they wouldn't release as much CO2. :)
On a more serious note though; for this to be comparable to tobacco the oil companies would have had to know BEFORE the public how harmful oil was- and actively try suppressing the truth. As far as I am aware- oil companies didn't find out before the public- and the public continued to use oil after learning of the dangers. Unlike tobacco who knew about the dangers of their product before the consumers did (and hid that information)- oil companies didn't hide anything. We've known as long as them how CO2 is linked to global warming.
It's also worth pointing out that it's hard to pinpoint how much blame goes to Oil as opposed to coal, deforestation, slash and burn, melting ice causing sequested CO2 and methane to be released.
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Even though they found out about the harm at the same time as consumers did, they then spent vast amounts of money trying to deny the harm and convince people that it wasn't happening with what they knew was bunk.
You could also argue that they failed to do proper research and checks on the harm their products did, because they didn't want to be told it was bad.
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On a more serious note though; for this to be comparable to tobacco the oil companies would have had to know BEFORE the public how harmful oil was- and actively try suppressing the truth. As far as I am aware- oil companies didn't find out before the public- and the public continued to use oil after learning of the dangers.
That's because you are willfully ignorant [insideclimatenews.org]. You don't want to know the truth. It's just a google search away, but you didn't ask because you didn't want to know. Well, I'm telling you anyway. Do people working for corporations really sell out our future for a cheeseburger? People do. [vox.com]
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CO2, soot, lead... Yeah I hold the oil companies responsible. Not least because when it became clear what was happening they were extremely slow to do anything about it, just like tobacco sellers.
The courts are a good venue for this kind of thing, especially in the US where politicians are owned by corporations.
Not even close [opensecrets.org]
If any group "owns" politicians, it's public-employee unions. Much more so that corporations.
And there are actual facts backing my assertion up.
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You also benefitted immensly from the oil companies, powering the industrial might, and therefore wealth of the West, with a hundred years of technological amd medical wonders.
Balancing this is exactly what elected officials are supposed to do.
Or is The Power of The Vote, the justification to any number of intrusive laws, something only believed in when the instrusion is in accordance with your own desires?
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If you hold the oil companies responsible you will also need to include everyone who has ever used or benefitted by the energy products produced by the corporations. It will be the largest class action lawsuit in history and as usual the only people who could possibly benefit are the lawyers. The use of fossil fuels to power manufacturing and transportation services go back hundreds of years. Those complaining about fossil fuels seem to have no problem driving to their protests or flying to their internatio
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CO2, soot, lead... Yeah I hold the oil companies responsible. Not least because when it became clear what was happening they were extremely slow to do anything about it, just like tobacco sellers.
More importantly, just like the tobacco sellers, they both a) paid for scientific research into the secondary effects of their products which indicated that they did harm, and b) followed this up by claiming that their products didn't have harmful secondary effects (i.e. AGW.) e.g. ExxonMobil [insideclimatenews.org]. They deliberately perpetrated fraud. If the tobacco companies are the standard (which seems reasonable) then they are precisely as guilty, and for all of the same reasons.
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As soon as you found out, I am sure you sold your car, and stopped having anything picked up or delivered on your behalf by gas powered vehicles? Also maybe you are fortunate not to live where you need heat in the winter, or electricity at night.
High horse and all.
If we stopped consuming it they wouldn't be able to make it.
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The EPA has all but been disbanded. Since they've abdicated their responsibility, the courts are what's left.
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Go ahead and go sit a few hours in a closed garage with a car with a running diesel or petrol engine. I DARE you.
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CO2 CO
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CO2 != CO
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even without the CO, the exhaust of cars are killing people (particulates, NOX, ...). Furthermore, the HUGE amount of CO2 released by burning petrol/diesel is increasing the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere of planet earth.
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Do you know what the major cause of Death is?
Living.
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Bad arguments (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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no other choice. The rest of the government doesn't always act in a manner that makes social change feasible.
If society is not ready to change because half of it doesn't want change. That says more about you wanting to force it through the courts than the process to make that change legitimately through the proper channels.
No amount of breathing by humans makes CO2 a pollutant... Exactly how do you think an EPA regulation will deny you access to breathing?
I understand just fine. You are missing the point. Lawsuit claims CO2 is damaging that must be regulated. Court agrees ordering the government to regulate CO2. The EPA creates rules on how much CO2 can be produced by anything that produces CO2. Lawsuit claims too much CO2 is being produced. Cour
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I care more about proper governance than climate change. Notice the argument isn't about the validity of climate change.
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If you think a judge doing this is a good idea, what's your thoughts on what Trump has done to disassemble everything Obama did? Because doing it by the courts has the same failure. What is done by one judge can be undone by another, and what all judges do can be easily undone by congress. It's a poor way to do this because it's so easily undone.
That is utterly false (Score:2, Interesting)
But you do know that people only exhale as much CO2 as the food they eat took from the atmosphere?
I don't tend to "know" things that are false.
CO2 exhalation is a result of a chemical process in our body, and has no relation whatsoever to the amount of whatever we consumed itself consuming CO2. I mean, how on earth to you square your insane belief system with someone on an all-meat diet, where a cow itself exhales CO2 and then we kill the cow and eat it and ourselves produce CO2 in turn? What about someon
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What about someone on an all-water diet for a week or two who continues to exhale CO2?
You burn carbon from fat that you stored earlier when you were eating more than you needed.
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But you do know that people only exhale as much CO2 as the food they eat took from the atmosphere?
I don't tend to "know" things that are false.
CO2 exhalation is a result of a chemical process in our body, and has no relation whatsoever to the amount of whatever we consumed itself consuming CO2. I mean, how on earth to you square your insane belief system with someone on an all-meat diet, where a cow itself exhales CO2 and then we kill the cow and eat it and ourselves produce CO2 in turn? What about someone on an all-water diet for a week or two who continues to exhale CO2?
Talk about anti-science...
If that was true, and every one of the trillions of life forms on earth generated more CO2 by exhaling than it consumed indirectly by consuming other plants or life forms, life would have exhaled itself into extinction by climate change a long, long, long time ago.
... Therefore, when we breathe out, all the carbon dioxide we exhale has already been accounted for. We are simply returnin
All the carbon in our body comes either directly or indirectly from plants, which took it out of the air only recently
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CO2 exhalation is a result of a chemical process in our body, and has no relation whatsoever to the amount of whatever we consumed itself consuming CO2.
What is the input to that chemical process? If you guessed glucose that our bodies derive from the food we eat you'd be right.
What I have found in life is that people who believe anything is a "zero-sum game" are the same kind of naive quacks
You've never even taken a highschool science class before have you? There are literally countless closed systems in our environment.
I have a better one for you: The entire physical process of the universe that governs everything around you is one large zero sum game. The universe is literally the exact opposite of what you think.
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Try again.
Crops are grown using synthetic fertiliizers that rely on the Haber Bosch process to provide the nitrogen compounds. It's an extremely energy intensive process. The crops are further mechanically sown, use synthetic pesticides, and are mechanically harvested, transported and packaged . All of these processes use oil. The same goes for animal feed and caring for animals.
Try actually thinking next time.
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And an explosion of human life was the result.
carbon ultimately comes from plants (Score:2)
Try again.
Crops are grown using synthetic fertiliizers that rely on the Haber Bosch process to provide the nitrogen compounds.
And I never said it wasn't. The question was where does the carbon you exhale come from. The answer is, it originated from plants, who fixed it from the atmosphere.
It did not originate from the fertilizer. The fertilizer provides nitrogen, not carbon.
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/ facepalm
Yes because all the steps and processes needed to make carbon something edible don't count. You might as well ignore the CO2 released from cooking food.
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The main issue is that all of this carbon has been slowly trapped in the earth over the last hundreds of millions of years, until we started releasing it at an alarming rate within the last few hundred years. That's obviously going to have a significant affect on the environment.
This is a fairly long read, but worth it. At least checkout "The Story of Energy" [waitbutwhy.com] section.
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You miss the point of "nuance" and "technicalities of jurisprudence". The idiocy is on you. If you use the courts, which are more services toward nuanced individual cases, to proclaim social agendas what will happen is like the example I gave. Large sweeping rulings that more than the intended outcome.
Do you have any example of a judicial exception being created that wasn't overturned by another court? Why would some producers of a pollutant not be regulated by a court ruling that says that pollutant is dam
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But what about the methane that people produce?
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Where is the EPA reg that treats short cycle CO2 differently from old CO2?
Your right, but right about an irrelevant point.
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Hey look, it's the same argument used for poor working conditions and a low minimum wage!
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Ugh. Maybe you missed the author of that particular article. Address the argument and not the location where it resides because that authors opinion is orders of magnitude more important than yours.
It make sense... However. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Tobacco had product liability, because it actually causes damage to the health of the person who purchased and used it, which they deceptively concealed to keep people from buying it. Petrol use doesn't have any harmful side effects for the user
well, yeah (Score:2)
And physics questions (Score:2)
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....
Re:And physics questions (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Suing them was unethical anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
(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.)
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It's a shame we don't have teleportation spells...
Spoken like a true muggle.
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You're leaving out an important point. The oil companies knew very well that their product was harmful, but continued to publicly deny it and spend lots of money to discredit anyone who claimed it was. That was a key argument in the lawsuit. Selling a product that causes both harms and benefits is legal, as long as you're honest about it. Selling a product that you know causes harm, but insisting that it doesn't and trying hard to discredit anyone who reveals the truth, even though you know they're righ
Not a fan of big oil, but this is a good ruling (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
That's it (Score:2)
That's really it! (Score:2)
I'm mostly there with solar power and electric cars. My lawn mower and snow blower are next. Eliminating plastic is beyond me, but I do try to minimize my use when it's practical.
If your roof isn't shaded by trees, then solar electricity probably makes sense, especially if your state offers any sort of incentive program. A few states have anti-solar programs (Florida) or really cheap electricity (Idaho), but even without incentives, it's becoming cost effective in many areas.
If you drive under 100 miles
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Most electric snow blowers are single stage. The reviews I see on Amazon tend to fall into two categories: If it's the first snow blower someone has bought, they give it five stars. If it's replacing a two-stage gas blower, it gets one star. My impression is that they just won't do the job when I have a three-foot packed wall at the end of my driveway from the snow plow.
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Most areas do not make financial sense to put up solar panels, there are only 12 states where panels out perform the S&P500, half the states can't out perform US treasury bonds over 30 years. Solar is not ready for mass adoption until it can pull its weight for the majority of home owners.
Stop using Oil then! (Score:2)
By all means live an Amish 15th Century technology lifestyle!
I think I will keep my lifestyle with vaccinations and Internal Combustion engines that can get me anywhere in the world in about 24 Hours. You know like Al Gore and all the other high living Global Climate "Experts."
Our entire economy & way of life is powred by (Score:2, Insightful)
We are *all* guilty.
Singling out the folks that dig the stuff out of the ground, clean it up, and bring it to the rest of us is just scapegoating.
Not only oil companies (Score:2)
My favourite comment from the nutjobs (Score:2, Informative)
The cities attorney was quoted as saying:
"Our litigation forced a public court proceeding on climate science, and now these companies can no longer deny it is real and valid."
I actually wonder who he's referring to. BP a major investor in Wind power in the USA, who's CEO is pushing for a price to be put on carbon? Royal Dutch Shell a major investor in electric charging infrastructure? Chevron with their work on Solar power? Conoco Phillips who have published on their homepage: "We recognize that human acti
Re: Consistent (Score:3, Funny)
No, cow flatulence is.
You can't pick on coal, China and the third-world rely on it, that would be racist.
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Specific fossil fuels are being promoted as environmentally responsible, e.g. natural gas is better than gasoline is better than coal and dung.
Re:Consistent (Score:5, Informative)
> 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.
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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.
Not in the next century. If we keep on adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, in the long term, yes.
Ice caps aren't a permanent feature of the planet. They can very well melt.
Gradual [Re:Consistent] (Score:2)
So I must point out that if we just dump fossil fuels today, everybody, across the board, we are going to be in a world of hurt
Which is an argument for a gradual replacement of power supplies with more sustainable ones, rather than abruptly dynamiting all the existing power plants and outlawing internal combustion engines. But gradual replacement is exactly what we are doing. Nobody is advocating an abrupt "stop all fossil fuel use immediately right now." So I'm not sure what your point is.
Re:Lock Him Up (Score:4, Funny)
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!
Re: Lock Him Up (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
You think 'Big Oil' is a thing, like a group that holds meetings and makes decisions.
There was even a documentary [wikipedia.org] about that selfsame group trying to influence US energy policy in the early '90s. They even had an official meeting.
Memo [Re: Lock Him Up] (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org].
In a 1998 memo [climatefiles.com], they outlined their "action plan" [insideclimatenews.org] 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 [insideclimatenews.org].)
(news article here [nytimes.com].)
Many sources [Re:Memo [Re: Lock Him Up]] (Score:4, Informative)
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 [nytimes.com], as a mainstream media source, but if you don't like those, I can send you a few dozen other [archive.org] links [eenews.net] to the file [archive.org]. Or you could just google it. [google.com]
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.
Re: Lock Him Up (Score:2, Insightful)
I love this logic - he must be on the payroll of 'big oil' to reach that conclusion, otherwise my long-held beliefs are wrong! it's right up there with 'the Russians threw the election, otherwise I have to admit that Hillary was a lousy candidate.
Re:Lock Him Up (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] to the Latin speakers.
Please learn about how the judiciary works before you spew misinformation.
So you want jackasses to decide policy? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
It sounds like you didn't read the article at all. Or even the summary for that matter.
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.
I see no such statement in the article. What are you talking about?
One more example of why judges should be required to accept the input of nonlegals like, you know, scientists and software professionals.
He did. The article says:
Alsup brought in the world's leading experts on climate change at an unusual hearing in March that he said was intended to educate him about the science behind the Earth's warming.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
So to be clear regardless if you think the judge actually is capable of doing his job, the fact he correctly states that it's the government's job to determine policy makes him in the pocket of an oil company or Russia?
Do you have a newsletter I could subscribe to?
One more example of why judges should be required to accept the input of nonlegals like, you know, scientists and software professionals.
So as a matter of interest, the fact that the judge clearly acknowledged the link between global warming and CO2 which is the only nonlegal aspect of this case, what would have changed? Do you think the presence of a scientists telling the judge s