Just because you help carry the guy you beat up within an inch of his life to the ambulance, that doesn’t mean you’re not guilty of aggravated assault or attempted manslaughter. Just because Big Oil talks about participating in the move toward Net Zero doesn’t relieve their decades long efforts to retard transition to renewable and non-carbon energy, even if you assume that now Big Oil is acting in good faith.

Of course, the ever-piling evidence shows they still are not acting in good faith. Take the statements made by oil executives at CERAWeek last week. If you aren’t familiar with CERAWeek, produced by S&P Global, the meeting is known as “the industry’s Super Bowl,” at least in the CNBC article, “Big Oil’s green-bashing stokes backlash as campaigners hit out at ‘talking points from the 1970s’,” published on March 20, 2024, by Sam Meredith. The meeting in early March did seem a lot like a pep rally, with CEO after CEO of Big Oil’s infamous fleet of mega-corporations making the argument that fossil fuel is here to stay and that green energy transition is behind schedule and anemic. The gloating tone of the comments is hard to avoid.

It isn’t that Big Oil is wrong in claiming the world still needs fossil fuels. Certainly, the world can’t immediately stop using coal, oil, and natural gas to produce energy, because the decarbonized energy transition is far from complete and we’ll be using fossil fuels to help power this transition. In the best case scenario, however, we’d be using less and less fossil fuels as more and more non-carbon energy alternatives take over, but there’s likely increases for electricity ahead—electrify everything programs, and AI and bitcoin and other growing data farms, for example—and that makes it more likely we’ll be using fossil fuels for that much longer as the transition gets in place, unfortunately.

Of course, what is particularly galling is that the world would be that much closer to not needing fossil fuels for energy if Big Oil hadn’t spent decades playing a deny and delay game with climate change and renewable energy solutions. The record of Big Oil’s culpability seems ever clearer by the moment, and that despite all the dark money feints and smokescreens following the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. The oil-boosterism of the recent CERAWeek event is simply unseemly, but then what else would one expect from an industrial sector that has known about the harm their products present even while the same industry sector has lied about the harm so that their usual business can continue as usual.

The concept of corporations’ sole responsibility being maximizing profits for shareholders is often cited as excusing this kind of behavior, but this concept is a relatively new position brought to the world by rise of neo-liberal capitalism starting at last century’s midpoint. The neoliberalism position can be reduced to its core argument that greed is good. Even on the face of it, this position is absurd. Corporations exist within a larger context of civilization and all the infrastructure civilization provides that makes the existence and health of the corporations possible, from transportation infrastructure to education to law, to name just a few building blocks in play. ExxonMobil without civilization and the markets and people made available by civilization would basically be an oily mud pit in the ground. Yes, fossil fuels have been instrumental in the emergence of developed nations, but let’s not have the tail wag the dog.

But of course, the tail of fossil fuel profits has been and continues wagging the dog of developed nations and the world at large, where climate change—a product largely of humans’ exploding use of fossil fuels over the last 150 years—threatens environmental collapse if not acted on sufficiently quickly and thoroughly. Increasingly rising world temperature mortally threatens hundreds of millions and even billions of people if unchecked. Excessive heat not only kills humans directly, but the collapse of eco-systems means the collapse of food production, to name just one of many essential requirements of human existence threatened by global warming.

And, no, I’m not a panicker. The pooch we’ve screwed to date likely remains addressable if action on climate change—which means action on shifting away from fossil fuels—happens fast enough, and there is a clear understanding of the potential to “electrify everything” and there are already proven economically sound clean power generation technologies in place to bring down carbon emissions. 2022 saw a small drop in carbon emissions in the United States, although, unfortunately, overall carbon emissions continues to rise world-wide. The point is that we know what to do about climate change and we have the means to do what needs to be done, and part of that knowledge is that Big Oil is an active barrier to the necessary work ahead. All the arguments from the fossil fuel sector that it needs growth—more exploration, more drilling, more capacity—flies in the face of reality. Yes, we still need fossil fuels. No, we don’t need more than we already have considering the phaseout of fossil fuels for power generation must take place as soon as possible over the next couple of decades.

So, what do we do with Big Oil and its self-serving (albeit, short-sighted) idea that the transition to clean energy isn’t, indeed, urgent? Maybe one thing we should do is treat Big Oil as the criminal. This option for supporting climate change progress seems to be picking up momentum.

You’ll find many news reports on the growing number of states and cities suing Big Oil.  The Conversation is just one such, and it ran an article in May 23, 2023 titled, “More than two dozen cities and states are suing Big Oil over climate change – they just got a boost from the US Supreme Court.”

 

Evidence is a funny thing. According to McCready Law Group, cited here to avoid any charges of plagiarism, “The term ‘evidence’ in a criminal trial involves any form of proof legally presented at trial – permitted by the judge – to prove or disprove an alleged fact about the case. Evidence aims to convince the court or jury of the points at issue.” Here’s one snippet from this article (with active reference links left in):

Local and state governments that are suing want to hold the major oil companies responsible for the costs of responding to disasters that scientists are increasingly able to attribute to climate disruption and tie back to the fossil fuel industry. Several of the plaintiffs accuse the companies of lying to the public about their products’ risks in violation of state or local consumer protection laws that prohibit false advertising.

So far, the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has declined to hear challenges to some of these lawsuits, although I’m hardly convinced that this now means clear sailing for such cases, as much as I would love to have evidence of Big Oil’s complicity in denying climate change and delaying ameliorative action show up in the court proceedings. After all, one of the wondrous elements of a court case is discovery, a phase of the proceedings described in Massachusetts Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 26(b)(1) as follows:

Parties may obtain discovery regarding any matter, not privileged, which is relevant to the subject matter involved in the pending action, whether it relates to the claim or defense of the party seeking discovery or to the claim or defense of any other party, including the existence, description, nature, custody, condition and location of any books, documents, or other tangible things and the identity and location of persons having knowledge of any discoverable matter. It is not ground for objection that the information sought will be inadmissible at the trial if the information sought appears reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence.

My nonlegal advice, though, is don’t hold your breath waiting for what is already well-known—such as the admissions on the part of Exxon scientists reporting the negative consequences of fossil fuel use contributing to global warming, back in the 1970s—to be entered into evidence. Before this happens, proposed evidence has to pass the evidentiary rigors of a court, and while we’re likely to see smooth enough sailing for this in lower courts, there remains a very good possibility that our current SCOTUS has other masters than the truth. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, believes that SCOTUS has been captured by special interests, and those special interests clearly include Big Oil. If you enjoy real-life whodunnits, I urge you to watch “The Scheme,” a many-part series of the Senator’s speeches from the Senate floor, available through C-SPAN and YouTube. The speeches build a detailed and name-filled case that today’s SCOTUS has been bought and how the buyers’ get their money’s worth. If you don’t think this would have anything to do with efforts to make progress against climate change, well, you haven’t been paying attention.

These days the nature of Big Oil’s full court press to keep business as usual has taken on hallucinatory features that would have George Orwell cursing himself for lack of imagination. The Guardian, on March 9, 2024, published a story titled “Oil industry has sought to block state backing for green tech since 1960s,” and running the deck, “Research shows industry lobbying against support for solar panels and electric cars while enjoying subsidies itself.”

There will be several central issues to resolve in any of the current or future suits against Big Oil, one of which may be the relevance of early (1960s-1970s) oil corporate funded research into the connection between fossil fuels and greenhouse gases/global warming. I can hear the argument: “Your honor, Exxon was acting as a responsible member of society in looking at potential downsides to our products, but while some of our researchers concluded there was a connection of fossil fuels and global warming, the scientific consensus of the day was that such conclusions were only theory and thus provided no basis for business decisions that could affect our responsibilities not only to our shareholders, but which potentially could threaten the larger economy of the country and undermine national security.”

On the other hand, consider that these fossil fuels corporations have spent big money lobbying against energy alternatives and technology such as electric cars and spent big money in public campaigns to deny the issue of global warming and fossil fuels, or, more recently, to confuse the issue now that global warming tied to fossil fuels is too well established by science. These sort of campaigns—some of which go back to the 1970s—directly implicate Big Oil in what can be argued—and, in my view, should be argued—as crimes against humanity.