California Files Major Lawsuit Against Top Oil Companies
The climate change besotted Democrats in California are at it again, working to destroy oil companies, this time with a lawsuit alleging that the energy companies have “misled” people about global warming.
A description of the lawsuit posted on leftist Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s website reads like a climate change screed written by Greta Thunberg or some left-wing polemicist rather than a lawyer.
“Oil executives deceived the public for decades about how fossil fuels are hurting our health and destroying our planet, protecting their own profits while sticking taxpayers with the bill for the damages,” the description reads. “California is suing these big polluters to hold them accountable for their decades of deception, cover-up, and billions of dollars in harm done to our state.”
The left coast state has filed its lawsuit in San Francisco County Superior Court against oil companies including Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron, along with the oil industry’s chief lobbying organization, the American Petroleum Institute.
“Oil and gas companies have privately known the truth for decades — that the burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change — but have fed us lies and mistruths to further their record-breaking profits at the expense of our environment. Enough is enough,” said Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, according to NPR.
Newsom’s office says that the lawsuit was launched after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that these nuisance lawsuits against oil companies should remain in state courts instead of being moved to federal courts, Politico reported.
“All these cases got tied up in years of procedural wrangling; oil companies doing everything they could to drag their feet,” Newsom spokesman Alex Stack said. The “Supreme Court finally let these cases go forward this spring — the state as a whole is joining cities and counties.”
Naturally, left-wing non-governmental organizations are thrilled with this latest attack on Big Oil.
“California’s decision to take Big Oil companies to court is a watershed moment in the rapidly expanding legal fight to hold major polluters accountable for decades of climate lies,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, NPR reported.
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“Whether it’s fires, droughts, extreme heat, or sea-level rise, Californians have been living in a climate emergency caused by the fossil fuel industry, and now the state is taking decisive action to make those polluters pay,” Wiles exclaimed without providing evidence that oil caused any of these woes.
One of the demands in the state’s lawsuit is that the oil companies must set up a massive fund to help states recover from “extreme weather events” and to pay to help cities prepare for future effects of climate change.
The lawsuit makes all sorts of accusations, such as the claim that decades ago the oil companies were secretly telling its top researchers and executives that greenhouse gas production was going to destroy the earth.
“Defendants’ own scientists knew as early as the 1950s that these climate impacts would be catastrophic, and that there was only a narrow window of time in which communities and governments could take action before the consequences became catastrophic,” the lawsuit states.
But as climate info website Watts Up With That shows, internal memos from as late as 1982 issued by oil companies were saying that there is no unambiguous evidence that the earth is warming.
On top of that, there were scientists in the 1980s who were still claiming the earth was cooling, not warming, so global warming as a concept wasn’t even accepted as axiomatic by the “1950s” as the California lawsuit alleges.
After reading over the lawsuit, though, there seems to be one glaring inconsistency. Even as California Democrats are railing at the evils of using fossil fuels, and claiming that oil is destroying the planet, the lawsuit only demands billions in funding for the pet climate projects being floated by California Democrats instead of demanding that the oil companies cease selling their product in California.
One would think that if oil was all that evil, money would be the least of California’s demands. And yet, there is no call at all for Big Oil to shut down in California. It seems like a glaring inconsistency that speaks to Democrats simply grabbing for cash instead of living up to their supposed principles.
Finally, it is also interesting that the state has taken no responsibility for the wildfires that have pumped all sorts of greenhouse gases into the air thanks to their poor land management policies or their failed strategies to deal with the drought conditions. Instead, state officials are pinning all the blame on fossil fuel companies.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
