Think Progress has an interesting article about whether ExxonMobil should be held liable for RICO violations. The claim is that ExxonMobil, and possibly others, knew as far back as 1977 that carbon released by burning fossil fuels would heat the planet and that, in spite of this knowledge, funded deliberate disinformation campaigns denying anthropogenic climate change.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/10/20/3713761/exxon-climate-denial/
What, exactly, are the scientifically proven negative impacts on US citizens by this product today. Today. Not what scientists are projecting for the future, but today. How many people in the US can scientists prove have been harmed or killed by climate change?
That seems to me to be the challenge and the difference between this and tobacco.
How is disinformation racketeering, corruption, or influence? Just go after them for bribing politicians, and the politicians while you’re at it.
Good points. Maybe some sort of statistical case could be made regarding some extreme weather events? Nobody can absolutely prove that *their *lung cancer was caused by tobacco.
But that seems a lot shakier than the tobacco cases.
I suppose it could be argued that they were not only engaging in practices that they believed to be harmful, but they were also engaged in attempting to cover it up.
Is there proof of bribery?
…so people would have stopped driving their cars had this info come out???
Probably not, but they might have tried to get more fuel-efficient ones.
Maybe without the disinformation campaign, the people may have pushed the government to research and support alternative sources of energy.
In any case, I don’t see how that would matter in a legal case. They were actively preventing people from getting information about something that was a danger to their well being. Whether people would have acted on that information is secondary.
Just on the liability of coastal cities dealing with the ocean rise should be enough to justify a lawsuit based on or similar to the RICO law.
In this case I think people do not need to die, but then I become more pessimistic when I consider the current levels of Xenophobia in many nations that will cause many to die when they are forced out of their countries; and well, there are more than a few that do think that most of the people coming here are just criminals and murderers.
Who said anything about people dying? You’ll never get a conviction on the idea that climate change, and not natural weather variation, has actually caused measurable harm to US citizens today. You can link to any number of articles that speculate about the causes of weather events, but “heat waves and heavy downpours” are not actionable offenses, as those are documented events from centuries past.
That is not to say that 50 years hence you might have a case, but now? Not a chance.
Dr. Buster, and let me remind you that you are under oath, can you state, beyond a reasonable doubt, that any given weather event has been due to Climate Change caused by disinformation from oil companies? And again, you are under oath.
The attorney who won the racketeering case against tobacco companies thinks that it’s worth pursuing, so she must think it could be winnable, or maybe she thinks that they’d settle rather than have their research in the public spotlight. Who knows what discovery could turn up?
Could they prove that any given case of lung cancer was due to smoking?
Keep in mind that she’s not talking about suing them for damages to cities or individuals or whatever (at least I don’t think she is). What she’s talking about is racketeering charges, a different thing.
She didn’t get the tobacco companies for damages to smokers, she got them for racketeering. Apparently some of their activities in trying to cover up the dangers of smoking opened them up to RICO charges somehow.
She’s probably thinking of something similar with ExxonMobil and the others.
Just what illegal activities have the oil companies engaged? The only reason they won the tobacco lawsuits is because big tobacco settled.
That is in any case irrelevant, you are using the same excuse as the tobacco companies (and it did not work for them), the point was that statistically speaking we are already making things worse (and all that increase in water vapor and energy has to go somewhere once something like a hurricane comes along) and it is clear that the fossil fuel companies did know what they were doing when they funded disinformation and supported politicians that only follow the scientists that today are in their payroll.
Two points.
First, I generally oppose RICO laws because they’re so widely abused. I’m not going to be hypocritical and call for their use now.
Second, while I can easily believe that oil companies have been immoral, I doubt they’ve done anything illegal. Spreading disinformation is not a crime.
Maybe they’ve bribed people?
Maybe there are things that they’d rather not have come out and will settle to prevent them coming out? I don’t know, but this apparently very competent attorney thinks it’s worth pursuing.
Lying under oath can lead a corporation to that indeed.
Have any fossil fuel company representatives lied under oath about climate change? That’s not a rhetorical question, I’m genuinely curious. Have they ever had to testify before Congress about it?
One of the best items that the discovery step against the Tobacco companies and freedom of information requests gave us was a note from an executive talking about their scientist Dr. Seitz being no longer reliable as he was clearly losing his mind.
That did not stop the doctor from getting funding at his George Marshall Institute for delivering more “science” that denied that cigarettes were harmful and then jumped to help fossil fuel corporations to deny that they were making a harmful product.