Shouldn't the cities be suing individuals who use the fuels? The oil companies are merely manufacturing a product that can be used, it's the responsibility of end-users for the destruction they cause.
The equivalent would be states suing gun companies for manufacturing handguns that are used in crimes, even though those same guns are used by police officers to uphold the law.
Don't energy companies produce energy resources that help impoverished people obtain clean drinking water and protect against environmental threats?
At least in the case of Exxon, the company actively engaged in a misinformation campaign regarding climate change and its link to oil. This is more similar to how the tobacco companies operated in regards to cancer.
Interestingly, once the states started getting large payments from the tobacco company settlement, they became interested in the long-term health of those companies.
No. Exxon knew what was happening since the 70s and pumped propaganda and fake research to fool the public into believing otherwise.
We have governments and companies with experts to allow normal people to just live their lives. When companies act in bad faith we need to hit them hard. My main problem with capitalism is that we're not hitting the same shareholders that existed back when all these shenanigans were going on.
Years ago governments tried suing gun manufacturers for handguns used in crimes. To my knowledge though they've never sued automakers for making get-away cars.
There have been several lawsuits filed against gun companies for making legal weapons. I'm not aware of any actually ending in a judgement against the company, but I know a few have ended in settlements. It was a minor political issue when Congress gave handgun companies immunity against some of those suits when George W. Bush was president.
* "The legal complaints also cite an internal Exxon document from 1982. Its authors predicted that global temperatures will rise 3 degrees Celsius before the century ends."
* "The defendants “promoted fossil fuels and fossil fuel products for unlimited use in massive quantities with knowledge of the hazard that such use would create,” the San Francisco suit says."
Can't wait for gaz stations to be like cigarette packaging/advertising (in most of the western world except the US): un-branded and with large warnings about the health/environmental consequences.
If I were an Exxon exec, I’d be less worried about lawsuits, and more worried about future lynchings by an enraged and suffering world populace. In particular, when a particular kind of person connects the dots between fossil fuels, climate change, and mass migration they’re going to flip.
Perhaps, but why is it only Exxon's fault, and not everyone who uses any form of energy based on fossil fuels? If things get that bad, I'm guessing the entire industrialized world is going to be blamed.
exxon has a hell of a lot more power than one single individual. also barring some wild off-the-grid alt lifestyle pretty much everyone relies on fossil fuels
Oakland and SF could start by banning all gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel in their jurisdictions. See how that works out. Can't we just get an international CO2 tax and slowly ratchet it up to the level to stop CO2 in the atmosphere from going up? Exxon wants it. And it looks like China would be on-board (trust but verify). Maybe India too and we are all set.
Ah but if we're honest the people really at fault is the capitalist society demanding labor for survival, even when there is no meaningful labor left to be done.
Have we suffered more or less since fossil fuels? One could argue that fossil fuels have reduced suffering. Relief supplies aren’t delivered by sailboat.
> "The legal complaints also cite an internal Exxon document from 1982. Its authors predicted that global temperatures will rise 3 degrees Celsius before the century ends."
No it only raised about 1C, but the rate of temperature increase has doubled. So like most predictions of the future, you get some things right and some things wrong. The important component though is that the authors did notice a trend.
This is pretty classic nuisance extortion through the courts. What were the oil companies meant to do in order to avoid this lawsuit? Shut down their entire businesses? So that instead Oakland could sue the new oil companies that would inevitably spring up, since our entire civilization still runs on the stuff?
Also, though the article doesn't say it outright, it looks as if there's not even given any evidence of current damages, just hundred-year-out projections. (And the record of long-term predictions in this domain is certainly not precise enough to base legal arguments on.) So they're meant to pay now for hypothetical damages that may happen later, as punishment for providing the energy that runs our whole society. Okay?
If I make a device that lets half of society sit on its ass for 100 years then murders everyone, I think the costs should be factored in by sueing me before everyone is dead. But maybe that's just me.
Every technology has negatives that companies try to turn into externalities. The ones that hurt their non-customers are the most egregious and should be subject to the highest corrections. Hardly a new theory.
To give an example, we should be paying more for many electronics as the result of suits against most existing companies for not dealing with Tantalum sourcing.
This is the kind of attitude that disturbs me about recent journalism and what appears to be the dominant opinion in the US.
Getting quantitative results is entirely useless if you don't want to think about the subjective qualitative reasons we thought some arbitrary metric might matter and how they might be limited. Having a high GDP or salary is about raising your quality of life and options. If you are actively prevented from living all sorts of other lives simply because they are not as profitable then you are poorer than the wild man.
So I can create antisocial companies that hurt more than they help and take/distribute profits until damning evidence is assembled using public resources, then pay back a small portion from whatever I couldn't get off my book value?
I'd say that's giving organizations rights in civil matters that only are supposed to apply to individuals in criminal ones. The end result is thousands of companies actively trying to kill us and manipulate evidence and politics for much higher profits than the ones doing net positive work.
You're presuming guilt before guilt has been established.
Why do companies make profit? It's because they're offering a product or service that people buy. Why do people buy the product or service? It's because the value they get from the product outweighs the cost. What this really means is that--- all successful companies are doing social good, simply by being in business. If a company is making a big profit, they're probably doing so by providing much more value in their product than what they are charging.
The people who buy stolen goods also get more value then they spend, so all thieves are inherently good?
Some companies produce more good than bad. Some companies produce more bad than good, but the bad is primarily not affecting their customers. The latter is inherently easier which is why civil courts must be eternally vigilant.
Thieves are using force or fraud, and that's obviously wrong.
I agree that we should include the negative externalities in any product, and that can be done by adding taxes to products. And that we should have a healthy civil court system. And I agree that companies often get to settle for far too little. But the way you phrased your previous comment was _really_ putting the carriage before the horse.
This law suit is absolutely ridiculous. What's next, let's sue farmers for farming cows that belch methane into the atmosphere? Or how about we sue all parents for creating people, since people create so much environmental damage. No matter where you stand on the policy of climate change, this law suit sets a dangerous presedent: Using the courts to afflict political change that should be done through other means.
I'm all for reducing climate change. But there are ways to do that. First of all, get rid of all the oil subsidies! That's the first thing that should be done. Then, tax the oil industry and others pollutants proportionately to the amount of climate change produced, perhaps measured by the amount of resultant Co2.
I'm just here to play devils advocate, I don't know how I feel about this suite.
That said, oil companies have known about the effects of climate change for a while, have known that their products cause it, and then with that knowledge funded climate change disinformation campaigns to persuade public policy.
You can liken it to a drug company knowing about the effects of thermeldahyde on pregnant women, but still pushing it as a cure for morning sickness.
Yes, but the cities of Oakland and SF use fossil fuels and energy made from fossil fuels, correct? The harm isn't in extracting the oil from the ground, it's in burning it. There are a whole host of people guilty of that, including everyone who puts fuel into their internal combustion powered car and turns the thing on.
Yes, however the confounding factor is that the large oil companies have spent a lot of money convincing people that these actions are harmless, despite internal data saying otherwise. In a world where these companies kept their mouth shut about climate research, then I don't see how they'd be at fault.
Over a period of how many years? If it's been, say 2-5 years, is that enough time for us to say "they've known and done nothing about it" effectively? Or are we just whining because we like to bitch?
If oil was the only cause of climate change perhaps there would be an argument. But what next? Suing Iceland over volcanic eruptions? Suing lumber companies for cutting down trees? It has become absurd. Climate change is big business. Case in point: financially strapped Oakland wants to get paid. How to do that? It’s just like Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition’s shakedown of corporations: “donate” or we’ll call you racist and picket your business.
When the solution to climate change is “pay me” then I am skeptical. Perhaps the San Fran area ought to immediately ban all gasoline and diesel sales and close all highways to non electric vehicles. And close the shipping port. And the airport.
No, they won’t do that because this isn’t about some immediate threat, this is about getting paid. As long as there is a single gasoline station in the Bay Area, Oakland and friends are doing nothing more that leveraging FUD to get paid.
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Did you see the new way of packaging these that doesn't require a pipeline? Interesting stuff, right? Let's fund that instead of the pipeline method and we can all stop bitching about oil spills!
"A while" being defined as what? 5 years, 10, 15, 20? I don't think that companies this large (and dependent on their product) can change their business plan in whatever your contrived timeframe is. I'm not defending the oil companies, but I defend the cost of change, the time to do it, and the demands still upon them to produce their main product: oil.
Can we expect the companies to shift production to something other than oil? In fact, as we became more and more aware of human-influenced climate change, we LEARNED what caused the problem. It's easy to look back on when we first really determined humans and the biggest cause of climate change, and judge them based on what we know NOW. Taking 2017 knowledge and applying it to 1997 by saying "they've had a long time to fix this" is disingenuous armchair quarterbacking at worst.
Isn't that the exact point of a free market? It only works if we have a method of handling externalities, the one our society has chosen is the courts. Politics don't even have to get involved. Your company ruined my air, now pay me; your company ruined my beachfront property, now pay me.
Farting cows ruin the air. A baby exhaling ruins the air. Volcanos ruin the air. What percentage of temperature is directly and certainly caused by oil? Not “50 years from now” but right now. You can’t sue for something that hasn’t happened yet. There’s a thing called standing. Also, you can’t prove a harm happened until it actually happened. This isn’t pre-crime.
Well, you can't sue a volcano, and a baby exhaling does definitely not ruin the air in any significant sense. Cows do, though—we should definitely sue people raising cows for ruining it for everyone.
Yeah, babies exhaling (and all people too) are producing CO2 which is a greenhouse gas. So, yeah, it is significant enough to pay attention to. However, without killing off a bunch of people we can't eliminate this problem. So, I suppose it's easier to sue farmers and oil companies than individuals - let's all get on board! yay!
This is a joke. You need standing to sue. You can’t sue unless you have actually suffered a harm.
The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld a lower court ruling on Crawford et al concerning FATCA; the 6th Circut overturned the precedent set by Susan B Anthony List v. Driehaus by adding a heightened requirement for standing; harm doesn’t need to just be credible to give rise to standing, it has to be credible AND certain.
Interestingly the recent 6th Circuit decision on Crawford gutted Roe v. Wade as well — essentially making the standing of any woman suing doubtful. Crawford rewrote the standing requirements of Roe v. Wade — and if applied to this current case, the cities will have the case thrown out because a harm from rising sea levels might be credible, but it definitely isn’t certain. That seas levels will rise at all is credible but also not certain. And beyond standing, the question is: did the oil company cause the harm? It could be argued that if an oil company caused a harm by supplying oil, Oakland and San Fran harmed themselves by using gasoline and oil for years and years themselves. So who is culpable? The addict or the dealer? How about city building codes that didn’t properly address the credible harm from rising seas? If such a harm were known and Oakland et al chose to ignore it and continue to issue building permits, then it casts doubt as to the credibility of that harm. If they issued a construction permit while being knowledgeable of the harm, they are negligent; if they don’t actually think it’s a harm enough to change building codes, then it’s obviously not harm enough to get paid by oil companies.
I realize that the 6th Circuit doesn’t apply to California, since they are in the 9th, but it’s highly likely Elena Kagen will grant Cert to the Crawford case — a case that’s going to have an incredible effect on standing requirements for lawsuits such as these.
I'm not sure that's a reasonable comparison. If Coke and Krispy Kreme had research 50 years ago that showed the link between their products and diabetes and then funded misinformation and contradictory research for the following decades to convince people otherwise it would seem warranted to sue them?
> If Coke ... had research 50 years ago that showed the link between their products and diabetes and then funded misinformation and contradictory research for the following decades
do you honestly believe this isn't the case? where do you think low fat marketing and all of the insanely bad public health fallout came from? it's bought and paid for by the sugar industry.
having said that, no, i don't think we should sue them, what's the point of that? people like eating crap and medical care is still privatized.
There was a case of somebody suing McDonalds with the claims "that the combined effect of McDonald's various promotional representations ... was to create the false impression that its food products were nutritionally beneficial and part of a healthy lifestyle if consumed daily" and "that its use of certain additives and the manner of its food processing rendered certain of its foods substantially less healthy than represented" ( http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-2nd-circuit/1181336.html ). The suit was dismissed because the lawyers who wrote the complaint didn't claim that the affected customers actually believed the advertisements.
Nice consistent trend going back 167 years. 1.94mm/year, +/- 0.19mm, for as long as we have been keeping records.
There is NO increase in the rate of sea level rise here, or anywhere in the US, that is above long-run trends going back to the start of record keeping. A quick glance at official government data will prove it. In fact, many West Coast stations (as well as Hawaii), show a decrease in sea level, due to continental rebound and volcanic rise.
No increase in the rate does not mean no increase. Clearly there is an increase. You want a hockey stick? Wait for Greenland to melt. You may well live to see that.
Unless you build your house less than 18 inches above sea level, you will not live long enough to have the long-run trend in sea level rise affect where you live.
Humans have been dealing with and adapting to the natural rate of sea level rise for hundreds of years. Most of Florida, most of Manhattan, almost all of Louisiana, and many, many other highly-populated areas were uninhabitable swampland before we learned to master sea level and the slow, natural rise that has gone on for as long as we have been making scientific measurements.
This panic about rapidly rising seas is nonsense. No Pacific islands have "disappeared" due to sea level rise, nor have any Arctic or Alaskan villages -- those that have seen changes are due to subsidence, not rising seas.
If you want to attribute the 160-year record of slow, steady, 2-3mm/year (2-3cm/decade) natural rise in sea levels to some mysterious factor that has been in place since CO2 levels were below 300, let's hear your theory. Otherwise, there is nothing to be alarmed about.
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it."
Here in reality, I actually live on an island. And our 100-yr flood lines just got moved in, meaning 2000 houses that weren't considered at risk of flooding are now having to deal with flood insurance or lack thereof.
I live on the Mississippi river and they also changed the 100 and 500 year flood lines. In my city alone after remapping the flood lines they added 2000-4000 additional houses to the 100yr flood zone and now required to have flood insurance. I'm in the upper midwest in a location that hasn't flooded in the last 100 or anywhere near close to that. Thats not to say it ever will, but the changing of the flood lines has little to do with sea level rise or lack there of. It has more to do with money than anything.
Whatever the reason for the change in flood zone lines -- less risk tolerance by the insurers, more accurate mapping, over-development, etc. -- it shouldn't be because of a change in the rate of sea level rise, because there isn't one.
Yes, sea levels are constantly rising -- at exactly the same slow, steady, manageable rate they have been rising for as long as we have been measuring them.
Modifying flood insurance coverage maps isn't anything new, either, but any changes being made should not be blamed on an INCREASE in the rate of rise, because there is no INCREASE in the rate of rise.
As far as Greenland goes, this year is beating last year's immense gain in surface ice coverage (just past the middle of summer there), and is on track to do even better than 2016's 5th-biggest-on-record gain in surface ice coverage.
So far this season, Greenland is gaining about 50 gigatons PER DAY in ice -- and the rate of gain is INCREASING.
You can thank Hurricane Nicole for that, and if you're going to talk about it in specifics, you should also mention that this was a rare positive blip in a long-term trend of melting that goes back for decades.
Greenland is losing ice at around 200Gt/year (this is also in your second link). And I don't see where you get the 50Gt/day gains. Unless the graph is lying, it's in Gt/day. Ranging from gains of about 12Gt to losses of about -8Gt over this past year. Quoting your source:
Over the year, it snows more than it melts, but calving
of icebergs also adds to the total mass budget of the ice
sheet. Satellite observations over the last decade show
that the ice sheet is not in balance. The calving loss is
greater than the gain from surface mass balance, and
Greenland is losing mass at about 200 Gt/yr.
It's all fine and dandy to link to data. It certainly makes your post look more legit. But when your links directly contradict your text you should either find other data, or reconsider your stated interpretation.
Greenland usually gains about 350-400 billion tons of ice over the summer, but this year, it gained 550 billion tons and is still gaining.
Temperatures in the center of Greenland's ice sheet never rose above -10C all summer, so it's hard to see how it could have lost any ice. Ice accumulation is nearly two standard deviations above the 1981-2010 mean for the same period, and it is very, very early in the season for such gains.
Both of Greenland's largest glaciers (Jakobshavn and Peterman) are growing at record rates, about 1km/year.
Icepacks and glaciers calve into the sea. That's what they do. It's Nature's way of moving the ice and snow away from the center and back into the ocean. If they didn't, the snowpack/ice would extend to the Equator, which is impossible, or the snowpack would be 5 miles high, which is not the case.
Unless I've misread your link, the 200Gt/year loss is the net between gain from snow and loss from calving. Your claim in your post was that Greenland was gaining 50Gt/day. This was not backed by your link. It literally isn't in there.
If it were true then the chart should show well in excess of 200Gt accumulated for this year so far, and it does not. In September they have so far accumulated 50Gt which is in line with previous years at this point.
Obviously there is an increase - but I think OPs point is that the steady increase has been going on since before we really burned fossil fuels. Wouldn't you expect an increase in the rate if our CO2 production was having a large effect on ocean levels?
~~~~~~~
edit: In response to Jtsummers below, since HN thinks posting more than 3 times per day is too quick:
>If the radius of the balloon increases at a constant rate, the volume of the balloon is increasing at a much greater rate (specifically, proportional to the cube of the increase in radius).
Sure, but we're talking about a numerical value which moved ~20cm over the entire measurement time, compared to the balloon which is 1,270,000,000 cm in diameter. The effects that you mentioned are entirely negligible and probably even beyond the resolution of our measurements.
To maintain a constant in a single dimension (sea level), the rate of water volume increase must be increasing.
Consider by way of analogy a balloon. If the radius of the balloon increases at a constant rate, the volume of the balloon is increasing at a much greater rate (specifically, proportional to the cube of the increase in radius).
By reducing the discussion to merely the sea level, we are ignoring the fact that we must add increasingly large amounts of water to the oceans each year to maintain even a linear rate of growth of sea level.
It should also be noted that since the oceans are not in an arbitrarily deep cylinder, as the oceans rise they will also increase in spread (overtaking what is presently land). If the rate of water going into the oceans were constant, we should expect a sub-linear increase in sea level due to this as well.
EDIT: The only way to have both a constant increase in volume and a constant increase in sea level would be if the oceans stopped at their present boundaries and went straight up sheer walls. I rather doubt this is the case.
Click the time next to my post and you can post a reply to my comment directly even if the reply link doesn't appear.
The balloon was strictly meant as an analogy, but it is illustrative and establishes the upper bound on the rate of increase of water volume.
Regardless of that, showing a linear increase in sea level (constant rate) still necessarily implies a non-constant increase in water volume due to the shape of the "container" for the oceans. Our oceans are not bounded by sheer walls, so it must also be increasing in surface area (spread over land). If it is increasing in surface area and still increasing linearly in sea level [0], then the volume is growing at a super-linear rate. That means each year more water is going into the oceans than the prior year (on average, at least).
[0] One measure from San Francisco, of course, is not enough to demonstrate this as there will be lots of local variations due to many factors.
Thanks for the tip - the reply link did appear, but when I tried to submit my message, I got the 'You're posting too fast' page).
I agree with the logic of your statement - it is perfectly sound. My point was that for a large enough balloon and a small enough rate of increase, the effect will "look" linear(e.g. look at the domain [4.1,4.125] of e^x and determine if it is a linear or exponential function), and our instruments (probably) can't even begin to measure for the effects which you propose.
Up until now, oil and fossil fuels have done way, way more good than harm to humans. They have enabled farming techniques that can produce food for billions of people. They have enabled global distribution of goods. They have enabled mass commercial air travel. They have enabled the greatest lifting of people out of poverty in human history. Abundant, reliable electricity most often powered by fossil fuels enabled the digital revolution.
This suit is very disingenuous and nothing but political grandstanding.
Oil companies have been compensated for those benefits by people paying for oil. They have largely not had to pay for those harms. Allowing them to be sued brings their compensation more in line with what it should be.
The defendants “promoted fossil fuels and fossil fuel products for unlimited use in massive quantities with knowledge of the hazard that such use would create,”
Why not Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota, Boeing...? Hey, I sell gasoline /diesel, one of the many (legally available) fuels, you either buy it or you don't.
This is ridiculous case
- lets sue sugar manufacturing for making sugar, which caused us to gain weight and other over weight related problems.
- heck, lets sue the farmer that grew the sugarcane and beet that were used to manufacture sugar.
The lawyers of Oakland and SF don't drive cars? Or travel on planes?
If the intention is to put pressure on the Oil companies to stop lobbying against clean energy - I don't think, this is the right approach.
This is also done for other things like having tobacco companies or alcohol companies finance health care and treatment programs.
Actually, for oil companies that is not even new. They usually pay quite a bit to account for the local damage they cause to the environment, so adding global damages as well seems very reasonable.
The only weird thing is why Oakland and SF are suing and not, say the federal government or the UN.
For such a bold lawsuit I thought a Scientific American article would surely post some trend data about what sort of sea level rises these specific cities faced. What a let down.
What a waste of taxpayer money.
I am all for moving away from fossil fuels, into renewable energy, but this is just ridiculous.
The oil enabled the developed world we live in today, without oil we would never get to the point where SF is one of the richest cities on earth. If anything the oil companies should sue the city for a share in revenue.
This is actually really nice to see. If they can prove that the oil companies were knowingly causing harm, the entire conversation around climate change will shift.
I'm disappointed in the discussion here so far. When did we become a community of "be nice to the big guys"?
Goes on to show that leftist loonbags are running these cities. I will not explain why this lawsuit is ridiculous, because other commentators have already made that point. I also think that YC is a leftist cesspool.
And at the same time the shoulders of the highways in the Bay Area (280 and 101) are literred with trash, the roads in San Francisco have so many potholes that you need an SUV to drive on them, and South of Market you need to be very careful not to step on piles of used syringes that are seeping off homeless encampments. And yet the city of SF is suing oil companies for rising seas. When will this dysfunctional ideologue city government be voted out, if ever?
This is such bullsh!t. Suing oil companies while, I'm sure, both Oakland and San Francisco benefitted from their wares for sale. In fact, without them, I'm sure both cities would have fared much worse in the past few decades.
This is a classic example of looking a gift horse in the mouth. Putting regulations on oil companies would benefit all, rather than this frivolous lawsuit which would benefit the two cities ONLY.
106 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadThe equivalent would be states suing gun companies for manufacturing handguns that are used in crimes, even though those same guns are used by police officers to uphold the law.
Don't energy companies produce energy resources that help impoverished people obtain clean drinking water and protect against environmental threats?
We have governments and companies with experts to allow normal people to just live their lives. When companies act in bad faith we need to hit them hard. My main problem with capitalism is that we're not hitting the same shareholders that existed back when all these shenanigans were going on.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Lawful_Commerc...
Two key quotes from the article:
* "The legal complaints also cite an internal Exxon document from 1982. Its authors predicted that global temperatures will rise 3 degrees Celsius before the century ends."
* "The defendants “promoted fossil fuels and fossil fuel products for unlimited use in massive quantities with knowledge of the hazard that such use would create,” the San Francisco suit says."
Can't wait for gaz stations to be like cigarette packaging/advertising (in most of the western world except the US): un-branded and with large warnings about the health/environmental consequences.
- big power plants are much more efficient than internal combustion engines, especially as the latter are operated over wide range of speeds
- it's much easier and cheaper to put emission capture tech on a power plant chimney than to put it in cars
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-ucs-electric-...
The power from the grid can be made cleaner too by increasing usage of renewable energy.
That, and social media.
Did it rise 3C?
Also, though the article doesn't say it outright, it looks as if there's not even given any evidence of current damages, just hundred-year-out projections. (And the record of long-term predictions in this domain is certainly not precise enough to base legal arguments on.) So they're meant to pay now for hypothetical damages that may happen later, as punishment for providing the energy that runs our whole society. Okay?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
To give an example, we should be paying more for many electronics as the result of suits against most existing companies for not dealing with Tantalum sourcing.
Getting quantitative results is entirely useless if you don't want to think about the subjective qualitative reasons we thought some arbitrary metric might matter and how they might be limited. Having a high GDP or salary is about raising your quality of life and options. If you are actively prevented from living all sorts of other lives simply because they are not as profitable then you are poorer than the wild man.
I'd say that's giving organizations rights in civil matters that only are supposed to apply to individuals in criminal ones. The end result is thousands of companies actively trying to kill us and manipulate evidence and politics for much higher profits than the ones doing net positive work.
Why do companies make profit? It's because they're offering a product or service that people buy. Why do people buy the product or service? It's because the value they get from the product outweighs the cost. What this really means is that--- all successful companies are doing social good, simply by being in business. If a company is making a big profit, they're probably doing so by providing much more value in their product than what they are charging.
Some companies produce more good than bad. Some companies produce more bad than good, but the bad is primarily not affecting their customers. The latter is inherently easier which is why civil courts must be eternally vigilant.
I agree that we should include the negative externalities in any product, and that can be done by adding taxes to products. And that we should have a healthy civil court system. And I agree that companies often get to settle for far too little. But the way you phrased your previous comment was _really_ putting the carriage before the horse.
I'm all for reducing climate change. But there are ways to do that. First of all, get rid of all the oil subsidies! That's the first thing that should be done. Then, tax the oil industry and others pollutants proportionately to the amount of climate change produced, perhaps measured by the amount of resultant Co2.
That said, oil companies have known about the effects of climate change for a while, have known that their products cause it, and then with that knowledge funded climate change disinformation campaigns to persuade public policy.
You can liken it to a drug company knowing about the effects of thermeldahyde on pregnant women, but still pushing it as a cure for morning sickness.
[1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
When the solution to climate change is “pay me” then I am skeptical. Perhaps the San Fran area ought to immediately ban all gasoline and diesel sales and close all highways to non electric vehicles. And close the shipping port. And the airport.
No, they won’t do that because this isn’t about some immediate threat, this is about getting paid. As long as there is a single gasoline station in the Bay Area, Oakland and friends are doing nothing more that leveraging FUD to get paid.
Remember the name kids, Black Tar Sands Crude: that's Black Tar Sands Crude, the only bitumen-based-oil unnecessarily pumped through multiple countries that's fit for your family!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM
Can we expect the companies to shift production to something other than oil? In fact, as we became more and more aware of human-influenced climate change, we LEARNED what caused the problem. It's easy to look back on when we first really determined humans and the biggest cause of climate change, and judge them based on what we know NOW. Taking 2017 knowledge and applying it to 1997 by saying "they've had a long time to fix this" is disingenuous armchair quarterbacking at worst.
Compare this to the methane emissions of a single cow. You're being reductive to the point of being offensive.
I mean, that'd be amazing. Beef is way too cheap in America; we're just having our grandkids pay it.
The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld a lower court ruling on Crawford et al concerning FATCA; the 6th Circut overturned the precedent set by Susan B Anthony List v. Driehaus by adding a heightened requirement for standing; harm doesn’t need to just be credible to give rise to standing, it has to be credible AND certain.
Interestingly the recent 6th Circuit decision on Crawford gutted Roe v. Wade as well — essentially making the standing of any woman suing doubtful. Crawford rewrote the standing requirements of Roe v. Wade — and if applied to this current case, the cities will have the case thrown out because a harm from rising sea levels might be credible, but it definitely isn’t certain. That seas levels will rise at all is credible but also not certain. And beyond standing, the question is: did the oil company cause the harm? It could be argued that if an oil company caused a harm by supplying oil, Oakland and San Fran harmed themselves by using gasoline and oil for years and years themselves. So who is culpable? The addict or the dealer? How about city building codes that didn’t properly address the credible harm from rising seas? If such a harm were known and Oakland et al chose to ignore it and continue to issue building permits, then it casts doubt as to the credibility of that harm. If they issued a construction permit while being knowledgeable of the harm, they are negligent; if they don’t actually think it’s a harm enough to change building codes, then it’s obviously not harm enough to get paid by oil companies.
I realize that the 6th Circuit doesn’t apply to California, since they are in the 9th, but it’s highly likely Elena Kagen will grant Cert to the Crawford case — a case that’s going to have an incredible effect on standing requirements for lawsuits such as these.
Cars, planes, trains do about 35% of it.
Manufacturing most of the rest.
I find this all rather populist, I'm not sure it's the best approach.
do you honestly believe this isn't the case? where do you think low fat marketing and all of the insanely bad public health fallout came from? it's bought and paid for by the sugar industry.
having said that, no, i don't think we should sue them, what's the point of that? people like eating crap and medical care is still privatized.
Here's the sea level data for San Francisco, CA since Abraham Lincoln was President:
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station....
Nice consistent trend going back 167 years. 1.94mm/year, +/- 0.19mm, for as long as we have been keeping records.
There is NO increase in the rate of sea level rise here, or anywhere in the US, that is above long-run trends going back to the start of record keeping. A quick glance at official government data will prove it. In fact, many West Coast stations (as well as Hawaii), show a decrease in sea level, due to continental rebound and volcanic rise.
Humans have been dealing with and adapting to the natural rate of sea level rise for hundreds of years. Most of Florida, most of Manhattan, almost all of Louisiana, and many, many other highly-populated areas were uninhabitable swampland before we learned to master sea level and the slow, natural rise that has gone on for as long as we have been making scientific measurements.
This panic about rapidly rising seas is nonsense. No Pacific islands have "disappeared" due to sea level rise, nor have any Arctic or Alaskan villages -- those that have seen changes are due to subsidence, not rising seas.
If you want to attribute the 160-year record of slow, steady, 2-3mm/year (2-3cm/decade) natural rise in sea levels to some mysterious factor that has been in place since CO2 levels were below 300, let's hear your theory. Otherwise, there is nothing to be alarmed about.
Here in reality, I actually live on an island. And our 100-yr flood lines just got moved in, meaning 2000 houses that weren't considered at risk of flooding are now having to deal with flood insurance or lack thereof.
Modifying flood insurance coverage maps isn't anything new, either, but any changes being made should not be blamed on an INCREASE in the rate of rise, because there is no INCREASE in the rate of rise.
So far this season, Greenland is gaining about 50 gigatons PER DAY in ice -- and the rate of gain is INCREASING.
https://beta.dmi.dk/uploads/tx_dmidatastore/webservice/b/m/s...
https://beta.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-she...
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card/Report-Card-2016/ArtM...
Greenland is losing ice at around 200Gt/year (this is also in your second link). And I don't see where you get the 50Gt/day gains. Unless the graph is lying, it's in Gt/day. Ranging from gains of about 12Gt to losses of about -8Gt over this past year. Quoting your source:
It's all fine and dandy to link to data. It certainly makes your post look more legit. But when your links directly contradict your text you should either find other data, or reconsider your stated interpretation.Temperatures in the center of Greenland's ice sheet never rose above -10C all summer, so it's hard to see how it could have lost any ice. Ice accumulation is nearly two standard deviations above the 1981-2010 mean for the same period, and it is very, very early in the season for such gains.
Both of Greenland's largest glaciers (Jakobshavn and Peterman) are growing at record rates, about 1km/year.
Icepacks and glaciers calve into the sea. That's what they do. It's Nature's way of moving the ice and snow away from the center and back into the ocean. If they didn't, the snowpack/ice would extend to the Equator, which is impossible, or the snowpack would be 5 miles high, which is not the case.
If it were true then the chart should show well in excess of 200Gt accumulated for this year so far, and it does not. In September they have so far accumulated 50Gt which is in line with previous years at this point.
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edit: In response to Jtsummers below, since HN thinks posting more than 3 times per day is too quick:
>If the radius of the balloon increases at a constant rate, the volume of the balloon is increasing at a much greater rate (specifically, proportional to the cube of the increase in radius).
Sure, but we're talking about a numerical value which moved ~20cm over the entire measurement time, compared to the balloon which is 1,270,000,000 cm in diameter. The effects that you mentioned are entirely negligible and probably even beyond the resolution of our measurements.
Consider by way of analogy a balloon. If the radius of the balloon increases at a constant rate, the volume of the balloon is increasing at a much greater rate (specifically, proportional to the cube of the increase in radius).
By reducing the discussion to merely the sea level, we are ignoring the fact that we must add increasingly large amounts of water to the oceans each year to maintain even a linear rate of growth of sea level.
It should also be noted that since the oceans are not in an arbitrarily deep cylinder, as the oceans rise they will also increase in spread (overtaking what is presently land). If the rate of water going into the oceans were constant, we should expect a sub-linear increase in sea level due to this as well.
EDIT: The only way to have both a constant increase in volume and a constant increase in sea level would be if the oceans stopped at their present boundaries and went straight up sheer walls. I rather doubt this is the case.
The balloon was strictly meant as an analogy, but it is illustrative and establishes the upper bound on the rate of increase of water volume.
Regardless of that, showing a linear increase in sea level (constant rate) still necessarily implies a non-constant increase in water volume due to the shape of the "container" for the oceans. Our oceans are not bounded by sheer walls, so it must also be increasing in surface area (spread over land). If it is increasing in surface area and still increasing linearly in sea level [0], then the volume is growing at a super-linear rate. That means each year more water is going into the oceans than the prior year (on average, at least).
[0] One measure from San Francisco, of course, is not enough to demonstrate this as there will be lots of local variations due to many factors.
I agree with the logic of your statement - it is perfectly sound. My point was that for a large enough balloon and a small enough rate of increase, the effect will "look" linear(e.g. look at the domain [4.1,4.125] of e^x and determine if it is a linear or exponential function), and our instruments (probably) can't even begin to measure for the effects which you propose.
This suit is very disingenuous and nothing but political grandstanding.
Why not Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota, Boeing...? Hey, I sell gasoline /diesel, one of the many (legally available) fuels, you either buy it or you don't.
The lawyers of Oakland and SF don't drive cars? Or travel on planes?
If the intention is to put pressure on the Oil companies to stop lobbying against clean energy - I don't think, this is the right approach.
Didn't we do exactly that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax
This is also done for other things like having tobacco companies or alcohol companies finance health care and treatment programs.
Actually, for oil companies that is not even new. They usually pay quite a bit to account for the local damage they cause to the environment, so adding global damages as well seems very reasonable.
The only weird thing is why Oakland and SF are suing and not, say the federal government or the UN.
I'm disappointed in the discussion here so far. When did we become a community of "be nice to the big guys"?
This is a classic example of looking a gift horse in the mouth. Putting regulations on oil companies would benefit all, rather than this frivolous lawsuit which would benefit the two cities ONLY.