Big Oil Needs to Pay for the Damage It Caused

[guillaumeb]

From the article:

This month in a Manhattan courthouse, New York State's attorney general Letitia James argued that ExxonMobil should be held accountable for layers of lies about climate change. It's a landmark moment—one of the first times that Big Oil is having to answer for its actions—and James deserves great credit for bringing it to trial. But it comes with a deep irony: Under the relevant New York statutes, the only people that New York can legally identify as victims are investors in the company's stock....


In fact, if the "justice system" delivered justice, the payouts for Exxon's perfidy would go to entirely different people, because the iron law of climate is, the less you did to cause it, the more you'll suffer.
The right set of priorities might put different groups of people at the front of the line for payouts: dwellers along the edge of the African deserts that are expanding fast as climate warms, Bangladeshi peasant farmers losing their land as the Bay of Bengal spreads inland, and Inuit hunters no longer able to depend on the sea ice. Every one of these groups was directly harmed by the decision of the fossil fuel industry to bury its knowledge of climate change in the 1980s and instead work to deny, deflect, and delay action.

To read more:

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/11/18/big-oil-needs-pay-damage-it-caused?cd-origin=rss&utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Email

[Kurt V.]

1. External repercussions.

[htuttle]

2. Privatize the profits and socialize the cost

That's been the American way for a long time.

[guillaumeb]

3. For so many industries.

Banking, the war industries, the energy industries.

And few really criticize it, or the costs of it, but if we talk about Medicare for All, so many ask "how can we afford it?".