45
votes
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a lawsuit Saturday against five major oil companies and their subsidiaries over climate change
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- After years of deliberating, California sues oil companies for climate damages
- Published
- Sep 16 2023
- Word count
- 636 words
Really tired of the "won't someone think of the shareholders!?!" bullshit when these companies and their shareholders have proven that consistent profits trump every other possible concern. If they somehow could make more money drowning orphans to power the planet they'd do it.
Reminds me of the tobacco companies, or Grace chemical whose pollution case was documented in the book and film A Civil Action, or DuPont with Teflon, or the makers of Thalidomide, and more.
Crazy how California can rapidly oscillate between disappointing and a place to be proud of.
My SIL from Oklahoma was somewhat astute in noticing that California and Texas are substantially more alike than either would like to admit.
Like two opposites of the same coin. Texas and California both suffer from authoritarian beuracratic tendancies, and Texas is a lot more in denial about it.
Oklahoma is much closer to what Texas imagines itself as, for better and worse. Honestly if they solved some of their worse issues WRT women and minorities, Oklahoma actually sounds pretty nice. They're even paying remote workers $10k to move to Tulsa.
This sounds like a great way to... get more companies to move their HQ out of the state.
Yea, turns out companies dislike being held accountable and would rather spend millions and destroy many livlyhoods than be slightly less profitable long term.
We're inevitably going to have a reckoning with oil one way or the other. Be it CO2 emissions or depleting supply, those companies as they exist will be no more inside of 40 years.
No sense in letting them lie to us and take our money while doing so for them to squeeze a few more years/dollars out.
I'm not disagreeing with your point, but are you under the impression that this lawsuit will change these companies behavior? All they're going to do is move to Texas like lots of other companies over the past few years and it'll be business as usual. Except now Texas will get the jobs and tax income, and California won't.
And doing nothing is somehow better? There's 7 other states so far doing the same thing. Eventually they run out of safehavens. Each step those jobs move to a less desirable place, like Texas. They'll have fewer qualified candidates to choose from, or they'll import others and maybe dissolve some of that toxic nature and Texas follows suit eventually. Texas is getting bluer than the Republicans like...part of why they have such a stick up their butt about immigration. Playing whackamole with moving headquarters is risky business that can destroy knowledge. And possibly start getting their products banned over ones who follow the rules.
Economic retailiation by companies to skirt rules should be met by economic retaliation by the state. Admittedly this is a riksy business, but also means that the more critical bits will probably end up under public control rather than going without.
See also: Apple fighting regulation in the EU tooth and nail until products being banned becomes too close to reality for comfort.
Forcing companies out of your state to another part of the same country where they will just do the same thing isn't "better". Maybe it makes you feel better, but it's realistically a net loss for the state of California.
Have you looked at political map of the United States? They're not going to run out of safe havens. They have 43 more states to choose from. And unfortunately, I don't see Texas turning blue in our lifetimes.
The EU is far more progressive than the US. I wouldn't use that as a comparison for what we can reasonably expect in the next 50 years.
So just give up then. Say "Fuck it", run the earth into the ground, and we can all bake on venus 2.0 - right?
I feel like you're painting a picture of what will be without trying to suggest what could be. How would you suggest we enact change?
By enticing people to change. Make it better, cheaper, faster, whatever. This lawsuit is nothing more than political posturing by Newsom. Nothing will change from this lawsuit other than the company moving their flag and California losing jobs and tax income.
You want to reduce oil consumption? Make electric cars better and cheaper than ICE models. Invest in chargers and the electric grid. Let's get some electric OTR trucks (the infrastructure is not there for this yet). Make it easier for utility companies to build alternative energy power plants. Accelerate the phase-out of bunker fuel in cargo ships - new ships shouldn't even be built with the capability.
There's plenty of innovation to be done. Lawsuits aren't helpful in this country.
There is plenty of precedent for lawsuits changing the behavior of companies. Enron, the Deepwater Horizon spill (briefly), or more topically Volkswagen's emissions fraud come to mind.
Having negative externalities priced in to oil--whether by law or lawsuit-- would have a massive impact. Not sure it would be a positive one, once the dust settles, but it would be consequential.
I don't think you'd be arguing that Phillip Morris shoul be building a better vape or that suing them is pointless. Similarly I don't think you'd argue more states weaken child labor laws or other worker protections to keep jobs from going to other countries.
Negative externalities, tragedy of the commons situations, and locally optimal decisions for politicians (like Scott Walker's Foxconn debacle) are hard problems to solve. Your company gets to use Delaware as a tax haven and can go to Marshall, TX for its patent lawsuits because that's the system.
Innovation is great, but you can't innovate your way out of the perverse incentives for Foxconn or the Amazon HQ2 bids which tragically pit Kansas City, KS against Kansas City, MO. Which ended up in NY and messy.
Legislation, lawsuits, and consensus building about what should be acceptable are needed. That last one is why it is pretty frustrating to see shit like people sign off on Trump/Elon being "smart" for not paying their bills or taxes. If your company is going to dump waste until rivers are on fire they should be condemned country-wide, even if plenty of states are willing to embrace that behavior.
You have to consider the fact that picking up and moving the headquarters of an enormous corporation is an incredibly expensive task by itself. The costs of finding new office space, reworking all your logistics, paying employees to relocate, replacing all the ones smart enough to not want to live in an unregulated republican hellscape. Plus, there is a reason these companies are located where they are.
Forcing a company of this size to relocate isn't just the slap on the wrist you seem to think it is. If it was, they'd have already done it just for tax purposes.
Thank you - I don't disagree on any of your points there. One worry, though, is that many of these changes also require top - down legislation to really get going, especially changes to utilities. Doesn't this also tend to drive away jobs?
Ultimately, change is always going to be an expense, and for companies that always need to improve profits, that change is bad.
I think that most of what I've mentioned would actually increase jobs. Building out infrastructure, building new power plants, creating new vehicles, recycling of materials from old ones, research and manufacturing of batteries, etc would all require jobs.
But you're right that top-down legislation is required. Utilities have shown continued reluctance to invest in infrastructure. It's an expense to them, which lowers profits. They'll only do it if they have no choice, and it needs to come from a national initiative for them to lose the choice. Those types of businesses will either need to invest in the future or see their days be numbered.
I do. In 2000, Texas was handing almost 60% of their votes to Republicans. In 2020, they were down to 52%. And this is with ever-increasing gerrymandering and voter suppression. Immigration is changing Texas in a big way, albeit slowly.
Barring a full collapse of any pretense of democracy, I'd say we see Texas flip blue before 2032. If there are in fact any moderate Republicans in Texas, they should be voting Libertarian and have the electoral map looking more like this.
I'm doubtful, but I hope you're right.
Not all of those 43 states are actually options, especially if gigacorps continue their crusade against remote work. Realistically they’re limited to parts of the US where there’s either a healthy pre-existing relevant pool of talent or is a place where current talent is willing to move to. If a company for example tells their employees, “follow us to this state that has nothing going for it or you’re fired”, realistically a huge portion (especially the more highly skilled) will respond with, “Cool, I’m quitting and finding work elsewhere”.
I'm okay with them staying out of Texas. Our home prices have tripled and we've run out of water from all these California people who don't blink at paying $600,000 for a house that was under $185,00 in 2019.
And higher interest hasn't helped us a lick because they're paying cash out of the equity from their California house.
Yeah, we have the same problem here in NC. It's absolutely insane. But I think you might have misread my comment. Jobs moving from California to Texas also means the potential for people to move as well, which creates the problem you're describing. It's certainly been that way for my company.
Here is a list, but it has been a well-known thing for the past several years now. The Fortune 100 tech company I work for is taking steps to do the same. Our CEO already moved to a new location that will likely be our new HQ, and we have mostly stopped hiring in California and have been selling buildings.
You're right, it's a huge undertaking. But that hasn't prevented the mass exodus of tech companies leaving California. We've been executing on ours for years now. It started with stopping hiring in California. The only requisition locations I could get for my team were other regions that we had offices in the south and east coast. Over the years, we've had many employees relocate from California to other regions. We have thousands of fewer employees there now compared to 5 years ago.
Now, our CEO and CFO have both left and moved to another state. The actual corporation moved to Delaware. The HQ will likely be Atlanta.
We're far from the only ones who have done this, or are in the process of doing it. If it's going to be done, there's a way of doing it smartly. Musk didn't properly plan for his move, he knee-jeeked like he always does and had to revert his change.
Who else has moved?