A couple of publicity-seeking Los Angeles city council members have suggested suing oil companies for the damages that have and will be caused by climate change. They’re joining New York Mayor Bill de Blasio – for whom the description “publicity-seeking” was invented – in doing so. This is to infantilize us all to the point that we’re babies again, helplessly gorging a dumping into our diapers.
Which is, of course, ludicrous. We’re adults, we have agency. And it’s not the oil (nor gas) companies that produce the emissions which lead to climate change. It’s us adults, employing our agency, who do.
Why is it that oil and gas companies go out to rape Gaia? How do they profit? What actually is the driving force here? Well, it’s not just because they want to boil the oceans now, is it? There’s got to be some stronger underlying reason than that.
It’s because people rather like oil and gas.
We like housing where we don’t have to wear three layers of clothing in winter (thanks to heating systems). We’re rather in love with personal transport, and need fuel for it. We’re absolutely stuck on the idea of three squares a day and that means fuel to cook, transport, and grow food. In fact, we’re pretty taken by this whole idea of modern civilization. That means we need fuel to power that civilization.
Sure, we’re all getting excited by varied forms of non-emitting power generation (most of which are definitively less useful than many claim) and there are those who insist the entire climate change idea is just a crock. But consider again who and what leads to the extraction of fossil fuels and their use.
It’s not the companies causing this. It’s us. If I drive them, I’m the one responsible for the emissions from my tailpipe. Not GM, Ford, Exxon or BP, but me. Getting dinner from a gas-fired BBQ doesn’t mean that the fracking company has made the emissions, it means my taste for a good burger has made them. Again, I’m responsible.
At which point, suing the companies for the emissions made by us is looking pretty stupid, right? But it’s worse than that. For it’s insisting that we’ve not made choices. We’re just the helpless playthings and have no agency, we’re not responsible for the outcome of our choices. Which really isn’t something I want any politician to believe and nor should you. For if we are unable to make our own choices, then they’ll start making them for us, won’t they? Which isn’t anything close to a reasonable definition of freedom nor liberty, the people being just those babies the politicians must direct.
There are a few amusements in the cases. They’re only going after investor-owned producers, not governmental. You know, let’s attack the capitalists but not any nation-state doing exactly the same thing because, you know, capitalists are icky and government’s just great. Equally, both state and federal governments have been earning royalties from fossil fuel deposits for well over a century now. But no claim is being made on that money – which progressive would ever try to do that? I can’t see that they’re suing any coal companies, but then at a reasonable level of accuracy they’re all already bust, aren’t they? Despite coal being a much more important source of emissions than other fossil fuels.
Yet what is truly dangerous here is this idea that the oil and gas companies are responsible for the emissions which cause climate change. They’re not. We are, the people who used the fuels to do the things we wanted done, like travel, cook, keep warm, and generally have a civilization. We’re responsible, no one else.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.
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