https://www.newsweek.com/miltons-landing-big-oil-must-pay-massive-storm-damage-opinion-1966615
By Aaron Regunberg – (Aaron Regunberg is a former Democratic state legislator and senior climate policy counsel at Public Citizen.)
Excerpt: Violent weather, storms, deluges, the fragility of civilization—for countless families in Florida, Georgia, western North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, these predictions have become reality. Hurricane Helene was a cataclysm of nightmarish scale. Experts have estimated the storm’s losses could reach $160 billion. Whole communities have been wiped off the map—families homeless, businesses gone, livelihoods destroyed. Millions have been left without power, water, or any near-term prospects for their return. And far too many have lost their lives—the current death toll from Helene tops 200, and experts predict this number will increase dramatically based on the many hundreds of residents who remain unaccounted for. Now, Hurricane Milton threatens even more devastation in Florida.
If a Bond villain had pushed a “killer hurricane” button to create such a lethal storm, law enforcement agencies would make it their top priority to find that villain and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. Our prosecutors and public safety officials don’t currently treat extreme weather events in this way. But for disasters like Helene, whose destructive power can in large part be attributed to climate change, perhaps they should.
If you engage in reckless conduct that creates a substantial risk of injuring another person or causing a death, you’ve committed the crime of reckless endangerment. If your reckless conduct actually does cause a death, you’ve committed reckless homicide or involuntary manslaughter. And if you recklessly caused a death while acting with extreme indifference to human life, you’ve committed second degree murder.
These offenses aptly describe Big Oil’s conduct relative to the destruction, injuries, and deaths we’ve seen this month from Hurricane Helene, and will likely see again from Milton. A relatively small number of Big Oil companies are responsible for generating the vast majority of all the greenhouse gas emissions that have caused our planet to heat up. These same companies spent (and continue to spend) vast resources to distribute fraudulent climate disinformation specifically designed to block and delay market and policy solutions that could have prevented or ameliorated climate change. This conduct was a direct and substantial cause of the abnormally hot water in the Gulf of Mexico that fueled Helene’s rapid 24-hour intensification from a Category 1 to a Category 4 storm and increased the amount of moisture it carried, allowing Helene to stay stronger farther inland. Indeed, a provisional rainfall attribution analysis found that climate change caused over 50 percent of Helene’s precipitation and made the storm’s lethal rainfall up to 20 times more likely.
To prosecute Big Oil for climate disasters like Helene, prosecutors would also need to show these companies acted recklessly. In criminal law, recklessness means knowing an act is dangerous and doing it anyway. So it’s significant that Helene was precisely the kind of “violent weather” and “deluge” that Shell predicted their fossil fuel products would cause back in 1989; or Exxon foresaw in 1982 when the company reported internally that climate change from the burning of fossil fuels would “cause flooding” across “much” of the United States.; or Chevron and BP executives were made undeniably aware of in 1980 when their executives were warned that their fossil fuel products would lead to “globally catastrophic” climate harms. The terrifying heat waves that have killed thousands across the American Southwest this summer are also no surprise to these corporations, whose researchers were predicting in 1996 that global warming would cause “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.”
So, these companies—and their CEOs—knowingly generated climate chaos while defrauding the American public with disinformation to thwart responses that would have lessened the threat, despite understanding full well that this conduct would cause the exact kind of destruction we’ve seen from Hurricane Helene. That’s a textbook example of reckless endangerment or, relative to deaths from Helene, reckless homicide.
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Regular people are paying the ultimate price for this sociopathic greed…Climate victims have paid so much for Big Oil’s reckless conduct. It’s time to make the polluters pay.
