Tamara Toles O’Laughlin and Bill McKibben at Yes! magazine write—Big Oil Needs to Pay for the Damage It Caused. Climate change disproportionately affects poor people and people of color. They should be compensated for their suffering:
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.
It is true that Exxon should not have misled its investors—lying is wrong, and that former CEO Rex Tillerson had to invent a fake email persona as part of the scheme (we see you, “Wayne Tracker”) helps drive home the messiness. But let’s be clear: On the spectrum of human beings who are and will be hit by the climate crisis, Exxon investors are not near the top of the list.
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.
When the CEO of Exxon told Chinese leaders in 1997 that the Earth was cooling and that it didn’t matter when they took action on climate change, the direct and indirect harm fell on South Pacific islanders now having to plan for the evacuation of their nations and South American cities losing their sole source of drinking water as glaciers disappear.
Even in the U.S., the burden falls disproportionately and violently on the most vulnerable communities—poor people and people of color. Wander into any disaster zone, from Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey to the California fires, and you’ll find that the hardest-hit people are the ones set up by the status quo with the least. Hurricane Sandy shut down Wall Street for a few days, but for working class and subway-dependent communities in the Rockaways and throughout Brooklyn and Queens, it changed lives forever.
Put another way, those who made their money peddling fossil fuels—the executives and shareholders holding funds—owe something to those who got hurt. It’s not, in the bigger picture, all that different from the demand for reparations by African American descendants of slaves—claims that in recent months more than a few institutions have begun to pay, among a growing number of faith denominations, universities and politicians, including presidential candidates, have begun to publicly endorse.
That’s not to say that fossil fuel extraction is a crime of the same kind as owning human beings. It isn’t—but the two are not unrelated; the same instinct to abuse and extract, deplete, discard, and disavow holds. [...]
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
The only thing that was clear was there would be no backpedaling. When Michael Hayden, who had been central to the early days of America’s experimentation with cyberweapons, said that the Stuxnet code [used to attack the software of Iran’s uranium-concentrating centrifuges] had “the whiff of August 1945” about it—a reference to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—he was making clear that a new era had dawned. Hayden’s security clearances meant he couldn’t acknowledge American involvement in Stuxnet, but he left no doubt about the magnitude of its importance.
“I do know this, “Hayden concluded. “If we go out and do something, most of the rest of the world now feels that this is a new standard, and it’s something that they now feel legitimated to do as well.”
That is exactly what happened.
~~David E. Sanger, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age (2018)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—NATO: Out of Afghanistan by 2014. Head-shakers galore:
At its summit meeting Friday, David Brunnstrom at Reuters is reporting, NATO will approve a four-year withdrawal of most of the 150,000 troops it has deployed in Afghanistan. One hundred thousand of those are American. The plan is going forward even though many analysts say the war is going badly and there will still be, in the words of NATO's senior civilian representative in Kabul, Mark Sedwill, "eye-watering levels of violence by Western standards."
The plan is to turn over all security duties to the Afghanistan government in 2014 despite widespread views that no way will there be enough Afghan troops ready and able to do so, no way will the poverty-stricken country be able pay for its military and police forces, and no way will the insurgency be under control by then.
Meanwhile, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell called 2014 "an aspirational goal," but neither a deadline for full Afghan control nor total U.S. military withdrawal
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: If you're going to the hospital, you're losing. Greg Dworkin says the data shows Dems cautiously optimistic, Rs wildly overconfident. Three years in, Trump still doesn't get how it works. That G-7 site search that just happened to land on Doral was all lies, too.
RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube|Patreon|Square Cash (Share code: Send $5, get $5!)