If people die because they listened to Rush Limbaugh, should he be tried for murder? Should ExxonMobil be held accountable for its share of warming and for misleading the public on climate change? Is it an abuse of executive power to impose a word count on environmental impact statements, or just a dumb move?
These are all, unfortunately, relevant questions at the moment. Let’s start with the least glamorous and most easily answered. Michael Doyle at Greenwire got his hands on an internal Department of Interior email sent around in the wake of Trump’s August 15th executive order. The DOI email states that, to comply with the new EO, environmental impact statements "shall not be more than 150 pages or 300 pages for unusually complex projects." For comparison, Doyle points out that one exceptionally long Obama-era review clocked in at over 16,000 pages. It’s our guess that this directive will, when inevitably challenged in courts like pretty much every other environmental move Trump’s made, be deemed an arbitrary (and therefore unlawful) approach to regulations.
Less clear-cut though, is the issue of whether or not deniers can, will or should be held accountable for their public statements. In light of Rush Limbaugh sending his listeners the message that the media over-hypes hurricanes to push the global warming narrative and sell bottled water, Brian Merchant’s essay in the Outline from last week suggesting that climate denial should be a crime is all too salient. With some very poignant anecdotes (including the detail that Houston’s head of flood control responded with flat-out denial to the now-famous ProPublica/Texas Tribune piece on Houston’s vulnerability), Merchant makes a fairly convincing case for criminal negligence via climate denial. (At least to our non-lawyer ears.)
Along the same lines--albeit using stronger language--is Mark Hertsgaard’s latest piece in The Nation arguing climate denial is murder. Hertsgaard’s kicker is worth quoting: “The first step toward justice is to call things by their true names. Murder is murder, whether the murderers admit it or not. Punish it as such, or we encourage more of the same.”
We’re sympathetic to Hertsgaard’s argument, but even we think simply calling denial murder might be a little much. This oversimplification of a complex legal question opens up an otherwise reasonable question to criticism that neglects the manslaughter forest for the murder tree.
A new peer-reviewed study from the Union of Concerned Scientists attempts to answer these important questions raised by both Merchant and Hertsgaard. In the study (described in depth on the UCS site and in plain language at the Guardian), the authors calculate that the 90 biggest carbon producers are responsible for “∼57% of the observed rise in atmospheric CO2, ∼42–50% of the rise in global mean surface temperature (GMST), and ∼26–32% of global sea level (GSL) rise over the historical period and ∼43% (atmospheric CO2), ∼29–35% (GMST), and ∼11–14% (GSL) since 1980…”
To establish wrongdoing, we’ll remind you, one would have to prove that the problem stemming from the use of these company’s product (aka climate change) was something they knew about. Which, of course, is what #ExxonKnew is all about. And with Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supan’s new study showing a stark divide between Exxon’s corporate advertisements and internal science, and an unrelated investigation tracking the decades of work that industry-funded deniers have done to prevent or undo climate action, it’s only getting harder for fossil fuels to claim innocence, naivety, or good faith.
And on mention of faith, we’ll end simply by sending our thoughts and prayers for those affected by Harvey and Irma, regardless of their causes.
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