When I was asked to join the Sue Big Oil (SBO) committee, I thought it was crazy.
While oil companies sold us the oil and gas, it was we the people who burned it in our cars and homes. If oil and gas produced climate change, we were responsible. Besides, I’ve always been a corporate kind of guy.
I was an entrepreneur running my own advertising and management consulting companies. For 25 years, I was a strategy professor teaching business students and executives corporate strategic planning. Corporations just sell what customers want. I taught them how.
I was wrong. Geoff Dembicki’s book, The Petroleum Papers, documents that Big Oil has known about the relationship between its products and climate change since 1959. They didn’t believe it. They did their own research to prove it wasn’t so.
When their own research showed that burning oil and gas was producing climate change, they kept the findings secret. They’ve known since the 1970s. Their own projections are eerily similar to the situation we face today.
So, what did they do instead of addressing the problem? They funded climate change denier research arguing climate change was a natural long-term temperature fluctuation, or even because of sunspots. For 50 years, the climate change problem was left unaddressed.
Corporations could have had 50 extra years to develop EV cars, solar and other green energy, but for all the obfuscation. Now, it’s an emergency with rising sea levels, and crazy big forest fires like the one that burned Lytton down two years ago. Both could happen here.
Suing Big Oil is a tried and true solution for companies that committed fraud by covering up problems with their products. It’s exactly what happened with Big Tobacco which, for decades, covered up its own research proving that smoking was a major cause of lung cancer. The lies produced major health care costs, and Big Tobacco had to pay up.
Ford had to fix its exploding Pinto car, against its will. Toyota was fined big bucks for cars with unintended acceleration. Volkswagen hid that its diesel engines weren’t really “green.”
Suing Big Oil is pretty conservative. A paper recently published by the prestigious Harvard Environmental Law Review argues that senior oil company executives should be charged with climate change homicide.
I’ve changed my mind. We should sue. Let Big Oil help municipalities recover costs incurred because of climate change, and keep our taxes down.
When will Grief Point need dykes to prevent flooding? When will Westview Ferry Terminal need to be raised? When will our storm drains be overwhelmed again by big rainfall events? How will we fight a big fire in the mountains east of town?
Big Oil has committed fraud for 50 years. They promised us everything was fine. They knew it wasn’t. How much compensation do they owe us for the problems caused by their false assurances?
Neil Abramson is a retired professor from Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business. The Sue Big Oil committee will be making a presentation at the City of Powell River committee of the whole meeting on July 11.
