The case may be nearing an end if the judge wants plaintiffs to find benefits that counter their argument.
By Irina Slav
Judge William Alsup who is hearing a case brought by San Francisco and Oakland against five Big Oil companies, has given the plaintiffs and Chevron a homework assignment that suggests the end of the case may be near. The two municipalities and Chevron must evaluate the positive effects oil dependency has had on the U.S. economy.
“We needed oil and fossil fuels to get from 1859 to the present. Yes, that’s causing global warming. But against that negative, we need to weigh-in the larger benefits that have flowed from the use of fossil fuels. It’s been a huge, huge benefit,” Judge Alsup from the U.S. District Court in San Francisco said.
Suing Big Oil for climate change is turning into the latest big thing. A UN survey from last year found there are nearly 900 suits focusing on climate change across 25 countries. The latest in the United States was former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger threatening to sue Big Oil for “first-degree murder”.
The San Francisco and Oakland suits were filed last September, and Reuters at the time quoted San Francisco officials as saying that the five oil companies “knowingly and recklessly created an ongoing public nuisance that is causing harm now and in the future risks catastrophic harm to human life and property.”
Full story at oilprice.com
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Judge Alsup “… Yes, that’s causing global warming. …”
While the judge appears to be impartial, as he should be, I think he is in error in this part of his statement.
The error is on the part of the defendants, since they did not contest the claim and effectively conceded it to the plaintiffs.
To remain an impartial arbiter, the judge mustn’t argue points that the parties in the case have chosen not to.
Don’t get any hopes up for this judge. That he would even hear this ludicrous nonsense says a lot of bad things about his judgement.
And fossil fuels allowed California to growth without the use of colonial networks like Europe.
That’s serious nonsense. Europe grew by becoming more productive – that’s what growth is.I certainly can’t sell to my colonies unless I am producing more than I used to, because otherwise domestic demand goes unsatisfied.
They stripped the resources with no local government to get in their way.
There’s a lot of ammo out there that can help these companies in this fight. For example, a very recent study by James Hansen and others mentions the following:
“Global warming in the past 50 years has raised global temperature (Fig. 1) well above the prior range in the Holocene (the current interglacial period, approximately the past 11,700 years) to the level of the Eemian period (130,000 to 115,000 years ago), when sea level was 6-9 meters (20-30 feet) higher than today.”
http://csas.ei.columbia.edu/2017/07/18/young-peoples-burden-requirement-of-negative-co2-emissions/
What this excerpt says is that the earth was as warm as it is today (assuming today’s measurements are accurate) 115K years ago while not pointing out that CO2 levels back there were we’ll below the safe level of 350 ppm. In fact, CO2 levels 115k years ago (per the graphs I’ve seen) was around 280 ppm.
So how the eff can people conclude that the warming today is from fossil fuels when the same warming that occurred 115K years ago occurred with earth’s ‘control knob’ set a little cooler?
The judge should tell the plaintiffs that he will hear the case if they give up their fossil fueled cars and everything that is made from fossil fuels. The cities should agree to cut oil and gas to their cities before the case is heard.
Judge Alsup should order San Francisco and Oakland to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in their cities.
It’s just so ridiculous, I don’t know why I keep reading follow-up posts to this farce-of-an-excuse-for-a-“lawsuit” story. I have a masochistic side, I guess.
Yeah, right, … without any complicity whatsoever by anybody who actually USEED fossil fuel, including, of course, those bringing the “lawsuit”.
USED .. with one “E”. /grrrrrrrr
Not only does CO2 cause plants to grow, it’s causing capital E’s to multiply.
By the logic of these lawsuits, the oil companies should be paid trillions of dollars for the ancillary greening of the earth from the increased CO2, which has helped to reduce poverty and increase wealth everywhere in the world.
Maybe the judge should order the plaintiffs to arrive in court with documented proof that they didn’t utilize any product or service that uses any Big Oil.
And shoes. Many plastic things could be made out of leather. This is going to cause problems for vegans.
finally a judge with some common sense…..look at this graph….
at the beginning of the industrial revolution the gdp/capita in 1990 dollars was about 200 dollars….today..it’s about 8000 dollars….all of that was driven by fossil fuels…none of it would have been possible without fossil fuels…..
the population without fossil fuels would be about 1 billion today….and with we are at 7 billion…..that’s a lot of lives…all made possible by fossil fuels……
the plaintiff will not be able to muster any argument to the net benefit fossil fuels have provided to man…
I haven’t been following this suit in detail but I had hoped that it would trigger a discussion of the merits of AGW claims, especially after reading that Lord Moncton et al had submitted a brief for the court challenging the validity of the models based on forcing. So what happened to that? Instead I see articles that the oil companies lawyers admitted that global warming is occurring (not sure if they admitted AGW) but that admission is all that AGW proponents and the newspapers care about. To them global warming and AGW are the same thing. So by not even challenging the science of the models how do the oil companies expect to avoid future lawsuits around the role of fossil fuels in warming?
We could do away with fossil fuels by switching to nuclear. The biggest problem is that a free society cannot prevent nuclear power from being 7sed to destroy that same society.
The same thing would be possible with an improved battery. As battery technology improves a short circuit is the equivalent of a phaser on overload.
A small battery with the energy of a tank of gasoline has no less potential to explode than does a yank of gasoline.