A group of senators is urging the Department of Justice to file lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry over its decades-long campaign to deny its impact on the climate crisis on the last day of what scientists predict will be the hottest month on Earth on record.
On Monday, Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) told Attorney General Merrick Garland that it is clear that the fossil fuel industry has for years broken a wide variety of laws in perpetuating climate denial, and that the DOJ must hold the industry accountable.
“The actions of ExxonMobil, Shell, and potentially other fossil fuel companies represent a clear violation of federal racketeering laws, truth in advertising laws, consumer protection laws, and potentially other laws,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter.
Since at least the 1970s, fossil fuel giants like Exxon have known that a dependence on fossil fuels would lead to climate catastrophe, with company scientists predicting with surprising accuracy how much their products would warm and destabilize the planet. Rather than heeding these warnings, the corporations worked in tandem to bury this research, and, borrowing from Big Tobacco’s strategy of lying about lung cancer, have spent decades sowing climate denial in order to enrich themselves and their shareholders.
The lawmakers say that these companies should, at long last, be held responsible for their lies. They cite research on the climate crisis that Shell, Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute were aware of, but chose to discredit.
While many states and climate advocates have brought lawsuits seeking to expose the industry’s lies or mandate an end to fossil fuels, the DOJ has not itself brought a lawsuit against the industry, though it did file a legal brief in support of a Colorado climate lawsuit earlier this year.
“Despite these companies’ knowledge about climate change and the role their industry was playing in driving carbon emissions, they chose to participate in a decades-long, carefully coordinated campaign of misinformation to obfuscate climate science and convince the public that fossil fuels are not the primary driver of climate change,” the senators wrote.
“Thanks to the illegal lies of the fossil fuel industry, climate change is wreaking catastrophic damage upon the United States. Floods, droughts, extreme weather disturbances, and wildfires are causing unprecedented damage,” they continued.
The DOJ must ensure that the costs of the climate crisis — which experts have projected will amount to hundreds of trillions of dollars over the next decades — fall on the industry that caused it, the lawmakers said.
“These costs, and the costs of repairing our environment and transitioning away from fossil fuels, must not fall on American taxpayers. Instead, they must be borne by the parties responsible for driving climate change and lying about the negative impacts of their products,” the lawmakers wrote. “The polluters must pay.”
The lawmakers’ call comes amid a summer marked by blaring warnings that the climate crisis is here, and will only get worse if those with power continue down this path. Global temperature records were shattered in July, with scientists saying the heat would have been “virtually impossible” without the climate crisis.“Just as we did with Big Tobacco, it is time to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable. It is time for the DOJ to join the fight,” Sanders said on Monday. “The future of our planet depends on it.”
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy