There’s no free lunch when it comes to protecting our environment
Cool Tips for a Hot Planet
When my daughter was six, she ate another child’s store-bought lunch instead of her homemade sandwich. She then apologized and spent her birthday money to replace the pilfered food.
When we harm others, we should pay compensation. If my tree falls on a neighbour’s yard, I should clean it up. Fair is fair.
For some reason the oil and gas industry doesn’t think like that. They pollute the atmosphere with their products, over-heating the planet, and we pay. We pay in health care costs from higher pollution, heat waves and wildfire smoke. Our municipalities pay to fill more potholes, repair roads washed out by deluges, or to provide cooling centres to protect us from extreme heat. We all pay when wildfires, hail or floods cause destruction. Our fellow creatures pay in lost habitat and lives, too.
The costs of cleaning up after these unnatural disasters have been mounting for decades. Prior to 2008, Canada’s insurance industry shelled out an average of $400 million a year in claims from extreme weather. Since then, the annual average has been $2 billion. This year, Toronto’s flash flood damage alone is estimated at $1 billion. And we don’t yet know the cost of rebuilding Jasper.
For years the fossil fuel industry has followed the tobacco industry’s playbook in denying the harms caused by their products. In the late 90s, with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the courts ordered the tobacco industry to pay up.
Now, attention is turning to the oil, gas, natural gas and coal sector, whose emissions account for over 75 per cent of global climate-warming gases.
Dozens of communities and states are taking fossil fuel companies to court for damages from products they have known for decades were causing destruction. In 1977, Marathon Petroleum’s magazine quoted top scientists who warned that industrial carbon pollution could melt the polar ice caps and “cause widespread starvation and other social and economic calamities.” That same year, ExxonMobil’s own scientists warned of similar consequences of burning their products.
Last fall, the governor of California said, “The climate crisis is, after all, a fossil fuel crisis.” His state launched a lawsuit against big oil and the American Petroleum Institute, arguing they have known about the “catastrophic consequences” of their products for decades. “They covered it up. Suppressed scientific data. Spent millions to cast doubts on climate science. It’s time for them to pay up,” he said. The suit seeks billions in compensation for future climate-related damages.
In May, Vermont became the first state to legislate that oil and gas giants like Exxon and Shell must pay their fair share for damages caused by these more frequent and intense climate disasters.
Here in Canada, Burnaby recently joined five other British Columbia towns in a growing class action lawsuit seeking compensation from fossil fuel companies.
“It is absurd that B.C. communities must pay the price of climate disasters while Big Oil (which is making billions in profit) gets off scot-free,” said Fiona Koza of West Coast Environmental Law, the company coordinating the lawsuit.
We could say the same about Toronto’s flash flood damage, or the fires in Jasper. It’s time for the oil and gas industry to learn what my daughter learned at age six: there’s no free lunch. Time to pay up.
The fires in Jasper were, in large part, the fault of Minister Guillbeault for cancelling a prescribed burn just months before the fire. He ignored repeated advice to manage the forest around Jasper and made it vulnerable to the devastation that occurred. And sadly, Canada’s insurance companies have been on the take, being caught laundering money, so it is hard to feel sorry for them. With the move to remote work, it has become very difficult to even find an insurance company if you need to serve them with legal papers, as their listed and registered addresses often no longer exist, replaced by keyed entries to offices used only for storage while their executives work in the cloud from exotic locations around the world (they fly there, expending a huge carbon footprint). Climate changes and has done so since earth formed some 4.6 billion years ago. Blaming this, that, and the other social system – in this case, capitalist oil – for losses associated with climate changes may be lucrative but it won’t solve the challenge we face as a species. We need to focus on changing our lifestyle to allow easier adaptation to severe weather, by creating more mobile and migratory shelter spaces. We’ve got the creative minds and technology to do that so let’s spend at least a little of our resources on surviving as a species instead of simply on profiting from lawsuits to defeat a pollitical model so the green energy sector investors can profit from our current vulnerabilities instead of oil and gas.