How Greens Humiliate Themselves Their latest lawsuit would have Exxon pretend that climate policy is succeeding.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-greens-humiliate-themselves-1540939433
Despite its general lack of merit, a lawsuit by the New York attorney general’s office is an entertaining symbol of all that has gone wrong with the green movement in the era of climate-change politics.
Exxon is accused of failing to adopt sufficiently penitential accounting for its oil and gas projects in light of climate regulations that, ahem, don’t exist. Indeed, politicians around the world have declined to enact the green wish list even when given the chance, notwithstanding their endless verbal opposition to climate change.
Presume for a moment the accusations against Exxon are accurate. Then greens should actually be glad because Exxon has spared them future embarrassment when the company is forced to increase the recorded value of its assets to account for the failure of green politics to deliver the expected carbon regulations.
Words are challenged to express how laughable this case is. Before getting lost in distinctions that Exxon internally draws (and the attorney general muddles) between project-specific costs and policies that would suppress demand for fossil fuels generally, let’s remember a few things.
Like all businesses, Exxon seeks to take only those risks that will pay off, and has every incentive to anticipate future regulatory costs correctly. The attorney general’s office and its green backers have an entirely different purpose: They want Exxon to use its internal disciplines to prevent oil and gas development even if it would pay off.
The mood ring the greens are wearing is not a pretty color. They can’t enact meaningful curbs through the political process. They failed to use the courts to hold Exxon and others liable for global warming, never mind that the damages they sought would have been paid by producing more oil and gas (and therefore more greenhouse gases).
They have not succeeded in slowing the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, but now are suing Exxon for not pretending otherwise in its accounting. It’s almost as if extorting Exxon’s participation in a fantasy of green success has become a substitute for actual green success.
The lawsuit is the last dribble of the grand inquisition launched by now-departed Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, subsidized (as we later learned) by outside climate lobbyists. Mr. Schneiderman was forced to leave office in May due to his practice of hitting women he was dating. He set out originally to prove that Exxon had lied about climate science, which Mr. Schneiderman apparently believed is devoid of uncertainties. (Exxon had pointed to uncertainties.)
That fell through, perhaps when his staff opened any of the reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These not only testify to the continuing uncertainties, but ironically have themselves become a five-volume testament to science’s inability to reduce these uncertainties despite tens of billions invested in climate science.
Here’s another embarrassment. Since climate change moved to center stage and became the holy cause of the green movement 20 years ago, greenhouse gases have grown faster than ever. The climate-change lobby has devolved into an angry cult. It does not seek to build bridges to others. It has run, by now, an exhaustive experiment showing conclusively that hysterical doom-mongering and vilifying skeptics as the equivalent of Holocaust deniers is a recipe for political failure.
Most of all, it has abdicated on the crucial grounds of cost and benefit, though it’s entirely possible to envision climate-related policies that would meet a cost-benefit test. Investing in basic science and research is almost always high-return. All governments must tax something; most governments tax hundreds of things. A carbon tax is one strategy that could command support across the political spectrum if sold with a touch of the conciliatory mind-set that is crucial to democracy.
The idea was not alien to the green movement, before it went insane. In the 1990s, environmentalists promoted a “double dividend” strategy—in which a carbon tax would be used to reduce taxes on socially useful activities like work and investment. As Resources for the Future’s Richard Morgenstern said in a 1996 paper: “Taxes on labor discourage work effort; those on savings reduce the pool of capital available for investment; and those on investment discourage risk-taking.”
Today’s greens and their Democratic allies would rather chant about the need for impossible, inherently corrupting, never-going-to-happen command-and-control actions to ban fossil fuels and subsidize alternative energy. And bonkers beyond words are the legionnaires of Naomi Klein, who insist that before we can address climate change, we must get rid of capitalism. Whatever is driving such people, it’s not a desire for progress on climate policy.
No less observable is the bad faith of the New York attorney general’s office. It debases itself and the law by trying to invent some kind of complaint against Exxon merely as payback for its green allies.
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