Oil companies should call California’s bluff and announce their departure from the state at the end of this year.
The state of California is the latest player to sue various oil companies for alleged damages from climate change, and the oil companies should call the state’s bluff.
Like the numerous cookie-cutter climate lawsuits filed by other states and municipalities against these same oil companies, the California lawsuit blames them for causing climate change and all manner of damages — drought, storms, heat, cold, wildfires, rising seas, and so on. And, like the other lawsuits, this one claims the oil companies knew about climate change as early as the 1960s and could have — should have — developed renewable-energy technologies to counteract it, but chose not to in favor of selling more profitable fossil fuels. Of course, it also claims the oil companies continue to damage California by supplying fossil-fuel products in the state.
The latter claim is a bluff that the oil companies should call. Currently, California has 14 operating oil refineries, down from 18 a decade ago. Of those 14, four are operated by two defendants in the suit: The Chevron refineries in El Segundo and Richmond, and the Phillips 66 refineries in Wilmington and San Francisco. Together, those four refineries account for about 45 percent of total refinery capacity in the state.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the National Review Online (paywall)
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Jonathan A. Lesser, PhD, is the president of Continental Economics, an economic consulting firm, and an adjunct fellow with the Manhattan Institute.
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