‘We’re Talking Very Big Bucks’: New Bill Could Put Oil Companies on the Hook for Climate Change Costs

Oil companies have become some of the wealthiest organizations in history by producing a product that we now know is endangering the future of humanity.

Many of these companies have known about the effects of carbon dioxide for decades, yet while they adapted their own businesses to survive climate change, they actively undermined efforts to understand it.

Should Canadians be able to sue oil companies for that?

“They are in a position to pay for this damage; they have the responsibility to pay for this damage,” Peter Tabuns, the NDP’s climate change critic in the Ontario legislature, told DeSmog Canada. “We’re talking very big bucks.”

Read Jimmy Thomson’s DeSmog Canada story - “‘We’re Talking Very Big Bucks’: New Bill Could Put Oil Companies on the Hook for Climate Change Costs.”

Are we approaching Peak Oil Demand? Not if the oil industry can help it

Peak oil used to be about running out of supply; now some think that we will run out of demand. The oil companies will ensure that we never run out of demand.

Remember Peak Oil? It was all over TreeHugger, the idea that the easy oil was going to start running out and it would get more and more expensive and difficult to find.

We wrote post after post about Hubbert's Peak and how we were all gonna die, that we are "in the confusion stage now, followed by chaos and collapse and basically the End of the world as we know it as we slide down the slope from the Peak.”

Then along came hydraulic fracturing (fracking), tight oil, deepwater drilling, Trump, Zinke and Pruitt, and the oil and gas are flowing freely and people are piling into pickups. Peak oilman King Hubbert became "a punchline rather than a visionary." And now, over at the NRDC, Jeff Turrentine asks Could Peak Oil Demand Be Just a Dozen Years Away? But he isn't talking about oil supply, he is talking demand, suggesting that electric cars are going to cause a different kind of peak.

Read Lloyd Alter’s story from Treehugger - “Are we approaching Peak Oil Demand? Not if the oil industry can help it.”

A trio of myths perpetuated by climate change deniers

F

or years, oil companies and special interest groups have financed campaigns to make people doubt the reality and seriousness of climate change, funnelling money into conservative non-profits, think tanks, politicians, and climate-denial front groups. Let’s take the industrial businessmen and political moguls, the Koch brothers, who have invested tens of millions of dollars over the last fifteen years in efforts to deny climate change.

With the support of Big Oil companies and their allies, a small but vocal group of climate deniers has become as pesky as mosquitos on a summer night. The mystery is how. After all, the facts are clear and when you consider that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that man-made climate change is real, it’s hard to believe that anyone could claim anything else with a straight face.

Read the Climate Reality Project story - “Three ways climate deniers cherry-pick facts about climate change,”