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Disinfo Doubleheader: Climate Lawsuits Against Big Oil Are Bad, but Suing Activists Is Good [1]

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Date: 2023-03-07

Last year, the lawyers defending Big Oil in public were pushing the message that the courts aren't the right place for climate policy. This may be true, but the climate lawsuits aren't actually about setting policy; they're about holding the industry accountable for its false advertising.

But it looks like Big Oil defenders might be trying a (not exactly) new counter-attack.

First though, let’s review the classic version of Big Oil's defense play. On Friday, the Washington Examiner published an op-ed by J.W. Verret, who defends the fossil fuel industry and attacks climate accountability efforts. Verret claims that the House Oversight Committee's report on climate disinformation didn't expose a "smoking gun" and "resulted in no determination of wrongdoing," despite the fact that it documented the industry " lying " and " greenwashing " its commitment to fossil fuels.

Verret implies lawyers will eventually give up on trying to hold Big Oil legally responsible for its false advertising in the form of climate disinformation, which is not exactly surprising coming from a professor at George Mason's Antonin Scalia Law School. (Reminder: George Mason is famous for being corrupted by Koch and the Federalist Society , the polluter-funded right-wing legal lobby shop that changed the name of the school to honor Scalia, who one George Mason student called " a borderline racist .")

Verret was just toeing the petro-party line and not advancing it. For that, the Washington Examiner turned to Paul Tice, letting him publish an op-ed the day after Verret's, where he somewhat breaks ranks with the 'climate lawsuit bad' orthodoxy.

Tice, a WSJ opinion page regular who's apparently got a book on ESG coming out this year, warns about how ESG activists are bringing lawsuits, like the one against Shell's board of directors. Tice writes, "Shell has become the corporate whipping boy for the climate-crazed ESG movement," which is evidence that "a policy of ESG appeasement is not working for oil and gas companies," who should instead "start copying the aggressive legal tactics of the opposition."

Yes, even as the fossil fuel industry's defenders decry courts as a venue for justice, Tice suggests that they should adopt exactly that tactic. "There is a strong case to be made for bringing a racketeering charge," he claims, "against the network of environmental, climate, and ESG activist groups now working in concert to shut down fossil fuel production through litigation and other means."

There isn't a strong case, because activists aren't the Mafia, and it's not even that new or novel of an idea. Tice himself notes that Energy Transfer is suing environmentalists over the Dakota Access Pipeline on these grounds, and it was tossed out by a US District judge before being refiled in North Dakota state court.

Indeed, claiming it's environmentalists who are actually behaving badly is a tried and true disinformation tactic. It's even one they used specifically on this issue: Back in 2015, one of the industry defenders' first reactions to the #ExxonKnew reporting and resulting litigation was to counter-claim that it's actually climate champs who are working together to break the law. And Tice's friends at the Wall Street Journal's opinion page were some of the most vociferous about it, running tons of pieces fruitlessly making the charge .

Given that the WSJ has run plenty of Tice's climate disinfo in the past, and plenty of pieces on this angle, it's a bit of a mystery as to why Tice couldn't place this op-ed in the WSJ, and had to go to the Examiner instead.

At the same time, it's no mystery how and why multiple fossil-fuel-defenders have mutually exclusive arguments- is this an issue for the courts, or not?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/7/2156702/-Disinfo-Doubleheader-Climate-Lawsuits-Against-Big-Oil-Are-Bad-but-Suing-Activists-Is-Good

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