Why is America Letting the Oil Industry Destroy the Planet?

When my mom got pregnant with me in 1950, my dad, whose lifetime ambition had been to be a history professor, decided to abandon the GI Bill, drop out of college, and go to work in a steel plant in Grand Rapids, Michigan to financially prepare for their new arrival. It was hot, dirty work and the steel came out of the furnace over asbestos-covered rollers, leaving Dad working in a cloud of the stuff.

In 2006, Dad was diagnosed with mesothelioma, an insanely painful and ultimately 100% deadly disease. I tracked down a lawyer who did suits on behalf of asbestos victims, and he showed up to depose Dad on videotape along with more than a dozen asbestos industry lawyers, several of whom were quite verbally abusive to Dad. They barely fit into my parent’s small living room and left my father in tears.

After the lawyers’ fees, I think Mom ended up with around $135,000, which was better than nothing, although the industry lawyers had filed an appeal that forced him back to the hospital for a painful second biopsy to “prove” he had mesothelioma. And then they procrastinated so long that the money didn’t come until after he’d died. These were Trump-style-relentless lawyers representing a murderous industry that had known since the 1930s that their product caused this exact disease.

Every senior executive in the industry for the more-than-70 years between the time they discovered how deadly asbestos was and my Dad’s death knew. And participated in the cover-up.

Just like the executives in the tobacco industry, who have known with certainty that they were peddling death and disease since the 1940s and are today responsible for an estimated half-million American deaths every year, including my younger brother Stan who died of COPB last year.

“Psychopath” is the only word that adequately describes these executives, their decision-making employees, and their hired-gun marketers who make millions knowingly selling poisons.

And now comes the fossil fuel industry, with a whole new crop of psychopathic executives, marketers, and attorneys. Burning their products produces air pollution that causes asthma, cancer, heart disease, and strokes; according to Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Medicine, an estimated 350,000 Americans die prematurely every year because of this industry’s products.

And that doesn’t scratch the surface of the death and destruction on the horizon, as severe weather driven by global warming from fossil fuel emissions kick in. Such events have cost America over $2 trillion and more than 16,000 lives just since Ronald Reagan began denying the science in 1980. Over 60,000 people died in Europe just last year from a series of severe heatwaves.

A new study from the international NGO Global Witness documents how there could be 11.5 million excess deaths from global warming worldwide by 2100 just based on the emissions of five companies between now and 26 years from now: Shell, BP, TotalEnergies, ExxonMobil, and Chevron.

And now we learned that the industry, which has been publicly praising the Paris Accords around reducing emissions and getting climate change under control, have been lying to us again and instead are — across the board — increasing their production of their toxic products.

This and other analyses of the death and destruction wrought by the fossil fuel industry’s carbon pollution have led a number of legal experts to suggest that now may be the time to lay the foundation for the prosecution of fossil fuel companies and their executives for murder or, at the least, manslaughter.

This would not be a new or novel event.

California utility PG&E was convicted of multiple manslaughter counts and paid $3.5 million in fines when their decision to use money that could have upgraded or buried their power lines — but instead went to millions in bonuses and stock buy-backs for their senior executives — led to the death of 85 people in the Camp Fire that consumed the town of Paradise.

Similarly, when BP’s failure to properly use and maintain their blowout preventers led to 11 deaths (and a massive oil spill) in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, that company pleaded guilty to manslaughter. BP and PG&E ultimately paid billions in fines and compensation.

A new analysis published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review (Vol. 48, No. 1, 2024) titled Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil For Climate Deaths lays out the case for holding fossil fuel industry executives and their companies accountable for the deaths they are causing as you read these words.

“For decades,” the authors write, “fossil fuel companies (‘FFCs’) have known that their product causes ‘globally catastrophic’ climate change. Rather than warn the public or alter their business models, they waged a multi-decade disinformation campaign to sow doubt and delay regulatory responses.

“Today, as experts continue developing and delivering ever more detailed and precise warnings of climate catastrophe, and vast numbers of people are killed at an accelerating rate by wildfires, floods, droughts, heatwaves, and other climate-related calamities, FFCs continue to expand the production, marketing, and sale of the products they have long understood to cause mass death.

“Activists and journalists have called executives of major oil companies ‘mass murderers,’ lamenting that ‘millions of human beings will die so that they can have private planes and huge mansions,’ and a growing chorus of communities devastated by FFCs’ lethal conduct have begun to demand accountability.”

The authors are blunt, arguing that these executives and their companies are knowingly complicit in the deaths of millions of people in America and around the world, with the numbers starting to explode as we cross multiple climate tipping points.

And still, like the asbestos and tobacco executives of the last century, instead of mitigating the harms of their products, they instead fight every effort at transparency or accountability.

“As additional evidence of FFCs’ knowledge of the lethal risks they were generating surfaces through leaks and court-mandated discovery, obstacles to a successful prosecution [for murder or manslaughter] are falling away. At the same time, with every new wave of climate-related deaths, the justification for prosecution grows.

“Although some of the harmful externalities that FFCs generate may be suitable for tort or regulatory suits, the lethality of FFCs’ conduct, their awareness of the risks they are generating, and their efforts to obscure those risks make criminal prosecution for homicide particularly appropriate.

“Perhaps most importantly, if FFCs continue to fight against all major efforts to reduce the harms they are generating, and if they continue to obstruct or delay state and federal regulation and civil suits designed to reduce the lethal impact of their conduct, then homicide prosecutions may prove necessary to prevent the escalating threat that their lethal conduct poses to millions of potential victims in the United States.”

Indeed, at a conference in Houston this week, Saudi Aramco’s CEO, Amin Nasser, was explicit with a comment that drew loud applause from his oil industry audience:

“We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas, and instead invest in them adequately.”

Similarly, Fortune magazine reported last month that the fossil fuel industry is positioning itself to be the largest donor to the Trump campaign, having already given him over $7 million following his recent promises to “drill, baby, drill” and to end all subsidies for electric vehicles and solar or wind power projects.

And, in response to President Biden’s tightening emission standards, the largest fossil fuel lobbying group has proudly announced an “8-figure” advertising campaign called “Lights On” to, as American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers told CNN, “dismantle policy threats” to the industry.

Commenting on it, The Los Angeles Times editorial board was emphatic:

“Californians should be wise enough to see this messaging for what it is: The behavior of a threatened, greed-driven industry trying to trick us into letting it hold onto its dirty and harmful old ways of doing business.”

This denial of the crisis and doubling down on advertising and more emissions is, of course, no solution.

In past articles here on Hartmann Report, I’ve argued for the US government to nationalize the three largest American fossil fuel companies by purchasing their stock in the marketplace; the total cost would be less than the Trump tax cuts for billionaires, and with new management the companies could help our nation’s transition away from its addiction to oil, coal, and natural gas.

Today there are families all across the country who are mourning the loss of their loved ones to climate-change-fueled floods, heatstroke, and violent weather as much as I grieved my father’s death at the hands of the asbestos industry executives.

They deserve justice, and the industry needs a wake-up call like the asbestos industry got in the late 1990s, leading to a wave of bankruptcies.

Holding murderous executives and their rogue companies bent on profiting from unnecessary death and destruction is imperative. As New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin noted a few months ago:

“Based on their own research, these companies understood decades ago that their products were causing climate change and would have devastating environmental impacts down the road.

“They went to great lengths to hide the truth and mislead the people of New Jersey and the world. In short, these companies put their profits ahead of our safety. It’s long overdue that the facts be aired in a New Jersey court and the perpetrators of the disinformation campaign pay for the harms they’ve caused.”

The men (they were almost certainly all men) who made the intentional decision to murder my father for profit are long dead; the men and women who today are plotting to render much of our beautiful planet uninhabitable are very much with us.

It’s beyond time to hold them accountable.