With gasoline prices reaching a record $5 per gallon just today, and with President Biden and lawmakers in Washington, D.C. “working like the devil” to ease this pain at the pump, proponents of climate litigation just stepped on a rake.

Recall that proponents of climate litigation base their cases and public relations strategy around the lawsuits that targeted tobacco companies in the 1990s. In a new column this week, an activist with 350.org accidentally revealed the true goal of the litigation: raise the cost of gasoline and power so much that it makes fuel unaffordable to “vulnerable populations,” thereby decreasing its use.

Activists haven’t been shy about comparing the current climate cases to the tobacco lawsuits they model. Their playbook, established in La Jolla in 2012, is titled “Establishing Accountability for Climate Change Damages: Lessons from Tobacco Control.”

However, these proponents usually stop short of recalling what the effects of the tobacco litigation were for consumers. Enter 350 Massachusetts’ volunteer Frederick Hewett, who said the quiet part out loud:

“Legal decisions in the 1990s didn’t eliminate cigarettes, but adult smoking rates did decline markedly in the first two decades of this century…The industry’s settlement funded national anti-smoking programs. It also necessitated price increases that made smoking less accessible to vulnerable populations, especially young people.” (Emphasis added)

Did you catch that? The litigation increased the cost of the product, which put it out of reach for less-wealthy consumers. The same is true for the climate litigation that is modeled on the tobacco lawsuits: it would make energy prohibitively expensive. The difference between tobacco and energy being that energy is a necessary part of our daily lives and economy.

Hewett then becomes even more explicit by writing – contrary to the plaintiffs’ claims that a favorable settlement would help pay for climate changes – that even a “modest success” would advance the real goal of bankrupting America’s energy industry:

“The many states with cases now in court against Big Oil – including Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, Connecticut, Maryland, Colorado, and New York to name a few – probably won’t succeed in landing as heavy a blow as in the Dutch ruling. But even modest success in these cases could, in the aggregate, create headwinds for the fossil fuel giants and undermine their financial stability.

“Being forced to pay out billions in damages year after year could cut into profits and make investors uneasy. It could become harder to raise the capital needed to sustain growth; a downward spiral toward bankruptcy or consolidation might ensue.” (Emphasis added)

We don’t have to take just Hewett’s word for it; some of the lawyers that have filed the climate lawsuits have said the litigation is designed to “shift behavior.” One of the outside attorneys representing Boulder’s climate lawsuit stated in 2020:

“Whether that’s cutting back on the harmful activities, and/or to raise the price of the products that are causing those harmful effects so that if they are continuing to sell fossil fuels, that the cost of the harms of those fossil fuels would ultimately get priced into them.”

Nearly every major oil company operating in the U.S. – ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Marathon, BP, Shell and several others – have been named as defendants in at least one of the more than two dozen cases that have been introduced in the country.

Hewett and other litigation supporters are hoping that all of these companies would go bankrupt. Meaning that the sector that provides Americans with gasoline to fill up their cars, natural gas to heat their homes and generate electricity, and produces the petroleum byproducts that are the foundation of nearly every essential good, including computers, medical equipment, common household items, and fertilizers to help grow food would all cease to be manufactured in the United States.

That would drive the price of nearly everything to unfathomably high levels for American consumers but do nothing to address climate change as they would be forced to import these fuels and products from foreign countries.

This campaign to bankrupt the industry would also destroy the very companies that are needed in the transition to a lower carbon world. As EID Climate has noted, the oil and natural gas industry is leading the way in developing the innovative technologies needed to lower emissions while still producing the energy the world needs.

Attacking the Social License to Operate

Indeed, this effort to increase the price of energy has been a focus of the litigation since before it was filed and to do that, activists have relied on attacks that attempt to undermine the energy industry’s social license to operate.

In early 2016, a group of the activists, academics, and lawyers leading the climate litigation campaign gathered at the offices of the Rockefeller Family Fund in Manhattan. The agenda: to wage a political and financial campaign against the U.S. oil and natural gas industry. This included a discussion on how to “force officials to disassociate themselves from” the industry, to “delegitimize them as a political actor,” and to “drive divestment.”

Six years later, with Americans paying record high gasoline prices that CNN predicts will “stay high for a long time,” these fringe activists – including 350’s Hewett – have doubled down on this campaign to bankrupt the industry that would almost assuredly cause energy prices to rise even higher.

A regular columnist for WBUR, Hewett’s biography states that his “organizational affiliations and volunteer interests include 350 Massachusetts” – the Rockefeller-funded activist group that’s played a key role in supporting climate lawsuits and whose leaders – Bill McKibben and Jamie Henn – were present at that 2016 meeting. Hewett is continues to carry out that mission while admitting that actually winning the case isn’t a top priority:

“Like the fossil fuel divestment movement, the legal movement against Big Oil helps to undermine the industry’s social license to engage in environmentally destructive business practices. According to Daniel Farber, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, which side emerges victorious from these cases is secondary: ‘The real stakes of the litigation thus may rely not so much on outcomes, but rather on the facts brought to light in the process.’

“Can a barrage of court cases make fossil fuels socially and politically unacceptable? The history of tobacco litigation supports the idea that products previously unquestioned can become stigmatized and, to a degree, marginalized.” (Emphasis added)

Conclusion

Hewett’s column reveals the true motivations of climate litigation that were mapped at the 2012 La Jolla gathering, and the 2016 New York City meeting remain at the forefront of the campaign agenda.

Litigation supporters want to use these lawsuits to raise the price of energy for American consumers and businesses and they don’t even care if they win in court as long as they drag the industry’s name through the mud.