An investigation by the Washington Free Beacon has revealed that the District of Columbia purchased over 1 million gallons of gasoline for government vehicles in 2018, even as the District’s leaders endorse litigation against the energy producers providing that fuel. According to the Washington Free Beacon:
“Invoices obtained by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for all wholesale purchases for city vehicles found that D.C. paid for more than 1 million gallons of fuel in 2018 alone. The city’s consumption of fossil fuels did not stop lawmakers from exploring potential lawsuits against the very companies it purchased fuel from.”
It is unclear whether the District will file a lawsuit against energy companies, though many cities who have followed a similar path have brought “public nuisance” complaints—a lawsuit which argues that companies should be forced to pay for the anticipated effects of climate change because they created a product that, when burned, contributed to global warming. Yet if the District does pursue a public nuisance case against energy producers, the city’s own purchase and use of petroleum products would subject the city to criticism of hypocrisy.
The potential lawsuits to which the Washington Free Beacon refers stem from investigations into ExxonMobil that the District of Columbia’s Attorney General Karl Racine made public in March 2019. A month earlier, the D.C. Office of the Attorney General (OAG) had created a proposal to hire outside counsel on a contingency fee basis “for legal services in support of OAG’s investigation and potential litigation against ExxonMobil Corporation…in connection with Exxon’s statements or omissions about the effects of its fossil fuel products on climate change.”
The proposal was met with almost immediate criticism not only for paying outside counsel on a contingency fee basis, which means that D.C.’s hired counsel would only be paid if he or she won monetary compensation through a legal settlement or court victory, but for allowing the counsel hired to seek outside funding. Such an arrangement would open the case to special interests that would benefit from the power of an attorney general’s office. As Andrew Grossman, an attorney and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute explained, “This allows litigation investor or even a hedge fund to invest in law enforcement, and the investors stand to profit the more aggressively that the private attorneys wield the government’s power.”
Attorney General Racine isn’t the only D.C. politician to target energy companies. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser sits on the Advisory Board for the United States Conference of Mayors, a group which has written an amicus brief in favor of San Francisco and Oakland’s case against energy companies, and which recently passed a resolution demanding that the U.S. Congress allow them to continue to file lawsuits against energy companies to force those companies to pay for the anticipated effects of climate change. The resolution also opposed a proposal supported by many leading economists, environmentalists, and corporations, that would place a rising tax on carbon and return the revenue generated to the American people.
The hypocrisy is clear—cities like Washington, D.C., which create emissions by using a large amount of gasoline, have leaders who want to blame someone else for climate change’s effects. They also oppose a plan that would reduce emissions while placing money in the pockets of every American, but which would also prevent litigious cities from alternatively extracting enormous wealth from energy companies for themselves and their outside attorneys, who stand to take up to a quarter of any damages or settlement.
Other cities that depend on affordable and efficient energy have also considered litigation or have brought lawsuits against energy companies. In California, multiple cities have brought lawsuits against energy companies, trying to extract payment for climate change’s effects. Yet California is the fourth-largest producer of crude oil. Indeed, California law mandates that its Public Utilities Commission “shall … encourage, as a first priority, the increased production of gas in this state.”
What’s more, California municipalities have been hypocritical in their claims that climate change poses a massive, immediate risk to communities. As ExxonMobil has pointed out, their lawsuits directly contradict how these municipalities represent their property values when persuading investors to purchase municipal bonds:
“Notwithstanding their claims of imminent, allegedly near-certain harm, none of the municipalities disclosed to investors such risks in their respective bond offerings, which collectively netted over $8 billion for these local governments over the last 27 years. To the contrary, some of the disclosures affirmatively denied any ability to measure those risks; the others virtually ignored them.”
On the east coast, New York City’s leaders have been equally hypocritical. In January 2018, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he would sue five oil and gas companies for the effects of climate change. Yet de Blasio has come under scrutiny for his own lifestyle, which consumes significant amounts of fossil fuels. As the New York Times wrote:
“Purring in the mild winter day, a small armada of S.U.V.s was parked Thursday morning along 42nd Street outside the New York Public Library. Inside was Mayor Bill de Blasio, at an interfaith prayer breakfast that went on for quite a while.
“By divine right of mayoralty, or someone, 13 vehicles waited at the curb in a no-standing zone, among them four black S.U.V.s (three Chevy Suburbans and one Yukon XL) an ambulance, a huge E.M.S. vehicle and a police school safety van. The engines on those big boys were running while the mayor was inside, for about two hours…”
Judge John Keenan in New York City raised similar concerns while speaking to attorney Matt Pawa, who was one of the counselors representing the city in its case against energy companies. Keenan asked “aren’t the plaintiffs using the product that is being the subject of the lawsuit and haven’t they been using it and aren’t they continuing to use it?”
Hypocrisy isn’t just prevalent in the United States, either. In December 2018, the resort town of Whistler, Canada, was roundly criticized for a letter its mayor sent to Canadian Natural Resources Ltd and other oil and gas companies, asking them to pay for climate-related damages to the town. After backlash from the letter, which included the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce announcing it would no longer hold its annual conference in Whistler after a 22-year relationship, the town’s mayor apologized. In his apology, Mayor Jack Crompton acknowledged that Whistler is a community that depends on fossil fuels—from the tourists who arrive via cars to the lights and machines powered by fossil fuels.
It isn’t too late for Washington, D.C., to realize how much it relies on oil and gas, and work with energy companies on addressing climate change rather than demonizing them for supplying an efficient and affordable fuel source. However, if Attorney General Racine and his future private counsel do not alter course and end up with their day in court against energy companies, it’s likely they’ll arrive there in vehicles fueled by gasoline.
