We would none of us be shocked to learn a lawyer has latched onto a lawsuit designed to squeeze a wealthy corporation, a corporation whose business is no longer fashionable or palatable to the public, and whose coffers are seen as ripe to be ravaged. We’d expect that lawyer to bluff and bluster and pretend to be shocked, shocked the corporation engaged in a business the lawyer himself patronizes.
Greed, therefore, unscrupulous raw avarice, could be the explanation for why a lawyer and a “private citizen” want to prosecute oil companies for homicide.
Greed is also the most charitable explanation. Indeed, we can only hope it is money lust that drives lawyer Donald Braman and “public citizen” David Arkush in their avowed hatred of oil sellers. For if it is their true conviction that oil companies are ackshually guilty of homicide, then something has gone badly wrong with their thinking.
The pair took to the Harvard Environmental Law Review with their plea “Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil For Climate Deaths“.
This being a law review piece, they stuff in page after tedious page of text and footnotes (the whole is 70 pages!) pointing to prior cases they hope justifies prosecuting a company for what it didn’t do. I am too ignorant of the law to criticize the niceties of their legal argument. But I can guess they might get away with it, especially given that many in their audience will be driven by the love of money. Which is the root, etc.
So let’s instead tackle the argument that using oil is homicide. Opening paragraph:
Activists and journalists declaim the executives of ExxonMobil, Shell, and other large oil companies as “mass murderers.” Lamenting that “millions of human beings will die so that they can have private planes and huge mansions,” they talk of “[d]ragging the corporate titans who profited from driving the world to the brink before a judge.” But as of this writing, no prosecutor in any jurisdiction is bringing homicide charges of any kind against fossil fuel companies (FFCs) for even a single death related to climate change. They should.
They should.
Pointing to what activists and journalists “declaim” about any matter should, to any sane person, signal that was is about to follow is at best hyperbolic putricity (you heard me), and at worst is, as the Brits say, utter bollocks.
Here we have a combination of both. To which we add the cardinal sin of hypocrisy, because, as I don’t need to tell you, but will, every one of these zealots uses fossil fuels, even if at a distance, and if only to charge their electric car.
And in the ink to print their article. So if using oil is murder—and it has to be murder and not manslaughter, for our authors know of what they do—then lawyer Donald Braman and “public citizen” David Arkush are murderers. Perhaps they’ll turn themselves in?
If it isn’t ink, it’s the gas they put in their cars, or the fuel in the planes in which they fly, or in heating or cooling their home, or running the electricity to pay for their Netflix accounts, or in manufacturing the clothes they wear, or in the plastic which surrounds them in their own homes, or in growing the food they eat.
There is no way these sad individuals can remove the charge of hypocrisy, or escape the logic of their own argument. Best they can do is screech and scream and hope to distract you by insisting there are bigger criminals—and murder is a crime, except perhaps soon in Maryland—than them. But it does not follow that they are not guilty just because others are.
Here’s proof, in the very next paragraph:
The case for homicide prosecutions is increasingly compelling. A steady growth in the information about what FFCs knew and what they did with that knowledge is revealing a story of antisocial conduct generating lethal harm so extensive it may soon become unparalleled in human history.
If this “lethal harm”, caused by use of oil, is indeed “unparalleled in human history”, then our authors, who knowingly participate in this lethal harm, damn themselves.
None of this can, or must, be taken seriously. The charge is absurd. It is asinine. It can only be the result of, as I said, lowly greed, or worse, profound stupidity and irresponsibility.
Likely the latter, because they say ridiculous things like this: “Scientists believe we are perilously close to—or perhaps beyond—triggering tipping points that would inexorably drive cataclysmic warming, resulting in Earth systems that could kill millions or even billions of humans.”
I’m a scientist. I say no such thing. If you’re interested in the uncertainties inherent in the science of climatology, please read this.
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I am a lawyer, I studied in another country, but I know, of course, of what happens in the United Gays with the civil responsibility law (torts and all that cool stuff). One salient caracteristic of the US system is that it is, to say the very least, lax with the necessity to prove cause and amount of the harm done, whar we call, more or less, “the equilibrium of patrimonies”. When I see cases where one part has to pay PUNITIVE damages to the tune of millions, when the actual damage was in the tens of thousands, my jaw can only drop, HARD. So, this horrid case is NOT out of the realm of the possible. In the rest of the countries of the world, you would say that it is not as much the case; BUUUT, since the United GAYS has to be imitated, and the climate swindle is an important feature of the world empire of the BANKS, I would NOT place a bet one way or the other….
It’s two Jews running another scam.
There is a peaceful way for citizens to slip the bonds of lawyered restraints on their freedom
Ever since the Judicial Branch, in Marbury v. Madison, the Judiciary has seized unconstitutional authority for itself over the other two branches of government.
We no longer have three separate but equal branches of government which can be most clearly seen in how the Judiciary can claim that any specific act of the Legislative Branch or the Executive Branch is Unconstitutional and voids that act.
Can the Legislative Branch declare a specific act of the Judiciary or the Executive Branch UnConstitutional and void that decision? No, but it could do so if there really were Three Separate but Equal branches of government.
Can the Executive Branch declare a specific act of the Judiciary or Legislative Branch Unconstitutional and void that act? No, but it could, and should, if there really were Three Separate but Equal branches of government and if those acts by one of the other two branches of government are Unconstitutional.
What would be the consequences of all branches of government acting as though they really were Separate but Equal?
Would their be chaos and confusion?
Likely, until We the People were taught that this is Our Constitution, not the possession of people appointed and approved for an office that has no term limits.
We the people must retake possession of the Constitution and if Trump had acted with courage we might have seized control of it back then.
Let’s say that Trump had declared an act of The SCOTUS Unconstitutional, who would it be that ultimately ruled on The Constitutionality of the action by Trump, would it be the SCOTUS itself or the Legislative Branch?
No, ideally (and even, eventually, practically) it would be We the people through the next political campaign following who would decide whether or not what was done was or was not Constitutional. Those campaigning for national office would have to argue either being in favor of or opposed to that action.
Imagine political campaigns focused on The Constitution of We the people rather than campaigns being about who said what 50 years ago, nicknames, doggerel, or who had their picture taken in a tank? Imagine those campaigning for national office being expected to know Our Constitution and being able to explain it in laymen’s terms?
This really is the only peaceful way for We the People to take back control of Our Constitution – it was written by and for We the People, not tyrants wearing black robes.
IF the Courts make another (you can be sure they will) Unconstitutional decision, it will either be kill the lawyers or use this nearly closed door in your escape to liberty.
By the same reasoning if someone was unable to get to the hospital due to the price of gas, then anyone contributed to a high price of gas is a murderer. (There are politicians who have explicitly aimed for high gas prices, and they knew that it would make transportation more difficult, especially for the poor.)
But of course no one would entertain this argument since the point is not any sort of logical consistency, but rather the punishment of enemies of the left.
“Activists and journalists”? LOL! They “declaim”? Double-LOL!
Good grief. If that’s the beginning of their argument, we’re knee-deep in Alice in Wonderland territory.
“But as of this writing, no prosecutor in any jurisdiction is bringing homicide charges of any kind against fossil fuel companies (FFCs) for even a single death related to climate change. They should. ”
It is usually a necessity for someone to die and a prosecutor to ascribe guilt for that death to bring a homicide charge. There are no “Climate Change” deaths yet.
Deaths can easily be arranged. In seeking to find “missing” COVID deaths the IHME simply declared that all excess deaths were in fact COVID deaths. That’s all it would take to suddenly find millions of “climate change” deaths.