Summary
Fossil fuel companies successfully lobbied to block California’s 2024 Polluters Pay Climate Cost Recovery Act, which aimed to make major polluters fund climate disaster prevention and recovery.
Chevron, Western States Petroleum Association, and others spent over $80M on lobbying, claiming the bill would raise energy costs and duplicate existing carbon taxes.
The Los Angeles wildfires, now California’s second deadliest, have reignited interest in the bill.
Advocates suggest revised legislation to avoid requiring two-thirds legislative approval.
Critics accuse big oil of evading accountability amid record profits.
I’m going to say something that may be largely unpopular here; but they are not entirely to blame. California is a state defined by wild fires. It’s at the edge of a desert. It’s always warm there. And it’s on the west Coast. The hottest place in the world is in California. It’s always been a tinder box.
People keep building and building there. The weather is great. But, that keeps making the area more and more dry. Blacktop does not allow water to go back into thw water table. The Colorado river keeps getting water pulled from it. It’s hardly the river it once was.
I have a hard time thinking this is big oil because or this. I’m not for big oil. We just laughed at the face of mother nature and it laughed back at our hubris*.
*hubris* but fair points.
And yet all of that was made possible and in some cases inevitable by the incessant flogging of oil by Big Oil.
At the end of the day, they knew 50 years ago they’d be destroying the environment and 40 years ago they decided not to tell anyone. This is just the latest, most graphic representation of that assault on the global climate.
Whoops.
Yup, this isn’t just on the power companies. Large agribusiness and real estate development is a huge driver of wildfires
I sure wouldn’t want them to pay more than they owe us.
I think I just saw somone report that ~25% could be blamed on climate change. That’s not 0, that’s not 100%, so it would be a bit strange to just blaime the oil industry.
I mean it would be a good idea to … remove all those non-native eucalyptus trees having been planted all over California? Those are basically pure explosive fuel.
https://www.independent.com/2011/01/15/how-eucalyptus-came-california/
