In this weekend's instalment, readers get a taste of how the public's case against big oil was argued.
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Climate Trials: the Case Against Oil
: Excerpt from the book The Climate Trials: Mikhail Bookchin and the YouTube “Stunt” that Changed the World, by Patti Weaver, p-42.
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The opening part of the Climate Trials was a case of the oil companies versus humanity, specifically dealing with the role they played in creating the climate emergency.
The prosecutor was an obscure lawyer from New York by the name of Wilson Gillespie who had volunteered to help with Mikhail Bookchin’s YouTube project. Contrary to all expectations, he turned out to do a brilliant job of succinctly explaining how the oil companies had known for decades about the threat of climate change yet had consciously chosen to methodically sow doubt and spread confusion in order to protect their profits. He was also able to provide documentation showing the way money spent on lobbying public institutions plus public relations campaigns had created tremendous pressure on elected officials to support their industry.
Since none of the institutions on trial wanted to give the climate trials any credibility through participation, Bookchin found independent individuals to act as “Devil’s advocates”. Their job was to work through as many public and private documents they could find in order to create the strongest possible arguments in defence of the oil industry. These were based on the same “talking points” used to delay implementation of real measures to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Again, an obscure yet tremendously-talented lawyer was found to be lead council in this particular trial: Hillary Chang.
Gillespie’s team did a great job of documenting the ways in which the oil corporations had:
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known about the problem long before it became common knowledge
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made a documented decision to “double down” on fossil fuel production instead of diversifying and moving the corporation towards a post-fossil fuel future
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hired public relations companies that:
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lobbied governments against taking action on climate change
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funded politicians who were willing to fight against climate change
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created fake “think tanks” to promote climate deniers who could then be cited as sources
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created campaigns aimed at convincing third parties to think of dealing with climate change as being “anti-Christian” or “anti-patriotic”
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In response Chang knew that she had no hope of winning her case based on facts. Instead she started out with an appeal to ideology and emotion. Primarily, her initial argument centred on the idea that fossil fuels had created an enormously wealthy society allowing humanity to flourish in ways unprecedented in human history. She attempted to pad her argument by bringing up the green revolution, dramatic improvements in housing, growth in the Gross National Product, and, so on.
After the end of Chang’s formal argument, Gillespie responded by pointing out that whenever an argument in favour something is based on tangible benefits, it is important to ask the ancient Roman question “Cui bono?”, or, “Who does it benefit?”. Did the tar sands mines in Northern Alberta benefit the Athabasca Chipewyas? Did Royal Dutch Shell’s oil extraction in the Niger Delta benefit the Ogoni and Ijaw people? Indeed, with all the catastrophes we are currently going through because of the Climate Emergency, are the people of today and future generations benefiting from the fossil fuel use of previous generations? It’s exceptionally easy to find benefits for some people in any activity, but to be truly beneficial, it needs to help everyone. If it doesn’t, then it just becomes another case of one group asserting privilege over another.
Even if one were to accept that this was a case of “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”, he pointed out that it is important to understand exactly what was on trial. Technology can have a tremendously useful role to play in our lives. But ultimately many problems humanity faces are the result of human behaviour. And if technology is used to just “paper over” these problems, it ceases to be a solution and just enables problems to get worse.
Gillespie specifically referenced the “green revolution” that Chang had spoken of. Fossil fuel agriculture misdiagnosed population growth and redistribution problems and redefined them as a lack of food problem. In exactly the same way, defining human prosperity simply in terms of an expanding Gross National Product redefined the problem of financial inequality out of the picture. And, as everyone now admits, these two problems simply didn’t go away until society decided to make dealing with them a priority. But by then, they had grown to be absolutely horrendous in magnitude.
Realizing that she had been neatly skewered by Gillespie, Chang changed tack. Her next statement boiled down to a defence of the individual leadership of the various oil corporations. She argued that they had merely been following the general wave of society---which was committed to various variations of the “fiduciary responsibility”. By law, by cultural norm, by competitive pressure, they were all selected for and forced to maximize profit at the expense of “sacrifice zones”, “externalities”, future generations, the environment, and so on. You cannot expect individuals to fight against their entire civilization---especially those people who have been schooled and selected to be its leaders.
Gillespie responded by pointing out that no particular individual was on trial. Indeed, that no one was going to be taken out of the court and “hung by the neck until dead”. Instead, the entire industry was on trial---especially the underlying assumptions that allowed it to exist in the way it did.
But having said that, he did point out that it isn’t enough to say that the leadership were “just doing what they were told to do”. That argument had been tried at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, and it had been found wanting. Moreover, it misses the point that the individuals managing the corporations---and the many minions who went out to do their bidding---used their access to large sums of money to influence government policy and public opinion. Gillespie drew the judges attention to the evidence he had presented to the court where oil money had been used to create fake think tanks with the cynical intention of creating doubt in the public about whether climate change was actually happening. He also reminded them about the sophisticated campaigns using hired consultants to convince evangelical Christians that environmentalism was “anti-religious”. He pointed out that professional lobbies had routinely put great pressure on politicians to weaken any legislation aimed at curbing the power of the oil industry. Complaints about how “all of society believed the same thing” seemed hard to believe when corporations felt the need to spend millions of dollars in campaigns to reinforce the “already universally accepted” point of view.
At this point Chang moved onto what was possibly the real “core” of her defence. It revolved around the belief that free market capitalism is absolutely essential to liberal democracy and even the concept of “freedom” itself. The idea is that the free market is what allows for the wide diversity of occupations and individual decision-making that makes a democratic society functional. A society where every aspect of life is governed by regulations not only can’t be felt as being “free”, but wouldn’t give individual citizens enough experience as autonomous individuals to be able to perform the responsibilities of citizenship. It might be the case that business executives were participating in the crafting of public policy with regard to climate change, but in doing so they were simply performing their role as good citizens in a liberal democracy.
Gillespie objected that this was an appeal to something as a universally agreed-upon ideal, which it was very far from being. It was true that some people believed that the core of the idea of “freedom” is the freedom to engage in corporate capitalism, but that isn’t how all everyone understands it. Indeed, all the world’s religions and most of it’s philosophical systems would reject this definition out of hand. And because the climate emergency was something that will exist all over the earth for hundreds of years into the future, it can be argued that this vision of uncontrolled capitalism as being the ultimate goal of all of humanity’s cultural evolution is just a form of cultural imperialism.
Having said that, he did admit that Chang’s point was extremely important in understanding how humanity had gotten into the current mess.
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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
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