Big Oil Could Face Homicide Charges | Opinion

Chimneys of the PCK refinery and other companies in the Schwedt industrial park rise into the sky on a cloudy January day.

Last month, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods made a claim so brazen it shocked even some of his most ardent critics. Humanity is not on track to meet its climate goals because the world “waited too long” to begin investing in renewable energy, and the public is to blame for it. In his words, “The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions.”

This is gaslighting, plain and simple. Everyday consumers are not the reason we “waited too long” to begin transitioning to clean energy. The reason is that fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil spent over half a century defrauding the public with climate disinformation in order to delay or block that transition.

That is not conjecture—the facts are laid out in the industry’s own documents. We now know that Big Oil understood with great precision that the products they were extracting and marketing would cause, in their own words, “globally catastrophic” climate consequences. By 1968 the American Petroleum Institute (API) was commissioning reports warning that greenhouse gasses from fossil fuel combustion could result in “the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, [and] warming of the oceans.”

Over the next decade Big Oil companies were repeatedly warned by their own scientists that global warming caused by their products would “have serious consequences for man’s comfort and survival”; that climate change could “produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the earth’s population)”; and that these effects could “bring[] world economic growth to a halt in about 2025.”

Rather than responding to this existential threat by warning the public, as any reasonably conscientious actor would, Big Oil companies waged a campaign of deception to hide the truth from regulators and consumers and forestall our transition away from fossil fuels.

In 1989 Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron, and API collaborated to found the “Global Climate Coalition,” which issued a stark warning to its members: “Unless ‘climate change’ becomes a non-issue, . . . there may be no moment when we can declare victory for our efforts.” The Coalition developed an action plan to dupe consumers by making “uncertainties in climate science” part of the “conventional wisdom” of the public and the media, and making climate solutions “appear to be out of touch with reality.” Their “Strategies and Tactics” included a $5 million “Global Climate Science Data Center,” to “rais[e] questions about and undercut[] the ‘prevailing scientific wisdom'” that combustion of fossil fuels causes climate change and a $2 million fund to disburse to organizations that spread climate misinformation.

In the run-up to the 1997 Kyoto climate conference alone, the Coalition spent $13 million on advertisements casting doubt on climate science, with claims such as that curbing emissions “won’t help the environment, but it will hurt America’s economy.” This despite industry sources predicting as far back as 1980 that climate change could “bring world economic growth to a haltin about 2025.”

Another fossil fuel front group, the “Information Council for the Environment,” set out to “Reposition global warming as theory (not fact)” through, for example, advertisements comparing concerns about climate change to “Chicken Little’s hysteria about the sky falling.” API also waged its own campaign of climate deception, creating a multimillion-dollar public relations effort claiming that no “scientific evidence exists that human activities are significantly affecting sea levels, rainfall, surface temperatures, or the intensity and frequency of storms”—claims directly contradicting the research API had been cataloging internally for decades.

This conduct did not just violate every principle of human decency; according to dozens of civil lawsuits brought by cities and states across the country, it violated the law, as well. And Big Oil’s liability may not end with civil claims.

As a growing number of legal experts, scientists, and former prosecutors have recently begun positing, the fossil fuel industry’s knowing generation and coverup of the climate crisis may constitute a range of criminal offenses. Indeed, the facts described in these civil suits could support charges including criminal fraud, conspiracy and racketeering, reckless endangerment, criminal damage, causing or risking catastrophe, and criminally anticompetitive practices. They could even support charges of homicide.

This, the most serious of crimes, is committed when a person or corporation contributes to or accelerates any death with a culpable mental state. Given the escalating body count from climate-driven heat waves, wildfires, storms, and other extreme weather events, and the mounting evidence that fossil fuel companies acted with clear knowledge of the dangerousness of their conduct, it may already be possible to show that Big Oil’s actions satisfy both requirements.

So, it’s no wonder that Big Oil executives like Darren Woods want to obscure this history. Like many unreformed criminals, fossil fuel companies want to pin the blame for their lethal conduct on anyone—everyone—but themselves.

Climate change poses the greatest threat humanity has ever faced. Under a plain reading of criminal statutes in jurisdictions across the United States, fossil fuel corporations—by recklessly or knowingly generating this crisis—committed criminal offenses. Indeed, their crimes may be among the, if not the, most consequential in human history. The chief executive of ExxonMobil says those responsible should “pay the price.” We agree. Prosecutors should begin to act accordingly.

Aaron Regunberg is a former member of the Rhode Island General Assembly and senior climate policy counsel at Public Citizen.

David Arkush is the director of Public Citizen’s Climate Program and coauthor of the forthcoming Harvard Environmental Law Review article “Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil for Climate Deaths.”

The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.

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