Successful Game-plan for Suing Energy Companies Over Global Warming?

An interesting piece that just came out in the Atlantic details how two prominent attorneys believe they have a proper game-plan for bringing lawsuits against large energy corporations for global warming damage. The lawyers argue, besides showing evidence of damage caused by climate change (from greenhouse gas emissions), that large energy companies have been actively conspiring to cover-up the threat of global warming.

The game-plan is the same methodology used against big tobacco companies in the 1980’s and 90’s. Basically, each industry engaged in the use of shill groups to raise and foster public doubt about the effects of their respective products (or emissions) on public health. From the article:

The energy industry’s ties to government, like the tobacco industry’s, have been unusually tight, and its lobbying efforts demonstrably effective. Philip Cooney, a liaison between the Bush administration and federal environmental agencies, edited uncertainty into reports on global warming by top government scientists from 2001 until 2005, when he resigned after examples of his changes were published by The New York Times. Before joining the White House, Cooney had worked for the American Petroleum Institute; a week after his departure, Exxon­Mobil announced he was joining the company. “In a sense, ExxonMobil walked right into the room of the science program,” says Rick Piltz, the federal official who blew the whistle on Cooney. A government memo obtained by Greenpeace outlines a State Department official’s talking points for a meeting with energy-company lobbyists: the president, the memo says, “rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you.”

The piece also centers around the sad story of the town of Kivalina, Alaska, whose residents will have to be relocated within 10 years due to massive beach erosion.

-- Dylan Blaylock