big fossil fuel goes after banks, adopts more of big tobacco's malicious tactics

As more banks, pension funds, and investors don't want to keep pouring money into burning toxic dead things, Big Fossil is threatening to sue them.

From the “that’s a bold strategy Cotton” files comes this story of Big Oil trying to sue banks and investment funds that don’t want to give them money to keep digging up and burning dead things as if the planet isn’t being set on fire as a side-effect. Their argument? That various alliances which pledge to divest from fossil fuels and pour all their energy investments in renewables like wind, solar, and geothermal instead, are actually acting like “climate cartels” and must stop based on their interpretation of a consumer protection law banning anti-competitive behavior. And unfortunately, they have allies in the form of conservative politicians happy to take their donations.

Republican lawmakers have been busy drafting bills essentially trying to forbid banks from not investing in fossil fuels, and the state attorney generals they appointed are threatening fund managers with lawsuits if they continue to divest from Big Fossil. It’s effectively a game of legal chicken that’s very similar to the one Big Tobacco plays in much of the world. Just as Big Fossil is demanding more money at legal gunpoint, Big Tobacco sues countries every time they want to require warnings about the dangers of smoking and tobacco products, claiming they’re violating WTO rules by impeding their business activities and engaging in an illegal boycott.

a long history of malicious lies

This is not the only parallel between the two malicious industries. Both hid vast reams of internal evidence showing their products were extremely harmful. Both paid a small army of science denialists to stir up doubt when independent researchers found proof of their products’ harm, even using the same think tanks. And now, both are trying to use the law to get those who no longer want to do business with them based on their history of lies and proof of their harm and malicious behavior, to reverse course. Even worse, Big Fossil also successfully enlisted politicians to spend years trying to reverse tax incentives on renewable projects that their own voters eagerly approved.

Yet in the upside down world of science denialism for tobacco, oil, gas, and coal, it’s not a problem to pump greenhouse gasses into the air faster than during the worst mass extinction in the geologic record, secondhand smoke is harmless and smoking only causes cancer if you don’t take good care of yourself, and protecting consumers means pumping their lungs, air, and water full of carcinogenic poisons or searing their planet to the point city infrastructures begin to collapse despite that fact that nearly all of them very much do not want any of that to happen. If anything, if you wanted to protect consumers, you’d keep Big Tobacco and Big Fossil the hell away from them.

how we made a deal with the pollution devil

Banks and investment funds which are parts of groups like the Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance, or NZAOA, are not violating any law or fiduciary duty unlike the threats from Big Fossil’s lawyers and political appointees imply. They disclose their green strategy and investors are free to move money around if they don’t agree with it. To force every last bank and fund to invest in fossil fuels actually takes away the consumers’ right to invest only in renewable projects and companies if they so wish. But Big Fossil does not care about that. It only cares about one thing: keeping a global $6 trillion subsidy gravy train going as they continue to parasitize the planet for profit.

Yes, right now we do need fossil fuels because our entire infrastructure demands it. At the same time, we need to be focused on alternative materials and renewables since the side-effects from the noxious chemicals currently filling our world, and the decay of many modern materials we’ve thrown away in landfills is quite literally killing us and polluting our environment and bodies, especially plastics. After all, we don’t have any spare planets and habitable environments waiting for us within easy reach, and every day Big Fossil chooses to do the wrong thing and slow our transition to a cleaner and healthier world is another day we’re all worse off for its existence.