By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 27, 2024 ~
According to reporting at the New York Times, on April 11 Donald Trump hosted oil executives and their lobbyists to a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida and requested a quid-pro-quo. If they donated $1 billion to his campaign for president, “he would roll back environmental rules that he said hampered their industry….”
Among attendees at the event, according to The Times, were executives from ExxonMobil, EQT Corporation and the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil industry.
Trump must have liked what he heard from the fossil fuel industry because when he accepted the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention on July 18, he told the crowd this: “We will drill, baby, drill…We will do it at levels that nobody’s ever seen before.”
By October 21, when Trump delivered remarks to a crowd of the religious right in Concord, North Carolina, he promised the crowd the following if they would vote for him: “We will frack, frack, frack, and drill, baby, drill.”
Trump’s remarks came in the same year that the U.S. was experiencing record hot temperatures in both air and coastal waters along with unprecedented wild fires, floods and hurricanes.
Yesterday, the Attorney General of the state of Maine, Aaron Frey, filed a breathtaking lawsuit in state court against fossil fuel companies, including at least two entities that were in attendance at Trump’s confab at Mar-a-Lago in April. Named as defendants, thus far, are: Exxon, Shell, Chevron, BP, Sunoco, and the American Petroleum Institute.
In a statement, Attorney General Frey explained the rationale of the lawsuit as follows:
“The State seeks to hold the Defendants accountable for failing to warn Mainers and concealing their knowledge about the devastating consequences of the increasing use of fossil fuels on Maine’s people, economy, and environment. This conduct has resulted in enormous financial burdens, public health impacts, property damage and other harms across Maine as a result of extreme weather, sea-level rise, and warmer temperatures. The complaint alleges that the Defendants knew about the potentially catastrophic consequences an increasing use of fossil fuels would cause as early as the 1960s, and the industry’s internal analysis proved remarkably accurate. But rather than warn the public of these consequences, the Defendants protected their own assets from climate change impacts and deployed strategic public relations campaigns designed to discredit the scientific consensus on climate change, create doubt in the minds of the public about the climate change impacts of burning fossil fuels, and delay the energy economy’s transition to a lower-carbon future, all while maximizing their own profits.”
Would publicly-traded companies like these, with Boards of Directors and General Counsels, actually endanger the planet and the lives of millions of families and children – to maximize profit?
If you know anything about the documents uncovered in the Big Tobacco lawsuit, you will know that the answer to the above question is undeniably Yes!
On August 17, 2006, Judge Gladys Kessler wrote the following in her 1,683 page decision in the Big Tobacco case:
“Defendants’ conspiracy was in existence as of December 1953, when several of the cigarette company Defendants met in New York City to create CTR [The Council for Tobacco Research] and to discuss and outline the Enterprise’s future strategy. Each Defendant agreed to commit a substantive RICO offense with the knowledge that other members of the Enterprise were also conspiring to commit racketeering activity. All Defendants coordinated significant aspects of their public relations, scientific, legal, and marketing activity in furtherance of the shared objective — to use mail and wire transmissions to maximize industry profits by preserving and expanding the market for cigarettes through a scheme to deceive the public. Defendants executed the scheme by using several different strategies including: (1) denying that there were adverse health effects from smoking; (2) making false, misleading, and deceptive public statements designed to maintain doubt about whether smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke cause disease; (3) denying the addictiveness of smoking cigarettes and the role of nicotine therein; (4) disseminating advertising for light and low tar cigarettes suggesting they were less harmful than full flavor ones; and (5) undertaking a publicly announced duty to conduct and publicize disinterested and independent research into the health effects of smoking upon which the public could rely.”
Documents in the Big Tobacco case also revealed that major law firms conspired with the industry to hide the deadly effects of smoking. Judge Kessler wrote:
“Finally, a word must be said about the role of lawyers in this fifty-year history of deceiving smokers, potential smokers, and the American public about the hazards of smoking and second hand smoke, and the addictiveness of nicotine. At every stage, lawyers played an absolutely central role in the creation and perpetuation of the Enterprise and the implementation of its fraudulent schemes. They devised and coordinated both national and international strategy; they directed scientists as to what research they should and should not undertake; they vetted scientific research papers and reports as well as public relations materials to ensure that the interests of the Enterprise would be protected; they identified ‘friendly’ scientific witnesses, subsidized them with grants from the Center for Tobacco Research and the Center for Indoor Air Research, paid them enormous fees, and often hid the relationship between those witnesses and the industry; and they devised and carried out document destruction policies and took shelter behind baseless assertions of the attorney client privilege.”
Maine’s lawsuit against the fossil fuel industry is courageous and brilliantly constructed. But it needs to be amended as hard evidence is obtained during discovery to include the names of the law firms that aided and abetted this conspiracy as well as the names of the taxpayer-subsidized nonprofit front groups that participated in the conspiracy. There is acknowledgement in the lawsuit that the state of Maine is aware of those front groups. It reads:
“Through their own actions and through their membership and/or participation in climate denialist front groups, each Defendant was and is a member of that conspiracy. Defendants committed substantial acts to further the conspiracy in Maine by making misrepresentations and misleading omissions to Maine consumers about the existence, causes, and effects of global warming; by affirmatively promoting Fossil Fuel Defendants’ fossil fuel products as safe, with knowledge of the disastrous impacts that would result from the intended use of those products; and by failing to warn Maine consumers about the disastrous impacts of fossil fuel use.”
Just weeks after Trump made his October “drill, baby, drill” remarks, wildfires had consumed 6,000 acres in New York, hundreds of brush fires had broken out in New York City and its suburbs, dozens of people had to evacuate their homes and Dariel Vasquez, an 18-year old New York state parks employee had lost his life battling the blazes.
The New York wild fires occurred following an October that was the driest in a century for the region.
This year also saw catastrophic hurricane devastation as the water temperature in the Gulf of Mexico set a historic heat record.
Hurricane Helene made landfall on September 26, as a Category 4 hurricane near Perry, Florida. It then proceeded to unleash its wrath northward, plowing through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Decimated areas in Western North Carolina – cities and towns such as Asheville, Chimney Rock, Lake Lure, Fairview, Black Mountain and Swannanoa – are 485 miles north of where Hurricane Helene first made landfall in Florida.
Unprecedented levels of rainfall from Hurricane Helene turned Western North Carolina rivers into raging torrents of water that destroyed homes along the rivers and swept them away. Tragically, dozens of people in those homes had no time to escape and died as a result. As of yesterday, the state of North Carolina was reporting that there were “103 verified storm-related fatalities” from Hurricane Helene, which represented 44 percent of the 232 deaths in the five southern states it ravaged.
What is becoming clear to climate scientists is that the heat records this summer in the Gulf of Mexico can spin up catastrophic hurricanes in as little as four days and unleash their impacts hundreds of miles away from where they make landfall.
Just 13 days after Hurricane Helene unleashed its fury, Hurricane Milton made landfall along Florida’s Gulf of Mexico coastline at Siesta Key, a barrier island to Sarasota, Florida. According to meteorologists, Hurricane Milton produced so much rainfall in the Tampa Bay area that it qualifies as a one in 1,000-year rain event.
Although Hurricane Milton made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane, it was one of the most rapidly intensifying hurricanes on record, reaching Category 5 status and 180 mph winds two days before landfall. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported the following regarding its rapid intensification:
“Hurricane Milton, the ninth hurricane of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, rapidly intensified into a Category 5 storm in the Gulf of Mexico on Monday, October 7, 2024. The storm exploded in strength and intensity at near record pace becoming one of the most intense hurricanes on record in the Atlantic basin. This explosive strengthening was fueled in part by record to near-record warmth across the Gulf of Mexico. The warmer the ocean is, the more fuel there is for hurricanes to intensify, provided other atmospheric conditions (like wind shear) are also favorable.”
Because the public’s awareness of the increasing size and intensity of climate change disasters has not kept pace with the fossil fuel industry’s propaganda war and Donald Trump’s willingness to shill for the industry by characterizing “Drill, Baby, Drill” as somehow a patriotic chant, tens of millions of Americans are sleepwalking their way to disaster.
