Courting failure again
In 2018, a federal judge threw out New York City’s vastly overreaching lawsuit against oil companies for causing climate change. Just this month, a federal appeals panel unanimously affirmed that ruling. In 2019, the state attorney general wielding New York’s powerful Martin Act failed to convince state courts that Exxon misled investors about climate risks.
Yet there was Mayor de Blasio on Earth Day with a sweeping new suit against oil and gas companies, this time for allegedly violating New York City’s consumer protection law. The theory of this case is that Exxon, Shell, BP and the American Petroleum Institute are defrauding the public through ads and other public communications when they portray themselves as getting greener — and leave out the fact that fossil fuels are a major cause of climate change.
Count us skeptical that fossil-fuel companies that are indeed investing millions in renewables, even as they continue to profit overwhelmingly from oil and gas, have an affirmative legal obligation in their own ads to brand themselves environmental villains, underlining what almost all New Yorkers already know. And why should Big Oil get punished for greenwashing while other companies with gargantuan carbon footprints from Amazon to Tyson Foods to McDonald’s to GM to Delta miss few opportunities to burnish their environmental bona fides?
When companies outright lie, there must be consequences, and to the extent these companies are doing that, we make no excuses. The city’s legal papers, to the contrary, are mostly full of sins of omission or standard advertising puffery that are no more egregious than Ben & Jerry’s failing to play up the damage saturated fat does to the heart.
Even as citizens and governments choose to burn fossil fuels to keep warm and move around the city and the world, New York is right to embrace ever more solar, wind and geothermal power. But de Blasio’s energy to keep banging his and the city law department’s head against the wall? That’s already endlessly renewable.