Environmental justice can be oh-so-boring, especially when brown and black people that speak Spanish or Creole are the victims. They may be the first to get kicked in the genitals by environmental catastrophe, but they won’t be the last. Still, they persist in the face of indifference and outright hostility. Such is the heartache of people who try so hard to fight against the oligarchs, media, and politicians that enable such brutality by resisting climate solutions and adaption with all their power provides to them.
The response by big oil spokespersons to a climate change lawsuit against them by the citizens of Puerto Rico is simply galling. The excerpts below are from Reuters and their reporting. Purto Ricans charged Exxon Mobile, Shell, Chevron, and other fossil fools of colluding with each other to deceive the public over the threats that they knew for decades would occur. The lawsuit points to the 2017 hurricane season (Irma and Maria) that brought unimaginable terrors to the Caribbean islands and Florida (Irma).
Filed in Federal Court, the complaint asks for relief in the form of financial damages for the flattening of their island. Both 2017 powerful wind storms that struck the island have been tied directly to climate change.
Irma brought thirty feet high waves that broke off San Juan. Other Islands, including Antigua and Barbuda, St Martin, The Florida Keys and Naples, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Anguilla, and the British Virgin Islands, all suffered as Puerto Rico had.
Carbon Brief wrote at the time:
With Hurricane Irma following so soon after the devastating impacts of Hurricane Harvey, much of the media has continued to seek input from scientists on the potential role of climate change.
You can read Carbon Brief’s roundup of the reaction after Harvey for more details on the science of climate change and Atlantic hurricanes. But, as three climate specialists – including Prof Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University – summarise in the Washington Post: “the strongest hurricanes have gotten stronger because of global warming”. This is, ultimately, a result of global greenhouse gas emissions, they note:
Reuters, on reporting the lawsuit, writes:
The group of 16 municipalities filed what they called a first-of-its-kind lawsuit last week against about a dozen fossil fuel companies and others. The towns say the companies coordinated a multibillion-dollar "fraudulent marketing scheme" to convince consumers that fossil fuel products do not alter the climate. That campaign ran contrary to the companies' own studies showing their products accelerate climate change, resulting in more deadly storms, the lawsuit said.
The municipalities said the companies outlined a plan of deception in a joint memo that took aim at international climate negotiations in the 1990s. The coordinated deception spanning decades violates U.S. racketeering and antitrust laws among others, the suit claims.
"Puerto Rico was hit by the perfect storm and is the ultimate victim of global warming," said Marc Grossman, a partner at Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman, a firm representing the municipalities, in a statement.
Shell spokesperson Anna Arata said in a statement that addressing climate change requires a “society-wide” approach, and the company doesn’t believe the courtroom is the right venue to address the issue.
Exxon spokesperson Casey Norton said that legal proceedings like this “waste millions of dollars of taxpayer money and do nothing to advance meaningful actions that reduce the risks of climate change.”
Theodore Boutrous of Gibson Dunn and Crutcher, a counsel for Chevron, said the "lawsuit is a baseless distraction from the serious challenge of global climate change, not an attempt to find an effective solution."
Fuck them.
Record-breaking hurricanes in the Atlantic basin, or "hurakan," meaning "terrible storm," as the Taino, the indigenous people of the Caribbean, called them, occurred in 2017. The most powerful, in no particular order, were Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Nate, which devastated Costa Rica.
But Maria focused the world's attention on the island due to Trump's incompetence, lies, and cruelty.
The NPR writes on the incredible rainfall from Maria and the connection it had to global heating.
In a paper published Tuesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, scientists at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and Sonoma State University in California analyzed rainfall from all 129 hurricanes that have affected Puerto Rico since reliable record keeping began in 1956.
They found that Maria was a behemoth compared with past storms that raked the U.S. territory. The average amount of rain Maria dropped on the island in a day — about 15 inches — was 30 percent more than the previous record set by a tropical storm in 1985, and 66 percent more rain than fell on average during what was previously the largest and costliest storm to ever hit the island, 1998's Hurricane Georges.
The rain was extremely destructive. It caused widespread flooding, destroyed crucial dams and helped knock out drinking water to nearly the entire island. A previous paper, published by another group of scientists in February, found that extreme rain triggered tens of thousands of landslides in the island's interior, "in some cases isolating communities for days and weeks."
In all, current estimates suggest the storm killed about 3,000 people.
Reuters noted the Puerto Rican cities wanted damages due to "lost education and healthcare opportunities and tourism revenue. Dozens of mainland cities have also sued big oil, but the cases have mostly been filed in state court. Reuters stated, "Those suits have been delayed amid numerous jurisdictional battles, and the Supreme Court has been asked to weigh in on where those cases belong." Well, there you go. The Federalist jurists on the Supreme Court will ensure that no justice will be served.