Chevron’s oil spills are profitable. We need to hold corporate polluters accountable

People need to hold CEOs and shareholders accountable, the legal system wont.

Article text:

Oil giant Chevron’s recent $13 million fine for more than 70 oil spills in California grabbed headlines and set a record for the biggest fine ever paid to the state Department of Conservation.

Yet this welcome example of polluter accountability falls far short in addressing Chevron’s devastating — and highly profitable — multi-million gallon spills. Yes, Chevron’s oil spills are profitable: The oil giant profits from sucking up and selling its spilled oil. It earned more than $11 million from one spill — almost matching that record fine. So why stop spills when they’re money-makers?

And that’s not to mention Chevron’s biggest offense: Spewing massive amounts of greenhouse gases to wreak havoc on our climate.

It’s well past time for polluters to pay up. And new legislation would make them do it.

Opinion:

First, let’s use Chevron as an example to consider how oil companies currently dodge accountability for their harm to people and our planet. The oil giant resolved more than 70 spills — including a months-long disaster of 1.2 million gallons — with a single check. The record-setting fine is a drop in the bucket given Chevron’s $2.3 billion fourth quarter profit.

Enforcement is uneven at best. Chevron hasn’t paid a dime for separate spills of 84 million gallons (and counting) in Kern County and 6 million gallons in the same area.

Although it’s easier to see and smell an oil spill, climate pollution is even deadlier and far more damaging. If Chevron gets fined for its oil spills, that same “polluter pays” principle should apply to the company’s spewing of millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

After all, Big Oil’s role in the climate catastrophe is traceable, quantifiable and undeniable.

That’s why last year California launched the nation’s biggest lawsuit against Big Oil over climate deception. As Gov. Gavin Newsom said, “This climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis.”

Now, new legislation would put commonsense corporate accountability into law. State Senator Caroline Menjivar, D-San Fernando Valley, has introduced the Polluters Pay Climate Cost Recovery Act. Senate Bill 1497, a “polluter pays” law for the climate, would require companies most responsible for climate pollution, like Chevron, to pay into a new fund directed toward achieving the state’s climate goals.

California isn’t the first to consider this idea. Similar bills have been introduced on the federal level and on the state level in New York, Maryland and Massachusetts. One in Vermont is on the brink of becoming law. Before that, we had similar funds for lead paint and tobacco to address harm caused by those products.

California can further its national climate leadership as the first major oil-producing state to impose a fee for climate damage — that is, if lawmakers are ready to cut ties with fossil fuel funding, ignore the army of industry lobbyists and, instead, put people and the planet first.

The alternative is to continue to foist the costs of climate disasters onto the public. In recent years California wildfire damages have well exceeded $70 billion. Just one climate-driven storm this year caused up to $11 billion in damages, and another extreme atmospheric river last year killed 22 people and cost as much as $34 billion.

Californians shouldn’t be paying the price with their lives and dollars while Big Oil strikes it rich off their own toxic oil spills.

Climate disasters are getting more severe and more costly. We can’t afford to keep paying for the aftermath while the companies responsible pay extravagant sums to their executives and enrich shareholders.

Instead of polluters lining their pockets with profit from their deadly products, let’s put those funds toward commonsense climate protections that will give current and future Californians and our wildlife the rich, healthy future we deserve.

(Hollin Kretzmann is an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.)

Monetary fines are the exception to prove the rule. By imposing a fine for a bad act, you are saying it is acceptable to carry out that bad act, so long as you pay the fine.

It's nuts that the penalty for behaving negligently or worse is not at minimum ALL profits the bad behavior generated plus ALL damages caused to the public plus immediately having to immediately, with no expense spared, fix the corporate system that allowed the bad behavior in the first place. And it's nuts that a company that fails to pay up is allowed to continue existing. It's nuts that ANY members of the management, C-suit, or board of a company that is caught with its hand in the cookie jar is not immediately put to criminal penalties and banned from doing business.

Meanwhile, the SCOTUS has consistently limited liability for corporations that behave in unspeakably bad faith. Worth remembering that even in one of the most heinous spills of public consciousness, Exxon Valdez, the SCOTUS reduced the fines from paltry to pitance. Because, they claim, that it isn't fair for punitive damages to be larger than compensatory damages. They say that if you did $1 in harm, you cannot be fined more than $2 for that harm. It's a breathtakingly-stupid legal opinion. There's just no reasoning behind it. It's asspull nonsense legislating from the bench. And that's what the court does; protect corporations from consequences.

I only mention it because these climate damage laws are finally moving to the right track. But they will inevitably head to the SCOTUS, and we need the SCOTUS packed or replaced before it happens. We need these corrupt, political hacks off the bench ASAP and replaced with sane, reasonable, compassionate humans who understand that the purpose of the court is justice.