Time for the lying to stop

According to Gizmodo magazine, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced on Wednesday that he’s suing ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute because the three firms deceived customers about the climate crisis. This is the first lawsuit of its kind to name API and Koch Industries, and it takes a novel approach by suing them solely for the lies they told.

“We’re here suing these defendants, API, ExxonMobil and Koch, for hiding the truth, confusing the facts and muddling the water to devastating effect,” Ellison said at a news conference.

Now I’m not convinced that the lawsuit will succeed and in many ways it may simply be a symbolic act but it does bring to light what some of us have know for some time, that we have been manipulated for decades by false information put out by U.S. conservative think tanks and corporations to protect fossil fuel profits.

Is it understandable that these think tanks and corporations would do this? Sure. America and most of the world really is all about the money and the continuing destruction of our environment to get more money. Right now, these companies will be hiring some extremely well-paid lawyers to fight this case and the arguments won’t be based on truth but rather legal technicalities to get them off the hook.

But since Covid 19 the world has changed. It has been a defining moment and somewhere in there the climate deniers lost. I don’t really understand why or how but they did. The move to renewables is now unstoppable. The population of the planet seems to have accepted that climate change is a thing, that we are responsible for it and renewables are the future.

There seems to have been a tipping point and even though there will always be a loud minority of ideologically driven deniers the future is suddenly looking brighter. Notice that I say deniers, rather than climate deniers. That’s because they will reappear again the next time anything appears to threaten laissez faire capitalism. Now before you start screaming socialist commie puppet of the NWO, I’m not.

Capitalism was and is useful and got us to this point in time. Fossil fuels were and are useful and got us where we are today. They brought many benefits and, like anything, had their downside. Fossil fuels aren’t going to go away overnight and neither is capitalism. We are in a period of transition and hopefully what’s coming will take the best elements of the past and improve on them.

This lawsuit is an opportunity to demonstrate to people how we have been manipulated over the past few decades by vested interests and we have to take some responsibility for allowing ourselves to be manipulated. After all, we are the ones using the fossil fuels, and no-one held a gun to our heads to make us use them.

Having said that these corporations still have a lot to answer for and whether they actually will, well, I’m doubtful. The best we can learn from their behaviour is this…’Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice, shame on me’