California’s attacks on energy continue—the latest being Governor Newsom’s attempts to control gas prices . Chevron’s already left the state ; Phillips 66 is leaving too. But these broadsides on the energy sector are no surprise: In 2023 the state of California filed a lawsuit against several big oil companies for obfuscating the impact that rising greenhouse gasses would have on the climate, asking the courts for billions of dollars in climate change damages.
But it isn’t just gasoline and oil in the state’s crosshairs—last month, the California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed another lawsuit claiming that plastics recycling is a myth and ExxonMobil is solely to blame for global plastic pollution.
While there’s little disputing that California (and the world) is experiencing the effects of climate change and that plastic pollution is a problem, the state’s strategy of blaming oil companies and demanding that they pay billions of dollars amounts to little more than a nakedly political grandstanding and constitutes non-solution to a real problem.
The availability of relatively inexpensive energy has been a crucially important factor in the enormous gains in material progress in the United States over the last century. Until very recently, most of this energy came from fossil fuels: Oil, gas, and coal.
We now know the burning of fossil fuels has led to an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere which has contributed to climate change. The U.S. Congress has been discussing what should be done to reduce these greenhouse gas emissions since the Clinton Administration. It has contemplated and rejected a carbon tax multiple times as well as a cap-and-trade scheme.
Ultimately, our government has attempted to address it primarily by subsidizing investment in clean energy, requiring energy producers—and the producers of energy-intensive goods—to be more efficient, and by participating in global alliances intended to encourage other countries to also take steps to reduce emissions.
While these policies are imperfect and took several Congresses and administrations to enact, they appear to be contributing to a reduction in emissions in the U.S. Last year, the country’s carbon emissions were lower than they were in the late 1980s, and have been trending down for some time.
Yet California’s political establishment is more interested in attracting media attention than creating lasting policies. In this political Kabuki theater, the oil companies are merely villains.
When discarded, plastic—which is produced from fossil fuels—creates a pollution hazard in oceans and waterways as well as in many places on land. Government entities like California have responded to this by banning the use of certain plastic items such as straws and single-use plastic bags but to little avail: Straws are an inconsequential proportion of total waste and plastic bag bans induce the use of bigger reusable bags that usually aren’t used often enough to come out ahead environmentally.
It’s also worth observing that the replacements for plastic containers are not necessarily any better for the environment — the paper drink containers aren’t easy to recycle and create pollution problems that rival plastic.
California’s attempt to sue the big oil companies into submission–which it has clearly done in close coordination with a number of environmental groups, which may open up a variety of ethics issues–is not going to change the U.S. economy’s dependence on fossil fuels or hasten the adoption of renewable energy sources. Nor will its grandstanding improve the recyclability of plastic or lead to a long-run solution for plastic pollution, which extends far beyond California.
But it will bring attention to politicians, which is doubtless the true intent of these efforts.
