The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/02/magazine/mag-oil-lawsuit.html

by metermaid • 12 years ago

106 26 12 years ago

nytimes.com

robbiet480• 12 years ago

Lobbying and what seems to me to be unchecked flouting of the law is utterly disgusting.

selimthegrim3• 12 years ago

I saw John Barry speak; had no idea he had a doctorate. Brought down the house, a real barnstormer.

spenvo3• 12 years ago

“Writing is pretty isolated,” Barry said. “I enjoy the action. I like to fight.” // More coders should feel this way when it comes to issues about which they're passionate. In other words, more of us should consider becoming hacktivists -- at least on the side. As hacktivists, a wise first step towards making a difference is to treat political science as continuing education. Yes, articles like this should pique your interest. Read them. But also pick up some books and get serious.

To that end, as an alternative to "Rising Tide" by John Barry (from the linked article): I highly recommend reading (as did Aaron Swartz)[0][1] "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York". It is a brilliant, Pulitzer-prize-winning case study of the forces at play in broken/corrupt governments (and how opaque the processes which formulate and execute the policies of governance truly are).

In Aaron's own words: "For nearly forty years, Robert Moses controlled New York. Controlled it almost absolutely, overruling every mayor, governor, president, and public pressure group. He did it all without anyone ever knowing: the press, when it did cover him, covered him only in the most glowing, reverent terms. He did it all without winning a single election: the two times he did dare run for office, he was defeated so soundly as to become a joke.

"_The Power Broker_ is the story of how our "democracy" really works. How men gain power and how it corrupts them. How cities get built and how real people suffer for it. How we became a nation desperately dependent on the car."

I will add that Robert Moses was the pioneer of eminent domain (a massive blow to the philosophical underpinnings of property rights in the USA) and modern public authorities (highly insular entities which are hybrids bodies corporate & politic -- receiving money from the public with zero effective accountability to taxpayers -- hard to summarize implications, but they have been enormous).

[0] http://www.amazon.com/review/RXOVNQ3JLY6GF

[1] https://zolabooks.com/list/aaron-swartz-reading-list/1

[2] - for those who'd prefer to listen, an excellent narration is available on Audible -- http://www.audible.com/pd/Bios-Memoirs/The-Power-Broker-Audi...

Next I'd consider: "Hacking Politics" (about SOPA/PIPA) or "Understanding Power" - a collection of talks by Noam Chomsky -- not for his ideological insights but for his manner of making observations and thought-provoking perspectives.

dankohn1• 12 years ago

I'm 3/4ths through the audio book of the Power Broker and second your recommendation. I started it while doing the 100 mile NYC Century last month (the only all-urban century), and it has changed the way I think about New York City, democracy, power, and journalism.

rayiner3• 12 years ago

What's tough and utterly ignored by this article is that it's not just the lobbyists who oppose you, it's ordinary people. There is a sincere and deep seated belief that it's morally objectionable to ask companies to answer for their actions in a court of law, that there are no alternatives to destroying the environment, and that such lawsuits threaten the existence of economies like that in Lousiana.

That's why these politicians can take actions in favor of the industry with impunity.

Jones figured there would be a period of quiescence while the industry decided how to respond. Within hours, Jindal, who was in Aspen, Colo., at a meeting of the Republican Governors Association, released a statement. “This is nothing but a windfall for a handful of trial lawyers,” Jindal said, arguing that the suit came “at the expense of our coast and thousands of hardworking Louisianians who help fuel America by working in the energy industry.”

85% of people in Louisiana buy this stuff up. They'll buy it up until all the oil is gone, and when the companies leave they'll have no jobs and their state will be a wasteland unfit for any other sort of economy.

To be fair, it's not just Louisiana. During the last Presidential election, Obama and Romney literally fought during one debate to show who was more pro-coal. There's no point in doing that if you're just after campaign donations--the coal companies can do their own advertising. No, such theatrics are to get votes in places like West Virginia, Pennsylvania, southeastern Illinois, etc.

spenvo3• 12 years ago

Frighteningly accurate. Most people shun the very act of investigating claims made by public figures if a.) (they believe) their livelihood is at stake on the issue && b.) said statements "tow the line."

My take on both examples: it's up to the rest of the electorate to raise the political stakes on said issues. At least to the point where two presidential candidates can't fight over who's more pro-coal. Or to the point where the rest of Louisiana (or even out-of-staters) can call bullshit on 11th hour text-swapping of bills immediately before they hit the floor -- that was just remarkable. Actions such as these should provide enough ammunition for a meaningful and sustained public opposition. Or, at the very least, actions such as these should haunt the "Jindal"s of our country in their pursuit for higher office (the presidency). Certainly raising the political stakes by that measure is possible, but it is also why the "Right to be Forgetten" policies in Europe are so disturbing (there is bound to be more to that story).

selimthegrim3• 12 years ago

http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/2014/10/state_judg...

CalRobert• 12 years ago

So long as they don't request assistance or funding after the next disaster (or the one after that, or the one after that), they can sleep in the bed they're making.

api2• 12 years ago

There's a deeper and equally sincere and deep-seated belief behind said beliefs:

It's objectively true that increasing the cost of energy amounts to something like a regressive tax: it will harm the poor and the middle class considerably more than it will harm the wealthy. Among causes for our current middle class woes, some have cited the peaking of domestic conventional oil in the 1970s and the general end of extremely cheap energy around that era.

The very existence of a middle class and a diamond-shaped social order is probably in part an artifact of cheap and available energy. People do understand this. They understand that an end to cheap energy will return themselves and their children to serfdom. (Unless they happen to be members of the tiny <1% financial elite that would probably become the new nobility.)

What people don't believe is that renewable energy can provide cheap energy. They fear a world powered by renewable energy might be one resembling The Hunger Games: tiny stratospherically rich technological enclaves served vast impoverished precincts of serfs.

Meanwhile they're also either against nuclear outright, or are at the very least suspicious of it.

So if the choice is between fossil fuels and a return to abject poverty, people choose fossil fuels. I'm not sure they're really ignoring climate change-- rather they're making a cost/benefit analysis to the effect that climate change is better than a return to feudal serfdom.

They're probably right. It is demonstrably better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. Poverty is worse than any natural disaster I'm aware of; I'll take a few million dollars and a hurricane every week over poverty and blue skies.

This also explains why the "developing" world has shown no interest in moving on carbon reduction. Cheap available energy is lifting billions out of poverty. Their response is pretty much "screw you, we're poor." For them to choose any different would be an act of huge-scale unilateral self-sacrifice.

The burden is on advocates of renewable energy to show that it can provide cheap, abundant energy sufficient to sustain a diamond-shaped social order. If it can't, it is politically dead and climate change is a foregone conclusion. The burden is also on nuclear advocates to show that they can engineer reactors that cannot fail like Fukushima or Chernobyl. (I mean cannot fail, not "low probability of failure," since anyone who understand entry-level stats knows that small probabilities become large when you scale things up. Think about what hard drive and RAM failures look like at data center scales for example.) Neither of these milestones has been reached.

Renewable energy remains a favorite political option among the inhabitants of uber-rich cities that resemble The Capital in The Hunger Games, like San Francisco. It's viewed as a luxury feel-good toy for rich people. Meanwhile the nuclear industry continues to iterate on the fundamentally flawed 1950s submarine reactor design instead of rethinking the problem from first principles and producing something truly engineered for civilian power production. IMHO the situation is worse in the nuclear domain... nobody is even trying, and the response to incidents like Fukushima is to double down on PR instead of doubling down on engineering.

Over time I've become more and more skeptical of the "people are stupid" answer to things like this. The reality is that people are not as stupid as you think they are. They just might be viewing things very differently or conceptualizing the problem from the perspective of different needs and goals.

In AI terminology they have a different goal function. Understand their goal function(s) and you understand their choices.

Another bugaboo in places like Louisiana is religious fundamentalism and opposition to evolution, etc. I've started to doubt "people are stupid" there as well. In that culture, the church is the center of social life. So you're basically asking people to choose between friendship, camaraderie, and the moral basis of cooperation and some esoteric scientific theory that does nothing to help them in their daily lives. Which would you choose? Insulting people and calling them idiots doesn't accomplish anything except to polarize them and reinforce the underlying social pathologies responsible for the problem. Poverty might also have some explanatory power here as well. Social cohesion -- here provided by the church -- is more of a necessity if you are poor than if you are rich. The poor do not have the luxury of choosing a certain amount of social alienation in order to be right about scientific precepts.

"People are stupid" is one of the great intellectually lazy answers of our times. Dig deeper.

czr80• 12 years ago

It's objectively true that increasing the cost of energy amounts to something like a regressive tax.

No, this is not (automatically) true, it matters how the increase is implemented. See, for example: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-...

quadrangle• 12 years ago

Amen! Thank you for the powerful comment, humanizing and empathizing with these people who are in a tough place (and still collectively making poor long-term decisions but without any easy solution anyway).

judk• 12 years ago

Energy cost is regressive. In theory, that can be fixed by allocating each household a budget of X units worth of energy at a low or no cost (or an equivalent in cash), and charging much more for excessive use by those who consume more

Natsu• 12 years ago

Having been a class member in many class actions, I can say that I have never seen any real benefit. I think I got less than $20 from Microsoft once, for example, and the terms given were calculated to cause further harm (they'd "donate" the remainder to schools in such a way as to funnel the money back to Microsoft). I actually spent a considerable amount of time writing up some opposition to that, only to be advised by a lawyer friend that while I had a few good arguments, I could not expect to get very far in court.

cpursley2• 12 years ago

One of the things that attracts me to libertarianism is how environmental disasters are handled. Shocker but under a more libertarian system, there would not be laws that protect wealthy corporations specifically allowing them to get away with pollution. Public and private land owners would be able to rightfully sue culprits for property damage.

In fact, some of the worst polluters are nations where the state owns the majority of land and/or production like Soviet Union and China. I was both dumbfounded and sad to see the amount of trash in the Black Sea along the Russian coast that was dumped there or floated into it via the danube river during soviet rule.

It's especially sad to see this sort of thing happening in the United States, which is a relativity environmentally conscious country with large swaths of protected land. I wouldn't take it as far is the following article details, but some of the ideas here would be better than the current system: https://mises.org/daily/5978/The-Libertarian-Manifesto-on-Po...

rayiner3• 12 years ago

As a litigator, I appreciate the sentiment, but litigation is ineffective at enforcing the rights of large numbers of people. Say there are no bank regulations, and a bank skims $100 of the accounts of ten million customers. The bank makes a lot of money, but it's not worthwhile for any given individual to sue. Your only recourse is the class action lawsuit, with all the limitations that entails.

The situation is even more problematic when the injured parties are not in contractual privity with the wrongdoer. If a coal plant in Chicago causes $1,000 of health damage to each resident, that's a multi-billion wrong. But unlike with a bank, the residents can't simply decide to do business with a different company.

There's a lot of money to be made doing two things: 1) selling people more risk than they think you're selling them; 2) foisting risk and costs onto third parties that aren't in a contractual relationship with you. So long as you do these things to a large number of people with a relatively small dollar value for each injury, you'll make a lot of money at it, and the legal system isn't great at stopping such behavior.

rhino369• 12 years ago

Not to mention that often the entities that caused the harm do not have the capital to pay back for catastrophic harm.

Also litigation takes for ever. That is doubly true for billion dollar cases.

I'm working on a case with a billion dollar verdict. It's been 6 years and not a dime was paid. We are going back for a retrial. This thing won't be done for several more years at the earliest.

pdq• 12 years ago

What you are describing about banks is outright theft, which under any system would be punished.

Even if courts did not exist, very few business would be that dumb to steal from their customers, because once details of it were known to the public, all rational customers would take their money out of the bank and it would eventually go out of business.

mindslight• 12 years ago

And what happens when a court sets a precedent that eg air pollution is not property damage? Even in a Libertarian system you're bound to such policy decisions, regardless of whether they are made explicitly or not.

briandh• 12 years ago

What you are describing would be more precisely called an anarcho-capitalist solution. There are a lot of self-described libertarians who would not endorse it.

jeffdavis• 12 years ago

A valid point, but a lot of complications and unanswered questions.

One major problem is that it weakens the rule of law (something that most libertarians prize highly) when you throw so much into the courts. Nobody knows where they stand or what their liabilities are, which leads to paralysis.

I identify with libertarians, but I think it would be much better to come up with clear laws inidicating the costs of negative externalities, and then force various behaviors to pay for those costs in various ways to various people. Also, certain practices should be outright criminal, in the same way that vandalism is a crime.

I think things like cap-and-trade are ridiculous, for instance. But a straight tax on air pollution or drawing from the water table might be reasonable.

cpursley2• 12 years ago

I especially agree with your last sentence.

thinkcomp• 12 years ago

I think that articles about lawsuits should allow readers to actually see the lawsuits themselves, and should always at least mention the case number. So, in that spirit, here it is:

http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/1zzhdj2de/louisiana-eastern...

The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever

Related Stories